Krysty started to speak, but before she could make a sound, a hand was clamped firmly over her mouth. She looked up at Ryan. When she nodded that she understood, he removed his hand and tenderly brushed her cheek with his fingertips in a quick welcome-back caress. There wasn’t time for anything more.
J.B. had the lid of the emergency-exit hatch slightly ajar and stood crouched over it, waiting.
The car swayed and creaked beneath them as it took on passengers. Lots of passengers. Krysty heard soft, moist kissing sounds through the open hatch. Holding her breath, she quietly rose to her feet. From under her fur coat, she drew her Smith & Wesson Model 640 handblaster.
Ryan reached over and tapped J.B. lightly on the arm.
The Armorer pulled the pin on the frag gren, silently counted to three, then dropped it through the gap. As it clunked on the floor below, he whirled away from the hatch.
The car jolted sharply as the grenade detonated. The hatch lid jumped out of its frame, flipping off to one side. Heat and cordite smoke billowed through the opening, up into the concrete shaft. The caustic fumes burned Krysty’s throat and made her choke.
Then the elevator’s automatic doors slid closed.
With a screech the car started up to the next floor. Steel scraped against concrete, raining showers of sparks on top of them. The high-explosive grenade had
bulged out the sides of the car so it no longer quite fit the shaft.
“Don’t like the sound of that,” J.B. stated.
“Me, neither,” Ryan agreed. “No more grens. Better chill them with blasters next stop.”
Then they all noticed another change, this one even more distressing: the damaged elevator was climbing at about half its previous speed.
“We can always take the other car,” Mildred suggested. After a pause she added, “Assuming this one gets us to the next floor.”
Krysty caught a quick movement at the very edge of her vision, near her feet. She reacted and had her blaster up and tracking before she realized what it was. Despite her quick reflexes, the stickie was halfway out of the hatch by the time her brain-to-finger message was received, and the weapon barked and bucked in her fist. Angling her shots down and away from her friends, she punched a pair of slugs through the stick-ie’s smooth forehead. It dropped back through the opening, out of sight
“Good one,” Ryan said.
The doors to the next floor loomed just overhead.
“My turn,” Jak said, picking up one of the new G-12s. He rotated the cocking knob, a round circle set flush in the stock behind the pistol grip. “Hold legs so don’t fall.”
The teenager positioned himself over the hatch opening, then with J.B. and Ryan securing his ankles, he eased through it, hooking the backs of his knees over
the edge of the frame. He hung upside down from the roof of the elevator like a white-haired bat The car stopped with a jerk, the electronic bell chimed and the doors whooshed apart.
Strobe-light flashes from inside the car accompanied the canvas-ripping sound of full-auto blaster-fire. Shrieks of animal rage and pain echoed through the shaft.
It was over in less than a minute.
Krysty understood Ryan’s strategy, why he wasn’t making a nonstop run for the surface, why he was hitting every floor on the way up. Like moths to a flame, the homicidal crazies lurking around the complex seemed to be drawn to the elevators. Even though they couldn’t chill all of the stickies in the redoubt, the companions could make a serious dent in their numbers. Each one they chilled now was one less they would have to deal with when they returned by this same route to jump out
Jak raised himself partway up, and J.B. and Ryan pulled him to his feet.
“Bastard prime/* the teenager said, grinning. He wiped the spatters of blood and tissue from the sides of his face with the tail of his T-shirt
“Are we going to switch elevators now?” Mildred asked.
It was already too late for that Somewhere far below, an electric motor came to life.
“We got trouble,*’ Krysty said. The set of lift cables on the other side of the shaft began to move.