Ryan moved fast. Ducking under the lumpy pile of multi-legged flesh, he brought the Steyr’s butt around in a wicked arc. The splat of the impact filled the small room.
The creature shrilled in pain and went scuttling away, hiding under the dilapidated bed. A broken mirror across from it held dozens of images.
Ryan drew the SIG-Sauer and pumped three rounds into the bed, searching for the mutie creature.
The whining it made became even more shrill and pained. Without a sign of its movements, it shot out from under the bed, its legs clawing for Ryan.
“Fireblast!” the one-eyed man snarled, but the word sounded out of sync to Krysty, slow and ringing. He pushed the blaster into the creature’s face and pulled the trigger.
Momentum kept the mutie beast flying at him even after he’d killed it. Blood and ripped pieces of flesh thudded against him. Some of it stuck to the armored vest. The main portion of the creature’s corpse dropped in a twisted heap at his boots.
“Now,” the woman urged.
“Ryan,” Krysty called.
He turned toward her, raising the blaster automatically until it centered on her face. His knuckle was whitening on the trigger before he squinted, then his eye widened in startled recognition.
“Krysty,” he said. His voice was choked, thick with emotion. “I thought they chilled you.” He reached a hand out to her, but it passed through.
“I’m not really here, lover,” she said, then tried to explain what she was experiencing. But the words wouldn’t leave her mouth. Instead, she said something else. “Dean’s here with you. Find him.”
“Dean?” He shook his head and called to her.
She tried to reach back for him even though her fingers would surely have passed through his anyway. Almost, they touched.
Her eyelids closed.
“You’ve done well,” the woman said. “Now it is up to them, up to the chain of events you’ve helped set into motion. Destiny is written in the stars, but sometimes we can nudge them a bit in one direction or the other. Hopefully this will be enough.”
“Enough for what?” Krysty tried to open her eyes but couldn’t.
“Enough to let both father and son live.” The woman’s voice faded. “You must look to your own needs, my child. Your path remains rocky yet, as well. Take care. And do not tell Ryan, no matter how much you might wish to.”
WHEN SHE OPENED her eyes, Krysty discovered she was still in the helicopter, leaning heavily against the empty copilot’s seat. All she wanted to do was sleep; she didn’t care where. Somehow she had managed to hang on to the torch, which was dying down rapidly now. Smoke filled the interior of the aircraft, stinging her eyes and making her throat burn.
Then she could hear Doc bellowing for her.
She pushed herself up, trying to find a more comfortable place on her shoulders for her bulging pack. She stepped outside the helicopter and waved the torch. “I’m here, Doc.”
Her companion waved down from the open fissure. “So you are, my dear, so you are. I was on the verge of becoming greatly concerned when I saw your torch stop moving about I thought perhaps you were having some kind of problem and had been incapacitated by something. Believe me, an overactive imagination is a curse of considerable magnitude.”
“What about the others?”
“They have not as yet joined us. Perhaps they ran into Ryan and John Barrymore, and are even now plotting our course from these dire straits.”
Poised on one knee, still a little down and forward of the helicopter, Krysty felt the beginnings of another tremor. At first she thought it might be her imagination, maybe her stomach jumping around because she was so done in.
When pebbles started skittering and falling down the incline, bouncing all over her in their rush to fall into the fissure behind her, she knew it wasn’t her imagination.
Metal creaked as the helicopter slipped free of its grave. In a moment it was loose and sliding at her.
Chapter Nine
After throwing the knotted rope they’d swiped and prepared over the garrison wall, Dean went up it as quick as a monkey. Calgary struggled behind, huffing and puffing.
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