“Bad spot get trapped,” Jak growled. “One door.”
“Bull,” Ryan stated, cracking his knuckles. “No baron would ever box himself in where he could be starved to death. There’s another exit somewhere.”
“Probably hidden like the door,” Mildred said, laying aside a British made Hollands & Hollands .475 Nitro Express rifle.
The huge rifle had to have been the toy of some Texas millionaire and was in excellent condition, with a whole jar of the thick blunt-nosed cartridges. But the Nitro Express simply had too much power for the physician. Without most of the tools she had trained with in the predark days, the woman had only her bare hands to perform meatball surgery. Fighting to control the recoil of the .475 would strengthen her hands and lessen her delicate sense of touch. Killing enemies with the Nitro Express would render her able to save friends. The incredible irony of the matter almost made Mildred laugh and weep at the same time.
“Want to swap?” Krysty asked, proffering a .30-30 Remington longblaster. The barrel had been modified to receive a slotted bayonet at the front, the edge of the blade was feathered from a recent sharpening.
“Sure?” Mildred asked, accepting the lightweight hunting rifle.
Krysty easily worked the thick bolt on the heavy Hollands & Hollands and slid in a fat half-inch-thick round, closing the massive breech with a solid, satisfying clack. “Absolutely,” she said grimly. She hated to chill anything, but when blood was necessary, Krysty did the job ruthlessly as any coldheart. It was a simple matter of survival.
“Dark night, we have enough stuff here to level this place,” J.B. said, packing a coil of homemade fuse into his munitions bag, along with an assortment of items, including three predark grens. They were only concussion models, designed to knock out people with a deafening boom, not the deadly antipers that threw off bits of shrapnel. But anything would chill folks in the right hands.
“The baron has really been holding out on his troops if they’re armed with homemades and he has blasters like this in storage,” Ryan said, lifting the lid of a steamer wag to find it full of cedar wood chips and belted links of fat brass. “Check this— 25mm belted ammo. I think the baron has a cannon somewhere.”
“Mebbe keep?” Jak suggested, sliding rounds into the side port of the Winchester.
“Yeah, on the roof, most likely,” Ryan agreed. “That’s where I’d put it to get the best field of fire. Cover the whole ville from up there.” Dropping the linked ammo, the man moved to a wall rack and started to rummage for 7.62 mm rounds for the Steyr, but so far nothing and he was dangerously low. He might have to grab that other Winchester.
Then Ryan saw the shockingly white stock of a U.S. Marine Corps M-14 and hurried closer. He knew the M-14 was a ceremonial rifle used in parades and military reviews for the predark prez. However, it used the exact same caliber as the Steyr SSG-70 sniper rifle. Pulling down the rifle, Ryan opened the 20-round clip and found it full of greasy hardball brass. Back in business!
Going over to the trunk full of belted ammo, J.B. pulled a knife and started to open the wide 25 mm shells to carefully extract the tiny C-4 charge inside the warhead. Some of the plastique was only a dried lump, but most of it was still soft to the touch, and still as volatile as the day it was made a hundred years ago. Soon he had a small mound of the material and started using his palms to press it into crude blocks. Pulling a shower curtain salvaged from the redoubt out of his backpack, Dean passed it over and the Armorer cut it into squares to wrap the C-4 nice and tight.
“We don’t need to waste an implo gren now to get through the front gate,” J.B. said confidently. “One of these blocks will blow that out of the wall like kicking a knothole.”
“Prep one as a scuttle,” Ryan said, slipping spare 9 mm rounds into the loops of his gun belt. “We’ll get rid of that plastic scorpion and Gaza’s private stash in one move.”