Ryan didn’t waste any time in watching the sec guard dying.
The next round lay under the hammer.
Just before he fired again, Ryan was aware of the waspish crack of the Armalite, seeing a gout of blood fountain from the second guard’s ribs, patterning the crisp snow. But the sound was drowned by the boom of the SIG-Sauer. The shock of the 9 mm round jarred his wrist, the force running clear up to his shoulder.
The last of the trio was just beginning to react to the horrific danger, lifting the Mossberg toward Trader. Ryan’s bullet glanced off the butt of the scattergun, angling upward, through the sec man’s right wrist, shattering both radius and ulna, exiting through the elbow joint.
The gun dropped and the man began to scream, reaching for the shattered limb with his left hand.
Ryan calmly shot him through his open mouth. The bullet sliced his tongue neatly in two, plowing a furrow through the soft palate and driving its lethal path out through the back of the neck, just beneath where the skull was set on the spine. The blood-slick, distorted bullet buried itself in a snowbank.
In less than two beats of the heart, all three of the sec men were down and dying, kicking and thrashing in the crimsoned snow, puking up more blood, moaning and gasping.
“Think anyone heard?” Trader asked, stepping quickly to check that all three were finished.
“Doubt it. Wind’s against it and we’re in a valley here. Snow’ll muffle the sound even more.”
Thea Gibson had only just finished picking up her fallen blaster and was standing, stricken, at the slaughter about her. “You didn’t”
“Yeah, we did,” Ryan interrupted. “And thanks for distracting them.”
“I didn’t mean you to murder them.”
Trader laughed and slapped her on the backside. “Thought we’d make them lay down their guns while we tied them up, gagged them and told them to count to one hundred before they tried to escape?”
“Something like that.”
Ryan shook his head, reloading the three spent rounds. “Not the way it works, lady. This isn’t fiction. This is living and dying. Us or them.”
“But what do we do now? The Professor’ll find out and what will he say?”
She was almost in tears.
“He’s going to be very seriously pissed at us,” Trader told her, “and at you. No more extra helpings of soup for you, Thea. Early to bed for a week with a red ass.”
“It’s not a joke, you cretin!” she screamed. “We’re all chilled by this.”
“Simmer down,” Ryan said. “The only people dead are these three. Way I saw it, and I think you saw it, too, they were planning to take us back to your bastard institute. And they didn’t care much whether we were still breathing or not.”
Trader gripped the woman’s chin in his steely fingers. “What do you say to that, Thea?”
“I can’t tell you. I owed you my life. I’ve settled that debt here, and I’ll never forgive myself for being the innocent agent of these men’s deaths.”
Trader glanced at Ryan, and there was an unmistakable question in his eyes. But Ryan shook his head. “No,” he said quietly. “Not yet and not here.”
“Sure?”
“Sure, Trader. We got some talking to do first, and the lady is going to help us find a good way into the institute without flags waving and a band playing.”
“I’ve done all I will.”
Ryan stepped in close, staring at her. “One more pays all, Thea. A back way in. Then we leave you. We won’t let on you helped us, if the leaves fall against us. You’ll be safe, and we can plan what we need to do That a fair, square deal.” He offered his hand.
After a moment’s hesitation, the scientist shook it. “Deal,” she agreed.
Chapter Thirty
“We walked into that like blind children into the jaws of a panther.” J.B. banged his fist against a wall of their room, hard enough to chip plaster.
“No reason to think danger,” Jak said, lying flat on his back on one of the beds, staring up at the ceiling. “Spilled blood can’t go back in body.”