“Please.”
As Ryan backed off, the sentry came toward him, but he was slower, crucially slower.
Ryan saw his chance and didn’t hesitate.
Swinging the eighteen-inch steel blade with all of his strength, he aimed at the sec man’s midriff. The panga was so sharp that there was almost no sensation of it cutting through the green jacket, deep into McCaffrey’s belly, before the eruption of steaming blood splashed over Ryan’s hand and wrist.
McCaffrey gasped in shock and clamped his hands to the wound, trying to tuck the tumbling lengths of slippery intestine back inside himself. But the loops uncoiled, ghostly pale in the light from the door, dripping in a wash of dark blood, tangling around the dying man’s feet.
“Shouldn’t have. Molly won’t.” he muttered, falling to his knees in front of Ryan, who quickly and economically slit his throat.
“Stupe,” Ryan said.
There was the noise of a scuffling fight from inside the door, the movement stopped by the flat explosion of the Smith & Wesson M-4000 and the familiar sound of a man passing from life into the endless mystery of death.
Ryan left McCaffrey’s corpse where it had dropped in the dirt, stepping quickly through the heavy sec door, pushing it shut behind him.
He saw a dying man on the floor, heels drumming, fingers clawing at the stone floor, the scratching nails the only sound in the stillness. There was a massive wound in his chest where one of the 12-gauge rounds had torn him apart. Blood still flowed, slowly, bubbling pink over the ruined lungs. The guard’s eyes were open, staring blindly up at the scarlet-splashed ceiling. A little blood was trickling from the open mouth.
“Anyone else?” Ryan asked.
J.B. was thumbing in a replacement round. “Not so you’d notice.”
“Shot sounded loud outside.”
The Armorer nodded. “Best bolt that door. Though I don’t reckon there’ll be anyone walking around outside.”
Ryan slid the bar across, taking a moment to look around him. The room was more of a space off a passage, with two doors, both closed. His automatic sense of location told Ryan that one door would open into the rear part of the baron’s collection of mutie creatures. The other one would lead them back toward the heart of the big house.
The dying man was finally still, and the ville was totally silent.
“So far so good,” Ryan said.
“I HAVE NO WISH TO ENTER into the more sordid and intimate details of why I wish to go along the corridor to the bathroom. Suffice it to say that I have a pressing need. Now, will you. It’s Morgan, isn’t it? Joshua Morgan? The sec man that we saved from the.”
Morgan nodded, half smiling, showing his prominent teeth. “Me, all right, Doc. Just about recovered from the run-in with the stickies. Thanks to you and your friends.”
“So, why can I not go to the bathroom?”
“You got a bowl in the room.”
The conversation was being carried out through a gap in the partly open door. Morgan stood guard there with two of his companions.
“I have no intention of. of doing what I need to do while in the company of two friends, one of them a young woman. You have my revolver and you are armed.”
“Baron’s orders, Doc. If he or Joaquin came by and found one of you out of the room, it’d be my back being bared on the triangle, Can’t do it.”
Doc glanced behind him, seeing Jak, hidden from the sight of the sec man, gesturing for him to persist in attempting to get out. They had talked it over and agreed that Doc would try to make a break for it. Whatever it took. The albino teenager had pointed out, with more accuracy than tact, that they likely wouldn’t bother too much with an old man like Doc.
Emma had taken no notice, lying on the bed in a restless sleep, waiting for the promised summons to visit the baron.
“I have to go, there’s a good chap.”
Morgan sighed. “All right. But the others don’t try to pull this one on me. Understood?”
“Of course.”
The door opened, slowly and cautiously, and Doc slipped into the passage. The other two sec men ostentatiously looked the other way, making sure they didn’t have anything to do with the flagrant breach of orders.