LITMIR.BIZ

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saw dirty yellow-white smoke billowing up from the middle of the wide floor. Already it rose high enough to obscure the second-story gallery from view, which meant it also obscured them from their enemies’ view, making aimed fire impossible.

      Ryan grinned as his friends came flying out of the giant half-gutted building, racing past him. He heard a rip of full-auto fire and recognized J.B.’s Uzi. The Armorer was clearly giving their attackers some additional reason not to be fast about rushing to pursue.

      Of course, they would pursue. That was a given. Especially once they figured out that what J.B. had unleashed on them wasn’t poison gas at all, but just one of the black-powder smoke bombs the Armorer and his apprentice, Ricky Morales, had started making in their spare time weeks ago.

      Ryan was impressed by just how much smoke a bomb the size of a predark beer can produced—and how quickly.

      “Best power right on,” J.B. called as he trotted down the steps, holding his Uzi in his right hand and his fedora pressed to his head with his left. “They’re starting to get organized, and it sounds like we got them hot well past nuke red.”

      Jak raced past and took off to Ryan’s right to put himself in front of his companions. Everybody else was clear. Ryan had checked them off mentally as they passed him.

      They headed southwest again, away from downtown—where they knew there were hostile blasters who more than likely were still keeping eyes skinned for them, even though they hadn’t pursued. They wouldn’t be any better disposed toward the companions after they had treated them to a faceful of mutie talons and all the accumulated sewage of some unspecified but no doubt vast swath of the great half-overgrown urban ruin-scape.

      It was as good a direction as any. Ryan stood and followed.

      * * *

      WHEN HIS BUDDY Jak sprinted past him to take the lead in the hasty retreat, Ricky found himself half-disappointed and half-relieved. It wasn’t that he was afraid to put his life on the line for his friends—he did that all the time. It was that he was a bit on the near-sighted side and hated leaving his friends’ survival dependent on senses that were far less keen than the albino’s.

      He carried his DeLisle carbine in preference to his Webley handblaster. The big top-break, double-action revolver, converted by his uncle Benito to fire the same .45 ACP cartridges the longblaster did, was handier to use in a close-in fight, and faster, too. But he already knew the Detroit ruins hosted muties with bad attitudes toward norms. And the green growth that exploded through the broken pavement here and there, or sprouted in more or less orderly rows in the cultivated plots they sometimes passed, provided enemies with excellent cover. The sturdy, stocky DeLisle made a far better melee weapon than a handgun did.

      They were running down the northwestern edge of the great half-ruined building. Even as he looked around for potential enemies, Ricky took in more of the extent of its ruination. He realized quickly why the big space they had glimpsed through the side door was full of crops and the daylight that gave them life. Something had taken off or collapsed the roof of the blocky center from twenty or thirty yards down from the entrance, all the way back to where an elevated track or walkway to a circular parking structure had been taken down by the same catastrophe. Or a similar one. The parking structure itself, mostly open, had survived intact, at least as far as Ricky could see. Open structures always seemed to have survived nuke blasts better than closed ones.

      Another cultivated plot grew at the building’s far end, where the elevated track had gone down. From there, several figures in dark vests jogged into the street in front of Jak and Ricky. One of them, with brown hair hanging to his shoulders, knelt and aimed a longblaster at Ricky.

      A sharp crack punched at his left ear. He yelped and swerved.

      The man with the longblaster dropped the weapon and folded over backward. What Ricky had heard, as his rational mind belatedly informed him, was the miniature sonic boom of a longblaster bullet going by him faster than the speed of sound. But it was fired from behind him. Ricky recognized the boom that reached him as the enemy gunman fell as the sound of Ryan’s 7.62 mm Steyr Scout.

      Not that Ricky was accustomed to hearing it from way out in front of its business end.

      Jak swerved right into an intersection. Ricky followed, even as he heard Ryan yell, “Covering fire!”

      Jak reached a concrete building corner. He hunkered down, leaned around and fired an ear-shattering blast from his Python.

      Ricky joined him a few heartbeats later. He pressed his shoulder against the wall. Wishing he were a lefty so he could shoot without exposing almost his entire body, the youth stepped out enough to get a look at the new pack of pursuers. They seemed to be coming out of a gap in the wall of the big building. Long slabs of the fallen track lay behind them, tilted at random angles amid thick, low vegetation.

      He laid his iron sights on the bare chest of the man running in the lead and pressed the trigger. His hefty longblaster fired a pistol cartridge, so it didn’t have much of a kick, and the suppressed weapon barely made a sound.

      The shot took the man at the upper-right top of his rib cage arch. Ricky could tell because he saw the blood splash red from beneath his target’s right nipple. The man took a header, dropping his long-barreled single-action revolver and rolling over and over on the cracked blacktop.

      Jak’s big .357 Magnum Colt Python made more than enough noise for both weapons. When he cranked off another shot, three of the vest wearers hit the pavement. Ricky had no idea if his friend had even hit one of them. There was no way he could’ve nailed all three, even with the Python’s tendency to overpenetrate. At least two people fired back, and Ricky and Jak had to duck hastily as chips of concrete flew from the corner.

      Shots were fired from up the street, too close to be the original pursuers—they had to come from Ryan and company. Ricky bent to avoid making his head a ripe target by poking it out where it had been before and risked a quick look at the enemy.

      Their pursuers were picking themselves up off the street and racing back for the far side. They left only two of their comrades lying there: the rifleman Ryan had shot and the runner Ricky got.

      Their five friends pelted by, turning up the same street they had.

      “Better move along,” J.B. called in passing. “The first bunch got themselves sorted out, and they’re not happy!”

      Ricky and Jak looked at each other and grinned. Then they headed out after the others as J.B. fired a quick burst back the way he’d come, then pivoted to loose another across the street.

      * * *

      AS RICKY AND Jak moved on, J.B. took station against the textured gray wall a few steps down the street. He held his Uzi ready. No new targets presented themselves immediately, from either the original pursuers storming out the front entrance after them or the new set from the giant building’s far end. He knew they wouldn’t stay out of play for long.

      Ryan ran past him, turned and knelt, bringing up his Steyr.

      “Into the garage!” he shouted.

      J.B. promptly wheeled right and trotted toward the entrance. It was wide, meant to allow two-lane access for cars going in and out of the parking structure. He slung his Uzi and took up his shotgun.

      Jak slipped in first. He still had his Python in one white fist, which looked like a child’s compared to the big blaster. Concern was written all over his pinched features.

      Ricky waited beside the open bay, clutching his DeLisle and peering uneasily inside. Krysty, Mildred and Doc stood in the street, out of direct line of the wide door, covering the street and the bluish building across it. They kept their handblasters ready.

      Unspoken but obvious—even to J.B., who didn’t take hints—was that they weren’t any more anxious to plunge into the depths of the garage than Ricky was.

      “Back me up,” J.B. told his apprentice as he went by. He entered the building without waiting to see if Ricky followed. He would.

      The

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