-Claude fired off a quick burst, just as he had learned so many times, into the center of mass of his advancing target, but that happened to be the three-centimeter-thick iron boss of the scutum, and the bullets deflected off it, fragmenting as they did so
-de la Cruz felt the impact of the fragments peppering his left arm, but the stings of insects would have felt worse as he closed, and his right sword-arm came left, then right, slashing in a way the spatha was not designed for, but the razor’s edge in the last twenty centimeters near the point did the rest, catching the cabron’s upper arm and laying it open just below the end of the short sleeve, and for the first time in his life, Centurion Francisco de la Cruz drew blood in anger
-Claude felt the pain. His right arm moved, and his finger depressed the trigger, and the long burst hit the oncoming shield low and right of the boss. Three bullets hit de la Cruz’s left leg, all below the knee, through the metal greaves, one of them breaking the tibia, causing the centurion to scream in pain as he went down, his second, lethal slash of the sword missing the man’s throat by a whisker. His brain commanded his legs to act, but he had only one working leg at the moment, and the other failed him utterly, causing the former paratrooper to fall to the left and forward
Mike Dennis ran to the window instead of using the TV monitors. Others were watching those, and the take from the various cameras was being recorded automatically in a bank of VCRs elsewhere in the park. His eyes saw, and though his brain didn’t believe, it was there, and impossible as it was, it had to be real. A number of people with guns were surrounding the sea of red shirts, and they herded them now, like sheepdogs, inward and toward the castle courtyard. Dennis turned:
“Security lockdown, security lockdown now!” he called to the man on the master control board, and with a mouse click the castle’s doors were all dead-bolted.
“Call the police!” Dennis ordered next. That was also preprogrammed. An alarm system fired off a signal to the nearest police barracks. It was the robbery-alert signal, but that would be sufficient for the moment. Dennis next lifted a desk phone and punched in the police number from the sticker on his phone. The one emergency contingency they’d planned for was a robbery of their cash room, and since that would necessarily be a major crime committed by a number of armed criminals, the park’s internal response to the signal was also pre-programmed. All park rides would be stopped at once, all attractions closed, and shortly people would be instructed to return to their hotel rooms, or to the parking lot, because the park was closing due to an unexpected emergency . . . The noise of the machine guns would have carried a long way, Dennis thought, and the park guests would understand the urgency of the moment.
This was the amusing part, Andre thought. He donned a spare white hat from one of his comrades and took the gun that Jean Paul had packed for him. A few meters away, Esteban cut the balloons loose from his hand, and they soared into the air as he, too, took up his weapon.
The children were not as overtly frightened as their parents were, perhaps thinking that this also was one of the magic things to be expected at the park, though the noise hurt their little ears and had made them jump. But fear is contagious, and the children quickly saw that emotion in their parents’ eyes, arid one by one they held tight to hands and legs, looking about at the adults who were moving quickly now, around the red-shirted crowd, holding things that looked like . . . guns, the boys recognized the shape from their own toys, which these clearly were not.
Rene was in command. He moved toward the castle entrance, clear of the nine others who were holding the crowd in place. Looking around, he could see others outside the perimeter of his group, looking in, many crouching down now, hiding, taking what cover there was. Many of them were taking pictures, some with television cameras, and some of those would be zooming in to catch his face, but there was nothing he could do about that.
“Two!” he called. “Select our guests!”
“Two” was Jean-Paul. He approached a knot of people roughly, and first of all grabbed the arm of a four-year-old French girl.
“No!” her mother screamed. Jean-Paul pointed his weapon at her, and she cringed but stood her ground, holding both shoulders of the child.
“Very well,” “Two” told her, lowering his aim. “I will shoot her, then.” In less than a second, the muzzle of his Uzi was- against the little girl’s light-brown hair. That made the mother scream all the louder, but she pulled her hands back from her child.
“Walk over there,” Jean-Paul told the child firmly, pointing to Juan. The little girl did so, looking back with an open mouth at her stunned mother, while the armed man selected more children.
Andre was doing the same on the other side of the crowd. He went first of all to the little Dutch child. Anna, her special-access name tag read. Without a word, he pushed Anna’s father away from the wheelchair and shoved it off toward the castle.
“My child is ill,” the father protested in English.
“Yes, I can see that,” Andre replied in the same language, moving off to select another sick child. What fine hostages these two would make.
“You bloody swine!” this one’s mother snarled at him. For her trouble she was clubbed by the extended stock of Andre’s Uzi, which broke her nose and bathed her face in blood.
“Mummy!” a little boy screamed, as Andre one-handed his chair up the ramp to the castle. The child turned in his chair to see his mother collapse. A park employee, a streetsweeper, knelt down to assist her, but all she did was scream louder for her son: “Tommy!”
To her screams were soon added those of forty sets of parents, all of them wearing the red T-shirts of the Thompson company. The small crowd withdrew into the castle, leaving the rest to stand there, stunned, for several seconds before they moved off, slowly and jerkily, down to Strada Espana.
“Shit, they’re coming here,” Mike Dennis saw, still talking on the phone to the captain commanding the local Guardia Civil barracks.
“Get clear,” the captain told him immediately. “If there is a way for you to leave the area, make use of it now! We need you and your people to assist us. Leave now!”
“But, goddamnit, these people are my responsibility.”
“Yes, they are, and you can take that responsibility outside. Now!” the captain ordered him. “Leave!”
Dennis replaced the phone, turning then to look at the fifteen person duty staff in the command center: “People, everybody, follow me. We’re heading for the backup command center. Right now,” he emphasized.
The castle, real as it appeared, wasn’t real. It had been built with the modern conveniences of elevators and fire stairwells. The former were probably compromised, Dennis thought, but one of the latter descended straight down to the underground. He walked to that fire door and opened it, waving for his employees to head that way. This they did, most with enthusiasm for escaping this suddenly dangerous place. The last tossed him keys on the way through, and when Dennis left, he locked this door behind him, then raced down the four levels of square spiral stairs. Another minute and he was in the underground, which was crowded with employees and guests hustled out of harm’s way by Trolls, Legionnaires, and other uniformed park personnel. A gaggle of park-security people were there, but none of them were armed with anything more dangerous than a radio. There were guns in the counting room, but they were under lock, and only a few of the Worldpark employees were trained and authorized to use them, and Dennis didn’t want shots to be fired here. Besides, he had other things to do. The alternate Worldpark command post was actually outside the park grounds, just at the end of the underground. He ran there, following his other command personnel north toward the exit that led to the employees’ parking lot. That required about five minutes, and Dennis darted in the door to see that the alternate command post was double-manned now. His own alternate desk was vacant, and the phone already linked to the Guardia Civil.
“Are you safe?” the captain asked.
“For now, I guess,” Dennis responded. He keyed up his castle office on his monitor.
“This way,” Andre told them. The door was locked, however. He backed off and fired his pistol at the doorknob, which bent from the impact, but remained locked, movies to the contrary. Then Rene tried his Uzi, which wrecked that portion of the door and allowed him to pull it open. Andre led them upstairs, then kicked in the door to the command center-empty. He swore foully at that discovery.