In one practiced move, Ryan unleathered the SIG-Sauer and waited until the M-16 stopped stuttering. The way his hidden assailant had been spraying ammo, Ryan deduced the shooter had to be reloading.
He reached down and as before, carefully, quietly picked up a handful of the scattered bits of discarded rock and metal on the floor; gracefully overhanding them toward a mass of empty storage pods to his right. The thrown debris hit the plastic, clattering a warning to the person with the assault rifle.
The hidden M-16 responded by spreading an uneven skittering pattern of destruction away from Ryan’s hiding place and in the direction of where the new noise had come from.
Sloppy, but Ryan was used to stupes who let weapons do their thinking in a combat situation.
In fact, he counted on it. Such foolishness had kept him alive many times during his long career, if one wanted to call riding back and forth in war wags and traveling by mat-trans across Deathlands a career. Not that Ryan relied on luck. Going into any situation, anytime, anywhere, he was ready for the unexpected, for that was the only kind of luck Deathlands ever seemed to offer.
Surviving was what Ryan and his friends did best, and if their opponents were sloppy, so much the better for them.
There was a pause in the barrage of steel-jacketed death. Ryan had easily placed the shooter by ear, now all he wanted was a final visual confirmation, which came soon enough as the M-16 spit a fresh hail of bullets. This time Ryan clearly saw the white flash from the barrel of the weapon.
Ryan brought his own weapon to bear. Aiming by instinct, he squeezed off three bullets, one of which wormed high into the front of the sniper’s left collarbone and out his back. A second bullet punched into the already critically wounded man’s cranium and through in a mass of grue. The final slug punched through what remained of the man’s forehead. As the sniper’s body grew slack, the M-16 fell silent. The next thing Ryan heard was the clatter of the assault rifle hitting the floor, followed by a series of gargling sounds from the dying man as he followed the weapon.
The interior of the hall outside the elevator shaft became loud with silence.
“Ryan?” came a subtle whisper from Krysty.
“Shh! Not yet.” Ryan stood and walked warily to the fallen body. As he had hoped, the sniper had been alone. He looked down impassively on the slain killer, striking a self-light while kneeling for a close inspection. The tight circle of light revealed a thin man of about thirty, with dirty long blond hair and a ratty goatee. The upper left of his forehead was missing where the slugs from the SIG-Sauer had struck.
The dead man wore a powder blue dress shirt that had already turned dark with blood from his wounds. A pair of combat boots had the cuffs of baggy, dirty trousers stuffed into their high tops. On the pocket of the shirt was a black-and-white skull patch identical to the ones on the sleeves and pockets of the corpses on the lower floor of the redoubt.
Ryan was getting ready to tell Krysty to come through the elevator access hatch when the interior of the redoubt lit up. For the second time since his arrival in the humid hellhole, Ryan found himself lunging down flat on his stomach, every nerve in his body screaming with alertness. He squinted, his vision colored with tiny explosions of color from his single overloaded cornea.
The pupil of his blue eye had been stretched open to maximum in the dimness, and it now involuntarily misted over in shock from the light as Ryan struggled to recover from the unexpected illumination.
As he blinked, Ryan grimly realized he was temporarily in the earlier blind position of the sniper. He reached out and retrieved the man’s rifle, adding the stripped-down M-16 to his own portable arsenal of the SIG-Sauer. Hearing approaching voices, he crawled in the opposite direction back toward the oversize cargo container. Temporarily safe for a second time behind the makeshift cover, he listened, waiting for his best opportunity, depending on who or what came around the corner.