James Axler – Keepers of the Sun

And he was sinking into it, admitting to himself that the waters around him had grown and grown.

And grown.

RYAN OPENED his eye, rolled on his side and threw up, the blood-flecked puke splattering on the dusty wooden floor. The pain was excruciating and he coughed, feeling it rending deep in his chest.

“Want some water, lover?”

He’d closed his eye with the sharpness of the agony, but now he cautiously opened it again. His field of vision was filled with what looked like a veil of living fire. He blinked to try to clear his sight, feeling a flood of salt tears coursing down his stubbled cheeks.

The vivid scarlet banner that waved in front of him was the hair of Krysty Wroth. She sat in a folding chair at the side of his bed.

“Water?” he muttered.

“Yeah. Helps. We can bathe your eye later and rinse out your mouth.”

“Yeah.” He was aware that while he’d been unconscious someone had crept by and filled his throat with red-hot coils of barbed razor-wire, and that the inside of his mouth and his tongue lacked any skin. He licked at his lips, finding them blistered and tender.

“Sit up.” She put her arm around him, eased him into an upright position and held a glass of water to his mouth for him to sip at.

He swallowed a couple of mouthfuls, gagging at the discomfort, trying to push the glass away.

“Slow and easy, lover,” she whispered.

Gradually the memory of the last moments before diving into the dark lake came back to him.

“You’re all right?” he whispered.

“Yeah.”

“The shogun What’s his name?”

“Mashashige?”

“Yeah. He make it?”

“In the next room. Real sick like you, but Mildred says he’ll pull through all right.”

“Mildred opened the doors for us?”

Krysty nodded, giving him another sip of water. “Heard the shooting and came running. Got here just in time for you and me and Mashashige.”

Ryan caught the subtext in her careful choice of words. “The others?”

She took the half-empty glass from him and rested it carefully on a small table by the head of the bed. “Not many made it.”

“The sarin gas chilled them?”

Krysty nodded. “J.B. says there’s no doubt that’s what it was. Sarin. Says the Nazis developed it, and then it got used a lot by terrorist groups in the States and in parts of the Far East. Lethal stuff. Cheap and easy to make as soon as you got the right chemical mix.”

“How many dead?”

“Not sure. By the time the doors were opened, most of those who’d been on the far side of the ballroom had already received a fatal dose. Drowned in frothing fluid that filled their lungs. Bastard way to go.”

Ryan sniffed. “Tell me about it, lover. So, the death toll was high?”

“Hundred dead, or so badly tainted by the gas that Mildred says they won’t see out the next twenty-four hours. Only about a dozen are going to make it.”

“Fireblast! Bad as that?”

Krysty looked at him, and he saw that her vivid emerald eyes were streaked with red, the lids swollen and sore. “Almost a perfect trap.”

“Near enough.”

“Yashimoto wants to chase after the ronin. Hideyoshi is all for caution. Points out that the ronin most likely outnumber us now. He thinks we should try and get back safe to the ville, soon as possible.”

“Sounds right to me,” Ryan said, moving to a more comfortable position on the bed.

“But neither of them’ll want to move a muscle until Mashashige recovers.”

“What’s our total force now?” He reached up and wiped his eye with the sleeve of his shirt.

“The six of us, Mashashige, Yashimoto and Hideyoshi, and four or five of the top samurai. Half a dozen men who were with the wags. Very few survivors from the ballroom.”

“Men on sentry watch.”

She nodded. “Seems they saw someone snaking out of the motel, presumably after he’d set the gas going. He slipped over the edge of the cliff, and they lost sight of him. Samurai with them claims the ronin must’ve been chilled, but there’s no proof.”