Earthblood

“… a number of men and women…” Half the remaining lights clicked off, casting the whole complex into an undersea gloom.

“Must be the guys with the guns.” Steve looked at Jim. “Get out?”

Jeff Thomas was already picking up his backpack, struggling to get the straps adjusted across his shoulders. “Come on.”

Jim shook his head. “Wait. Zelig’s getting to the wire. Sounds like there might be some kind of a plan or something.”

The tape had halted, but now it began again hesitantly. But there seemed to have been an important gap in it.

“The place for this hasn’t yet been finalized. But contact can be made in a variety of ways. First priority is to reach Calico by the middle of November, when…”

The explosion that blew in the outer security doors was devastating, sending a blast of heat and choking dust swirling through the astronauts’ quarters. The lights instantly blinked off.

Chapter Fifteen

Jim was knocked sideways, falling into the cassette player. He was vaguely aware of a metallic crashing noise, but he was too busy getting onto hands and knees to pay any attention to it. Behind him there was shouting, and he glimpsed torches slicing through the wreathing dust.

Someone trod on his fingers, making him yelp in pain.

“They’re in, Jim!” shouted Mac from somewhere toward the sleeping quarters.

“Get everyone out—” he caught himself, not wanting to give too much away, “—out the way we agreed, Mac. Packs and all.”

“How about you?”

“Be right with you.”

The Ruger Blackhawk Hunter was in Jim Hilton’s hand, his index finger snug on the broad trigger of the single-action revolver.

It had never felt so right.

There was scuffling movement all around him. Once he’d recovered his bearings, Jim knew his own heavy pack was lying close by the double doors that opened through toward the air lock and the rear exit.

Now he waited, crouched by the overturned music system, left hand loosely holding his right wrist in the approved shooter’s stance.

“This way, Harry!”

The boom of a shotgun sounded near the lobby, followed by a yell of rage or pain. Jim guessed one of their attackers had been trigger-happy.

His father had fought in Nam, wriggling in the stinking blackness of the tunnels around Cu Chi. The experience had messed up his mind, and he had woken with nightmares of the hand-to-hand butchery, right up until Jim was ten years old. Then his father had gone out into the garage at three o’clock in the morning, when the blood runs slow and the soul suffers through its dark night.

He’d hung himself.

But he’d talked about killing to his son. Talked in the long drunken evenings, as the level dropped lower in the bottle of Southern Comfort and the pain glared through his eyes.

“It’s a skill like any other, son. But I pray to Jesus Christ Almighty that you never, never, never have to learn it.”

The men with the flashlights were hesitating, just on the other side of the doorway into the dining quarters. They were crowded together in the cramped passage less than twenty feet from where Jim Hilton was waiting silently for them… waiting to begin learning his father’s skill.

“Get in!”

“Why don’t you get in yourself!”

“Get the hell in, or I’ll put you down on your fucking back!”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Get inside. We got the torches. Looks like they don’t.”

Jim waited. Behind him he could hear the others, doing their best to keep quiet as they headed for the exit.

“What if they got guns?”

“They’d have used them when we nearly had ’em trapped, wouldn’t they?”

“Yeah,” came the answer grudgingly.

“So, get in. We’re all right behind you.”

Jim fought to slow his breathing, steadying the barrel of the revolver on the juddering beams of the flashlight.

“Wait,” he whispered to himself. “Not too soon. Wait.”

The first man was inside the doorway, shining his flashlight around, but the pall of smoke and dust bounced it back at him.

Now they were crowding the door, made more confident by the silence and the lack of response from their trapped victims.

Jim Hilton tightened his index finger on the Ruger’s trigger. The jolt ran through his wrist, past his elbow, to the shoulder. In the confined space the crack of the explosion was surprisingly loud.

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