In drawing up his spur-of-the-moment attack plan, he had assumed that the black armor that shielded both the people and then- aircraft provided an impenetrable defense against blaster slugs. The cannie sniper might have been the lousiest shot this side of the Shens, but Ryan’s skill was triple wicked. And he hadn’t been able to do any damage to the aircraft. J.B. had reasoned that if the people in black and their black plane couldn’t be hurt by blasterfire, perhaps the white rocket could. This unproved weakness was the basis of his strategy. That and the fact that the missile was plenty valuable. A lot more valuable than Ryan.
J.B. figured they could encourage the bastards to make a trade for Ryan by threatening to ventilate the rocket with bullet holes. In the back of his mind he knew he was grasping at straws, but time was running out, and nobody else had come up with anything better.
The key to running a bluff like that was in making sure the enemy believed you were willing to die in order to win. The Trader had taught him that. He’d also taught him that once you got your edge, once you had the enemy rocked back on their heels, you had to push that advantage to the wall, until the bastards were chilled or otherwise knocked out of the fight.
Sometimes going in like a bunch of crazies was the only way to win.
Sometimes it was just suicide.
None of their short-barreled weapons were particularly accurate past one hundred yards. But the missile was big, and they didn’t care where they hit it. Before they had split up to take their attack positions, he had told the others, “If they give us any shit after the shooting starts, aim for the bottom stage of the missile. That’s where most of the fuel is. Bastards have to think we’re ready to blow them back to where they came from.”
J.B. had no idea if Ryan was even still aliveand if he was alive, if there was any way to bring him safely back from wherever he’d been taken. It occurred to him that perhaps this was already a lost cause, that in the great scheme of things there was some other field of battle that John Barrymore Dix was scheduled to die on.
The Armorer looked around. This battleground was as good as any, he decided. Flat. Dry. Lots of broken cover. Still plenty of daylight left. And the cause? Friendship. Rescue. Revenge. Success was well worth a seat on the last train west, if that was what it came to.
When he had given the others enough time to get into position, he checked his Uzi, drawing back the charging lever just far enough to catch the glint of brass that indicated a live round in the chamber. Then he cleared out his mind and let his anger build.
Rage was good.
He drew a deep breath, cupped his hand to his mouth and shouted over to Main Street.
“Hey!” he cried. “Hey, assholes!”
SHORT OF THE SPRAWLING profusion of Moonboy’s shacks and lean-tos, Krysty paused and crouched behind a chunk of sloping cinder-block wall, her Smith amp; Wesson revolver in her hand. A step or two back, Mildred dropped to one knee, looking for targets over the barrel of her Czech-built .38.
Twenty yards from the outskirts of the ville proper, the unmistakable scent of death hung heavy in the air. Both of the women had toured the aftermath of massacres before.
They shared a look, steeling themselves for what they expected to find.
Krysty broke from cover, running low and quick to the edge of the ramshackle structures. Doors were a luxury here. The residents used sheets of plastic to cover the entrances or did without. Floors, other than tamped dirt, were a rarity. She looked inside a shack. The reek of death was mixed with something else, a smell so sharp that it made Krysty’s throat clamp shut.
There was no tangle of bodies on the ground, only a wide brown patch where some liquid had dried on the dirt. Along one wall was a low shelf made of scavenged brick and a narrow piece of sheet metal. On it sat three crudely fashioned straw dolls, a couple of badly chipped enamel pots, a broken piece of yardstick and a tin measuring cup.