Hutter raised his blaster to chill the mad dog and also to put Jourgensen out of his misery, but his sole attempt at charity for the baron of Charity was stopped by two streams of blasterfire that came his way from Jenny’s and Rudi’s Uzis. They’d heard their leader cry out and wanted him to achieve his revenge without interruption.
But in their single-minded desire, they had neglected to watch their backs, and so found themselves open to blasterfire from those few sec men who had decided that they should keep a watch on their baron.
Jenny and Rudi weren’t the only ones to leave themselves open in this manner. Correll was now in a world of his own, the chaos and carnage around him meaning nothing, failing to register in his addled brain. For Joseph Correll, the Hellbenders and the whole assault and ambush on the trade convoy between Summerfield and Charity was as of naught. The only thing that mattered was that Baron Al “Red” Jourgensen was now beneath his blade, the chilled corpse of the baron nothing more than a mess of offal as the saber hacked him into ever smaller pieces. Correll raised his head to the skies, clouded as they were with smoke, sand and the smell of destruction, and laughed long and loud. He looked over to where some of Jourgensen’s sec men had emerged from the mists.
He knew what was to happen, but it no longer mattered. There was nothing now left for him to live for. His raison d’entre was fulfilled. He turned to the sec men and raised the saber aloft triumphantly, laughing wildly and welcoming the hail of blasterfire that ripped into him. The metal box on his chest gave way under the hail of fire as it ripped into his exposed head and limbs, the stress on the primitive welding making it give way beneath the onslaught.
Correll stayed on his feet—kept partly upright by the force of the bullets ripping into him—long enough for the box to fall open, and its contents to finally be revealed.
The charred and semimummified remains of Correll’s wife tumbled from the box and fell on the mutilated remains of her tormentor…followed closely by Correll’s lifeless corpse.
The real battle was over. Now it was just a question of who would get out alive.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Dean, Jak and Danny backtracked through the sandstorm and smoke, each with his blaster at the ready, in search of a wag that could be used to get them out of the arena. Doc followed, bringing Ayesha with him. But the one-eyed man held back.
“What is it, lover?” Krysty asked him.
“J.B. and Millie,” Ryan replied simply. “We need to find them. They won’t know where we are.”
“They might if they saw Correll,” Krysty replied. “They knew he was in our wag, and they’d probably guess which direction to take.”
“That’s a lot of mebbes,” Ryan said grimly. “I’ve got to try and find them.”
“In this? We could wander forever and still not find them,” Krysty told him.
“We?” Ryan queried, then grinned when he saw the expression on her face. “Okay, let’s do it.”
While Ryan and Krysty set off to try to find J.B. and Mildred, the other five in the group were making their way toward the rear of the convoy in search of a wag they could use.
“Shit, I’ll be glad when we can get the hell out of here,” Danny whispered to Dean.
Jak heard him and grinned with a vulpine relish. “No one get in our way,” he said simply, a leaf-bladed knife appearing in his hand. “Get close, chill quick and quiet— no one guess where we are.”
“You don’t know how much I hope so,” Danny murmured fervently.
The party of five had been lucky so far. The main hand-to-hand was taking part toward the middle of the desert floor, where the Hellbenders had rushed to take on the sec men as they emerged from their wags. So getting back as far as the rear of the convoy was a matter of keeping eyes and ears open and staying close to the wall. Jak, Dean and Doc knew their respective strengths and fighting skills, but Ayesha and Danny were still unknown quantities, so they didn’t want to risk conflict unless it was absolutely necessary.