Desolation Angels

Once again they paused to return fire. Bullets cracked through the air around Ryan. One bounced off the pavement right ahead of him and howled away in ricochet.

J.B. paused by the corner of the tilted brown-and-black skyscraper to fire a burst at the Angels under the slanted structure. Ryan saw one go down, yelling and kicking. The others dropped to take cover among the rubble.

That turned out not to be a good idea. Apparently the fallen skyscraper wasn’t altogether stable. Or perhaps the earth had just shifted in a tremor Ryan was too preoccupied to feel. A block of masonry the size of one of the Motor City’s most famous products—a big old gas-guzzler sedan—dropped straight down and crushed a kneeling Angel. The others cut off their assault and scuttled away like frightened quail.

“That was more luck than we deserve,” J.B. commented. He fired another burst but didn’t seem to hit any of their pursuers.

Ryan raced past him. J.B. grinned as he flashed by and moved to follow.

Jak had burst in among the colorful shacks. To his surprise Ryan realized it was an active marketplace of sorts. The colors came from old scavenged signs, cracked panels of plastic and that old standby for Deathlands building and decoration both, hammered-out soda cans. The shacks themselves seemed to consist largely of nonmetallic car body panels.

The people swapping goods and gossip broke apart like a flock of pecking birds that had had an alley cat dropped in their midst. Some of them, mostly keepers of the kiosks of fresh fruits and ancient predark goods, stood their ground, shaking fists and shouting in outraged anger at the intrusion.

“We’re sorry!” Krysty and Mildred shouted as they ducked between the stands. Mildred knocked over an angled rack of brightly colored garments and sent them fluttering to the ground, which was bare earth hard packed by decades of feet.

Ryan glanced back as he and J.B. came among the stands. The group of Angels that had chased them out of Nikk’s domain had appeared behind them. As he watched, so did the ones the block’s fall had flushed.

Shouts and shots started to fly from the two groups of Angels. Fortunately, with all the kiosks and the bodies of fleeing customers, Ryan and his friends had plenty of concealment.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t much cover available. The rapidly dwindling number of incidental bodies would stop bullets much more reliably than the fiberglass panels.

“What you wanna go and bring the Angels here for?” a sturdy-looking woman in an apron and a red bandanna shouted at Ryan as he darted around her table full of what looked to him to be fried rats on sticks.

“Didn’t have much choice in the matter, lady!” he yelled back.

At that moment a wrinkly stepped from between two booths up ahead, raised a giant black single-action blaster in two palsied hands and shot Doc in the head from twenty feet away.

Chapter Eight (#ulink_d7886c9b-366e-5e1c-bb0a-06efbc7c1fc9)

“Fireblast!” Mildred heard Ryan yell.

From his tone of voice she knew something bad had happened. She turned, feeling sick fear in her gut. That last shot had sounded shatteringly loud, meaning it had been fired from nearby.

Mildred stopped, turned and saw Doc reeling, a hand clapped to the side of his head. Blood flooded between his fingers and down the back of his hands, ran down his cheeks and dripped onto the lapels of his long coat. And off to her right stood an old guy, wearing nothing but a grimy loincloth stained with she didn’t even want to imagine what. He held a big battered Ruger Blackhawk in both his pale, liver-spotted hands, and he was trying to crank the single-action hammer back with his thumbs.

Mildred’s reaction was automatic. Inevitable. She’d taken a half step to turn her right side toward him. She raised her right arm, stiffened. Her ZKR 551 target revolver was held at the end of it. By reflex she thumbed the hammer back as she brought it up.

The blocky sights aligned on the old man’s stringy-haired head, as if the upper half of it were sitting on top of the front post. At that instant she pressed the trigger.

She saw blood spray pink out the side of the elder’s head. His skinny legs and grubby fish-white body folded beneath him. She had chilled him and never given it a thought.

He was just trying to defend his place in the world, she thought, then reality set in. Tough titty. Her survival, and the survival of her companions, was paramount. She had done what needed to be done.

Now, blaster still in hand, she was moving swiftly toward Doc. He was still on his feet, but barely.

“No!” Mildred heard Ricky scream from behind her.

“Come on,” Krysty said firmly.

From the youth’s protests Mildred guessed the redhead had grabbed his arm and was physically dragging him onward among the now almost-deserted booths and stands.

Mildred was by Doc’s side. He tried to wave her off with his nonbloody hand.

“Go ahead, dear lady. I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine.”

As if to prove the truth of her words, he reeled and toppled into her arms. Fortunately, she was professional enough a shooter to have her finger outside the trigger guard when she didn’t intend to fire the weapon. His weight was considerable, more than was expected by the look of him. But it wasn’t deadweight. He was still conscious. Just woozy.

“Jak!” she heard Ryan shout as she staggered back a step. For all his protestations, he hadn’t been too proud to drape his free arm around her neck for support. “Find us cover right now!”

He and J.B. appeared, flanking Doc simultaneously. The Armorer grabbed his left elbow while Ryan grabbed the right. They hauled him out of Mildred’s arms and kept running.

They scarcely even slowed.

Shouts erupted from behind them. The pack was closing in. The Angels were already among the southern booths, though fortuitously none of them had line of sight on their prey. Yet.

Without looking Ryan stretched his right arm back and cranked off two shots from his SIG. A stout black lady in a red turban scurrying for cover threw up her hands with a wail of despair and fell to the ground.

Mildred steeled her heart and turned to run after the three men. Ryan didn’t like to chill without need any more than she did. But if random third parties got in the way of shots he fired in defense of himself and his friends—even just popped off to try to spook some caution into whatever happened to be chasing them—he wouldn’t lose a second’s sleep over it.

She doubted he’d even remember it five minutes from now.

But she would. And she’d likely lose the sleep for him.

* * *

“WHY ISN’T DOC DEAD?” Ricky asked.

Krysty looked over the bottom of the large, empty front window, her snub-nosed .38 clutched in both hands. A large man, bent over with his big gut hanging out the front of his open vest, approached through the waist-high weeds and brush of the overgrown parking lot. She quickly lined up the sights and fired.

To her surprise the man dropped straight down out of sight, as if she’d actually hit him from fifty feet away. That was far from a given with her handblaster.

The overgrowth lit up and began to shake from multiple muzzle blasts as the Angels lying among them returned enthusiastic fire.

They ran into a former fast-food restaurant—the nearest available cover on the northwest side of a five-way intersection just north of the market. Its roof had been blown off so that its walls stood open to the sky. For what it was worth, it offered a decent field of fire in three directions. The way they had come was mostly clear for about twenty feet before the weeds kicked in. To the southwest a hundred feet of rubble-choked former parking lot—a lot of twisted ankles just waiting to happen—separated them from a stand of chest-high wheat and barley. On the northeast side, a wide, fairly intact street lay between them and a three-story red-brick building.

Ryan lifted his head cautiously above that wall and peered across the street.

“I’m not seeing any activity over there,” he reported. “Yet. If they put snipers on the roof, we’re going to have a long afternoon.” He jerked his chin at the structure, whose rooftop gave a commanding view of the far third of the former dining area where they had gone to ground.

“Doc got shot in the head,” Ricky said. He ignored the storm of bullets cracking over his head and flying over the counter into what had been the kitchen area of a derelict KFC. “Why isn’t he dead?”

“It wasn’t a fatal shot,” Mildred replied. Doc sat with his back to a side wall near the dark-haired youth while Mildred crouched next to him. She had the lid of one eye skinned wide-open with her thumb. “He isn’t going to die. Of this, anyway. But he is concussed.”

“So how is he not dead?”

“A person’s skull is pretty good armor, Ricky,” she said. “It’s possible that a handgun bullet could bounce off, even fired from point-blank range. This was just a graze. Lots of blood, but a small wound.”