Ryan’s hand was on the butt of the SIG-Sauer, ready to draw it. “That you, Paddy?”
“Yeah,” the voice said, like a ragged whisper from the far side of eternity.
The door swung open slowly and the little man stood there, his face like parchment, left hand clasped tight across his belly, the other still holding the doorknob. For several long heartbeats he didn’t move.
“Trouble?” Ryan said quietly.
There was a slight, almost imperceptible nod of the head. The room was in shadow, but Ryan thought he could see something glinting stickily on the old man’s fingers.
“Won’t beto the ville with you Sorrynever had much of fuckin’ friend….Sorry”
Then he knelt down very carefully as though he were on a precious Oriental carpet and slid forward on his face. His body jerked, and blood flowed from his stomach across the floor. He sighed, then lay still.
Ryan looked down at the body for a moment, then straightened as he heard boots clattering on the stairs.
Chapter Seven
“Find yourself in a hole, get out of it” was one of the Trader’s many thoughts on living and staying alive in Deathlands. It came to Ryan as he stood by the body of the little old man who’d saved his life.
It didn’t matter much what had happened downstairs at the poker table. Perhaps Paddy had cheated or tried to cheat, or the three men had combined to cheat him. The only hard fact was that Paddy Maxwell was very dead, his stomach sliced apart with a long blade. And his killers were at the top of the stairs, coming for Ryan. Nothing else mattered.
Ryan glanced around the room, considering the possibility of using the window to escape. He who didn’t fight but ran away, lived to run away another day. That was another of the self-evident truths that the Trader had held to.
But the layers of cream paint looked solid and cracked all around the frame, as though the window hadn’t actually been opened in years.
Which turned the bedroom into a trap.
All of that took less than half a second, as Ryan’s combat-honed brain weighed the possibilities, coming up with the answer that had occurred to him first.
Get out shooting.
The door still stood open, and he didn’t hesitate a moment longer.
He dived through it, out into the passage, rolling agilely on his shoulder, coming up in the classic gunman’s crouch on the far side. He sighted down the barrel of the SIG-Sauer P-226 and opened fire instantly on the three men advancing toward him from the top of the stairs.
The leader was stout, with long hair tied back with a length of green ribbon. He held a Civil War bayonet in his right hand, its narrow shaft slick with blood. In his left hand was what Ryan had spotted downstairsa Heckler amp; Koch automatic, looking like the P-9 S 45, the model that had been rechambered to take the .45 round.
At his shoulder was the youngest of the three, peach fuzz on his pale cheeks. He had a Smith amp; Wesson double-action revolver, the 64 model.
The third of the trio was holding an ESFAC Pocket Pony, a rare, single-action, 6-shot, .22-caliber revolver.
One of the things that had rung small alarm bells for Ryan when he’d passed the trio downstairs was their weaponry. The blasters were good ones, in top condition, not the kind of guns you associated with drifters.
His sudden appearance at floor level, rolling in a tangle of arms and legs and coming up shooting, totally threw the three killers.
The first one went down to a head shot, the side of his skull exploding as the full-metal-jacket round angled to the right after penetrating an inch below the eye and fragmenting inside the cranium.
As he fell, the man was in the act of hurling the bayonet, but it flopped weakly from his fingers, penetrating the toe of his boot as it dropped.
The next round sliced between the second and third of the men, hitting an imitation chandelier at the head of the stairs, shattering it into shards of glass and clear plastic.
The double-action Smith amp; Wesson barked once, but the youth was partly blinded by a faceful of puddled brains and splintered bone, already staggering backward. His bullet went wide and high of Ryan, eventually hitting the ceiling at the farther end of the corridor.