Ryan stared hostilely at the blind guard as he stumbled off into the chaotic throng.
“He said ‘the Beast,'” Dean said hesitantly. “Could it be?”
Her hair tightly curled, Krysty nodded dumbly.
“Impossible,” Mildred stated. “After we dropped a building on it? It must be another tank.”
“Let’s not stick around and find out,” Ryan said, grimacing. “Double time, people. Shard, which way?”
The wounded man pointed. In a two-on-two cover formation, the companions moved through the melee, avoiding conflict with the slaves whenever possible, and chilling any sec men who came their way. Soon the stink of a dog kennel filled their nostrils, and Shard directed them to the right, past a beheading block, and then to the left.
“Square one,” J.B. growled, his hands tightening on the grip of his Uzi.
The canvas tent was exactly where they remembered, but even if they had been interested in checking it, slaves had torn the material and they could see nothing was under the canvas but gas canisters and still forms lying on the ground.
The five-story tower dominated the courtyard, the gallows to one side, the bloodstained crosses to the other. A large garage door was partially hidden by ivy, its windows covered with plate steel. Two sec men stood guard, both armed with pistols and shotguns. They constantly swept the crowds with the scatterguns, and shot anybody who dared to get close.
“Take them,” Ryan said, leveling the Steyr.
The companions did the same with their blasters, and on Ryan’s command cut loose at the same time. The guards were slammed back against the door, spouting blood in a dozen different spots. The older guard managed to fire his shotgun once, and then collapsed onto the street. A slave snatched it from his grip and raced away, whooping and howling, brandishing it like a trophy of war.
Hitting the wall alongside the door, Dean stood guard while J.B. took the keys from a guard’s belt and unlocked the door.
The room was cavernous, covering the whole ground floor of the tower. The floor was stained with the grease and oil from a hundred vehicles, the walls lined with shelves and stacks of boxes, the entire place brightly illuminated by electric lights. But none of that mattered when they saw what was prominently sitting in the middle of the floor.
“By the Three Kennedys!” Doc roared, clutching Shard so tight the man whimpered in pain.
It was Leviathan, intact and undamaged, glistening as if washed and waxed, surrounded by slaves busy removing the very last tire.
Chapter Twenty
In a hundred different locations outside the stone wall, a soft hissing began to sound from the ground. Fleeing slaves toppled over in piles, fell down stairs and plummeted to their deaths from the scaffolding in the mine. Sec men rolled off horses, and officers tumbled from moving motorcycles, many of them mangling limbs and wheels with grisly results. In less than a minute, a profound silence encircled the ville, punctuated only by the crackle of small fires, labored breathing and the soft whoosh of distant rockets launching from the top of the Citadel toward the predark war machine battering at the massive iron gate.
IN THE GARAGE, J.B. raised his shotgun and fired a round into the air. “Put those tires back on!” he shouted. The kneeling slaves froze at the booming discharge, then hurried to do as they were ordered.
“Look out!” Krysty cried.
J.B. turned as a snapping whip wrapped its leathery length around his gun barrel and the blaster was painfully yanked from his grip. He heard his hand crack, and saw his index finger was bent backward into an unnatural angle. He clumsily raised the Uzi.
Laughing, Eugene snaked the whip around his obese form and lashed out again, entwining the leather around J.B.’s throat. Turning purple, the Armorer clawed at his neck, gasping for breath.
Ryan swung the SSG-70 in a short arc, pointing the big-bore barrel toward the sneering eunuch.
“Shoot me,” Eugene chortled, his bloated belly jiggling obscenely, “and your man dies! Now drop your weapons and surrender!”
A pistol cracked, and the whip was torn from the eunuch’s grip in a spray of bones and blood. He stumbled backward, screaming in pain and clutching his shattered hand when the Steyr boomed. Eugene flew backward, his face no longer whole.