“You brought the breakfast for us? Well, it’s way too fuckin’ early, so you can go away and stick it up your ass, kid.” He giggled. “Less you want somethin’ else up your early-mornin’ ass, kid?”
“Don’t call me ‘kid,’ asshole,” Jak said, shooting him through the upper chest, knocking him backward out of the chair. His legs kicked the table over, waking the other three members of the gang.
Knowing his limitations with blasters, Jak aimed for the safe, broad target of the upper chest, not risking the head shot. He put the other men down and dying with three bullets, leaving himself two more rounds.
Doc heard the muffled rumble of the rapid gunfire and a single yell of terror, and transferred the Le Mat to his left hand, propping the swordstick against a hitching rail. He wiped the sweat from his right hand before taking up the heavy blaster again.
He was just in time as the door was flung open and two men raced out, one wearing only a shirt, the other in a pair of shorts, both barefooted, neither armed. One of them was screaming at the top of his voice.
Doc hesitated for a moment, then remembered the crucified bodies and the raped girls. He leveled the Le Mat and squeezed the trigger, cocking it and firing it again. At less than twenty feet, both the .44s were perfect aces on the line, tumbling the fleeing thugs like shotgunned rabbits.
A half minute later Jak appeared in the door. “Nobody else here,” he said, looking at the two corpses leaking dark blood into the dirt. “Got them both? Good.”
“I heard more shooting, Jak.”
The boy paused, head on one side, the light breeze blowing his long white hair back off his chiseled face. His red eyes darted around the ville. “Be out and running any second. Be some more shooting.”
Nineteen were dead, or down and dying, in the first minute and a half of the raid.
Roughly ten norms and a couple of stickies were left alive in Harmony, all of them jerked from deep sleep by the sound of shooting, broken by the occasional scream.
Ryan hesitated outside the church, looking at the ville, wondering how the others had done so far.
The first drillings were just the beginning.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Ryan watched as a window opened in the second floor of one of the houses that they’d marked down as harboring gang members. A breed with a heavy mustache appeared, looking both ways, not seeing the one-eyed man in the shadows. He climbed out onto the top of the porch, followed by a companion. Both were partly dressed, holding bundles of clothes and both with unidentifiable revolvers in their hands.
Ryan waited until both of them were preparing to jump before bringing the Steyr rifle to his shoulder. The light was growing stronger every minute, but the night scope was still useful, the laser image enhancer making everything easier.
The SSG-70 barked and Ryan worked the bolt action, readying another of the 7.62 mm rounds, squeezing the trigger a second time, watching through the scope as the two men rolled lifelessly off the porch onto the ground.
THE PLAN HAD BEEN for everyone to separate after the first flush of the butchery, going to other properties where they believed other gang members were staying.
Doc was nearly caught by a stocky man with a bush of gray hair and protruding teeth who suddenly jumped down from a low roof, knocking the Le Mat from his fingers, sending him staggering into a green-painted picket fence.
“Whodafuckyou?” The snarl turned the phrase into a single word. The man had a bowie knife in his right hand, and he gestured toward Doc with it.
“We are the lily white boys, clad all in green,” Doc replied, giving a twist to the silver lion’s-head hilt of the swordstick, letting the ebony sheath fall to the alley, exposing the blade of the slim rapier.
“Fuckin’ swordbastard!”
He came at the old man in a grinning, clumsy rush, the blade held low in the classic knife-fighter’s pose, ready for the lethal cut upward at the unprotected belly.