As if to underscore the remark, screams loud enough to be heard over the din of music came from the room above.
A dark form plummeted past the window to Ryan’s right. As he turned to face the glass, another body dropped from above. The crowds outside roared their approval.
“That’ll be Major Lujan, on his way out,” Thrill Bill said. He pushed between Ryan and Damm and threw open the windows so they could all lean over the sills.
One story below, the mob was closing in on two men in armor lying crumpled on the street.
A few feet from the building’s facade, a pair of gray ropes swayed. Wet, glistening, gray ropes. On closer inspection, Ryan thought they looked more like empty hoses. Only they were twisted and kinked. Stretching over the window frame, he reached out a hand to touch one.
“No, don’t,” Nara cautioned. “You-hoo!” someone shouted down at him. Ryan craned his neck around and looked up. The sec men leaning out of the windows of the floor above waved at him. They had bloody knives in their hands.
Not hoses, Ryan thought. Guts. Before Thrill Bill’s bodyguards had thrown their prisoners out the windows, they had nailed their intestines to the sills. The weight of their bodies had made their innards uncoil as they dropped, and when the weight came down on the ends of the tether, guts ripped free. That this had partially broken their fall was no mercy. With stomachs torn halfway through the missing armor plates on their chests, they were set upon by a swarming, angry mob.
“There is no truth, but some small justice,” Thrill Bill said.
“So, what’s your answer?” Damm demanded. “Are you in or out?”
“If I can get us into the complex,” the warlord said, “you can get us across to Shadow World?”
“No, but he can,” Damm said.
Thrill Bill stared at Ryan.
“FIVE will take him back dead,” the mercie said. “It’s either that or the alliance is going to fall apart. But they would prefer to get him alive. Once we’re inside in the complex, we can use him to bargain for transport.”
Ryan had already picked out the weapon he wanted. He darted away from the window, stooped and swept up a submachine gun with a stick mag. He flicked the charging knob and leveled the blaster at them. “I think I’ll find my own way back,” he said. “And you can forget about tagging along. You’re never going to leave this room.”
“Easy, Ryan,” Nara said. “We’re not going to sell you out and leave you behind. I owe it to you to get you back where you came from. You don’t deserve to die here.”
“We’re all getting out, Cawdor, or no one is,” Damm said.
The mercie’s words were still hanging in the air when the building was rocked by a blast that rained ceiling plaster on them.
Ryan looked out the window and saw black APCs pouring out of the ramp that connected to the levels above, fanning the street with lines of green fire.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Jak Lauren wasn’t watching the sky as the aircraft closed in; the shores of the boiling lake held dangers, too. Dangers just as near.
Over the bubbling mud and the beat of the propellers, he strained to locate the sound he had just heard. Despite the sweltering heat, the muted back-and-forth yap-yap had made his blood run cold. There it was again. A signal. Not human.
Jak kicked one of the bleached bones at his feet, a thigh bone from a wild boar, probably. It was sheared at both ends. To do something like that, an animal had to be triple big, with sharp teeth and powerful jaws. Long bones only cracked under tremendous pressure.
The other companions stood transfixed by the aircraft swooping out of the night sky. Jak alone watched their backs.
Along the shoreline in the dim distance, bursting through clouds of sulfurous steam, the teenager saw dozens upon dozens of red eyes just like his, bobbing a foot or two above the ground. Jak caught flashes of the moonlight reflected off yellow fangs, and over the steady rumble of the boiling pools, he heard their exalted yapping.