Glancing toward the power plant, Ryan asked the Armorer a silent question and J.B. shook his head. Fireblast! Ten minutes before all hell broke loose.
“Fuck you,” Sheffield snarled. They seemed rushed, nervous. Maybe his troopers were on the way. He decided to play for more time.
“Where is he?” Ryan demanded, firing the blaster and scoring a bloody graze along the man’s head, then pressing the hot barrel against the baron’s cheek. The flesh sizzled from the contact.
“All right!” Sheffield shouted, recoiling, almost tearing from the awful pain. “He’s in the small room at the far end of the slaves quarters.”
“Is that your prison?” Krysty asked, filling her pockets with loaded clips from the gun rack.
“Interrogation room,” Sheffield muttered, drooling blood from the side of his mouth.
Ryan hauled the man upright and threw him toward the doorway. “Show me,” he commanded, jabbing the man along with the fluted muzzle of the Kalashnikov.
ANNOYED, THE SEC MEN stepped away from their prisoner, their knives dripping blood.
A hundred shallow cuts crisscrossed his chest, warm blood running down his stomach and thighs, but Jak still refused to speak. Once you started, it was impossible to stop. He had been tortured enough before to know that for a fact. And he only had to stay alive for another ten minutes or so. Just long enough to see their faces when the boilers blew and the base was obliterated.
Unfortunately, something had to have shown on the teenager’s face as the sergeant frowned.
“This ain’t balls,” the sec man said in a worried tone. “The freak knows something.”
“Crap, mebbe there are more of them!”
“Got a rescue planned, or something.”
“Sound the alarm,” the sergeant decided abruptly. “Rally the troops. Let them come. We’ll blow the coldhearts to hell and back.”
“Yes, sir!” a private said and threw open the door to shout when a thundering gunshot shook the room and the sec man slammed into the far wall, minus a head.
With a supreme effort of will, Jak forced his vision to focus and saw his friends enter the room with every weapon firing. Caught by surprise, the sec men where slaughtered where they stood.
“Jak, my boy, are you still alive?” Doc asked, working on a chain.
As the wrist came free, the teenager start to slump, and the old man caught him before Jak hit the floor.
“Hey” the teenager whispered softly.
The clothes of the dead men were too bloody to use, but Krysty spotted a bearskin attached to wall. Ripping it down, she draped it over the naked youth and lifted him into her strong arms.
“Leave me,” Jak wheezed, trembling. “No time. Bombs soon.”
“Think we’re going to die just to save you?” Ryan asked. “We have a ticket out of here. Say hello to Baron Sheffield.”
Jak looked up, then fainted dead away.
Mildred checked for a pulse. “He’s okay.”
Ryan glanced at his watch. Seven minutes. No time to reach the slave gate and climb over. They were on the other side of the ville.
“Head for the garage,” Ryan commanded, going for the doorway with Sheffield in tow. “We need speed, and that’s our best bet. Krysty, grab Jak’s clothes there.”
“Why not use the hole in the wall?” Krysty asked, jostling Jak’s limp body as she stooped to carefully grab what she could.
“Too good a spot for snipers to pin us down on foot,” Ryan countered. “We’re driving out.”
“The garage is right near the Quonset hut!” J.B. admonished. “When that baby goes”
“There will be no more sec men to chase after us,” Mildred observed. “Hurry! Seven minutes to go!”
Sheffield had no idea what was going to happen in seven minutes, but he already knew he wanted no part of it.
As the companions raced across the ville, a whistling sec man ambled out of the night contentedly munching an apple, an AK-47 slung over his shoulder muzzle downward. Without pausing, Ryan shot the man from behind and kept running. “Move faster, fatso!” he ordered the baron.
Pretending to be more frightened than he was, Sheffield did as requested, a plan for revenge already forming in his mind.