“Bail, goddammit, or we’re all gonna fry!” the driver shouted through his plastic hood. Beside him, the gunner sat slumped, chin resting on his chest, blood pouring from his ears and pooling at the tightly cinched neck of his yellow breather bag.
There would be no return of fire.
Booting the rear doors open, four of the uninjured sec men jumped out with their weapons raised.
“Go! Go!” Nara shouted at Ryan, shoving him hard in the shoulder. She, too, had grabbed up a tri-barreled blaster.
Ryan hopped out onto the tarmac and sprinted after the sec men who were deserting the wag. Nara ran right on his heels.
The world outside was bleak, and it was still inside . Bathed in hard artificial light, a vast, tunnellike freeway easily fifty lanes wide, stretched out before him. More than half the lanes were blocked by vehicles obviously wrecked, stripped, abandoned. Other wags appeared to be undamaged except for numerous sideswipes, perhaps left by their drivers because they had run out of fuel. The wailing alarm horns had turned this high-speed obstacle course into a parking lot. The operational vehicles, those with drivers, had stopped, too, waiting for the danger to pass; evidently, there was no way to escape from it, whatever it was.
Most of the wags looked nonmilitary. They had transparent windshields and side windows, and no heavy armor plate. Behind their yellow plastic hoods, wide-eyed drivers sucked on green canisters and stared as Ryan ran between the lines of bumper-to-bumper vehicles.
The sec men paused just ahead, beside an occupied civilian wag. Ryan was closing the gap when the front windshield exploded in hard, bright light and the roof peeled back like the lid of a predark can. The shock wave sent the sec men crashing to the deck.
With bits of metal debris screaming past their ears, Ryan and Nara took cover behind a rear bumper. Then something much, much larger swooshed overhead.
Ryan cranked his head around in time to catch the glint of the freeway floodlights off a thin wire suspended in the air. In the same instant, he saw a guy in a yellow bubble and white coat leap from the wag’s rear doors. Huth jumped a fraction of a second before the wire-guided rocket burrowed inside the opening.
No one else got out.
With a terrific thunderclap the wag flew apart. Its dismantled side panels clobbered the vehicles on either side. Before Ryan could blink, there were more explosions, a chain reaction of them as one after another, fuel tanks in the parked vehicles blew. Orange balls of gasoline fire blossomed, blackening the freeway’s low ceiling, then dying back to envelop wag roofs and driver compartments.
Beyond the burning wreckage, Ryan got a glimpse of Hum’s bobbing yellow hood as he raced in the opposite direction. It was easy to disappear among the thousands of stopped cars. Likewise, it was hard to see where the enemy fire was coming from.
Then the ear-splitting siren stopped. After a pause, it was replaced by a long, steady tone.
“That’s the all clear,” Nara told him. She stripped off her breathing device and discarded it.
Ryan and the sec men crouched ahead of them did the same. Even without the hood, he couldn’t see where the attack had come from. “How about a blaster for me?” he said, pointing at the black grip of the spare side arm she had stuffed in her lab coat pocket.
“No, let’s move,” Nara said. Sec men didn’t need an invitation from her. Some seventy-five feet away, they were already up and running through the maze of parked and destroyed vehicles. Ryan and Nara ran after them.
After the all clear, the operational wags didn’t stay parked for long. Drivers peeled their tires to get clear of the free-fire zone. They had no intention of stopping or even slowing for pedestrians in jeopardy.
As Ryan started across a lane of freeway, Nara grabbed him by the arm, jerking him back as a monster truck roared down on them. The long trailer it towed momentarily blocked their escape route and separated them from their supposed protectors.
“Hey! Wait!” Nara yelled at the sec men as the rear of the truck swept by.