“No!” he roared, his voice suddenly sounding amazingly deep and powerful.
He might as well have tried to pick a sec lock with a piece of wet string.
Thwarted by finding the little middle-aged man in her way, Krysty stabbed at him. The point of the knife struck him in the center of his right cheek, slicing down, hacking off a neat section of his face, exposing the pearly whiteness of teeth in the gum beneath, until the silent wave of crimson came washing down to obscure them.
Buford’s crystal-shattering scream was the catalyst that sparked chaos.
Krysty stabbed again and again, cutting the white-coat’s face apart, ripping flesh away, carving the end off his nose, lunging and popping one eye neatly out of its socket. Buford was unrecognizable, his features ripped apart like a ruined carnival mask, sodden in spurting, gouting blood.
She was now shrieking at the top of her voice, like an enraged harpy. “You next, Ryan, you dead-meat bastard!”
And still he wasn’t able to pull the trigger on the SIG- Sauer, wasn’t able to blow the madwoman away.
Buford had sunk to his knees, his cries for help and mercy drowned in his own blood.
But the chaos didn’t end there with the savage butchery of the scientist.
It began there.
The three sec men, lying prone under the threat of Trader’s Armalite, noticed that the red-haired woman’s attack on the whitecoat had distracted everyone. Even Trader, the survivor of a thousand firefights, had been taken aback by Krysty’s insane behavior and lost his combat concentration.
So they made their play.
The large room was a bedlam of screaming. Crichton had taken his own chance to ring the emergency bellpull, summoning more sec men to help. Dean shouted to his father to run away from Krysty. Mildred yelled at her friend to stop the slaughter. Jak had spotted the blasters on the table and was moving to regain his own Colt Python, J.B. at his heels. Doc stood with his Le Mat in his hand, eyes staring in disbelief at what was happening. Abe had been walking toward Trader when Krysty had started her crazed attack, and now be was frozen, halfway across the floor.
There was the sickening sound of the knife still hacking away at the dying whitecoat, the point grating on the planes of bone around the eyes, cutting the lips to ragged tatters of crimson flesh. Buford’s hands were also destroyed as he’d tried to fend off the merciless strokes of the gleaming knife, two of his fingers completely severed.
Ryan had backed away several steps, the SIG-Sauer pointing uselessly at his woman.
The three sec men were all up on their hands and knees, one of them clutching at Trader, trying to bring him down and grab his blaster.
It seemed to break the spell.
Ryan spun and fired quickly, seeing one of the guards go down, clutching at his chest. Trader had wrenched away his Armalite, using the butt to batter the second man to the floor. Jak had thrown one of his knives, miraculously backhanded, into the third sec man’s neck, knocking him onto the bloodied floor.
Buford was finally down, death bringing him its dubious, delayed mercy. And nothing stood between Krysty and Ryan. The point of the knife in her hand was snapped off, broken against the scientist’s jaw or teeth, but it was still a terminally lethal weapon.
“Shoot her, Trader,” Dean screamed in a fragile, piping voice. “Shoot Krysty!”
“No,” Ryan protested, but his voice was so quiet that nobody heard itexcept Krysty, who leered at him.
“That’s right, lover,” she whispered. “Just you and me.”
At that moment the doors at either end of the room burst open.
Through the far door came eight or ten sec men, all holding Mossbergs, nearly falling over one another as they took in the scene of dying and death.
Ryan half turned to the figure who had come in through the entrance just behind him, blinking his eye in disbelief.
It was Krysty Wroth.
“Hi, lover,” she said. “Get out of the way so me and that phony bitch can get to it.”
“Chill slut, Ryan,” whispered the Krysty who stood facing him.