Desolation Angels. James Axler

meant nothing to Ryan. If a person pointed a weapon at him or his friends, the person would die.

      No exceptions. He pulled the trigger.

      The Steyr kicked his shoulder with the buttplate. He held on to the stock, rode the recoil and brought the blaster back online with practiced ease.

      A pink spray blossomed behind the shooter’s head when it reappeared in his telescopic sight. It plopped forward, revealing the ragged red mess where the back of the skull had been knocked out by the bullet’s passage.

      He heard a rippling roar of blasterfire from behind him to the right.

      “Haul ass, Ryan!” J.B. shouted. “We’re clear.”

      He sprang up and ran for safety through a barrage that crackled around him like bacon frying on a grill.

      Ricky knelt among weeds at the corner of a building, laying down covering fire with his suppressed longblaster. J.B. kept stepping out to fire a quick, short burst then nip back into cover.

      “Here come more of them,” Ricky said as Ryan raced past him.

      “Looks like the first bunch that set out after us decided not to mess with the stickies,” J.B. commented, putting his back against the wall out of the line of enemy fire. “Seems like shooting some of them just made them madder.”

      “Happens sometimes,” Ryan called.

      “What do I do?” Ricky yelled.

      “Try to keep up!”

      * * *

      HER BREATH WHISTLING in her ears, Mildred slogged heavily through a muddy field of leafy green vegetables. The farmers who’d been tending it went flying in all directions at the approach of a heavily armed crew of strangers, flip-flops flopping and flat-cone straw hats falling back behind their heads to hang by chin straps.

      The fact that a much bigger, just as heavily armed and amazingly pissed-off bunch of people in leather vests was running fifty yards behind the intruders probably didn’t reassure them.

      Mildred felt bad as her boots squashed tender plants into the carefully tended soil. She knew these people worked hard at their plots because their survival was at stake.

      But so was hers. So on she ran, heedless.

      Though it couldn’t have been more than a handful of blocks, the whole flight had become a nightmare steeplechase in her mind: a blurred montage of cracked streets, shattered buildings, burned-out husks, riotous undergrowth and orderly plots like the one they were so industriously, if incidentally, violating.

      The pursuers fired off an occasional shot. Like all the others—so far—it didn’t hit any of them. The bad guys were shooting on the run. Whoever it was chasing them so doggedly had discovered a few turns back that if they actually stopped to aim, they got left behind.

      As they approached a half-collapsed building, Jak suddenly appeared out of a staring, blank doorway. He gestured to his friends frantically.

      The place looked trashed. Once several stories tall, the building appeared to have mostly fallen in on and around itself, judging from the fragmentary sheets of red stone sticking out of the piled rubble. But the lower floor looked intact. The place still looked anything but promising, much less remotely safe.

      Ryan headed for the door without hesitation.

      The others followed. Ryan Cawdor wasn’t always right, but his decisions had kept them alive so far, through some of the worst situations imaginable.

      At the door he turned, shouldered his Scout longblaster and fired back at their pursuers. Mildred didn’t bother glancing around. It only made her more likely to stumble or maybe twist an ankle, which would be fatal.

      Anyway, there was no need. The men—and occasional woman—in vests chasing after them had had been taught caution by Ryan’s and Ricky’s marksmanship. They knew to duck when one or the other opened fire on them. They didn’t care to come too close yet, but they showed no signs of giving up.

      Ryan, Krysty and Doc entered the ruin. Jak was already inside, leading the way. Mildred followed.

      As she stepped inside she heard J.B. murmur something behind her. She glanced back to see Ricky nodding and grinning.

      “Best keep moving,” J.B. said to Mildred.

      The interior of the fallen-in building alternated shadow and shafts of sunlight from holes in the overhead. It stank worse of death than the stickies’ parking structure had.

      As she followed immediately behind Krysty, Mildred quickly found out why. The path Jak led them on wound down hallways and through broken walls. A bloated torso lay against a wall inside a room next to one they passed through. Mildred couldn’t tell what sex it had been. A head with long, dark hair was turned away from them.

      She reckoned that was fortunate. Along with being mottled red and yellow and green from rot, the chill had neither arms nor legs. The wounds visible through big tears in the gray-on-gray plaid flannel shirt gave Mildred the impression it had been partially eaten.

      By something big.

      To her physician’s eye those marks had been inflicted postmortem. She didn’t find that terribly reassuring.

      To her relief she was quickly outside in the sun again. Almost immediately her relief vanished. Her group had come out on the south side of the building—meaning they were now headed back toward their pursuers.

      Then she realized they were east of the street she’d last seen their enemies on. And the sight lines between were blocked by fields of high weeds. In the middle of it stood the remains of a small shantytown. The small, frail constructions, knocked together from random bits of rubble, trash and scavvy, were all the more pathetic for having obviously been trashed and abandoned. Some were no more than burned-out skeletons of charred tree limbs and twisted metal rods.

      As they headed southeast, Ricky trotted out of the ruin to join them. “Did you do like I asked, Ricky?” J.B. said to him.

      Ricky nodded vigorously. “Yes, sir!”

      “Good man.”

      Jak led them through the weeds toward a dark gray building that showed them a long, blank face. No windows were visible, only some intact ducts on the level above the street.

      He moved toward the northeast end of the mostly blank wall, near an abutting building that had several more stories with glass in the windows. It might have been an annex of the first one. A loading bay door stood open between shrubby trees. The albino slipped up a ramped walkway to the bay’s far side. He crouched next to it and looked in.

      Then he looked back at his friends and nodded. But he held up a hand in the sign for caution.

      A crackle sounded from behind the companions. It quickly expanded into a storm of gunfire. Mildred reflexively ducked, then turned back. She saw nothing but the weeds, the shantytown and the red-faced ruin.

      “Fireblast!” Ryan exclaimed. “What the nuke?”

      “Ricky left them one of the little surprises he’s been working on,” J.B. said, as proud as a new poppa.

      Ricky blushed. “Nothing lethal. Just a string of black-powder firecrackers with a tripwire and a pull initiator left in the front door of the place we just left. It works just the same as a firefight simulator.”

      “That does not sound simulated,” Doc declared as the blasterfire continued to rage from the direction of the derelict building.

      “It’s not,” J.B. said, “now.”

      “Triple clever,” Ryan told them. “Now get your asses in gear. That won’t keep the bastards busy long.”

      Ryan went up the ramp to where Jak still hunkered down by the yawning bay. The albino gave way for him to take a quick look inside. Then the taller man straightened and walked in.

      “Because