Mildred pitched in, helping him shift bodies to the improvised front-door barricade. Predark doctor though she was, when the shitstorm came down, she had become surprisingly ruthless. The Angels held their fire for the moment. Now they were concerned about hitting their own people, especially the wounded. Probably they were more than a little shocked by the outcome of the assault.

  Ryan had no doubt they were still out there in the weeds and rubble. Nor did he doubt they’d make another play for their prey once they got their nerve up again.

  The companions slumped where they were, regardless of the blood squishing under their cheeks. Ryan felt physical exhaustion trying to pull him down like a pack of Plains wolves. They’d been running and fighting with little respite since they’d popped into the basement of the hidden redoubt, now flooded with sewage. And it wasn’t as if they had been well rested before that....

  “Fabulous,” Mildred said, sitting down heavily beside the door. “Now the sewage we waded through isn’t the worst smell.”

  More than a dozen Angels remained in the erstwhile fast-food restaurant. Some of them were still breathing, though it was pretty clear most of them wouldn’t be for long.

  “What did we do to rile them up like this?” asked J.B., squatting next to Mildred like a tired dog. “I don’t recall pissing in their boss’s bathwater.”

  “This individual might be able to shed light on what motivates his comrades,” Doc announced. He was in the far front corner, back against the wall. Sitting beside him was a young, lean Angel with blond hair plastered to his head by blood and sweat. He was wheezing, visibly losing the fight to breathe against the blood slowly flooding his lungs from the sword thrust Doc had dealt.

  His blue eyes blazed with defiance, though.

  “You’re chills,” he gasped out. Now that he had his enemies’ attention, he was making the agonizing effort of forcing the words out of his gaping mouth. “We’ll never stop till we drag you down and put your heads on stakes outside the Joe.”

  Mildred knelt beside him. She didn’t touch him, just looked at him and shook her head.

  “But why?” Krysty asked, wiping her forehead with the back of a white hand. The effort just smeared the gore around.

  “Nuking...mercies,” he said. “Coming into the Cobo, looking to chill our leader, Red Wings. Think you’re the first to try to do DPD’s dirty work? You think Hizzoner...gives a fuck? Even if you did it, he’d...pay you with a knife...in the back—”

  He coughed violently, blood and foam flying from his mouth. Then his body convulsed. He settled back with his head slumped to his breastbone and his eyes rolled skyward.

  “Gone,” Mildred said, putting her hands on her thighs and standing.

  “Easy!” Ryan rapped out.

  Mildred ducked again. As she did, a bullet, coming in through the front window and passing out through the side, cracked through where her hunched-over shoulders had been an eyeblink before.

  “It sounds as if the blighters have rallied,” Doc said with his characteristic understatement. His blue eyes, which had been drooping seriously a moment before, snapped wide.

  A new wave of blasterfire erupted from outside. It came from two sides, the fields to the southeast and southwest.

  Earlier Ryan had reckoned, mostly on a fighter’s intuition, that at least a hundred Angels were out there. Now even after all their losses it sounded as if a hundred blasters were opening up at once.

  The storming party had been routed, but the yellow-haired Angel had obviously told the truth. The survivors weren’t giving up. They had just paused to get themselves ready to go again.

  J.B. risked a glance around the door frame. “Dark night!” he exclaimed.

  Startled by his friend’s unaccustomed vehemence, Ryan risked a quick look of his own from the other side.

  Instead of beans and corns and broccoli, the now-abused fields out there were sprouting Angels, dozens of them, firing blasters from the hip and yelling in fury.

  This was the all-out assault. This time they meant to chill the intruders no matter what it cost. And given the savage cost Ryan and his crew had already laid on them, he had no doubt they’d succeed this time.

  And from somewhere to the west, out of sight north of the gutted fast-food restaurant, a machine gun suddenly roared to life.

  Chapter Ten

  “And I thought it couldn’t get worse!” Ricky wailed.

  “It can always get worse,” Mildred muttered. “Haven’t you learned that yet, kid?”

  J.B. looked at the long, straight magazine in his hand. “Last one,” he said thoughtfully. He clicked it decisively home in the well in the Uzi’s pistol grip.

  Ryan frowned and cocked his head. The machine gun snarled again, ripping out a laddered burst—three shots, four, five, three—to reduce chance of a failure to feed and eke out a little more time before the barrel overheated and had to be swapped out or shut down, or it would burn out.

  The other blasterfire, from the charging mass of Angels, had seriously slacked off.

  Jak put his head up. The long, lank hair hanging down to the shoulders of his jacket was more pink than white.

  “Running,” he said.

  “By the three Kennedys!” Doc exclaimed. “The lad’s right! The blackguards are fleeing!”

  The machine gun was a serious boomer. Ryan recognized a 7.62 mm, shooting the same cartridges his Steyr did. It was nowhere near the blockbuster a Ma Deuce .50 caliber would be, but it offered serious firepower nonetheless. Enough to be decisive in a street fight like this one.

  When Ryan looked for himself, he saw that it had. He spotted nothing but elbows and asses and brown leather vests with those jaunty round badges on them.

  “The sapient Arabs have a proverb,” Doc said meditatively. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

  “Naw,” J.B. said, hauling back the bolt handle of his machine pistol to cock it. “Your enemy’s enemy is just that. Not another thing at all, necessarily.”

  Doc shrugged and sighed. “So I have often found.”

  He stood up and shot his cuffs. “Gentlemen and ladies, our new guests demand that we give them a proper reception. Shall we?”

  Mildred got slowly to her feet. “Yeah,” she said determinedly.

  “Hey,” Ricky said as he peered over the sill of the southwest window. “Horses.”

  “Horses?” Krysty echoed.

  Her green eyes caught Ryan’s lone one. They shared a shrug.

  Ryan glanced out the window toward the northeast side of the street, where not a scrap of threat had come from that tempting tall-building-cum-sniper’s-nest standing right across it. He wondered why.

  “Foot soldiers on this side,” he said. “Look like...predark riot cops.” His home in Front Royale, where he grew up as the privileged son of a baron, had a library of sorts, and he’d spent hours looking at predark picture books.

  They were, too—men wearing black uniforms bulked out by body armor and black helmets with clear polycarbonate visors. They carried curved shields made of the same stuff but presumably thicker gauge. Instead of batons, though, they carried shotguns and handblasters. Ryan wondered where they’d gotten items in such good condition.

  He looked out the far window. Other cops in short-sleeved uniforms and helmets without visors or patrol caps were riding into view on horses. They advanced at a walk. One raised an M4 carbine one-handed and loosed a single blast after the fleeing Angels.

  Ryan winced. The big handsome bay barely twitched its ears, despite the shattering muzzle blast of high-powered rounds fired out of a short barrel.

  “Now, that’s something you don’t see every day,” Mildred said. “They look like...mounted cops?”

  “Hear engine,” Jak said.

  Now that the albino mentioned it, Ryan wondered how he hadn’t before. He realized he’d been hearing it since sometime after the last furious Angels barrage began, preparatory to their abortive all-out assault. Or felt it, anyway, rumbling up through the floor through the soles of his boots. They could’ve been firing up a dozen sirens just out of sight and he would have had a double-hard time actually hearing it over all that blasterfire. And apparently his subconscious had adjusted to the rumble, and once the furious fusillade died down, he had better things to do than try to distract his conscious mind from more pressing issues. Such as imminent death from an unexpected direction.

  But there was no mistaking the sound now—the deep growl of a diesel engine idling.

  “This is the Detroit Police Department,” a voice barked authoritatively. “We have you surrounded. Put down your weapons and come out with your hands up. You will not be harmed.”

  “Detroit Police Department,” Mildred repeated, shaking her head. “Really? Really?”

  “Can we trust them?” Ricky asked, wide-eyed.

  “Of course not,” Krysty replied. “The question is, do we have a choice?”

  “Let’s see,” J.B. said, pretending to count on his fingers. “We had a hundred Angels preparing to chill us at any cost. These new boys show up, and they run like bunnies.”

  He looked up and grinned. “I think they win.”

  Ryan nodded. “Yeah.”

  Reluctantly, Ryan scuffed a stretch of the floor with a boot sole. Then he laid down his weapons reverently.

  “I hate this,” J.B. muttered as he did the exact same thing. “Blood messes with the bluing something fierce.”

  Krysty and Mildred had already disarmed themselves. Now they dragged the bodies away from the hastily improvised human barricade. None of them was still breathing that Ryan could tell. Not that he cared.

  “Weps’ll clean,” Ryan said, rising. It took far more effort than he expected to get to his feet.

  “Don’t shoot,” he called out. “We’re coming out.” Lacing his fingers behind his head, he walked out into the cloud-filtered early-afternoon light.

  “On the ground!” another voice, this one more belligerent than authoritative, barked out. “Do it now or we’ll chill you!”

  “Easy,” the first voice called. It was a younger man’s voice, this time calming rather than cracking. But it was still firm. “No need for that, Sergeant Kurtiz. I don’t think we have much to fear.”

  Ryan agreed with him. The riot cops had appeared in the street to his left. They promptly dropped to one knee and pointed their blasters around their shields at him. More foot soldiers—or cops—appeared around the other side of the roofless building, dressed the way the horsemen were. They pointed longblasters at Ryan.

  The two groups were angled so that they could burn Ryan down where he stood without cross firing each other.

  “If you say so, Lieutenant,” the second voice said resentfully.

  Ryan glanced toward its owner. It was one of the foot cops to the west, a bulldog of a man with a black bulldog face and hatless to show off severely cropped black hair. He was reluctantly lowering an MP5-K he’d been pointing at Ryan with his left hand gripping the foregrip beneath the abbreviated barrel. The shorty machine pistol, a compact version of the old standby Heckler & Koch MP5, was the same piece Patch the scavvy woman had sported back in the building Nikk claimed as his own. Ryan wondered if that was a coincidence, or if they were just popular here.

  “I don’t trust these coldheart bastards as far as I can throw them,” he rumbled from deep in his chest.

  “We don’t need to trust them,” the lieutenant said. “We have enough blasters pointed at them to vaporize them.”

  That man was mounted. He was tall, with a surprisingly young face under buzz-cut blond hair. He rode as if he knew how and carried, of all things, a broom-handle Mauser in his right hand.

  “It’s all right,” Ryan called to his companions, who had prudently remained inside when the sergeant started yelling threats. “You can come out.”

  The others filed out to stand flanking him.

  “That’s all?” the lieutenant asked in surprise.

  “Bullshit!” Sergeant Kurtiz yelled, warming to his theme again. Ryan was getting the impression he usually didn’t talk so much as yell. “No way a measly group of seven ragged-assed Deathlands derelicts could stand off that many Angels.”

  “He’s got us pegged right, anyway,” Mildred said.

  “No talking, you—”

  “Sergeant, stand down.” This time the fresh-faced officer put a little crack back in his voice. The sergeant stiffened.

  “What were the Angels doing this far north, anyway, Loot?” asked one of the nonriot foot troopers. A pair of others went cautiously into the building, blasters ready.

  “Chasing us,” Ryan said.

  He didn’t see any profit in lying. Not about that, anyway. Although he knew better than to trust a sec man, at least the lieutenant was acting friendly. Ryan wanted to do what was reasonable to keep him that way on the off chance it wasn’t an act.

  The officer squinted at him. “What in the name of blessed Stephen did you do to make them so mad at you?”

  “No idea,” J.B. said.

  “We just walked into that really huge building not far from the river,” Ryan said. “The one with half the roof knocked off. They saw us, started yelling something about ‘DPD mercies’ and opened fire. Been chasing us like a pack of hounds ever since.”

  “Glowing night shit!” a voice called from inside the fast-food restaurant. “It looks like a nuking slaughterhouse in here! Blood’s ankle deep, and there must be twenty Angels. All chills.”

  Ryan heard a loud moan from behind him. A moment later a gunshot echoed out of the roofless brick box.

  “All right,” the cop yelled. “All chills now.”

  He’d exaggerated the body count, at least by Ryan’s admittedly unscientific reckoning. He felt inclined to cut the sec man some slack. What he’d found inside was enough to take anybody aback if they’d walked in on it unsuspecting.

  “Blasters lying all over the place like somebody knocked over an armory,” the other cop yelled. “And a bunch of backpacks stashed in the back.”

  “Those’d be ours,” Ryan said. “Also the weps.” He grinned. “Some of them, anyway.”

  The lieutenant stuck his Mauser C96 in a cross-draw holster in front of the clasp of his web gear. Ryan wondered if those were fashionable in the Detroit rubble, too, or it was just another coincidence.

  The mounted officer pointed to several of the infantrymen in turn. “Go secure the weapons and gear,” he said. “Load them in the Commando.”

  That had to be where the Diesel growl came from and no doubt the heavy MG fire, too. The V-100 Commando was a burly four-wheeled armored car made by Cadillac Gage, which if Ryan could trust his ancient history, had once been a proud Detroit company.

  “I’m Lieutenant Mahome,” the officer said, turning back to the captives.

  “I’m Ryan Cawdor.” Ryan named the others off in turn.

  “What are you doing here?” Mahome asked. “Apart from walking into the Cobo Center and kicking the whole Angels hornet nest right the nuke over?”

  “Was that their headquarters?” Ryan asked. “Cobo Center?”

  “Not exactly. It’s their stronghold, where a lot of their fighters and workers bunk. They actually farm the old show floor with the roof gone and all. Protects the crops from the wind.”

  “We saw,” Ryan said.

  “But their real fortress is the Joe. Old hockey stadium right near it. That’s where their boss, Red Wings, hangs his hat. Vicious, crazy old bastard that he is.”

  “That used to be the name of the hockey team in Detroit,” Mildred said.

  “Is that so? Anyway, Mr. Cawdor, you were about to explain how you happened to stroll in there.”

  “We just arrived in the ville,” Ryan said. “We’re looking for work. Don’t know the place, so we just started walking.”

  “Come across from the Windsor rubble, did you? Don’t blame you for clearing out of there. Stuff happens down there that’d gag a stickie.”

  “Funny you should mention that, Lieutenant—”

  “Oh, you ran into them, too? They got into that old parking structure right across from the Center ten years or so back. Angels get their asses handed to them whenever they try to clear them out. Makes them hotter than nuke red.”

  “Easy with those weps, son,” J.B. called to a cop emerging from the building carrying his M4000 in one hand and Ryan’s Scout longblaster in the other. “We’ll be wanting those back.”

  “No fucking way, coldheart,” Kurtiz barked. “We’re confiscating them.”

  “Not necessarily,” Mahome said.

  The sergeant snapped his head around. Ryan was surprised he even could, given how little he showed by way of a neck.

  “What do you mean, Lieutenant? We can’t let a bunch of random assholes out of the Deathlands wander around our city! What happened to restoring law and order?”

  “That remains to be seen,” Mahome said evenly, “until we get them back to headquarters. Where their fates will be decided by people above your pay grade or mine.”

  He looked back to the prisoners. “You can put your arms down.”

  “Yeah!” Kurtiz shouted. For once he sounded approving, though still shouting every syllable. “That way we can secure their wrists!”

  “No,” Mahome said. “I don’t think there’s a need for that. They’re disarmed and we outnumber them. And I don’t think they pose much flight risk, now that we have all their stuff. Do you, Mr. Cawdor?”

  “Depends,” Ryan answered. “If you’re just taking us back so your bosses can chill us, I’d rather we take our chances here and now.”

  “We don’t play that way,” Mahome said. Ignoring that Kurtiz muttered “I would” under his breath, the lieutenant went on loudly, “As the sergeant rightly reminded us, we’re the forces of law and order. We’re the good guys. Anyway—” he grinned “—anybody who can make the Angels that mad, and kick their teeth in that hard, could be a useful asset. I’m not making any promises here. Because, don’t get me wrong, I can’t. But if you’re looking for work, it just may be that the Angels’ paranoid notion of you being mercies working for us might turn out to be prophetic after all.”

 

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