The light blazed brighter, sending a distorted shadow of the plastic boulder across the floor.
J.B. was hoping the sec men would pass by without seeing them, that they’d get a chance to jump on their backs and overpower them.
He hadn’t counted on the spooks.
With a roar and a clanking of heavy chains, something huge and angry lunged at them from the dimness. Powerful fingers brushed J.B.’s face, nearly knocking loose his glasses. Mildred was so startled by the attack that she yelped and jumped out from behind the rock.
“Hold it right mere,” the sec man with the torch said. He held her covered with the rifle in his other hand. “The rest of you come on out.”
His partner stepped to one side, aiming at the rock with a battered, wood-stocked AK-47. “Yeah, come on out.”
As J.B; and Doc rose from cover, there was another roar and clank. This time it came from behind the second sec man. As they watched, a loop of heavy chain flopped over his head and down around his neck. With a crunch the loop cinched tight. The sec man dropped his blaster and clawed at the links that were crushing his throat. He was hauled, kicking, back into the darkness.
It all happened in a heartbeat.
The man with the torch swung around and, with his autorifle aimed at belly level, rushed to help his buddy. Mildred timed her kick perfectly. She caught the sec man moving forward, with one foot on the ground. She booted him sideways, in the direction of the plastic rock. The rifle and torch went flying as he crashed on top of the boulder. He disappeared behind it.
Darkness closed in as the torch sputtered out.
A second passed, then a blood-curdling scream ripped the air. It was followed by the loud whop of heavy steel chain slamming into meat and concrete, and the guttural grunt of an all-out effort.
Slap. Grunt. Over and over.
By the time J.B. found the rifle and the AK-47, the screams had become a bubbling moan. When the three of them reached the Ghost Castle Spook Train’s entrance, it was dead quiet behind them. Doc held back
a corner of the curtain so the Armorer could check the actions and mags of their newly acquired blasters.
Mildred drew back the curtain on the other side of the doorway, stuck her face outside and sucked in some fresh air.
“Scary ride, huh?” J.B. stated, slapping the 30-round box back into the Armalite rifle.
Chapter Seventeen
When his psychic network told him the three berm bunkers were out of commission, Lord Kaa pushed himself up from the mud and grabbed his M-60. He was already running for the middle bunker when he visualized the rising of his troops. As he pinched closed his middle eyelid, the scrubland dirt plain behind him jumped to life. Thousands of stickies joined him in the charge.
His creatures had their marching orders. Once the wave of shrieking stickies reached the wall, it split into three parts. The middle section funneled straight on through the center bunker. The other two turned in opposite directions and sprinted along the barrier to the unmanned blasterports, where they, too, broke into the Willie ville compound.
Kaa led the middle force through the tractor-cab gateway. Inside the trailer blood was splattered everywhere. His stickies had to pass through the puddles of gore, to walk in them barefoot, to smell them. And as they did, their excitement reached a fever pitch.
Lord Kaa, too, was excited. On the inside of the berm, his split forces rejoined. He ran at the head of a mass of bodies. They moved quickly toward the paved
lane between the end of the Independence Park Amusement Zone and the baron’s brewery.
Though there was no real resistance yet, he could hear distant screams of panic and sustained bursts of blasterfire. His prelim entry teams were already at the hotel, where the sec men were the most concentrated.
The baron’s sec men didn’t open fire until the main force was almost to the brewery. A blaster position on the roof of the building sprayed their right side with autofire and scored scattered hits. Stickies along the flank leaped and spun in the air as they were drilled. The mist of blood raised by the blasterfire only made the survivors more frantic to kill.
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