“What’re you” he began, the great curved cicatrix that disfigured the corner of his mouth tugging the lips into a parody of a smile.
“Dark night!” J.B. breathed, for once knocked completely off balance.
There was Ellison, stone dead at their feet, Jak’s knife still rammed into the weeping eye socket.
And there was Ellison, alive as could be, standing less than six feet away from his own corpse.
The only one of them who reacted to the bizarre situation with any sense was Doc. He walked quickly from his place in the circle and stepped right up to Ellison, the Le Mat concealed behind his back.
Ellison stopped and stared suspiciously at him. “What the fuck do you want, you old goat?”
“I want only to speed you along to meet the dark ferryman, Charon of the Styx.”
He pressed the .63-caliber, gold-embossed shotgun barrel of the revolver into the sec man’s midriff as hard as be could and squeezed the gold-plated trigger.
Ellison’s body absorbed much of the noise of the blaster, muffling it. The charge ripped through the man’s belly, tearing his intestines to bloody rags of sinew, pulverized a section of his spine, completely blowing away four vertebrae into tiny white shards of bone. The spent slugs scattered bloodily into the wall behind Ellison, spraying it with dappled crimson.
Doc stepped quickly back, tutting as blood gushed over the toes of his cracked knee boots. He allowed the body of the sec man to stagger three broken steps backward, before dropping to the floor.
“His twin?” Abe suggested.
Mildred shook her head. “No. Dean, remember you thought you heard that dying man whisper a word? Said it sounded like ‘coning’ to you?”
“Sure.”
“It wasn’t ‘coning,’ Dean. It was ‘cloning.’ I know it. The twin dogs. That’s what the sick bastards are doing here. They’re cloning, copying people. One of these would be the original Ellison, and the other is a copy of him, perfect in virtually every detail. Probably genetically engineered and matched from a DNA sample.” She took a deep breath. “My God, friends. We should find Krysty and all get out of here as fast as we can. There’s true evil here.”
THE SOUND OF THE SHOT hadn’t penetrated through the soundproof door to the guards in the corridor.
J.B. had taken one of the pair of matched silver Mossberg scatterguns, tossing the second one to Abe. Jak had retrieved his knife from the eye of the first Ellison, replacing it in its hidden sheath.
Doc reloaded the spent .63-caliber shell from one of his deep pockets. Mildred and Dean each took a knife from the bodies.
“Right,” the Armorer said. “Take the sec men from outside now, as quick and quiet as we can. Bring them in here like we talked about.”
“Chill them.” Jak’s voice didn’t leave room for very much discussion.
“Yeah,” J.B. agreed. “We chill them.”
Mildred looked at him. “Can’t we tie them and leave them here, John?”
“If this was an old predark fic vid, then sure we could, easily. But this is real life, Mildred. Real Deathlands living and dying. Only takes one to get loose or someone to come by while we’re wasting all that time and” He drew his index finger across his throat.
She nodded. “Then we try to find a way across the top of the atrium at this level. Into the research wing and look for Krysty. Then out and run for it. Hope Ryan and Trader eventually link up with us?”
“That is indeed the plan, Dr. Wyeth,” Doc said. “You sound just a tad dubious about the possibilities of its success. Of course, if you have invented a better option, then I am sure we would all be delighted to hear it.”
“Fuck you, Doc. The least worst option, isn’t it? And so far, so good. Let’s carry on the killing.”
Jak went to the door and opened it a little way, calling out for the guards to come inside the room.
J.B. DISCONNECTED a sec alarm that would have closed off the aerial walkway that spidered high over the central atrium. Then they were all able to pick their way, in single file, over what had obviously once been a maintenance catwalk, with ventilation ducts and electrical conduits opening off it.
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