“Now, Dean!” he cried, rounding the end of the bed.
Krysty was right on his heels as he charged into the wide aisle that separated the rows.
The ville shooters hiding behind the bed in the next row gave up their cover to get a clear shot at the rapidly closing targets. As they popped up over the greenery, they had expressions of righteous fury on their faces. Nobody was going to steal from them; nobody was going to bushwhack them; nobody was going to trick them.
If Ryan felt sympathy for the people of Bullard ville, he had to crush it, to bury it under the weight of his own determination to survive. This wasn’t the fight he had wanted, not the fight he had intended. But survival was on the line for him and the companions. If he ended up chilling the very folks he’d come to help, it was because he was left no choice in the matter.
Crossing the strip of open ground, Ryan wondered why the Bullard ville sec force hadn’t kept to its cover. There was such a thing as being too confident; there was such a thing as mistaking dumb luck for skill, letting a few successes go to your head. And there was such a thing as liking the heat of battle way too much. No matter how you spun it, jumping up to shoot was a bonehead move.
As the sharpshooters’ blasters blazed, so did Ryan’s. He ignored the hot lead roaring past his ears. The SIG in his fist bucked and cycled, bucked and cycled as he pulled the trigger as fast as he could. It was impossible to shoot fine and tight while sprinting for your life. The best he could do was to lob slugs at the sec force. A 9 mm slug from his handblaster ripped a big chunk out of a tall man’s upper arm. For a split second, a mist of red hung in the air around his shoulder. The tall man stopped firing and twisted away, clutching at himself, his hand on the wounded side dangling uselessly at his hip. Ryan’s next shot hit him in the right cheek, just below the eye. The decompression shock as the back of his head blew away popped the eyeball from its socket.
A fraction of a second later, a guy in patched bib-front overalls standing next to him absorbed a center body hit, doubling over around the bullet impact, clutching at his stomach and showing Ryan the bald top of his head. The one-eyed man was already tightening down on a followup shot as the man started to bend over. He put the second round in almost the same place relative to the ground, but because the man had moved while the bullet was in flight, it crashed through his skull instead of his mid-section. As the bib-front guy toppled backward, a torrent of blood rushed from his nose and mouth, and it geysered high and red out the top of his head. Two strides later, Ryan was vaulting the still kicking bodies and cutting around the end of the bed. As he did so, Krysty’s .38 barked in rapid fire.
Six hollowpoint slugs clipped through the greenery—two sailed on, high and wide, but four made solid thwacks as they hit flesh and bone.
The flesh and bone belonged to the whoremaster of Bullard ville and two of his best gaudy sluts. The women were all dressed up for the carny show in long, shiny ball gowns, their bosoms bare to the nipples, their faces feverishly rouged, lips thickly painted. Suddenly single, small, round beauty spots appeared near the centers of each of their foreheads, and big cratering holes in the backs of their skulls where the mushrooming hollowpoints exited. The sluts dropped their battle-scarred Walther PPKs and made stiff, awkward curtseys as their knees buckled. Their bottoms struck the ground at almost the same instant, dead before they hit the dirt.
The whoremaster O’Neil was slammed twice in the chest, .38 slugs coring both lungs. As he fell, he discharged his mini-Uzi into his own boots, pinning the trigger on full-auto, sending up flurry of yellow dust mixed with blood and bone chips.