“White boy’s right,” Catherine said between shots of her own. “Ignore the pain. It’s much more satisfying to see those bastards go down,” she added with a grin as one of her shots took out a sec man, his head splitting like a ripe melon, visible even through the dust storm. The blood and brain from his exploding skull was absorbed into the swirling dust around as his body slumped, the impact of the slug absorbed almost totally above neck level—where there was nothing now left to indicate he had ever had a head.
The grin on the blonde’s face turned to a grimace of pain as a flurry of shots from the opposing sec ripped along the side of the wag. The vast majority of the shells ricocheted harmlessly off the wag’s armor, but Catherine had drawn the short straw when it came to luck, and was about to become the first casualty among the Hellbenders.
Two slugs from the sec men squeezed through the gap around the barrel and sight of the AK-47, and if she hadn’t turned to reply to Jak’s comments, they may have just wounded her in the upper arm or missed altogether. But that fraction that she moved to speak, pushing her head away from and higher than the sight on her blaster put her in direct line for the shots that had squeezed through.
The first one caught her on the cheekbone, freezing the grimace for an awful second as it ripped the flesh away from her face, exposing the bone and teeth of the jaw, before the bone seemed to splinter and powder in front of them. It seemed as though everything were happening in slow motion as her head jerked upward slightly, the second slug hitting home at her temple, ripping flesh and hair from her head. Her green eyes seemed for one fraction of a second to register the most intense pain and surprise, pleading for a reason why this had happened by such a fluke, before the light went from the eyes, followed by the viscous fluid of the eyeball itself as it exploded under the pressure of the blow.
Just as her shot had made the opposing sec man’s head explode like a melon, so the two shots that had squeezed through the gap in the armoring reduced her head to pulp in a matter of a second or two and extinguished the life of the belligerent and feisty blonde.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Lonnie said, looking over his shoulder as her body was thrown across the wag and landed in Danny’s lap, making the youngster puke. “When Rudi finds out, he’ll go shit mad—he’ll probably take ’em out on his own. And don’t stop firing just because of that,” he added as Jak and Dean returned their attention to their blasters and started to loose shots once more at the trade convoy.
One thing was certain, though—the sudden, freakish and unexpected chilling of one of their own people had brought home to everyone in the wag that they were outnumbered at least two-to-one by those on the outside of the Hellbenders’ caravan, and that every life lost, especially in such a stupe manner, was more of a blow to them than to the men of either Charity or Summerfield.
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN, you can’t drive one of these?” Claudette yelled at Ayesha. “Didn’t your daddy ever give you a wag as a present, like your brothers?”
Inside the wag that had carried the women into the arena, the noise from outside was drowned by the argument within. With the chilled body of the sec man still in the corner, and now bereft of both sec shotgun and driver, as well as the traitorous Anita, the women were huddled in the rear while Ayesha and Claudette stood face-to-face.
“Of course he didn’t, you stupe,” Ayesha yelled back. “I’m a girl, not a boy. Shit, you worked at the palace, or so you say—you know what he was like. Girls are for fucking, and boys get the toys.”
A look clouded across Claudette’s face suddenly, as though the argument was suddenly forgotten.
“Yeah, you’re right,” she said quietly. “My ma always said that Red was like that.”