The shotgun roared and kicked J.B. in the shoulder. A pair of Bloods riding in the back of an open Jeep Cherokee began thrashing and spurting blood.
“These are some persistent sons of bitches,” he remarked to Doc as he pulled back to reload. The two of them were shooting from the window of the second room south toward the staircase from Ryan and Krysty’s room, on the east side, directly overlooking the rutted dirt street.
“Indeed,” Doc remarked and triggered another 3-round burst from his M4.
No fire was coming their way. Circling like vultures, the coldhearts were shooting exclusively at the ground floor of the main trading-post building, as were the Bloods who had scrambled onto the roofs, some flat, some peaked, some crazily slanted, of the buildings surrounding it. They were clearly exchanging brisk fire with Helga Spotted Elk and the other defenders. And had just as clearly been ordered to avoid doing any shooting that might risk hitting the goal of this whole mass attack: Mariah.
Nonetheless J.B. pulled back out of sight behind the windowsill to stuff buckshot shells into the long in-line magazine beneath the barrel of his M-4000 scattergun. He didn’t want to take the chance of somebody taking an opportunity shot while he stood there in plain view, distracted, like a simp. Plus good habits were good habits for a reason, and to keep good habits you had to avoid varying from them. Just like checking the chamber of a blaster you had just taken hold of, even if somebody had just checked it before handing it to you.
The roar of blasterfire was stupefying. J.B.’s highly tuned ears could even pick out the snarl of automatic weapons. He wondered where the coldhearts were getting all that ammo. The air was thick with shouts and screams; the smell of powder, both smokeless and smoky; lubricant and fuel, all burned; as well as the reek of guts voided in fear, the relaxation of death, or plain torn open.
He poked the Smith & Wesson out the window again. As before, he found what could be called a “target-rich environment.” The coldhearts had poured into town and were washing around the trading post and hotel like floodwaters.
He lined up the sights on another open wag. Like the rest of the attackers, its occupants, male and female, were dressed in a dizzy variety of random scavvied garments, modern manufacture and bits of decoration ranging from wild hair, and face and body paint to feathers, scraps of fur, cartridge belts, leather straps and less identifiable objects.
He blasted into the crowded pickup bed. At that distance, about thirty yards, the shot pattern spread out to somewhere upward of a foot. It was enough to poke .24-caliber holes in two or three people—if he was lucky, four. His object wasn’t necessarily to chill any of the coldhearts. He was trying to wound as many as possible, to take them out of the fight, or at least reduce their efficiency, and to force other Bloods to do something to get them to healers for first aid. Or barring that, to mess with coldheart morale simply because they weren’t getting help.
Trader had always been strict in his teaching: no chilling for chilling’s sake. And in this case, chilling wasn’t the most efficient way to cut the odds facing them.
Not that it seemed to matter. J.B. had no clue what Hammerhand had said or offered to this mob to get them so fired up to bring him one little girl—although having seen her in action, he could well understand why the Blood boss wanted her. At this rate, even though their stocks were plentiful, they’d run out of rounds long before Hammerhand ran out of willing blasters, even counting on the morale multiplier, which old Napoleon said was three-to-one, a figure J.B. always found on the light side.
He heard hammering on the frame of the open door behind him. Somebody wanted to attract his attention without flat barging in and risking collecting a belly full of buckshot.
He pulled back around with his back to the wall and his weapon held muzzle up. Doc was currently away from the window in the process of reloading his carbine.
The newcomer was Ricky, his cheeks colorless and his eyes big and wild. “They’re storming in through the back!” he said breathlessly. “Already got inside the kitchen.”
Ricky and Jak had been stationed in a room on the west side of the top floor, mostly to keep an eye out for just such eventualities. Although since Ricky had his replica DeLisle in his hands, he had likely been handing out hot-lead grief to the coldhearts on that side, just to keep their minds right.
“Such was inevitable,” Doc said.
J.B. nodded. “We’re not doing more than pissing in the ocean here anyway,” he said. “Time to brace ourselves for the rush and the real fighting. Has Ryan heard yet?”
“Jak told him.”
When J.B. and Doc stepped out, the others were gathered in the narrow corridor, even Mariah, ignoring the two grown women’s efforts to shoo the pigtailed child back into the shelter of Ryan and Krysty’s bedroom.
Ryan had slung his Steyr and held his SIG blaster in his left hand and his big, broad-bladed panga in his right.
“We need to get ready to pour fire down the stairs,” he said. “Krysty, let me borrow your M16.”
“Not a chance,” the redhead said firmly. “Nor my Glock. I’d just as soon meet danger faceup than hunching back of the front line where I might get another ten seconds of life if the Bloods break through.”
“It is kinda romantic how Ryan keeps trying to shield you from danger every now and then,” Mildred said.
Krysty shot her a quelling look, but the stocky healer was hard to quell, which was one reason J.B. felt about her the way he did.
She turned her attention on Ryan. “Do we have an exit strategy here, kemo sabe? I know you’re not counting on us running out of bad guys before we run out of bullets.”
Ryan peered down from the top of the stairs. His brow was furrowed in concentration. From the look on his face, he wasn’t liking the banging and screaming he was hearing from downstairs. Jak stood beside him, quivering with eagerness like a pup who smelled a catamount.
“I mean, get out on our own legs,” Mildred persisted, “and not roped together by the necks or anything.”
“Hold on until night,” Ryan said, “then sneak out.”
“It’s worked for us before, Mildred,” Krysty said.
“Yeah. But right now it seems kind of like that ‘hang on until dark’ thing is not looking too workable.”
“I can help,” Mariah said.
“I know,” Ryan told the girl. He didn’t look at her. “I don’t want to get dependent on you, though. You’ve hauled our chestnuts out of the blast furnace a number of times now. But somehow we went all these years doing it on our own, up to the point we met you.”
“Are you willing to lay down your life to prove a point, Ryan?” Doc asked.
“I didn’t think you were all that attached to life yourself, Doc. Funny you should ask that.”
The old man shrugged. His chin had sprouted white stubble, which made him look even older than he usually did.
“Please do not misinterpret my intent. It is a question asked purely out of curiosity. Inasmuch as that would be a substantial departure for you.”
“Well, I won’t say no to survival. But we’ve always stayed alive as a team, everybody doing their part. Not one of us relying on another all the time.”
Jak brought his head up, whipping his long white hair way from the shoulders of his camo jacket.
“Coming now!” he said.
* * *
RYAN HUNG BACK a few steps up the warped-plank floor of the hallway. He was feeling none too pleased with the choice, but it was the practical one.
The stairwell opened up on the south end of the hall, on the left-hand, or eastern, side. It was built to rely on the wall of the structure itself for support, probably to economize both on space and building materials. Like the kitchen and gaudy annexes and the rest, the upper stories had been added onto the Bodacious Creek Trading Post and Hostelry over the decades. That was plain to see.
The fact played both for them and against them tactically. A freestanding case that switched back along the north-south axis rather than one wall would have allowed room for all of them to stand around and blast downward, possibly clear down to ground floor. But it would also allow the invaders more scope to shoot up at them. And while Ryan was slide-lock certain the Bloods wouldn’t try any of the tricks that would have been obvious had they just been looking to rub out the little group, like filling the floor below with blasters and just shooting upward through the wood floors until they could be sure they’d riddled everything larger than a particularly lucky mouse, he couldn’t feel confident they wouldn’t open up if they saw clear targets that clearly weren’t a little girl.
There was just room for the four people with full-auto blasters to line up, either leaning over the rail or at the head of the stairs: J.B., Mildred, Doc and Krysty.
“Eyes skinned,” Ryan said to Ricky and Jak, who waited with him in the corridor back from the stairs. “The only way the bastards can come is up those stairs, so—”
“No!” It was Jak, his ruby eyes blazing. “Climb outside!”
“Fireblast! What was I thinking!”
The answer is, you weren’t, he told himself savagely. But in a brief thought he realized that was another example of what he’d meant to Mariah, that they couldn’t come to rely on just one person. Not even him.
“Right. We need to spread out and start cycling through the rooms and the far end of the hall, checking for somebody trying that.” It wasn’t likely, he calculated, but he didn’t want to get back-shot because of relying on what he thought the enemy would do, rather than on what they could. And if they got frustrated at taking casualties trying to bull up the stairs...
“Mariah? Can you give us a hand on this?”
She nodded so hard her pigtails whipped up and down. She was painfully eager to do her part, even if it didn’t entail any terrible reality-distorting mutie power.
“Then let’s start rolling,” he said, then turned to move to the window of the bedroom where Krysty and he had spent most of last night not sleeping.
Would it be their last night? He couldn’t help but wonder.