Deathlands 117 desolatio.., p.25
Deathlands 117: Desolation Angels, page 25
“Sure,” Ryan said. “If you want to explain to the mayor why you got your fingerprints all over his shiny new playmate.”
“Uh—” The guard dropped his hand. Then he and his partner reluctantly stepped to either side to clear the way.
To Ryan’s surprise, the corridor beyond was clear of guards. Apparently Michaud—and his now-late sec boss—had relied largely on intimidation to keep intruders out of Hizzoner’s private sanctum. Naturally, though, there would be more sec when they reached Michaud’s rooms.
Ryan felt the opposite of relief. This is too easy, he thought.
* * *
THE TWO GUARDS stood crowded together in the doorway, staring single-mindedly after the four escorts and their flame-haired captive.
It placed them in an absurdly easy position for Mildred and J.B. to step out on the landing below, sight on the gap between the backs of their polycarbonate helmets and the beginning of their body armor and fire a kill shot each.
They fell where they stood without uttering a peep.
J.B. and Mildred stood aside to let Ricky and Raven slip past as the noise of their heavy slides reciprocating echoed down the stairwell. They sounded as loud as gunshots to Mildred, though she knew they were far from that. They didn’t sound like gunshots, though, and that made all the difference. If there was even anybody in position to hear them, which she doubted, especially with the battle raging outside.
I know they were brutal coldheart bastards, Mildred thought as she, J.B., Doc and Ricky followed the two scouts, who had quickly made sure the guards were truly chills and moved on. And no doubt extrasadistic, to make Bone’s first team and Michaud’s personal detail. It still makes me feel a bit better about shooting a man in the back to know that he died watching Krysty’s perfect rear end work its moon-white magic as she walked away, Mildred thought.
“Krysty really is a pro,” she murmured as she and J.B. hauled the dead guards to the sides of the door, out of sight from the hallway beyond. “The way she cut open the rear of her jeans like that, just for that added level of distraction.”
“The woman’s good,” J.B. agreed, straight-faced. He showed no signs of interest himself.
He knows what’s good for him, she thought.
* * *
MICHAUD’S RESIDENCE LAY down a blessedly short corridor from the last turn in their path. Though Krysty and the others had gotten a basic idea of where it lay on the seventh floor while they still worked for Hizzoner, Jak and Raven had had to scout a couple times to find the right route. She was constantly amazed at how labyrinthine the giant old building was.
When they turned the final corner, she gave her head a toss, partly to make sure she had the proper look of defiance on, partly to hide the restless stirring of her sentient hair.
Four guards stood flanking the door, arrogant in their black SWAT armor. Like the ones by the stairs, these held batons ready, though each man had a longblaster slung.
These guards reacted the same way: initial barking followed immediately by big, staring eyes. Just before turning the corner Krysty had pulled open the right side of her much-abused shirt a little farther to enhance the effect.
“We were ordered to bring this one straight to the mayor!” Ryan barked. “Let us in.”
The guard nearest Ryan nodded instant acquiescence. Krysty had to force down a laugh at the way his head bobbed while his eyes stayed locked as if gyro-stabilized on her naked breasts. He reached a gloved hand and knocked a fast but complicated pattern on the door, which was covered in what appeared to be a brass sheet, engraved in curious geometric patterns, dominated by a curiously intricate cross and a symbol with a drawing-type compass and angle ruler with a giant G in the middle. From the sound of it there was thick hardwood behind the metal.
Krysty heard heavy locks being disengaged. The door opened.
Inside stood the last thing Krysty had expected to see: an Asian-looking woman almost as tall as Krysty in stiletto heels, with jade-green eyes and black hair flowing down over a black leather bustier almost to the tops of a pair of black thigh-high boots. Dawn light pouring through huge windows outlined her graceful form.
She tipped her head to one side and slowly smiled. Then she turned her head.
“It’s the red-headed mutineer woman, Claude,” she said. “They’ve caught her and brought her right to you.”
“Splendid!” Hizzoner called from behind her.
The woman stepped back, pulling the door open.
Ryan raised a heavy boot and kicked the door open. It knocked the woman sprawling backward against the side of a huge bed.
Krysty heard two clacks from behind, coming one on top of the other, as J.B.’s and Mildred’s handblasters cycled after firing a single suppressed shot each. Both guards immediately to either side of the door grunted and collapsed.
Then came the sound of soft feet rushing forward. She heard ripping sounds, gurgling. Then liquid splashing on the black-and-white checkerboard floor.
Jak and Raven had just chilled the other two sentries with their blades.
Ryan stepped into the room, drew his M4 one-handed and fired a quick burst into the ornate ceiling to make sure he had everybody’s attention. Leto unslung his big riot shotgun and leveled it.
Krysty took a large step forward and to her left. She drew a compact autopistol from where she’d kept it concealed tucked into her pants, its cold muzzle pressing uncomfortably between the cheeks of her half-exposed backside, with the untucked tail of her shirt to hide it. She aimed the blaster at the man on the bed.
The sight that met her astonished eyes instantly wiped away any trace of regret, either for helping beguile sec men to their deaths or helping Ryan with his brutal treatment of the slinky doorkeeper.
The room was a bizarre and gaudy fantasyland even by the standards of the old temple. She had the impression of the usual hand-rubbed hardwood paneling and the metal ceiling of gilt and silver and deep indigo blue, both on the floor and parts of the wall. But there was also a fireplace with a gilt mantel, and flanking the bed stood two obelisks, fluted like Greek columns and topped by malachite globes, as well as nightstands and sturdy chairs.
But the bed was the centerpiece. And not because its size—Krysty thought it had to be ten feet by ten—dominated the spacious, high-ceiling room. Behind and on either side of the bed stood, or sat, or reclined on silk cushions at least a dozen women dressed in a variety of what she could only think of as fetish outfits: a bare-legged nun, at least a pair each of white-clad nurses and plaid-skirted schoolgirls, saucy maids, garter-belted dominatrices like the still-stunned Asian woman, a pair in tentlike baby-doll nighties who were clearly nude beneath.
Six women lay sprawled on the red satin spread of the bed, some asleep, some clearly drugged to stupor. These were all quite young, though Krysty noted with some relief they were all clearly in their twenties.
That didn’t make her feel any more charitably inclined to the man in the gold-trimmed deep-blue silk robe sitting with his back propped on pillows against the high, wide headboard.
But the somnolent young women scattered with casual contempt at his feet and around his legs were all entirely nude. Whatever the status of the women in fantastic outfits was, clearly the naked women were something they were not: captives.
“Get your hands up, you fat bastard!” Krysty yelled.
Hizzoner Claude Michaud smiled insouciantly.
“Why should I, dear girl?” he asked in a voice of calm reason. “If you meant to chill me, you would have blasted me the instant your male escort kicked open the door. Might I hazard a guess that he’s another former employee of mine named Ryan Cawdor?”
Ryan took off his helmet and tossed it aside with what Krysty recognized as a look of relief.
“Yeah.”
Leto likewise discarded his helmet. “And I’m Leto, new Maximum Leader of the Desolation Angels.”
Michaud nodded courteously to him. “I have heard descriptions of you. They don’t quite do credit to your...presence.”
The others were coming in behind and spreading out along the walls. Friendly and Bronk had already winged out left and right to stand alongside the two men in SWAT armor.
Some of the bizarrely clad women sashayed forward as if to surround the bed protectively.
“Stay where you are!” Ryan snapped.
“What are you going to do, you big handsome one-eyed devil, you?” asked the doorkeeper. She rose gracefully from where his door kick had thrown her against the bed. The trickle of blood from where the door had hit her nose looked disturbingly natural, trickling across her equally red lips. “Shoot us?”
“If we have to, honey,” said Mildred from Krysty’s left, “we will.”
“It was an admirably constructed ruse,” Michaud said in his voice of honeyed oil. “But to what do I owe the honor of this little pageant if it’s not meant to murder me?”
“It’s still an option,” Ryan growled. “That ‘murder’ thing.”
“We want to negotiate with you,” Leto said. He lowered his shotgun and looked questioningly at Ryan.
Seeing no resistance, Ryan shrugged. “Right. Put them down. Keep eyes peeled and shoot at the first sign of trouble.”
He lowered his own carbine.
“Negotiate what?” Michaud asked.
“An end to this war,” Leto said. “It can only drain us both to the point the other gangs in the city will see us as potential prey and jump on us. If that happens, neither of us wins.”
“Perhaps,” Michaud said. He smiled. “But what if I win?”
“Doesn’t seem likely from where I stand,” said J.B. from Krysty’s right.
“And what do you offer by way of inducement for me to negotiate with you?”
Leto pushed his head slightly forward on his neck and stared as if suspecting the mayor was stupe. “Your life, to start with.”
Michaud laughed heartily.
“Time to start taking this seriously, Michaud,” Leto said. “The time we’re willing to waste on you is limited and running out fast. So what’s it going to be? Yes or no?”
“I do not negotiate with terrorists. What do you have to say to this?”
Then he whipped out a tiny black handblaster and shot Ryan three times in the chest.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Ryan whipped up his right gauntlet. “Hold fire!” he rapped to his people. Then he felt gingerly where the bullets had struck him.
“You do know I’m wearing your own SWAT armor, right?” he said. “And that’s a what? A blaster that fires a .25-caliber bullet?” He grinned.
“Except for, nice grouping, Your Honor. Okay, haul his butt out of bed. It’s time this got real.”
He gestured. Bronk and Friendly started forward. Fetish maidens moved to bar their path.
“Indeed it is,” Michaud said.
“Do what he tells you, you fat murdering rapist bastard!” Raven shrieked.
In a single bound she was up on the bed, knocking the hapless doorkeeper sprawling again, this time to the deep blue floor. Raven waded right across the still-unconscious naked women to kick the blaster from Michaud’s hand. Then she pressed the tip of her bloody sword against the wedge of hairy chest visible at the top of his robe.
He had paid more than a cursory glance only to Krysty, Ryan and Leto. The others he had flicked a mere glance over and dismissed. But now his cheeks became ashen, and his eyes bugged wide.
“Aaliyah?” he said.
A plump black woman in a platinum bob wig and white nurse’s costume picked up a candlestick and struck Raven over the head with it.
And it all went to glowing nuke shit at once.
Friendly had grabbed a willowy Latina in a formfitting red dress with a slit clear up to her rib cage by the wrist. “C’mon, honey, out of the way,” he said.
She tugged furiously. He was as immovable as granite.
But the tug had been a blind. It gave her cover to turn half away from him.
When she turned back she whipped around with a commando-style dagger protruding from the bottom of her fist and buried it in his sternum.
He bellowed like a scalded buffalo bull and backhanded her with all his enormous strength. Her neck broke with a loud snap. She was flung atop the bed like a rag doll.
The nude young women she fell across were scarcely more limp and passive than she was.
Bronk was advancing along the other side of the bed when Friendly was stabbed. As she turned to look, the black nurse whipped out a MAC-11 and emptied its magazine into her from four feet away. The little machine pistol lacked its customary counterbalancing suppressor. The noise was loud as hell.
The Angel threw her head back, cried out in agony and fell.
The MAC’s slide locked back from an empty chamber. Then the nurse’s head rocked back with a blue hole over her left eye as Mildred shot her.
Staggering, Friendly grabbed the dagger’s hilt with both hands. A pale, blue-eyed waif of a woman in an absurd pigtailed blond wig and blue-and-white Alice in Wonderland pinafore dress held out a snub-nosed .38 in both hands and blasted all five shots from the cylinder into the huge man’s torso.
Ryan was trying to swing around his M4 to bring her down. The room was full of screams, curses and hurtling bodies. He had to take a step back as two women, one dressed as a cowgirl with a hat hanging behind her neck by a chinstrap and the other another nurse, jumped up on the bed, sprinted over the limp bodies and launched themselves at Krysty in a flying tackle as she tried to line up a shot on Hizzoner.
A splintering crack came from Ryan’s blind side. He snapped his head around in time to see a shiny wood panel explode before a massive black boot. He snapped the carbine that way and a figure lunged out of the concealed niche at him.
A whistling blow of a side-handle baton slammed against the right side of his chin and sent him smashing straight down to the floor with blackness and purple lightning vying for space in his cranium.
But he kept his presence of mind enough to fire a long, shuddering burst into the center of the immense, blocky, black figure that loomed suddenly over him. From around the room he heard echoes of the first clash as other bodyguards kicked their way out of similar concealment.
The figure didn’t so much as rock. Suddenly Ryan’s blurry eye focused enough to realize that it was a sec man wearing Type IV body armor, a kind of apron with pockets down the front holding ceramic-steel plates. Ryan’s regular SWAT armor was Kevlar, with only a single trauma plate over the center of his chest.
Of course he’d shrugged off the burst of point-blank 5.56 mm rounds. That armor would stop pretty much everything short of a .50 cal.
“Take the rest alive!” yelled Michaud, who remained in bed. Probably he felt that was still the best way to stay out of danger for the moment. “Don’t mark the women up too bad, and you can play with them!”
Before Ryan could switch his aim to the sec man’s lower legs, the boot came down right at his head. He had to roll violently aside to avoid the stomp.
He caught quick glimpses of some of his friends. Krysty was rolling around in a furious kicking, punching tangle with the two women who had jumped her. Doc was reeling around trying to dislodge a tiny woman in a French maid outfit who clung to his back with her legs locked around his chest, holding a fistful of his hair with one hand and punching his head with the other. Ricky flung himself at a sec man in assault armor like the one who’d clubbed Ryan, and he got stiff-armed onto his butt on the floor for his troubles.
Leto raised a handblaster to the other sec man who had appeared on the far side of the bed near the outer wall. He fired two shots into the man’s chest. The sec man, not even bothered, stunned him with an overhand club blow to the head.
And then Friendly rose from the floor, roaring like an angry grizzly bear with blood streaming from his mouth and nostrils. He lunged at the sec man who’d struck down his Maximum Leader, put his shaved head down and stuck his right shoulder into his midsection. He locked his arms around the heavily armored figure and drove him bicycling backward.
The sec man windmilled into a tall, wide window past the head of Hizzoner’s bed. The metal framework holding the glass was strong, but it couldn’t resist the berserk power and fury of the dying Angel, nor the combined masses of two big men. The framework tore free of the stone, and the two men flew out the seventh-story window in a flurry of sharp glass fragments.
Ryan saw Ricky tackled by a fetish guard in a pink baby-doll nightie. Doc went to his knees, stunned. Then Ryan rolled back to his right side.
His mind was still fuzzed by the baton blow, his reactions not as crisp as he needed them to be. The heavy-armored sec man’s boot caught the M4 before it came to bear and ripped it out of Ryan’s hands. It clattered on the floor out of sight.
Suddenly a figure interposed itself before the enormous sec man and the supine Ryan. It was J.B., hat defiantly in place. He held something in his hand that sputtered. Before the guard could react to J.B.’s sudden appearance from his blindside, the Armorer had grabbed the neck of the shirt he wore beneath his armored apron, yanked it open and stuffed the little object down inside.
“Get clear,” the Armorer called to Ryan, a heartbeat before following his own advice and diving back in the direction of the doorway. Ryan rolled frantically away, fortuitously landing on the backs of the legs of the cowgirl, who was sitting pinning one of Krysty’s arms while her nurse partner sat astride the redhead’s hips, pinning her as they beat her.
The guard stood staring down at himself in horrified disbelief. He dabbed at his armor-plated chest with his unwieldy black gauntlets, going, “Buh! Buuuuh!” in mindless panic.
The fuse burned down to the cap stuck in the C-4 chunk J.B. had jammed inside his armor.
The deafening detonation blew out the other window glass in the mayor’s luxury suite. It also blew the sec man’s arms and head right out of the armholes and neck of his armor, if not entirely to shredded pieces. Blood fountained upward and to both sides, along with clouds of pulped organ and splinters of bone.
