The albino had been shot once through the back of the head, matting the fine, silken white hair with clots of pink-gray brain and splinters of bone. Then in the last, ghastly shock of dying, he’d managed to draw one of the throwing knives, holding it, unthrown in his hand.
J.B. AND MILDRED had returned to their bedroom to be close to Doc.
“Room still stinks of cordite,” Straub said as they paused in the passage. “Sec men went in mob-handed on this one. Weren’t taking any chances. Six of them, and it looks like they emptied their Rugers into the bodies. Kind of messy. Sure you want to see them?” He pushed Ryan through into the shambles.
The bodies were almost unrecognizable, and the room was filled with the biting fumes of the gunfire. It was just as Straub had said it would be. Mildred lay across the corpse of the Armorer, one arm blown off at the shoulder, most of the ragged wounds in her chest and stomach. J.B. stared at the ceiling, blank eyed, one lens of his glasses smashed like a star. Neither of them had had any chance of reaching their weapons.
“See,” Straub said. “Just as I told you. They were such easy meat, and all because of your stubborn pride. Want to see the old man?”
“Yeah. See the butcher’s bill that needs paying,” Ryan said, grating out the harsh, helpless words. He barely hung on to the shreds of sanity at the realization that he had been completely defeated. All of his friends dead. All of them. And his own death only an hour or so away.
He felt physically beaten, hardly able to move, yet somehow movement was easy as Straub showed him everything that had happened. It was oddly dreamlike, with no sense of walking from place to place. The bald man clung to his arm and whispered it in his ear, and there it was.
“LOOKS PEACEFUL, DON’T HE?” Straub sneered. “Weak as a kitten, the lousy old prick.”
“Why did you have to chill them all?” Ryan whispered, head spinning, feeling his stomach knotting with bitter bile. “Just take me.”
“Not good enough for my lady. You spit in her face, and she couldn’t just walk away from that.”
Doc was on his back, eyes closed, the only sign of his violent passing his hands, clenched in front of his face as if he were trying to ward off a blow.
“How?” Ryan asked.
“Pillow. Didn’t struggle too much.”
TIME WAS STRETCHED and meaningless.
One moment Ryan was listening to Straub’s painting the picture of Doc’s bleak and lonely passing, then he was seeing it in every detail. And then he was back again in Straub’s room, lying on the sofa, one hand absently rubbing at the wound in his thigh. He was vaguely aware of its prickling heat and how tender the flesh felt.
Straub was leaning over a large crystal, polishing it with a strip of aquamarine satin, breathing on it, his gleaming, skull-like face grotesquely distorted in the internal reflection of the globe.
He was whispering to himself in a childlike, crooning voice. Ryan heard the words and recognized that they had to make some sort of sense, but he still failed to understand them. Only snatches penetrated into his drugged, paralyzed mind.
“Feed her cream. Mebbe allow her the child. Take him under my wing. Use my powers to close the lady down. Careful and slow and gentle. Think of the enemies, all dismayed, creeping in the corridors, frightened of my shade.”
Ryan slept, his mind brimming with the hideous, deathly images of his butchered comrades. His memory flicked back over adventures gone, never forgotten, looking out to the empty future, alone.
When he came back into the misty half world, Straub was still polishing, still whispering, hugging himself like an old woman against a bitter cold.
“Or pluck the flower from the nettle now? Let the plan run. Let the deaths come at her hands. Finish them all and finish the one-eyed rat king himself. You’re such a fine, brave fellow, Straub, aren’t you? You have two plans, and both are brilliant. Finest ever. Each one a glittering, flawless gem, with its own beautiful facets to cut and polish. You the best, Straub. The very, very best.”