“Too bad for him,” J.B. commented, moving to a corner of the charred office. Some timbers had fallen from the ceiling there, and he kicked away the covering to expose a partially melted plastic box.
“Bingo,” he said softly, taking the case and putting it on the desk. Carefully inspecting for traps, the man then opened the lid and beamed at the weapon laying inside on a cushion of crunchy gray foam. The pistol was short and fat, a breech loader with a maw large enough to shove in a gren. On either side were neat rows of color-coded, waxy cylinders.
“That’s a Navy flare gun,” Ryan said, bolstering his blaster. “My father used to have one. He used it to signal troops during large battles so he wouldn’t have to relay orders by shouting.”
J.B. caressed the signal gun as if it were gold. “Yeah, a Veri pistol. I spotted it when we were here before. Had no use for the thing then, but now” The wiry man smiled. “Now it’s our key to killing Overton.”
“How the fuck are we going to bust open the keep with that?”
“Come on,” J.B. said, closing the case and starting for the door. “I’ll show you.”
Chapter Eighteen
High above Front Royal, the blue shirts in the war room of the keep looked down at the ville below, sweeping the streets with the scopes of their longblasters, hunting for targets. There was a huge reward for the man who chilled Ryan or Nathan, and so they were concentrating their attention on anybody with black hair, man, woman or child.
Suddenly, there was a flash of light from a nearby rooftop, and something streaked their way to hit the outside of the keep and bounce off the hard stone.
“What the heck was that?” a sec man demanded with a nervous laugh.
“Must have been a homemade rocket,” someone answered. “Piece of shit didn’t even explode.”
“We better close the shutters anyway,” another man suggested, bending out of the window and reaching for the drawstring.
Just then another burning object streaked in to impact on the wall, spraying sparks everywhere. The sizzling blue light was blinding, and it gave off volumes of thick sulfurous smoke. Raggedly coughing, the men knocked the object to the floor and stomped on it until the blazing illumination died while another grabbed a bucket of sand from a wall niche. Then a second blue flare entered the war room and glanced off the closed door to land on the table, setting fire to the maps and charts.
The nearest sec man grabbed the flare with his bare hand and tossed it away but missed the window. It hit the floor as a crimson-red flare smashed against the wall, spraying sparks and embers in a pyrotechnic geyser. Another red flare flew in to ricochet wildly, followed by a green, then a blue. The room was stifling with the awful heat, the air barely breathable from the reeking fumes. A chair caught on fire, then a blaster rack. Yanking the blasters off the burning wood, the blue shirts beat at the flames with blankets and threw buckets of sand onto the flares. One sec man tried for the door to escape, but couldn’t find the exit in the hellish light that seemed to pierce his closed eyelids. Another man shouted directions, the words lost in the loud sizzling of the incandescent rockets.
More flares shot in, crashing into an oil lantern, smashing a glass case full of crossbow arrows and landing in the middle of a crate of Molotov cocktails. A screaming guard dumped the last bucket of sand on the flare in the gasoline bombs, but it was already too late. A blue shirt, covering his face with his hands to block out the terrible light, heard a new sound, a deep hissing, and squinted in horror at the crossbow arrows tipped with sticks of dynamite. Plunging his bare hands through the jagged glass, the man slashed his arms into ribbons grabbing for the lit fuse.
RUTHLESSLY SHOOTING civilians and brown shirts alike, Overton and his personal contingent of guards proceeded along the main street of the ville. In the distance, they could see the keep rising above the smaller sections of the fortress, an indomitable column of stone rising skyward. Turning into the mouth of a small alley, the blue shirts stopped in their tracks, staring at the door to the garage.
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