Harvey had wanted the knife, and he had taken steps to acquire it. As with everything, his attention was focused. As it was now focused on attaining the nuke.
But that focus could be one-dimensional, and as the sec chief cut through the swarm of muties, he didn’t notice that one of the Sunchildren he had cut wasn’t quite chilled.
Ryan was in the vicinity, having fought his way through toward the nuke. Looking across, he saw the injured Sunchild drag herself up from the earth, her robes splattered with blood. A slash from the Emerson had cut her throat, and she had collapsed from the shock. But only veins had been cut, not an artery, and although she would eventually bleed to death, she was mustering all the strength she could for one last assault on the sec chief.
Ryan was in hand-to-hand combat as he saw this, and guessing what was to happen, doubled his efforts to dispose of the mutie he was battling. Shifting his balance, he knocked out the grip the mutie had on him by thrusting his arms up and out. While the Sunchild was off balance, Ryan’s own powerful forearms crossed, catching the mutie’s head in the middle of the cross. A flexion of the powerful muscles and a twist of his body weight insured that the mutie’s soft-boned neck broke.
He was dead before he hit the dirt, and Ryan had already turned his attention to Harvey’s predicament.
Ryan covered the few yards in a matter of seconds, but he was still not quick enough. His SIG-Sauer was holstered, and by the time it was unsheathed a clean shot would have been impossible, with the Sunchild and the sec chief too entwined.
Harvey, for his part, was taken completely by surprise. The Sunchild threw herself about his neck, attempting to drag him backward. His attention focused entirely on what was to the front of him, it was only the wiry man’s strength that stopped him tumbling back under the sudden force from behind.
Harvey could feel the warm blood trickling from her, her fetid breath in his ear and on his neck, the panting and grunting of her breath as she tried to pull him down with all the strength she had left in her body.
The sec chief fought against it, pulling himself forward and attempting to throw her over his shoulder. But her weight was centered too far down her body, and the whole force was dragging too much for him to get any momentum on his own movements. Even more urgent was the fact that her arms were locked around his throat, and he couldn’t breathe properly, gasping for breath. He hacked at her flesh with the Emerson, but in her dying condition she seemed impervious to pain, and not even the razor-sharp blade cutting through the flesh of her fingers could force her to relent.
Ryan could see the difficulty the sec chief was having, and unwound the scarf from his own throat. The long scarf was weighted at each end by carefully concealed and secured weights, which made the scarf a useful and unobtrusive weapon.
Useful like now. With a flick of his powerful wrist, judging the distance exactly with his practiced eye, Ryan kept hold of one end of the scarf and sent the other shooting toward the mutie. The tip of the scarf, weighted as it was, gained momentum in flight and cracked against the temple of the woman’s head. A large bruise, weeping a thin trickle of blood, grew up almost as soon as the weight hit home, and she grunted heavily, her consciousness dimmed by the blow.
Harvey heard the crack, felt her heavy breath as she grunted, then felt her grip ease as her weight increased and became dead. She slipped away from him and down to the earth, still bleeding from her throat wound, and now with no consciousness to impair her way to death.
“Thanks, Cyclops,” Harvey said hoarsely, rubbing his sore throat.
Ryan retrieved the scarf and wrapped it around his neck once more. He fixed the sec chief with a glare. “Don’t thank me. Just remember you owe me,” he said shortly, before plunging on into the fray.