covering their remains.
Inside the cell, J.B. and Koll sprang to their feet. Hunaker and Sam were
already tearing cotton wool out of their ears.
J.B. dived across the cell and out through the now empty door space. Smoke and
concrete dust rose like a fog in the narrow area beyond, but his eyes took in an
M-16 lying some distance away and he grabbed it and began automatically checking
it as he galloped along the passage, closely pursued by Hunaker.
Hunaker, too, was now armed, with the other man’s auto-rifle, another M-16. She,
too, was galloping. She, too, was spidering her fingers along her piece, tugging
out the mag, glancing at it, ramming it back up again.
As they neared the bottom of the steps, two men appeared at the top, in the room
with the bloodstained block in it. J.B. mentally crossed his fingers, uttered a
brief prayer to the only two gods he worshiped, the god of good fortune and the
god of ingenuity, and squeezed off a controlled burst on the sprint.
The M-16 functioned. Devastatingly. Rounds pounded at the two sec men at the top
of the stairs, punched them back out of sight, their limbs going into spasm.
“Behind me! Hit the upper steps!”
J.B. jumped ahead of the girl as he snapped out the command and sprang up the
steps, keeping tight to the left-hand wall. He squeezed the trigger and used up
his entire mag, firing up and over the top of the steps at the ceiling, then
dropping his angle of fire as he reached the room. He sprayed death around it.
He dived at the floor, and Hunaker, behind him, suddenly had three perfect
targets on the top set of steps—three sec men, fleeing in panic, lunging for an
escape route. Her fire line caught them as they bunched in the narrow stairway,
scrambling to get out. Rounds zip-stitched three broad backs, erupting kidneys,
shattering lumbar vertebrae, transforming them into bloody dolls.
Apart from the two guys that J.B. had shot from below, there were two more
stiffs in the room who’d caught his bullets, one on the floor, the other
sprawled drunkenly across the wood block, new blood from him sluggishly pooling
out and soaking into the old.
J.B.’s eyes darted around the room. He swore as he spotted an auto-rifle lying
inches from the outstretched fingers of the man lying on the floor. A stubby
Steyr AUG with the long barrel.
He said, “The nukeshitter had my piece!” in horrified tones.
He swiped it up and began to check it out feverishly as Hunaker threw down the
M-16 she’d been holding and picked up another. She ran to the bottom of the
upper steps, squeezed off a 3-round burst around the wall angle and risked a
look up. No one at the top, but she could hear a babble of voices from the huge
upper room and then she had to duck back as rounds flayed the stairwell above,
spraying brick and concrete shards on her.
“Hell, we could’ve worked ourselves into a corner here, J.B.”
J.B. was too busy field-stripping the AUG and muttering blackly.
“Shit, fucker only had it an hour. See that dent?” He angrily jabbed a finger at
the Steyr’s stock. “See that? Fucker only had it an hour!”
“Uhh…J.B.”
“Yeah!” the wiry little man snarled through his teeth.
“Could be we’re stuck down here, J.B.”
“Grenade the bastards out!” he snapped viciously. “Fucking vandals.”
“J.B., it’s only a dent…”
He glared at her murderously, his eyes simmering behind his adopted steel-rimmed
glasses.
Hunaker turned away from him. Sam was stuffing herself with hardware while Koll
collected spare mags for an M-16 he’d picked up. He tossed a couple of HEs in
her direction and said, “Hey, J.B., let’s get outta here, like Hun says. You can
polish yer butt later, man.”
J.B. shot him a dark look but nodded.
Suddenly Sam’s head jerked up. She rose from where she’d been squatting beside
one of the stiffs on the floor. Her eyes widened, the whites contrasting starkly
with her velvety black skin.
She said huskily, “I heard a bang.”
No one made a joke, even under the present circumstances. Even when, a second