The cord around her right wrist snapped with a sharp sound, like a metal spring failing. The left followed only a moment later. She began to sit up, the bindings breaking together as she flexed both legs.
“What the fuck!” said Neal, looking around. Alain hopped off balance, his eyes wide as saucers in his pinched face.
Even Lori, lying still, opened her eyes at the crack of the cords disintegrating, unable to believe what she saw.
Gripping the table’s edge with both hands, Krysty pushed herself off, aiming her feet toward Neal’s face; the tapered heels of her boots sledgehammered toward his mouth.
“You” he began, the word rammed back into his throat as Krysty’s boots struck.
The power of her attack was utterly devastating.
The silver-patterned leather heels hit the sec guard plumb in the center of his gaping mouth; the blow tore his lip into tatters of bloody flesh, splintering his few remaining teeth into shards of bone. His lower jaw cracked like a dry twig, dislocated, the awesome force actually ripping it from its socket so it flapped loose as he staggered backward. He was momentarily lifted clear off his feet.
But the effect of the kick didn’t stop there. Krysty pushed off like a gymnast, her boots crushing Neal’s nose, destroying both cheekbones, pulping the left eye to watery jelly. Fragments of bone were driven upward through the soft palate into the lower part of the brain, beginning the irrevocable process of death.
Alain was still teetering, his trousers falling to his ankles and revealing a shrinking penis and sagging balls. Had his reflexes been honed, there was a split-second when he might have gone for his blaster and shot Krysty, while she was still recovering her balance, nearly slipping in Neal’s spouting blood. But his hands went in panic to his groin as his eyes searched for a way out. His mouth opened with the beginnings of a request for mercy. “Lady” he began.
“I don’t have the time,” she hissed, swinging around, pivoting on the right foot, the left lashing out toward his abdomen.
This time it was the toe that did the damage. The craftsman who had worked away, chiseling silver into points to ornament the western boots, could never have dreamed a hundred years ago how lethal those elongated tips could be.
Though Alain tried to fend off the kick with his hands, he might as well have tried to throttle a cyclone. Three fingers were crushed and broken, the thumb on the right hand agonizingly dislocated. The foot powered on, puncturing his scrotal sac, transforming his testicles to crimson rags of gristle, nearly severing his penis. With the cracking of bone, the entire pelvic girdle opened up. The guard staggered back, banging against the table, his face as white as parchment, a mask of silent pain. Falling to his knees, he collapsed, blood fountaining from his ruined groin, legs kicking and jerking spasmodically under the colossal shock.
Turning from the dying men, Krysty effortlessly snapped the cords at Lori’s wrists and ankles.
“How did you kill them like that?” stammered the blond girl, instinctively hoisting her panties back to their rightful position.
“I guess it’s ’cause I’m a fucking mutie, girl.”
“Can you open door?”
Krysty shook her head, feeling the familiar wave of weariness touching her temples. Using the powers always left her drained and enfeebled. It was the price that her mother had warned her that she must pay.
“Too tired. Must sit down, or I’ll” At her feet, the body of the younger sec guard finally ceased thrashing. Blood oozed silently across the floor. There was no sound from beyond the bolted door to indicate that anyone had heard anything from inside.
Lori swung her long legs elegantly over the side of the table and rose. She put her arms around Krysty, hugging tier tightly and feeling how the red-haired girl was trembling.
“Be fine,” she said. “Them fuckers dead. Got what wanted. Don’t cry, Krysty. Be fine. I won’t talk. Nor you. Even if that giant mutie mongrel kills us. One day Doc and Ryan and J.B. an’ Finn’ll do for him. Beg pardon, but it’s fucking true.”