Trader used to say that it was always better to slay a sleeping enemy rather than one wide awake.
Ryan catfooted to the man on the alter and brought the barrel of the SIG-Sauer to his nap, angling it toward the occipital bone at the rear of the skull. He looked behind him to see that Krysty had takes a similar position, kneeling by one of the sleeping gang of killers.
Four fifty-nine and fifty-seven seconds.
Eight.
Nine.
Five o’clock.
Ryan pressed the blaster against the warm skin and pulled the trigger before the man could lurch out of sleep. The 9 mm round drove through into the deeps of the slumbering brain, bringing death before wakefulness, giving a dark mercy that the killer had done nothing to deserve.
Once that first marker had fallen due, it was quickly on to the second, before the muffled echo of the shot had traveled around the building. His heavy booming SIG-Sauer was followed immediately by the lighter, flatter crack of Krysty’s 5-shot, short-barreled revolver.
The murderers died without waking, with the exception of the one who’d been sleeping near the pulpit. Ryan was still a step away when that figure started to throw back the blankets, the beginnings of a scream birthing in his throat.
Ryan pulled the trigger of the SIG-Sauer, and the bullet smashed through the front of the killer’s head, exiting into the base of the font in a welter of blood and brains, drilling a hole clean through the carved wood. The body slumped down, the holy water leaking all over it, streaming darkly down the center aisle of the church.
As the corpse rolled clear of the blanket, there was enough light for Ryan to see that he’d killed a middle-aged woman with short, curly hair.
Krysty walked across to join him, the heels of her Western boots ringing on the stone flags, carefully avoiding the spreading pools of dark blood.
“Done?” she asked, pausing as she saw the last victim. “Gaia! That’s Martha Pachelbel. I knew her when I was little. Lived next How come you ?”
“Just another person in a blanket,” Ryan said, swiftly replacing the empty rounds.
“I guess if she was sleeping in here with them then Hear more shooting.”
Ryan nodded. “Others getting on with the business. Let’s move. Every second’s precious.”
They left the building by the front door, calling for Carl to join them from his watch on the side entrance.
“You get them all?”
“Yeah. Seven. Never felt a thing.” Ryan didn’t mention the woman. Time for that later.
J.B. AND MILDRED had been given the school. It seemed that this was one of the centers for the muties, and the firepower of the Uzi and Mildred’s uncanny accuracy with her Czech revolver could prove vital.
J.B. took the back, slipping in past the outhouses into a small cloakroom, lined with benches and rows of pegs. Mildred walked along the grass at the side of the gravel path to the front door, which stood slightly ajar. There was the strong smell of smoke, and she could make out the remains of a big fire still glowing in the grate, which was another pointer to the presence of stickies with their notorious love of flames and explosions.
She entered the single classroom at the same moment J.B. appeared from a door at the side of the teacher’s desk. The first dawn light was just enough, as Ryan had said it would be, for them to make out the sleeping enemies.
The Armorer started to check his chron, but his keen hearing caught the sound of shooting from over toward the church and he knew that it was time to start.
There were six sleeping figures, mostly snoring through open mouths. All were unmistakably stickies, with eroded, corrupt features, scabbed skin and the tiny circles of the suckers on their hands and fingers, opening and closing rhythmically, in time with their breathing.
J.B. had the Uzi on single shot and walked briskly between the sleeping muties, killing each of them with a single bullet in the brain.
The shots came at three-second intervals. The fifth stickie was partly awake, sitting up, rubbing at his eyes as the Armorer shot him through the suckered palms, straight into his skull.