The sec men around Ryan removed their helmets and opened the snap flaps of pouches on their combat belts. They moved deliberately, but in no real hurry. Each took out a green canister the size of a soda can, which had a large, translucent, yellow-tinted plastic bag attached to one end and a metal cap on the other. Nara handed him one of the devices. “You put it on like this,” she said. She removed the end cap from the canister and pulled the yellow hood over her head. Then she cinched the throat strap tight. “Breathe through the mouthpiece, like this,” she told him, “and you’ll be fine.”
Ryan donned the plastic hood as she had showed him. The mouthpiece tasted like rubber and charcoal, and it took some effort to draw air through it, which created an unpleasant, dry sensation all down his throat. The colored plastic distorted his vision. It made things look wavy, and the tint turned everything inside the wag a sickly orange. Across from him, Kisser had a face like a two-week-old corpse.
“What’s this for?” he asked Nara.
“I’ll explain everything after the all clear,” she told him. “Too hard to talk with hood on. The inside always fogs up.”
In the wag’s front compartment, the gunner was helping the driver on with his hood as he continued to slow. Ryan felt a tingling sensation on his bare arms and the backs of his hands, like thousands of tiny pinpricks. The sirens were still howling as the wag came to a halt.
Ryan leaned forward for a better look at Kisser, whose head had slumped to one side. The sec man had his eyes shut. With his lips wrapped around the mouthpiece, he was trying to catch a catnap. Whatever was going on, Ryan figured it had to be fairly routine.
Then something crashed into the right side of the wag, snapping him hard against his shoulder restraints. With the screech of metal on metal still ringing in his ears, there came another collision, same place. Then the wag was being forced to the left by a grinding sideways pressure. Up front, the driver gestured wildly for the gunner to do something.
The head-on impact that came next nearly separated Ryan’s neck from his shoulders. Battened-down gear sprang loose, filling the inside of the compartment with missiles. A small metal box fell on Kisser’s head, tearing a foot-long rip in the front of his plastic hood.
Eyes wide with shock and panic, the sec man desperately and futilely tried to hold the lips of the tear together.
“Don’t breathe!” Huth shouted at him. “Just don’t breathe! I’ll get another unit!”
Kisser’s panicked expression said it was already too late. His face turned purple and his eyes bulged out as he fought to keep from coughing. He lasted no more than a few seconds before his jaws gaped, his throat opened, and in a single horrendous paroxym his insides came flying out his mouth. Hot blood mixed with shredded lung tissue splattered against Ryan’s hood and chest.
Other sec men ignored Kisser’s final spasms. They frantically unbuckled their safety harnesses and charged their weapons.
Again the wag rocked, this time by a deafening explosion that lifted the vehicle high into the air. The wave of intense heat that slammed them said only one thing to Ryan thermite.
Chapter Fifteen
One of two things was going to happen, J.B. thought as he crouched behind a heap of concrete chunks. They were either going to get Ryan back, or they were going to piss off the black-armored people in a real big way. He had easily moved into position in the same general area as the sniper, on the south end of Moonboy’s main street. No one had fired on him and he’d seen no sign of antipersonnel trip wires.
Down the road, five people in black were hard at work on the missile. They had unscrewed panels along the sides of the nose cone and hooked up cables that connected it to what had to be a launch-control computer across the street. They were getting the white-and-red bird ready to fly.
Where and for what purpose, J.B. didn’t have a clue. Furthermore, he didn’t care. He knew the target, if there was one, couldn’t amount to much. Deathlands had nothing left worth nuking.