Most of the neon lights were mounted on the buildings on either side of the cracked street twenty yards to their left. A few of the buildings were whole, but most of them were smashed. Whoever had put the lights back into operation had known something about electrical work. Fields of brightly colored illumination overlapped one another, creating even more tints, ripping away even the blackest shadows.
Glancing up at the wall forty feet above him, twenty feet above the nearest and tallest tree, Ryan saw the perimeter guards walking their assigned posts. Killing them from the distance was simple enough, especially with the Steyr slung over his back. But it didn’t give them a way out.
He moved on, looping around a collection of busted and rusted wags. Something shifted inside, giving Ryan the only warning he received. He backed away a half step from the vehicle as a serpent’s head shot out of the dark recesses.
The snake’s mouth was open wide, jaws distended and fangs glistening bone white.
Ryan raked the panga through the thick neck behind the wedge-shaped head, decapitating it. Operating on nerve reflex, the rest of the snake’s thirty-foot body came coiling out of the burned wag. Bleeding profusely from the stump, the serpent’s body writhed on the ground, leaving black splatter patterns.
“Ryan!” Mildred called.
“I’m okay,” he called back, scanning the wag for any further movement as the snake continued to flop around. Nothing else appeared. He took up point again, then noticed the shifting shadows under a series of forked branches from a fifteen-foot-tall spruce.
The back of Ryan’s neck tightened, feeling eyes on him now. A gleam of metal flickered, picking up a purple and then a turquoise haze from the neon lights surrounding them. He reached down for the SIG-Sauer, moving sideways so his blaster hand was away from them.
Then branches cracked over Ryan’s head. A massive feline head shook as the big animal regained purchase and leaped at him.
Clearing the blaster of leather, Ryan barely had time to yell a warning to the others before he was dodging, trying to get clear of the big mutie cat that was determined to drop on top of him.
DEAN GLANCED UP at the second story through the hole that had been chopped through the ceiling of the first-floor room he was in. Baron Vinge Connrad’s sec teams poured liquid into the room from a fifty-five-gallon drum. It sloshed and sparkled in noisy glugs as it splashed against the wall and the floor.
The sharp, sweet odor told Dean what it was in a single drawn breath. “Gasoline!” he yelled to the other boys. They all retreated to the farthest wall.
Perry had drawn back, separating himself from the rest of the group even though he wore the same green armored vest as the rest of them.
Dean pressed against the double doors that would open onto the pit area. He was tired from seven days of travel, of constantly looking along their backtrail to see if his dad or some of Brody’s sec people were following. In all that time he’d seen no one. Now his nerves were stretched tight as catgut on a bow. Adrenaline surged inside him again, though, as the gasoline pooled around their feet.
“Dirty fuckers!” Louis railed, his blond hair plastered to his skull by the heat that had stifled them in the room. “You brought us all this way just to set us on fire? That it?”
Dean felt like yelling, too, but he knew it would have been just out of fear, and he didn’t want to give them that He leveled his Browning Hi-Power. Solomon had stolen it out of Nicholas Brody’s safe, proving that the phys-ed teacher hadn’t planned on going back to the school after the transaction, and had given it to their captors with an explanation that it was Dean’s personal weapon. Vinge Connrad had been pleased to discover that Dean had such a weapon, and had made returning the weapon a presentation just before the other boys were armed.
Squeezing the trigger, Dean fired at the sec boss now brandishing an unlighted torch. The bullet plunked into the see-through plas sheet on a tangent that would have put it squarely between his target’s eyes.