LITMIR.BIZ

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breath, snicked off the big Colt’s safety and slammed open the hatch.

      Sunlight fell against his face like scalding water. He thrust the .45 up into it and swarmed after.

      To find himself staring along the rounded black top of the weapon into a pair of huge black eyes, shot through with veins and flecks of gold.

      The face surrounding those eyes wasn’t norm, being drawn out into a dark snout with nostrils as convoluted as a bat’s. But the surprised expression was unmistakable all the same.

      For as long as it took Ryan’s forefinger to exert about three pounds of pressure on the trigger.

      The eyes and the top part of the head that held them vanished into a dark haze. The mutie’s body rolled over flopping, black blood spurting from the lower jaw and stub of neck that remained. Ryan sprang upright on the roof. A norm-looking ambusher was frozen, having just crawled over the tall roof parapet behind the mutie whose head Ryan had just blown apart. He clutched a spear tipped with black volcanic glass. Ryan shot him twice. He went backward over the parapet with arms flailing.

      Something struck Ryan in the back beneath his left shoulder blade. He whirled into a crouch, brought the heavy handblaster around in a two-fisted combat grip. A bandy-legged norm stood on the roof of the next house, desperately trying to notch a second dart to the end of his throwing stick. Ryan centered his sights on the white stripe conveniently painted down the front of the norm’s ribby chest, pulled the trigger. The 1911 bucked and roared. The man sat, dropping dart and launcher. He felt his chest, looked up reproachfully from the blood on his fingers to Ryan, and fell backward out of sight.

      The one-eyed man went flat on his belly. He thumbed on the safety, stuck the .45 inside the waist of his fatigue pants behind his right hip—not an ideal means of carry, but Ryan was seasoned enough to know always to keep his finger out of the trigger guard until the weapon was drawn and pointing downrange, which much diminished his chances of becoming abruptly half-assed.

      He reached around to probe at his back. He felt nothing from where he’d been struck, not necessarily a good sign in itself. The impact site was impossible to reach and see, but he didn’t feel any trace of blood. A quick check of the flat roof, covered with a thick and well-packed layer of the same hard earth that made up the street below and here and there sprouting a clump of weeds, showed no sign of leakage. He caught sight of the dart: a simple shaft of some kind of wood, whittled to a point and probably hardened in a fire. It hadn’t been hard thrown enough to penetrate his leather coat, which was one reason he still wore it despite the heat.

      He unslung the Steyr, cracked the bolt, turned it and pulled it back enough to glimpse a confirmatory gleam of brass, yellow in the merciless sun. He closed and locked the bolt again. Then he got a knee up to his chest and a boot under him and raised himself cautiously for a look around.

      Three houses up the block a couple of manlike figures pointed at the apparition of his head. One of them threw a longblaster to its shoulder. He ducked. The weapon boomed, its report echoing off the flat fronts of houses. Where the shot went, he had no idea; he heard no noise of its passage.

      Through the roof Ryan felt a vibration. From down in the street in front of the garage came a dull heavy thump, followed by cheers and shouts in a language he couldn’t make out. He guessed it was Spanish. The muties seemed to have contrived a battering ram and were having a go at the doors. They seemed pretty sturdy, and anyway Ryan was going to have to let his friends below deal with the problem, at least until he got the nearby rooftops clean.

      He reared, rolled back into a sitting position, knees up. He brought the Steyr to his shoulder, bracing his elbows against the insides of his knees, snugged the buttplate tight to his shoulder’s hollow, welded his right cheek to the stock and peered through the scope with his single eye.

      The blaster man who had shot at him was fumblingly spilling powder from a horn—an actual cowhorn, by the look of it—down the barrel of his musket. He was shaking so much he was pouring most of the black grains on his hand, which was twined about with strange yellow growths or veins. Ryan lined the crosshairs up on the center of his chest and squeezed.

      The Steyr kicked back against his shoulder. He worked the bolt with quick, calm efficiency as the barrel rose. Another round, head-stamped 7.62 mm NATO, was chambered and ready to go when the long slim barrel came back down on line.

      The musketeer was nowhere in sight. His companion, whose skin hung loose on his small skinny frame in flaps, was staring down with puzzled bloodhound eyes at what was probably him. Belatedly he caught hold of the notion he might be in some danger here. Instead of simply dropping flat, he started to turn to bolt. Ryan shot him through and through, right side to left, and dropped him like a deer.

      Ryan felt another shiver of vibration through his tailbone, heard a scrape from right behind. As he spun, a terrific shuddering, crashing sound assailed his ears. He knew full-auto blasterfire when he heard it. He threw himself sideways, clumsily bringing the long rifle around and up, to aim more or less at the Armorer, who stood grinning down at him through his wire-rimmed specs from the shade of his hat brim.

      “Scraped off a couple muties coming up the wall,” J.B. said.

      “What are you doing up here? You’re supposed to be—”

      “You’re welcome for saving your lean ass. Figured you’d need some backup.”

      He walked to the front of the garage, leaned out over the parapet and whistled. “Hey, boys,” he called, “up here.”

      He fired the Uzi down into the street, three, four, five quick bursts. Ryan heard shouts, screams. J.B. ducked back down as return shots cracked from the street, then rocked back over the parapet and let the rest of his magazine go in a long spray.

      He sat, out of sight, to wait out the return fire from the street, waving his stubby machine pistol in the air with its heavy bolt locked back to cool it.

      “Down to three mags,” he said. “Way too few to be hosing them blind through the door.”

      Ryan nodded. The flash of annoyance he’d felt at his old friend was already forgotten. The companions followed Ryan’s lead. Not his commands. J.B. had spotted a weakness in their deployment and acted promptly on his own initiative to correct it.

      It had been a good call. That meant they all got to live a little longer. They were a team, which had always been their mainstay.

      For what it was worth now.

      Ryan eased his head back above the parapet, looked through 180 degrees, ducked back, duck-walked a few steps left, raised up, checked the other half circle. The rooftops were clear of marauders, or at least any who happened to be on roofs were keeping out of sight.

      “This is mebbe not so good, Ryan,” J.B. said quietly. “Street right out in front is clean, but you can bet your last meal the houses around us are swarming with the bastards. And I can see them all over the streets surrounding. There must be a couple hundred of them out there.”

      Ryan lay on his back, gazed up toward the sun, knowing enough not to look directly at it. It still rode high in the sky. There was plenty of daylight left.

      “Think we’ll make it until sundown?”

      J.B. laughed, took a swig from a canteen, recapped it and tossed it toward Ryan, who caught it.

      “Nah. Not that it’d make a spit of difference. These bastards are taking it personal. If they didn’t have their black little hearts bent on seeing the color of our insides, they’d have cut stick and pulled out long since from the hurt we’ve laid on them.”

      “How about making a run for it?”

      The Armorer shrugged. “They blocked us once. They might do it again. Still, it’s probably our one and only shot. Even if it likely doesn’t mean anything but the difference between getting chilled moving and getting chilled standing still.”

      He looked at Ryan. “Doc says the muties keep hollering something about a ‘holy child.’ It’s like their war cry. Don’t know what

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