Then the guards jumped as something moist smacked onto the roof nearby. Working the bolt on his longblaster, the corporal walked over and was stunned to see a dead eagle sprawled on the concrete, wisps of steam hissing from within its curved beak.
Starting to twitch badly, the puzzled sec man stared at the other guards and saw their eyes turn solid white a split second before his own vision went completely black.
Wild panic seized the men, and they dropped their blasters to rub their eyes in the desperate hope something was merely covering their faces and blocking the light. But nothing was there, and they began to twitch from the painful tingling now covering their entire bodies. Abandoning his friends, one sec man darted for the stairs and ran straight off the edge of the roof, wailing all the way down to the street where he landed across the top of an artesian well, the brutal impact shattering his spine and shoving pieces of bone through his chest Blind and paralyzed, the sec man couldn’t even scream anymore as he felt his lifeblood flowing along his limbs and into the water below.
Crawling along the roof, the other sec men made it to the stairs and soon were tumbling down the steps in their haste to escape. As they reached the fourth floor, the sounds of blasterfire became noticeably louder. They stumbled along a hallway, shouting for help until the corporal accidentally bumped into an alcohol lantern, spilling the fuel all over himself and bursting into flames. The burning man screamed in agony and madly dashed around, igniting wallpaper and tapestries until finally collapsing to the carpet, the predark shag whoofing into flames as if it had been designed for such a purpose. Backing away from the growing conflagration, the third sec man found himself trapped in a corner with nowhere to run. Clawing the wall to try to find a door or a window, the trooper felt his clothes catch fire and grew strangely peaceful as he drew his handcannon and shoved it inside his mouth to blow out his brains rather than burn to death. But the bullet only grazed his skull, removing an ear and a lot of flesh. Badly wounded and unable to make a sound, the sec man was horribly alive as the flames claimed a new victim.
Somewhere in the ville, the alarm bell began to ring, as thatched roofs on the servants huts started to smolder and smoke. In the streets, horses screamed and ran blindly through crowds, knocking over the twitching civilians before dashing out their own lives against a stone wall. More birds fell from the terrible blue sky as the people began to understand they were blind and insanely screamed for help.
TAKING THE STAIRS two at a time, Henderson reached the next floor of the building and hid in a closet to drop his pants and extract the bamboo tube of jolt from its hiding place. Taking a deep sniff up each nostril, the man instantly felt years younger, stronger, smarter, his heart pounding with renewed strength inside his old chest. As he buckled his belt, he could hear the constant explosion of live rounds from upstairs, and an alarm bell was ringing. He wondered how anybody could have learned of his escape so quickly.
Going down the hallway and through the kitchen, he passed the cringing servants and reached the banquet hall, heading straight for the damaged window. It was his only chance of escape. The first floor of the building was the barracks for the sec men. He’d never get out that way. Grabbing a chair, the whitehair battered at the weakened planks until they came free and fell to the floor.
“Hey!” a female voice said, shuffling forward with a strange expression on her face.
Ruthlessly, Henderson fired point-blank, the .44 round opening up the belly of the serving girl like a bag of rope. Returning to his work, the old baron tore fingernails as he struggled to remove the last of the planks and kick his way through the glass. More planks covered the window from the outside, but those were easy to remove, and soon Henderson was able to climb onto the ledge. He was bleeding from both hands, but the river was almost directly below. As he tested the wind and tried to gauge the distance, the old baron felt itchy all over, the tingling sensation oddly pleasant mixed with the effects of the jolt, and then he went stone blind.