Ryan found himself striding openly from the ruins, right toward the riot-armored SWAT troopers debarking the two canvas-back trucks that sat behind the Commando. “What’s going on here?” Ryan demanded.

  Morgan turned his way. In the half light Ryan saw teeth shown in a mirthless grin.

  “So it’s our pet mercies,” Morgan said. “Well, you did a good job. You’ll be paid like we agreed. So why’re you hanging around here? We got this.”

  “Mercies? We do what we have to when a blaster’s to our heads,” Ryan said through gritted teeth. He stopped. His friends had emerged from cover behind him and were coming up on both sides of him. “And just what have you got?”

  Morgan laughed. “This ville.”

  Black armored officers carrying truncheons trotted past the V-100 and the sad, bewildered, bearded man and into the ville. They began bullying the ville folk into gathering the weapons that had been placed on the ground.

  A woman said something to a SWAT trooper. She didn’t seem heated or disrespectful, though she was too far away for Ryan to hear over the grumble of the now idling Commando. The black-armored man struck her backhanded across the face with his truncheon. She fell down like an empty sack.

  Krysty uttered a little moan.

  “Where are the Jokers?” Mildred asked. She sounded pissed. Ryan hoped she’d keep control of herself. He didn’t want to have to rein her in. He was having a hard enough time keeping his own temper in check. But he was well aware that if shit started, he and his friends would be the ones taken out.

  “Jokers?” the spokesman said, clearly confused. “What about the Jokers? Their turf is west of here. They don’t mess with us.”

  He straightened slightly.

  “We’ve taught them better.”

  “You can see these people have loads of weps,” Morgan said to Ryan. “Dangerous weps civilians shouldn’t be allowed to keep. And they’re way too ready to use them to defend this piss-pot ville and their fields. Fact is, they’ve put a scare up the actual gangs hereabouts.

  “Not that they’d be more than a speed bump to us, with the wag and our SWAT boys. But we’re looking to own the ville and the labor. Not trash the one and chill the other.”

  “So you had us take their water supply,” J.B. said.

  “Hey—we’re benevolently gonna provide them water. So long as they know who’s in charge.”

  “Why here and now?” Doc asked. “The whole city knows you are prepared for a final showdown with the Desolation Angels. How can this possibly serve Mayor Michaud’s ends?”

  “Who said anything about Michaud?” Morgan said. “Hizzoner’s had his eye on expanding this way for a long time. But these yokels stood in the way. He promised me that if I could take the ville without wasting a lot of manpower and valuable gear, he’d give it to me as my very own personal fiefdom. For me to be baron over. Subject to the mayor, of course. So I reckoned I’d show some initiative, go ahead and grab the place before the balloon goes up, give my shock troops a little warm-up exercise. After you folks did the heavy lifting, of course.”

  “That was what this was really about?” Ryan said in disbelief. “Making you a baron?”

  “Of course. And it worked ace on the line. Which reminds me—”

  He drew a handblaster from a shoulder rig strapped over his bulky body armor. It was a SIG Sauer P226 like Ryan’s.

  “Since this ville has a new baron, there’s no need to keep you around anymore.”

  That was said to the bearded spokesman. He looked up at Morgan, not understanding.

  The captain shot him in the face.

  “Now that’s not good,” J.B. stated.

  “You lied to us,” Ryan said as the shot echoed down the hill. He didn’t say it loud. He didn’t have to.

  Morgan just laughed. “Yeah, so I did. Rank hath its privileges and all that shit. I didn’t want you getting slack thinking you were going up against a bunch of helpless scrubby-ass ville rats. You mighta screwed up.”

  “I don’t like being lied to,” Ryan said.

  “Who gives a rat’s ass? You’re hired hands. Nothing more. Don’t start getting ahead of yourselves. Unless you want to be paid in lead, instead of jack.”

  He shook his helmeted head.

  “Walk away and I’ll just forget this little incident. I can see how you might feel trust hasn’t been a two-way street here. No reason to let that fuck up what’s been a real ace working relationship, though. Not if you don’t push it.”

  Ryan stared at him a moment longer. Then he turned and started to walk down the road, away from the ville and the evil bastard into whose gauntleted hands he and his friends had just delivered it, gift wrapped.

  The others followed.

  They walked through the usual assortment of clumped huts and reclaimed ruins, neat fields and derelict buildings. The rising day did not noticeably brighten their spirits.

  “Is this starting to make anybody else wonder if we’re fighting for the right side?” Mildred asked after a while.

  “We’re fighting for a baron who has control of this area,” Ryan said in a flat voice. He wasn’t feeling much. He didn’t feel as if feeling was a luxury he could afford right now. “And I mean Michaud and Bone, not that prick Morgan who gives us our orders. Right doesn’t enter into it that much, so long as Hizzoner can say if we live or die.”

  “How much can we trust him?” Krysty asked. “Michaud, I mean.”

  “Do you even need to ask?” Ryan said. “But for now—his is still the only game in town.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  “Now,” Krysty heard Ryan yell.

  She turned around into the glassless window she’d been standing next to, her Smith & Wesson 640 gripped tightly in both hands. Two men in Angel colors were walking in her field of view in the bright morning sun. They carried blasters and walked in that sort of hunched-over way people often did when they were in what they understand to be a danger zone.

  She bit down hard on her misgivings. After the part they’d been tricked into playing in the subjugation of the ville northwest of DPD headquarters, it was hard for her to think of the Desolation Angels as the ones most deserving of getting suddenly blasted. But she also lined up the sights and shot the nearer man, who had long, lank, light-brown hair, right through his bare left biceps. This was all-out war, and if the Angels stumbled on them, they’d certainly shoot first.

  And then shoot again to make sure and move on without bothering with questions.

  The man fell yelling. Krysty didn’t know whether the soft .38 caliber lead slug had penetrated his torso or not. The farther Angel, a goateed black man, turned toward her, bringing up his single-shot shotgun. She quickly fired twice at him. She thought she missed both times, but he dived to the street, anyway.

  To her left Mildred was banging away with her usual precision with her ZKR target revolver. To the right, the shotgun barrel of Doc’s LeMat bellowed, eliciting a scream followed by booming shots from the main .44 caliber barrel. At the southeast end of the roofless ruin of what J.B. suggested had been a machine shop, Ryan cranked rounds from his SIG at the tail end of the twelve-man Angel patrol.

  A bullet cracked off the brickwork by Krysty’s head, forcing her to crouch hurriedly below the sill. A violent fusillade burst from the survivors of the companions’ first volley, bullets snapping and whistling through the tall, narrow windows.

  The others all ducked down or sideways out of the line of fire. Then from up the street came a snarl of full-auto fire. J.B. and Ricky had opened up from behind piles of rubble of the next building that had slumped into the street and partially blocked it. Ricky was using his DeLisle, Krysty knew, so she didn’t expect to hear his shots.

  Yells of alarm and cries of pain broke out from the patrol. Then J.B. called, “They’re running!”

  He fired another burst just to keep them headed in the right direction.

  Cautiously, Krysty straightened enough to peer out the window. The street was littered with moaning, writhing forms and ones that just lay still. From a quick glance she could tell seven or eight of the Angels had been hit hard enough to go down.

  The sharp, hard stink of burned propellant and lubricant was enough to beat down the smells of gore and voided bowels.

  From the east came the sounds of a major firefight. Krysty was becoming aware of the noise again after totally focusing on the ambush—first the tense wait for the enemy to walk into the kill zone, with discovery and disaster a constant danger, and then the hot blood of the actual fight, brief and one-sided though it had been.

  “All right, Jak,” Ryan called, “head on out.”

  Jak was crouched by the door, which opened onto a cross street. He instantly rose and slipped out of the half-collapsed building. It was time for him to take his usual position scouting ahead of the rest.

  The Angels hadn’t been total stupes. While their patrol was scouting for the main force, sent out to reconnoiter the enemy’s western flank, they had been smart enough to send a scout of their own ahead, working through the rubble on this side of the street. Possibly a second had worked the far side, also; Krysty had no way of knowing.

  But the Angel scout who had investigated this building had been no match for Jak Lauren’s stealth, nor his blade skills. He died without yelling a warning to his comrades—and also without providing the more customary heads-up a scout provided: getting blasted.

  “Time to move on, everybody,” Ryan called. He and the others headed for the exit Jak had taken.

  * * *

  THE DPD’S POORLY kept secret offensive against the Desolation Angels had begun, but it began in a way that took even J.B. and Ryan completely by surprise. And Ryan knew he wasn’t flattering himself in thinking that was a hard thing to do—not because it was so wildly innovative that it was nothing even one of them would have come up with, but rather because it was that sort of plan.

  As expected, they had invaded across the Seven-Five—the former Interstate 75—in force. As not expected, they didn’t continue to drive on into Desolation Angels’ territory to throw themselves against the defenses of a smart, determined enemy who had had ample time to prepare.

  Rather, they grabbed a foothold—and dug in themselves.

  It wasn’t a direct invasion of Angel land at all. It was a challenge Red Wings could not ignore.

  The Angels leader could only have had his questionable self-control sorely tested by Hizzoner’s impertinence. Ryan presumed whoever had planned the offensive had hoped the alcoholic and angry Red Wings would act rashly and throw his forces willy-nilly against well-sited, well-supplied DPD blasters.

  But Ryan didn’t see the Angels’ boss had much choice other than to respond, and as quickly as possible. If he let Michaud and Bone get away with the move, they’d strengthen their new position and use it to encroach farther into downtown, which would bring them into the turf actually claimed by the Desolation Angels.

  And if the Angels let such a flaming insult and actual threat slide, the other gangs of the downtown area were liable to figure that their power had peaked and begun to decline again, just as Red Wings’ mental state was said to be deteriorating. They’d turn on the Desolation Angels like a pack of armored coyotes.

  So they counterattacked. Not impulsively, lashing out in their boss’s vicarious blind fury, but before they had sufficient time to mount an optimal operation.

  Still, the outcome wasn’t guaranteed. Had the Angels been a pushover, the Detroit Police Department would have done the pushing long ago. Or at the very least not stopped their drive until they were partying down in the former hockey rink that was Red Wings’ personal castle. A lot of fighting had to be done before anything was determined.

  * * *

  THE ANGELS POINT man made his way in a crouch through the rubble that covered the street. Weeds sprouted between blocks of masonry and chunks of concrete with jagged rebar sticking out of them. Bushes grew to the height of a person’s shoulders. Some of them were covered with pretty little white flowers, lending the scene an entirely unwarranted air of harmlessness.

  An Angel patrol ten strong had followed its leader in a wide V formation. Now the eight men and two women were moving in a crouch, holding blasters at the ready. Ryan had no idea what they expected might be lying in wait for them, nor why, if they feared ambush, they hadn’t just picked another, safer route.

  The bushes were high enough to provide excellent concealment, screening them entirely from the sight of enemies on the ground. Ryan lay on his belly at the top of a square concrete tower a couple blocks away and watched through the scope of his Steyr on highest magnification, but as far as he was concerned it did dick.

  The tower had housed an external staircase for a four-story building that had fallen down completely. Ryan had no idea which of a litany of possible disasters had caused the structure to disintegrate so completely that the dense overgrowth where it had stood completely hid the mounds of its rubbled remains. Because the stairway had survived intact this long, and looked and felt solid enough, Ryan reckoned it was unlikely to implode beneath him.

  The woman at the rear of the trailing right arm of the V suddenly jerked and fell on her face. Ryan wondered how Ricky was handling dropping the hammer on a woman. The kid had odd scruples. In the heat of action he pulled together and worked with an efficiency to make the exacting J. B. Dix proud of his pupil. But the patrol posed no immediate threat to Ricky or his friends.

  He had taken the shot and made it. Ryan knew he’d have to talk to the youth later, to explain that, in the end, it was the survival of the group that counted. They’d have to bide their time.

  Ricky lay on the second floor of a gutted factory two blocks to the west of the patrol. Ryan reckoned piles of rubble here and there occasionally blocked his shots. But the point here wasn’t to slaughter the enemy to the last man or woman. It was to put the fear of the DPD into them.

  J.B. and Mildred secured the lower floors of Ricky’s sniper’s nest. Krysty and Doc hid in the weeds at the base of the stair tower, doing the same service for Ryan. Jak patrolled somewhere, keeping his eyes skinned to prevent more enemies from stumbling onto his friends.

  Ryan laid the reticule on the lead Angel and fired. The Scout roared and bucked.

  When the rifle came back online, a new 7.62 mm cartridge neatly chambered, the lead man had dropped out of sight and the rest of the patrol was looking frantically around for the source of the attack.

  Another man yelped and went down, struck through the breastbone by one of Ricky’s big slow .45 ACP bullets, to judge by the sudden spray of red from his chest. Somebody else yelled to the others that he’d been hit. Another Angel noticed the woman at their rear had also vanished.

  Ryan held off firing. He had plenty of targets, but chilling wasn’t the object here.

  As he sensed they might, the Angels broke and fled back to the southeast. A sniper was a terrible enemy to have to face. Ryan himself well knew the awful sense of powerlessness that came with being under the sights of somebody who could reach out and touch you—or your friends and loved ones—at will without you being able to strike back.

  He fired another shot. It wasn’t aimed at anyone in particular. Its purpose was to reinforce that sense of impotence and help the resultant fear blossom into full-on panic. He hated to waste a cartridge on principle.

  However, the DPD had seen they had plenty of ammo. You had to give that to the bastards, too. They hadn’t tried to stiff their minions, no matter how much contempt some—like Morgan—showed them.

  So far.

  Ryan watched the last of the patrol disappear beyond more ruins. Then he slithered back to the stairs, slung the Steyr and started down to rejoin his friends.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The Angel appeared in the doorway close enough for Jak to touch.

  The man was brown skinned, dark haired and not much bigger than Jak himself. He had spotted the albino slipping into a block of bombed-out buildings. The Angel scout’s first mistake was assuming Jak hadn’t also seen him.

  The gangbanger had a big-bladed hunting knife in his hand, and his young face was set in intense lines. He was intent on the hunt and primed for chilling action when he came on his unsuspecting quarry.

  The Angel scout had washed within the past two days with a strong lye soap. He carried a handblaster that had been fired within the past hour. Jak had smelled him as he approached the entryway.

  He was wearing some kind of soft-soled moccasins—obvious modern make, not scavvy. Jak had heard him, very faintly, as he approached across the rubble on the far side of a yellow-brown limestone wall whose top was jagged.

  The man was good.

  Jak was better. He was waiting and ready when the slight, stealthy man appeared close enough to touch.

  And touch him he did, with the clip-pointed blade of his trench knife, delivered in a brutal uppercut that punched its clipped point through his bare solar plexus and up behind the shielding arch of his rib cage to cut his heart in two.

  Jak reached out, grabbed his arm and held him as he died, not to comfort him but to ensure he didn’t make a lot of noise when he fell. The patrol he was scouting for was noisily advancing about a block away.

  Jak twisted the knife inside the flaccid torso to make sure the scout was all-the-way dead and not able to empty all five rounds from the cylinder of his snub-nosed Model 36 .38 Special into Jak’s back.

  Then he pulled the blade out with a slight sucking sound and wiped it carefully on the man’s baggy urban-camo pants. The leather vest with its colorful badge on the back would have been handier, but Jak chose not to dishonor the man’s colors.

  Hunter’s honor. The man had been worthy game.

  Then Jak turned and made his way back through the rubbled row to alert his friends to the rest of the squad’s approach.

  * * *

  “SOUNDS LIKE A real meat grinder back there by the DPD lines,” Ricky said as blasterfire to the northeast reached a fresh thundering crescendo.

  The companions were passing through a cavernous, largely intact warehouse in a loose V formation, with Ryan at the tip and Jak naturally out in front. A lot of such structures, along with various factories, populated this area. They were staying off the streets to spare themselves exactly the sort of hurt they’d just laid on the Angel recon patrol.

 

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