Holding the Uzi with both hands, J.B. carefully aimed at the ceiling on the other side of the barrier.
“No need for that yet,” he spit, and fired.
The ceiling tiles broke apart, displaying a dozen plastic bottles tied to the rafters. Riddled with bullets, the containers poured out their pale blue contents onto the sec men. Shrieking with pain, the horrified men dropped their weapons and shields, beating insanely at their melting flesh, white bones and pulsating organs already in plain view.
Advancing, the companions slaughtered the dissolving victims, and caught a couple of unhurt men trying to leave the hellish lobby. Two shots and the cowards fell face first into the sizzling puddles.
“What was that?” Ryan asked, backing away from the cabinets. The pungent smell was horrific, beyond description; his nose was running and eye watering. “Acid rain water?”
Moving to a safe distance, J.B. grinned without humor. “Liquid drain cleaner, spiced with a little of my brew. I found a whole carton in the janitor’s closet. Great stuff. They won’t hit here again for a while.”
“Got more?” Jak asked, snapping off a shot at a dashing wolf and missing. He cracked the cylinder, dropped the brass and reloaded.
“No,” J.B. said solemnly. “Got a bunch of stuff cooking downstairs, but it’s not ready, and this is it for traps. We’re on our own.”
DOWN IN THE BASEMENT, a scratching noise drew Mildred’s attention from the commotion upstairs. Grabbing a lantern, the physician moved through the fast-food restaurants, tracking the disturbance until finding a manhole cover in the floor of a back utility room. The round disk was rotating, as if unscrewing, and faint voices murmured on the other side.
Turning off the lantern, she took a position behind a cold furnace and patiently waited. Finally, the cover was gently lifted and a face peeked out of the hole, eyes glancing quickly about.
“See anything?” asked somebody deeper inside the access shaft.
“Looks clear,” the first sec man replied, glancing about.
Mildred stretched out her arm and neatly shot the man in the temple. His head jerked, and he dropped out of sight down the shaft, the heavy iron lid slamming back into position. Dim cries came from below as the falling corpse apparently knocked several sec men off the access ladder.
Holstering her ZKR .38, Mildred ignored the water heater and furnace as too heavy for her to move, and passed by a stack of spare doors as too light to be of any use. Ramming her shoulder into the side of an upright freezer, the woman managed to shove the piece of equipment forward one foot at a time. The manhole cover was starting to move again, when Mildred strained against the awful weight, but managed to topple over the freezer to resoundingly crash on top the sewer hatch. If there was any reaction from the other side, it was muffled by the four hundred pounds of steel and ceramic lying across the lid.
Searching the shelves, the woman placed a few cash registers on top of the sideways freezer, along with a fifty-pound bucket of floor wax. The container didn’t feel that heavy. The ages had to have stolen every drop of moisture from the compound, lightening it considerably, but even twenty extra pounds of weight was useful.
Leaving the door to the utility room jammed open, Mildred went back to her post at the fountain basin where she could keep a watch on the back room and the stairwell. Suddenly, the mammoth freezer shifted a bit with a muffled thump, and she knew there would be no more trouble from below. The physician could only imagine the awful mess in the sewer when the explosion failed to penetrate and the back-blast hit the unsuspecting sec men. They had to have been instantly pulped. The basement was secure again.
Just then, a violent explosion rocked the building to its very foundation. Reclaiming the shotgun and laying it on her lap, Mildred glanced skyward and wondered just how badly the battle upstairs was going.
Chapter Twenty-Two
On the rooftop, Doc emptied the HK, raining death from above on the sec men as they scampered about for safety. Drawing the LeMat, he heard a thump and, leaning way over the roof, saw a group of men ramming a park bench against the metal door on the side of the government building. He ignored them and watched for others in the streets. That weak point in their defenses was blocked by an entire room jammed full of office furniture. Even if they got inside, it would take them an hour to dig through the mess. Then again…