“No way, Jose,” muttered Doc mysteriously.
“Dead or taken?” That was the big question. Would there be burying and revenge, or rescue?
“I figure taken. You hear a couple of stun grens go off?”
“Yeah,” said Ryan,
“That was it. I went in the front and out the side of a house, doubled back to kill whatever moved. Fucking weird. Put out a triple burst from the old Hamp;K here.” He patted the silenced gray submachine gun on his lap. “All hit him in the throat. Fucking head fell right off. Never seen that before. Clean as a big axe. Rolled round my fucking feet and fucking near tripped me over. That was when I heard the stuns. Ran up into the loft of an old frame house. Looked down. They were loading the girls into one of the wags. I had a go, but it wasn’t no good. Near got caught. I tried.”
“Sure. Never thought any different, Finn. You couldn’t save ’em, then no man could.”
Finn nodded, taking another long, bubbling draw at the bottle, draining it dry, then let it drop from his hand with a dull clunk.
The room was silent. Ryan wondered when the sec men might be back, guessing that they’d be reporting to the sinister Baron Tourment with their prizes. They’d interrogate Krysty and Lori to find out all they could about how many there were, about arms, strength. And if the girls didn’t cooperate, they’d use stronger measures.
“Time’s wasting,” said Ryan. “They’ll guess we might come in after them. Be ready.”
Never for a moment did Ryan, J.B. or Doc consider just walking away. It would have been easy to head for the gateway and shut the door. Move somewhere else. And with the unreliability and random quality of the mat-trans systems, there was no way they’d ever come back to Louisiana. It wasn’t like it used to be with the Trader.
Back then, with a small army traveling together, if you got left, then you got left. It was the survival of the mostest that counted. That was the rule, and every man and woman with the warwags knew that. You lived and you died by those rules.
Now there were just the six of them, moving together through an alien land where hostility was the norm and friendship was suspect. That meant you went out on the edge for one of the others.
One of the codes was a man didn’t just close his eyes and ride around.
The three men looked at each other in the dusty, dimly lit room, each absorbed with his own private thoughts.
The stranger’s voice, coming out of the darkness by the door, made them all jump.
“You ‘gainst Baron?”
Ryan answered. “Well, we ain’t fucking for him.”
“Then we ought talk.”
In the dim light, the newcomer’s white hair flared like a vivid magnesium torch.
Chapter Sixteen
MEPHISTO WAS THOROUGHLY pissed off with what had happened.
His best ivory suit-was ruined. Soaked in salt water, sodden with orange-gray mud, and liberally smeared with gator shit.
Baron Tourment wasn’t that concerned for the health and well-being of his sec men. But to have eight corpses to dump into the bayous in a single day couldn’t just be overlookedand there were four more men with serious gunshot wounds to tend.
All that lay on the crimson debit side of the day’s accounting. But there was an entry to be made on the credit side.
He had two prisoners, both fairly unhurt. And as a bonus, both were female, and both young and attractive.
They had a few cuts, bruises and scratches, nothing worse. Except that the stun grens always left victims partly deaf for a couple of hours, often caused a little bleeding from the ears and nose and mouth, and frequently burst tiny capillaries in the eyes, making them pink and sore.
Mepbisto was in the storage room in the basement of the old Best Western Snowy Egret Inn, only a few miles away from the Holiday Inn in West Lowellton. Half a dozen of his best men were stationed in the corridor, and the guards around the perimeter had been doubled. The Cajuns had spoken of six people four men and two women. Mephisto had very nearly gotten himself chilled by a fat man in what looked like a dark blue uniform. The zipping burst of lead had missed him only by a fraction of an inch and had actually torn a hole through the padded left shoulder of his suit.