“Probably so. Both ends of the mall roof are showing movement,” the techie said. “How they got on the roof is anybody’s guess. We’ve only got cameras for this side. I don’t know if the other section has been lit up or not.”
“What’s with the alarm?” Rollins said as he clomped into the room.
“We’ve got company,” Ryan replied tightly, gesturing toward the screens. “Look for yourself.”
“Shit. Fire. I hate fires,” the sec man said.
“Has to be stickies.”
Rollins nodded in agreement. “Let’s take a look. You get the two of yours, and I’ll alert two of mine. We’ll go up and recce on this side. I’ll alert a team on the other side of Freedom to check their end, as well.”
“Got it.”
Rollins’s men were already waiting when he and Ryan exited the monitor room. The four men raced down the access hallway, picking up Krysty and Jak on the way. Like Ryan, both of his friends already had their hardware in hand, with Krysty holding her .38-caliber Smith amp; Wesson and Jak his huge .357 Colt Python with the six-inch barrel.
“What’s with the parade, lover?” Krysty asked.
“Visitors. Set off the motion sensors on the roof. If we’re lucky, it’s just a flying squirrel or a bunch of birds or something,” Ryan told her.
“In the middle of the night?” Rollins said. “I doubt it’s birds. Squirrels, either, unless you’ve ever seen one that weighs a hundred pounds.”
Ryan laughed. “Brother, I’ve seen things in Deathlands that make a hundred-pound squirrel look like a stuffed cuddly toy.”
Rollins cocked his blaster. “Don’t matter to me none. A hundred pounds or a thousand, a few rounds to the head will take care of the son of a bitch. I just don’t want to be the one stuck with the shovel having to bury his big fuzzy ass.”
The narrow workmen’s stairwell to the roof was dimly lit with red bulbs, giving the group the sensation of walking up through the intestines of a volcano. There were no sounds here. The alarms that had been tripped on the rooftop were silent this close to the scene.
When they came out of the elevated trapdoor entrance onto the rooftop, the group of six split into two parties. Ryan kept Krysty and Jak. Rollins took his own pair of trained men. This decision was made wordlessly and without conscious thought. Each man wanted his own crew backing him up. Ryan could respect that.
Rollins swung open the door and carefully leaned his head out, letting his eyes adjust to the scene.
As far as the eye could see from the protection of the small freestanding doorway of the roof level stairs access, fires were burning in patches.
“Smell it?” Ryan asked.
“Some fuel.” Jak replied.
“Flammable liquids. They’ve sprayed the roof and lit it up somehow,” Rollins said. “How in the hell did they do that?”
“Must have a really long hose.”
“Well, the fires I can see. Let’s try finding them. Maxwell, you got the hardware?” Rollins asked.
“Yes, sir,” one of the two sec men who had accompanied Rollins replied.
Ryan looked at the device the younger man was holding. “It’s an image intensifier,” Maxwell explained.
“Thought we could use it to see what was on the ground,” Rollins said.
“I’m getting some ground movement,” Maxwell replied. “They look too damn far away to have done this, though.”
Those were the last words the young sec man ever said before a loud shot rang out above the soft crackling of the flames. The oversize image intensifier he was holding to his eyes disintegrated into a cloud of plastic shards, and his face immediately followed, the upper half of his head breaking open from the slug that killed him.
“From above!” Jak cried, raising the big Colt and firing into the darkness overhead.
“How?” Krysty asked, and then she saw what Jak was aiming at. A stickie was indeed overhead, hanging from the tubing of a makeshift glider like an evil, diseased bat. She could see the mutie’s pale face as the craft swooped around, diving again for another pass. More of the flammable liquid was dropped, sprayed from an oversize plastic-bag apparatus to cause a new burst of flame to shoot into the air.