* * *

  EVERYONE FROZE AT the terrific noise. Ricky felt as if he’d been clapped over both ears with frying pans. The blonde who straddled his body reeled.

  He was physically stunned by the sharp and echoing crack of the plas ex going off—muffled only a little by the armor, which had largely had the effect of concentrating the blast’s energy into puréeing the whole upper half of the man’s body and squirting it out the available apertures. But the kid was less mentally disoriented by it because it didn’t take him completely by surprise.

  He had seen what his mentor was about to do, and he was similarly equipped.

  Ricky took advantage of the oh-so-brief pause in the head punching and boot stomps to fish out his own C-4 chunk and the little spring-and-gear striker he had fashioned himself in emulation of his teacher, J.B. He lit the tiny sprout of fuse and sent the chunk skittering between the legs of the sec man, who had taken two steps back as if physically driven by the force of his companion’s detonation. Then he grabbed the woman in the peculiar pink lingerie, who had recovered enough to be cocking her fist again.

  “Stop hitting me!” he yelled, then rolled them both to his left, away from the sec man and the improvised bomb beneath his boots. Fortunately, the good old inverse-square law guaranteed that the blast energy of the plas ex would taper off rapidly with distance, especially in the open air. Not so fortunately, at least where Hizzoner’s special bodyguard was concerned, it didn’t dissipate fast enough to help him.

  Unmuted by cloth, metal or flesh, this explosion was much louder than the first.

  Dissipated though it was, the blast wave stung like a vicious full-body slap when it hit Ricky and rolled on. Luck had him roll just far enough—just past being on his back again—that his nearer eardrum wasn’t aimed directly at it, or his eardrum would have been burst for sure.

  He still felt as if he’d been picked up about ten feet and dropped on pavement.

  Fortunately, nobody else in the room was in better shape.

  When his sense and senses, all of which had been bodily booted out of his body by the shock, came swarming home again—in a momentarily confused form—he glanced back over to where the sec man had been. The man’s armor hadn’t helped him. His legs had stuck unprotected out the bottom because death from below was not something it was designed to deal with.

  The blast had wrenched the left leg off at the hip and traumatically amputated the right one just below the knee. He was still spraying blood in rapidly diminishing clouds as he rolled around thrashing his arms on the mayor’s formerly pristine indigo floor.

  Ricky became conscious—very—of the blonde, still atop him, leaning down to press her small, pointy breasts in their thin chiffon against his chest.

  “You saved me,” she murmured. He could just hear her through the ringing in his ears. His head hurt. “How sweet.”

  She kissed him once on the lips.

  Then she head-butted him. Yellow light stabbed through his skull as his nose broke.

  A boot came whipping up from Ricky’s left, clocked the bodyguard on the right pigtailed side of her head and knocked her clean off him.

  * * *

  “SORRY, HONEY,” KRYSTY said to the woman she’d just kicked in the face. Her voice came to her as if from the other end of a well through the ringing in her own ears. “Be glad I didn’t feel the need to chill you.”

  The two women who’d taken her down had probably been as surprised by Krysty’s almost-manlike strength as Krysty and her crew had been by their sudden, vicious attack. Now the cowgirl lay moaning next to Ryan, clutching her broken jaw, and the nurse was facedown and stunned with her left arm visibly dislocated.

  Everybody in the room seemed to be moving at half speed. The two blasts, especially the second, had had a terrifically disorienting effect on everyone. Not just the two men they blew into bloody ruins.

  And the blood was everywhere, floors, walls, even the ceiling. It was spattered on the women bodyguards in their bizarrely lascivious outfits, all of whom were down now. The naked bodies, brown and white, strewn casually on the bed, some of whom were beginning to stir and slobber and make incoherent sounds as they returned to something like consciousness, were dappled in red. The mayor’s fantasy boudoir looked as if big bags of blood had exploded in it.

  Which literally is what happened, I guess, she thought.

  Violent motion drew her eye left. There was one massively armored guard still on his feet, and Ryan was face-to-face with him, holding his wrists in his own steely grasp, wrestling for control of the folded-stock longblaster he had unslung.

  Ryan hooked a boot behind one of the sec man’s ankles and threw his weight into him. Still stunned by the explosions, the guard hadn’t recovered all his balance yet. He went right over backward and cracked his head on the walnut baseboard behind him.

  Krysty winced. That sounded fatal enough. But then Jak was on him from somewhere in a catamount leap, slicing his throat with a single savage swipe of a knife.

  When Krysty had been a little girl, growing up in the mountains of Colorado, her uncle Tyas McCann had an expression he sometimes used: “He’s a man likes to wear a belt as well as suspenders.”

  Jak was that way, too. Only, when it came to chilling.

  * * *

  RYAN GOT TO his feet a little slowly. He felt as if a giant had picked him up by the ankles and used him to beat another giant to death.

  He looked at Hizzoner. Mayor Michaud still sat at the head of his bed, enthroned in silken pillows. He was dabbing blood from his features with a purple silk handkerchief. Otherwise, he looked entirely unmoved by the impossibly grisly scene before him.

  “That’s it, Mayor,” Ryan rasped. “It’s over.”

  Michaud smiled beneath his mustache.

  “Oh, Mr. Cawdor,” he said. “What an optimist you are. But I think not.”

  From the right side of the bed Ryan saw a sudden stir of purposeful motion. It wasn’t more than a few feet from him.

  A woman with long, dark hair, dressed as a nun, who apparently had been lying stunned along with her fellow bedmate/bodyguards, suddenly reared up. She hauled with her the limply unconscious body of Raven, the ferocious Angel woman, who still managed to keep her katana in her limp fist, as if it was naturally attached to her.

  And then Michaud had the woman’s body held in front of his as a shield on the bed and the abbreviated barrel of the dead nurse’s MAC-11 stuck up under the angle of her slackened jaw.

  “Throw your weps down, everybody,” he said in a voice of confident command. “Or I blow her empty head right off!”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Ryan looked Hizzoner dead in the eye, then he grinned and shrugged.

  “Go ahead,” he said. “She never liked me, anyway.”

  “Wait!” Leto said, climbing to his feet. He made an uncertain job of it, and Ricky had to go help steady him. His long face, always more compelling than handsome, was a hideous mask of blood. Some of it was likely his, Ryan judged.

  “Don’t chill her. I do care.”

  “Do you, boy?” Michaud said nastily. “You honestly don’t have any clue what you’re dealing with in this treacherous little bitch, do you?”

  He extended the machine pistol one-handed to aim at Leto.

  Raven’s eyes snapped open. She dug her left elbow sharply into the mayor’s short ribs, where his flab didn’t protect him so much. Then she yanked her head free of his momentarily slackened grasp.

  Grabbing the hilt of her long, curved sword with both hands, she rolled to her left and swung hard. Ryan heard an ax-striking-cordwood kind of sound.

  The mayor’s hand, still clutching his blaster, flew off his wrist and fell on the bed. Blood gushed from the stump to soak the face and strawberry-blond hair of one of his drugged playmates, just as she stirred and raised her head.

  “You know I don’t like it when you do that!” the nude woman cried. Then she curled into a fetal ball and lay whimpering.

  Hizzoner stared in flat incomprehension at his spurting wrist. Raven sprang to her feet. She cocked the katana back and drove it deep into his capacious belly.

  His eyes bulged huge. His mouth opened to spew saliva and gargling, choking sounds of inexpressible agony as she twisted the blade inside his guts.

  “Fuck you, Daddy!” she roared.

  She ripped the blade free and held it up over her head in a two-hand grip. Cast-off blood spattered across the elaborately worked gilt ceiling.

  “This is for what you did to Mommy and me!” she screamed, then split his face in two with a single brutal stroke.

  “This is all getting pretty complex,” Mildred said.

  * * *

  “WHAT IN THE NUKE,” Leto demanded, peering into the bright morning sun, “is going on out there?”

  Leto and Raven and Ryan and his companions stood in a little concrete-walled pump house—long since looted of its massive and massively valuable piping and pumps—that stood in a weed-choked field a hundred yards southeast of the DPD HQ wire. The ancient builders of the Temple had included a secret underground escape route. Ryan reckoned it was only natural that they should.

  Jak and Ricky had found it, too—or what they took for the entrance to one—during their nocturnal rambles. It had only been bad luck that when they escaped, they didn’t have ready access to it.

  Though the way it turned out, he thought, maybe it was the very best kind of luck.

  “Sounds like a pitched battle, Leto,” Raven said.

  Because it was. Blasterfire snapped from all around the Temple complex perimeter and crackled and popped in vicious reply from firing pits and windows within.

  The Commando was still smoldering, Ryan noticed.

  “It looks like half the gangs in the Rubble are attacking police headquarters,” Leto stated.

  “Reckon that’s because that’s just what’s happening,” J.B. said.

  Leto and Raven stared at him.

  “There’s something you’re not telling us.”

  J.B. looked puzzled. “Of course there is!”

  The familiar pull of the straps of his overladen backpack at Ryan’s shoulders reassured him. Before departing the none-too-friendly confines of the late Hizzoner’s fantasy castle, they’d located their missing gear and weapons. It was all in an impound room on the ground floor. Nobody had had a chance to pick through it yet, which seemed hardly surprising under the circumstances. Bone and his merry men and women had had plenty else to think about.

  And that was before half the gangs in the Detroit Rubble had attacked them.

  “Remember how,” he said to Leto, “after the spectacular failure of our final attempt to drum up some allies, your man Raúl reported we went out again on an errand of our own?”

  “You mean the one when you ran away in a hail of bullets,” Raven said.

  “That one, yeah.”

  Leto shook his head ruefully. His face was clean, other than a few stubborn traces of congealed blood in the crevices and crannies of his face. But his long, shaggy blond hair was still an ugly shade of pink, even after cleaning it. Somehow the City of Detroit managed to supply fresh running water to the lower two floors of their massive fortress. Mildred had nagged the whole group into sluicing off in a communal bath before going after their possessions, which Ryan for one was fine with. Blood felt bad when it dried on the skin. And the salt got itchy.

  It hadn’t been a security risk, at least. Everyone in the whole rad-blasted building was either pointing blasters at their enemies or hunkered down somewhere deep inside the Temple’s convoluted bowels, hoping they went away.

  “All right,” Leto said, “I remember Raúl telling me that. What has that got to do with—” he gestured out the door “—this?”

  “We went back and dropped the word on the street in a few key places,” Ryan said, “that the Angels were gonna hit Hizzoner all on their lonesome. This morning, in fact.”

  “You traitors!” Raven screamed. “Leto, I told you you couldn’t trust these bastards!”

  Leto looked at her.

  “Oh,” she said.

  Then she shook off her momentary chagrin to fix Ryan with an even angrier than usual stare.

  “Well, I still don’t have to like you!”

  “No,” Ryan said, “you don’t. You did fight like a devil alongside us, though. And that’s all we asked of you.”

  After a moment she said, “Yeah. You, too.” She still looked at him meanly, though.

  Leto was frowning, but obviously in confusion, not anger.

  “But I don’t get it,” he said. “Weren’t you risking all our asses if some snitch told Bone we were coming?”

  “I’m sure someone did,” Ryan said. “Likely multiple someones. Think it through. If they even took the warning seriously, they were expecting this—” he gestured at the battle outside “—not somebody attacking from within. Anyway, they were preoccupied with their big push against you that they planned to launch today.”

  “Why didn’t they at least put the whole nuking perimeter on high alert last night?” Raven asked.

  “What were the most two salient characteristics of your da—that is, the mayor and his chief of police?” Mildred asked.

  “Rape and murder?”

  “Well, apart from those.”

  “Arrogant stupidity,” Leto said promptly.

  “There you go.”

  “One wonders how such arrogantly stupid men could have amassed so much power,” Doc said mildly.

  “They inherited a lot of both,” Leto pointed out.

  “Amazing how far brute force and animal cunning can take you if you put your mind to it,” Ryan said.

  “As my father’s last few years proved,” Leto added.

  “Leto,” Raven said, “I don’t understand. They all turned us down cold. But here they are, doing just what they told us they wouldn’t do.”

  “Not so surprising,” Leto said. “As our friend Ryan said, think it through. If they joined us openly for an attack, and we lost...”

  “Right,” Ryan said. “We’re out of here.”

  “Back to the Joe?” Raven asked.

  “No. Now that the mayor and his troops are off our backs, it’s time we shook the dust of this ville off our boots. What about you?”

  Leto glanced at Raven. Then he grinned and gestured at the trap door that led down to the tunnel from the embattled HQ.

  “I’m going back.”

  “You’re what?” Krysty and Mildred said in unison.

  “It’s self-chilling and nothing else,” J.B. warned.

  “Naw,” Leto said. “I’ve got a plan.”

  He looked to Ryan. “You know the story of how Claudius got to be Roman Emperor after Caligula got chilled by his own Praetorian sec men?”

  “Yeah. I’ve got to admit, I’m surprised you do.”

  “Well, you know, my father wasn’t always like that. Always had more temper than was good for him, but he was a smart man.”

  “I know.”

  “He brought me up to be a full baron’s son. He always wanted the Nation to become a proper barony. So I got a broader education than you might’ve expected.”

  “And what about you?” Mildred asked. “Is that what you intend? To make sure the Desolation Angels have a ville of their own?”

  “I reckon I got a shot at it. So long as we don’t piss our strength away on fights we don’t need to be in. And if we’re someday gonna unite the Rubble, I reckon we got a much better chance of doing it by setting such a good example everybody wants to join up. Rather than trying to hammer and grind everybody into submission the way that fat freak Michaud and his predecessors did.”

  “So what about Claudius and Caligula, then?” Ryan asked.

  “I’m gonna go back and drag some likely bureaucrat out from behind an arras and proclaim him mayor,” Leto said. “Then he and I are gonna negotiate a peace treaty. A nice, lasting peace treaty.”

  “What about these boys and girls?” Mildred asked, gesturing at the attacking gangs.

  “Looks as if they have already commenced fighting with one another,” Doc observed.

  Leto tipped his head briefly sideways. “Best get back before they start to win, then. Raven, you can clear out if you want. Head back home and let the people know what we accomplished here.”

  “No way,” she said. She stepped up beside the Angel boss and slipped an arm through his. “You’re not getting rid of me that easily, lover.”

  “Well, I’ve gotta try to protect my dainty little flower of a future wife best I can, don’t I? You men know what it’s like.”

  “Yeah,” both J.B. and Ryan answered simultaneously, after only a moment’s hesitation.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Ryan ducked as a burst of full-auto fire thudded into the thick masonry wall. A few bullets cracked in through the window over his head.

  It was a long burst. When it stopped abruptly, he came up with his Steyr already pointed toward where he’d seen the woman with the M16, a block away.

  Through the scope he saw that she had her head down and was fumbling to swap the magazine she’d just exhausted for one that was loaded. He drew a bead and fired.

  Just as the trigger broke, he saw her look up, which meant that instead of hitting her on the crown of the head, the 7.62 mm bullet hit her smack in the middle of the forehead.

  She had already fallen to the cracked and weed-grown sidewalk when he brought the longblaster back online. He promptly crouched back into cover of the stub wall as more bullets came his way.

  They had been besieged since late the previous night. Fortunately, they’d found cover in the ruins of a sturdy two-story building standing by itself on a corner, with only rubble plots and patches of low weeds immediately surrounding it. The structure was small enough for the seven of them to keep an eye on the situation and lay down fire at need in all directions. Some of the second story was actually still standing, though the way the ceiling sagged in places didn’t make Ryan confident that it would stay that way for long.

  “Who’s out there right now?” Krysty asked. She was hiding behind a wall at ninety degrees to Ryan. She had a lever-action .44 carbine she’d kept from their haul from the late Hizzoner’s arsenal.

 

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