“You’ll make it,” Dean said confidently. “Come this far, I am not going to let you die on me now.” His fingers worked the boy’s armored vest, becoming bloody almost at first touch. When the body armor opened up, he peered under the armor and saw that Louis was right.
The bullet that had hit him in the lower back had passed through his groin, then deflected off the body armor covering his crotch and tore its way through his upper body, as well. The spent bullet lay a couple inches above his right nipple, a dark spot just below the freshly bruised skin that looked like a nest full of maggots.
“Those shifters!” Dean yelled in angry frustration and fear. “They shot you bad, Louis! They shot you real bad!”
Without another word, Louis toppled forward as if the bones had gone out of his legs. Blood leaked from his mouth below his sightless gaze.
Dean tried to catch the dead boy, but the sudden loose weight was too much. He went down under Louis, panicked all over again. “Louis, you can’t die! You can’t leave me here alone! Louis!”
The absence of the boy’s breathing seemed like an impossible vacuum to Dean. Then it was filled by the snuffling of some large beast just outside the door. Hooves rang on a concrete patch out in the corridor.
It felt as if cold talons suddenly pinched the skin on the back of Dean’s neck, pulling it way too tight. Forcing himself up; the boy drew the Browning, barely breathing as he watched the door.
“Dean,” someone said, and he couldn’t believe how much it sounded like Krysty.
Something shimmered into being on his right. It was impossibly close, near enough to reach out and touch him. He’d have seen anyone or anything that had come that close to him.
Then he saw the face, made out the features. She was indistinct, as if he were seeing her through a heavy fog.
“Krysty?” he said, not believing it.
“Your father is coming for you. Look for him.”
Her words sounded as though they were coming from a long distance, then she was gone, just like some kind of ghost. Before he could puzzle over her appearance and what it meant, the door burst open.
Framed in it was a nightmare figure that Dean remembered well a giant mutie pig, its beady, merciless eyes nearly buried in wrinkles of scarred gristle. The wicked tusks curled up on either side of its mouth.
Before he could get the Browning, the beast started for him, squealing shrilly in anticipation of an easy kill.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
The corridor Ryan turned onto was filled with fire. A roiling ball of it wavered back and forth in front of him, seeking oxygen, threatening to collapse in on itself from the lack of fuel.
He had eluded his pursuers for the moment and was aware that the Mirage was showing potential for burning down around his ears. The sec men with the flamethrowers had been generous with their attentions, leaving burning areas and dead monkeys in their wake.
The group at the bottom of the inferno hadn’t been so lucky.
Eyes stinging from the heat and the smoke, Ryan couldn’t tell how many of them there were, or what exactly had killed them. With the way at least temporarily impassable, he turned back and took one of the other hallways that he’d passed up.
He sucked at the knuckles of his left hand, which he’d skinned badly when he’d thrown himself away from the flamethrower at the window. He spit out a mouthful of blood, hitting a small fire that clung tenaciously to fragments of the worn carpet in the hallway.
When he was halfway down the new corridor, glancing to the sides to check the doors of what turned out to be more hotel rooms, he felt a chill gust through him, and even thought he’d smelled Krysty’s scent next to him. He didn’t look; if Krysty was still alive, she was outside with the others.
Servos whined through the hall, but he didn’t know what they came from. There were other men searching through the ruins of the Mirage, as well. He’d seen them. And he’d seen one more dead boy in green. At the most, only five of them remained.