Finishing the first boot, Mildred took a drink from her tin cup of coffee. It was room temperature, but she needed the caffeine to help stay awake. Sipping the brew, the physician listened to the stillness. The old building was as silent as a grave, and even her breathing seemed to echo slightly amid the empty stalls and bare walls. Jak was on the ground floor standing watch, and the others were out on recce, so she was alone again with Dean. Even if the group had working radios, they wouldn’t be so stupid as to waste precious batteries on idle conversation.
Placing aside the empty cup, Mildred dutifully started on the other boot, removing the laces first so they wouldn’t become oil soaked and impossible to tie anymore. But then the physician jerked her head toward the sleeping boy lying under the conference table. Had his breathing just changed a little?
Putting aside the boot, the doctor padded over. Suddenly, Dean started to hack and cough. His left arm ripped lose from the binding, and he clawed at the restraining straps.
Grabbing the limb and pulling it away, she knelt on the arm to keep it still, and the boy stopped breathing. Immediately, Mildred started to apply CPR, but then realized pressing on his chest to force air into the lung would only aggravate the possibility of a puncture from the broken rib. Pinching his nose shut, she inhaled deeply and exhaled into his mouth, their lips pressed tight together. His chest rose and fell at her ministrations, but the boy didn’t stir and his pallor took on a faint grayish tinge.
“Come on, Dean,” she panted between breaths, feeling light-headed from hyperventilating herself. “Live!”
EXPLOSIONS SOUNDED from the ground floor of the skyscraper, then the front door exploded in a spray of glass. Firing steadily, Doc and J.B. stumbled into the tinged sunlight, their blasters booming and chattering.
Backing into the middle of the street, the two men paused for a moment as they quickly reloaded.
“Looks—” J.B. paused to swallow and moisten his throat, “—looks like we made it.”
“By Godfrey, what foul magician conjured these dark visitors!”
“Here they come again!” J.B. cried, snapping the bolt on his Uzi and triggering the blaster.
Doc was only half finished reloading the LeMat, but he leveled the blaster and discharged the scattergun barrel. Smoke and thunder blasted from the muzzle, and something inside the building screamed in pain. His heart pounding, Doc pulled a paper cartridge from his pocket, bit off the top and poured the black powder into an empty recess of the nine-shot cylinder, then placed the lead ball from the package into the recess and lastly tamped down the paper to hold the charge and lead in place. He shifted the selector pin from the shotgun back to the revolver. God’s blood, how many of the damn muties were there?
Doc reached over his shoulder and hauled out a Molotov.
“Light me,” he ordered, proffering the rag fuse.
But J.B. started for the Hummer. “Let’s get out of here while we got the chance,” he retorted. “Then we’ll blast them with a LAW from down the street.”
“Brilliant,” Doc said, as a window on the second floor exploded and a black shape sailed across the street to land heavily on the hood of the military wag. The bat clawed and bit at the sheet metal covering the engine, its large eyes shut tight against the blinding sunlight.
J.B.’s Uzi barked a dull staccato of death. The 9 mm rounds knocked the mutie off the wag, yellow blood spraying out from the impacts. The men rushed forward just as a dozen more of the muties leaped from the ruined front door of the building and landed in the middle of the street.
The companions froze, trying to be as quiet as possible while the creatures raised piglike snouts and loudly sniffed the air, turning their misshapen heads this way and that. In the tainted light of the cloudy sky, the beasts were mostly wings, their bodies no bigger than a dog’s. Their ears were almost a full foot tall, their mouths filled with rows of needle-sharp teeth. The wings gave a semblance of size, spreading well over eight feet wide, the elongated elbows sticking high over their bodies and waggling ridiculously as the killers crawled about in a gross pantomime of walking.