Ryan heard the running feet stop and readied himself with the SIG-Sauer.
J.B. edged closer, alert for any threat. The powerful shotgun was braced at his hip, finger relaxed on the trigger.
He noticed the door on the left, slightly ajar. He moved away quietly to the opposite side of the corridor, giving himself a better angle.
Ryan sensed the intruder, very close. All of his attention was focused on the main passage, making the instant decision to take the initiative. Other enemies might be closing in, and time wasted was time lost.
He kicked the door open, finger whitening, checking the movement at the last splinter of frozen time as he recognized the crouched figure of J. B. Dix.
“I nearly” Ryan began. But J.B. hadn’t stopped, swinging the gaping muzzle of the Smith amp; Wesson toward him and firing. Ryan felt the blast of heat and noise.
Chapter Ten
Doc Tanner came to, finding himself lying on his left side, knees tucked up to his chin and a thread of spittle cooling over his cheek.
He knew better than to open his eyes too soon after a jump, aware of the sickening rush to the cortex that normally resulted.
Doc swallowed a few times, pleased he wasn’t going to throw up. He coughed to clear his throat and spoke into the darkness around him.
“To make one jump is unfortunate but to have to make two jumps seems like carelessness.”
He waited for someone to respond, expecting some waspish dig from the cantankerous black woman doctor with the beaded dreadlocks.
“Mildred?” he said.
There was simply the vast silence, a stillness so intense that the old man was aware of the sound of the blood coursing through his skull.
He opened his eyes and remembered.
IT WAS TWENTY MINUTES to ten in the morning.
Krysty was running as fast as she dared, Michael and Dean struggling to keep up with her. Ahead of her she’d just spotted the entrance to the elevator.
“What’s rush?” the boy panted.
“Trouble. Ryan, trouble.” She had no breath to explain more. Not that you could explain the icy fingers that gripped you by heart and lungs, the feeling that in some limitless cavern on a barren star a hooded figure had opened its shadowy eyes and directed a ruby laser into the deeps of your soul.
MILDRED WAS HALFWAY between the top of the shaft and the scene of the killings, but she heard the unmistakable thunderous roar of the big shotgun.
“John,” she breathed, and began to run up the slope of the corridor.
RYAN SLIPPED, losing his balance in the spilled blood, landing on top of the dead mutie. He came within a hairbreadth of putting a bullet through J.B. for the triple-stupe attempt to send him to buy the farm. Then behind him he heard the sudden noise of someone clattering to the floor.
“Ace on the line, Ryan,” J.B. said, levering another round into the shotgun.
The mutie had been able to creep up close behind Ryan without him hearing, and it had been gripping a steel-shafted hatchet in its clawed fingers. If the Armorer hadn’t chanced the risky passing shot, then the blade of the ax would have probably been buried in the back of Ryan’s skull.
The Smith amp; Wesson scattergun fired eight rounds of Remington flechettes, twenty inch-long darts in each shot. At any range over fifty yards the spread was so great that they were of little lethal value.
But the mutie had been only a dozen paces from J.B., and the flechettes had, literally, ripped its heart apart.
As Ryan got to his feet, still holding his blaster, he noticed what lay on the floor a few steps behind the most recent mutie corpsea severed human arm, so slender that it must have belonged to a dead child, with three fingers missing, gnawed off at the splintered knuckles.
J.B. was checking the bodies of the ghouls, whistling between his teeth as he realized what they’d stumbled on. “I caught the smell. Thought it was a hospital.”
Ryan nodded, joining him in the main passage. “Same here. But the body parts have been emptied of blood. Preserved in some way. Frozen or pumped with chemicals.”