later, another burst of firing clattered out from above and they had to duck to
one side as lead ricocheted around the room. When Samantha the Panther said
she’d heard something no one else had, it was advisable not to laugh it off.
J.B. slid a 30-round mag up into the Steyr and said, “What kind of bang?”
“Big one, and a rumble. You didn’t feel it?”
Hunaker shook her head. She said uneasily, “C’mon, J.B. I don’t wanna hang
around down here if they got something nasty waiting up there.”
There was silence. The sub gunner had ceased firing. Not even the sec men
themselves could be heard. Nothing could be heard. Nothing at all.
Sam said, “And another.”
“Okay, let’s beat it,” said J.B.
He took a grenade from Hunaker, saying, “Cover us.”
Koll slid to the corner angle of the steps, poked his M-16 around and fired a
long burst, and as he did so, Sam sprang to the other side of the stairway and
fired, too, straight up, her body hunched, the rifle spitting lead, the sound
racketing shockingly around the echo chamber of the stairwell.
J.B. and Hunaker unpinned the eggs, counted, darted forward and, almost as one,
hurled the grenades upward. The two eggs sailed high and disappeared from view
beyond the top step. There was a frenzied yell, a howl of terror, then light
blazed down the stairwell and there was a fierce cracking double blast, followed
by the sound of glass shattering, metal clanging against metal, a rumbling roar.
J.B. hurled himself up the steps as dust and smoke billowed at him, roiling
around the stairwell. He hit the top and sprayed lead into the fog with the
Steyr, Hunaker behind him, her own auto-rifle chattering in a wide sweep.
The room was long and wide, formerly the high-ceilinged entrance lobby to the
bank. At the far end were two massive doors, each one a wood sandwich enclosed
by pierced steel planking, triple thickness. The counter of the bank remained,
but nothing else. Strasser’s sec men had turned the place into a recreation
room, with chairs, tables, closets stuffed with weapons. Now the furniture was
blasted apart by the HEs. Bodies lay around, either slumped like piles of old
clothes, or in contorted heaps. Long windows to the left had all blown out, the
glass and the steel shuttering together.
“Holy shit!” muttered Hunaker.
She pointed at the windows. Instead of darkness, a lurid and vibrant light
throbbed redly. But this was no Deathlands sky effect caused by the rich
chemical mix in the atmosphere, which often transformed night into bizarre day
with a glow that made the northern aurora look off color.
“That’s a fire.”
Then she cried out, her yell lost in a thunder of earsplitting sound. She felt
herself lifted from the floor by a shock wave that slammed into her sickeningly.
For a second she felt almost weightless as she flew backward through the air and
then she saw, as though in a dream, the two vast doors splitting apart and
bowling toward her across the room in an orange eruption. She thought they
looked like cardboard doors. Then she thudded back against something hard and
blacked out.
Chapter Ten
THERE WAS SOME IDIOT using a mallet inside his skull, and it was as if he was
fixing fence posts. Every few seconds, whomp! There were also various sets of
crazed characters having a tug-of-war with the muscles of his arms and legs, and
there was a cretin who seemed to be marching around his body, or maybe swimming
along his arteries, jabbing a knife into various key places, though mainly his
ribs, as and when it suited him. Not to mention that some clown seemed to be
eating into the small of his back.
“Apart from that,” muttered Ryan, his voice like the sound of a rusty rasp, “I’m
fine.”
“Check,” came Krysty’s reply in the darkness of the speeding truck.
Ryan froze—physically not a difficult operation because he was hog-tied anyhow,
lying on his left side like a strained bow, his wrist and ankles tightly laced
together behind him. But it was more a mental shock, a freezing of the mind.