“Got you covered, lover,” Krysty said, nudging him with an elbow.
He grunted in reply. No matter how good you were, mistakes happened to everybody. But mistakes got you chilled in the Deathlands.
A few blocks later, the pair froze and retreated into a recessed doorway. Standing in the middle of an intersection and making no attempt to hide was a sec man holding a bolt-action rifle, a towel tied across his mouth. His hair a wild frenzy, the red-faced guard bowed under the gusts of wind, but stayed right there, squinting against the dust and sand.
“Perimeter guard,” Ryan said, his hand double-checking that the safety was off his blaster.
“We’re close,” she agreed grimly, making sure her own MAC-11 was set on single shot. “Double-team him?”
“On the next upsurge. Check.”
Lightning flashed, and the storm increased for a few moments, blinding the sentry completely. Covering his face with an arm, he rode out the buffeting until the wind eased. Dropping the arm, he recoiled as a mummy charged out of the dust clouds. He raised his blaster and white-hot pain took him in the kidneys, then the throat. A terrible cold washed over the sec man and he dropped to the ground, pumping out blood. The dry soil absorbed the fluid on contact, the storm covering the crimson fluid and the dying man with ruthless efficiency.
Systematically, the companions moved sideways along the picket of guards, traveling from man to man, until finally reaching where they started.
“None of these men were large enough,” Krysty said, wiping the gore off her stiletto.
“So let’s find more,” Ryan replied.
Two more guards were encountered and dispatched, along with a lieutenant found asleep in a telephone booth, before they reached the sloped ramp that led to the tunnel.
Moving toward the embankment, the companions reached the tumbled entrance to the underground tunnel, the jagged pieces of concrete and twisted steel beams already partially buried under a softening blanket of sand. Four men struggled to haul away some of the smaller pieces of rubble, while a burly sergeant with an M-16 wrapped in a sweater stood guard. That was the right idea, but it was nowhere near enough protection for the weapon against the billowing sandstorm. However, the scuba mask on the sergeant’s face gave him an unobstructed view through the stinging dust clouds, and that was trouble.
Quickly, tactics were discussed, then the companions moved. Approaching from the direction of the wind, Krysty took out the sergeant first with the stiletto between the ribs, twisting the blade to enlarge the hole and deflate his lungs. No pressure meant no sound.
Ryan grabbed the blaster to stop it from hitting the ground, as the sec man sighed out a warning and died. Laying the useless blaster aside, the man and woman simply walked behind each of the armed workers and shot them at point-blank range.
Removing the jackets of the two largest men, Ryan and Krysty bundled the garments into an empty bag and took refuge behind one of the searchlights. A few handfuls of sand rubbed out most of the blood spots. Trying the jackets on over the camou wrappings, Krysty’s fit perfectly in spite of her top-heavy figure. But Ryan’s was too small in the shoulders, and he had to leave the jacket unbuttoned. Hopefully, nobody would notice.
Now resembling sec men, they crawled out from behind the searchlight and studied the buildings on either side of the access ramp. Several windows were gone, probably from the concussion of the rockets. It also removed those places from the list of possible campsites for the baron and his men. A liquor store with an iron grating over its front window seemed a good location until they noticed a sandbag wall that closed off an alleyway, alongside a massive granite building on the corner. Boards covered the windows on both stories.
“That’s their base,” Krysty said, tucking a loose strand of hair away, only to have it immediately fly free again.
Ryan agreed. “Wags must be in the alley to cut the wind.”
Just then, light flared inside the liquor store directly across the street from the bank, then it was gone.
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