Ferguson lifted the rifle, then squeezed off a shot, quickly working the bolt action and readying another round. The second bullet wasn’t necessary. In the distance the sniper dropped from the tree without a sound.
Dean started to move from the water, but something rubbery and strong wrapped around his leg and wouldn’t let him move. Glancing down, he heard a snuffling of loosed breath breaking through water, then a gray body rose up, pulled along by the arm-leg gripping Dean.
It was a mutie of some kind. That was all Dean knew for sure. The thing had five rubbery limbs nearly six feet in length at first glance. Then he realized one of the limbs had eyes, three of them, spaced in a triangular shape. In the center was an algae-covered shell that looked whole, then opened up into a teeth-filled mouth big enough for Dean to shove his head into.
Two more limbs roped around the boy’s left arm and his neck, pulling the mouth toward his abdomen. Jaws extended, filled with razor-sharp ivory, reaching for Dean’s flesh.
Raising his blaster, the boy felt his breath lock tight in his chest. He fired several rounds, blowing chunks of the shell away from the creature, sending the jaws retreating. As the limbs withdrew from their tight embrace, he put three more rounds through the appendage with the eyes.
The mutie beast screamed as it released Dean and slid back into the dark water. Blood floated on top of the water like an oil slick, throwing off patterns that picked up the garish neon lighting surrounding the pit.
“Hot pipe!” Dean said, backing out of the water with his blaster pointing at the pool. He was shaking, but tried to get over it quick. He wished he knew if the thing were still alive, then decided it didn’t really matter, because he wasn’t going close to any more basins. He joined the other boys.
Louis was staring intently at the terrain. “Remember how Solomon used to say that every battlefield was like a chessboard?” he asked.
Dean didn’t remember, so he figured it was something the phys-ed teacher had talked about with the ten original members of the team. But the others nodded.
“Always said the best place to take was the high ground,” Louis went on. He stabbed a finger through the darkness. “That, I figure, is about the highest ground we could take.”
Following the direction the blond youth was pointing, Dean made out the red neon lights proclaiming The Mirage. More glittering sputtered in front of the immense building. He squinted his eyes, not daring to believe what he was seeing, then recognized that his eyes hadn’t played tricks on him. Five, possibly six stories up on the building, water gushed out, creating falls that fell somewhere in front of it, lost in trees and foliage.
“Place is huge,” Conor commented. “Be hard to hold.”
Louis nodded. “We’re not going to try to hold the whole thing. We’ll just find a place inside it that we can hold, wait things out and make them come to us.”
“Supposed to be chilling these people out here,” Green said, his face showing the pain he was in.
Louis looked at him. “That what you want to do, Enrique? Start wandering around finding people and things to chill? This isn’t a shooting gallery. Me, I’m just wanting to get out of here with as much of my own skin intact as I can.”
“Said they’d chill us if we didn’t fight.” Green indicated the wound in his leg, then jerked a thumb back at the gasoline fire still coiling out of the room they’d been forced to evacuate. “I believe them.”
Louis made his face hard, sweeping the faces of his friends with his gaze. “I don’t figure they’re planning on letting any of us out of here. And that’s the truth. We never even heard about these Five Barons and their seven villes until a few days ago. Hell, we didn’t know anything about Solomon, either. If they let us go, they’d know they were in for some trouble from mebbe our parents. Mebbe us on down the line. Safe jack’s just to kill us and be done with it.”