Desolation Angels. James Axler

beard, turned back to yell something just as Ryan’s trigger broke. The shot hit him in the left shoulder and spun him.

      “Smoke bomb out!” he heard J.B. yell from right beside him. Something arced down into Ryan’s field of vision, trailing brownish-gray smoke.

      “Didn’t think they’d fall for the ‘poison gas’ gag a second time,” J.B. said. “Come on, Ryan. We’ve got to go.”

      Without a second thought Ryan jumped to his feet. He’d had no intention of sacrificing himself to hold the pursuers off while his friends escaped. For one thing, he doubted it would’ve worked. There were just too many of the bastards. He saw no point in risking his ass when there was no need to.

      A huge cloud billowed up between him and the enemy.

      “That’s our last one of those for now,” J.B. said. He ripped off a short burst from his Uzi into the smoke screen, just to make the Angels think twice about barging in blind through the smoke. Then he and Ryan sprinted down the block away from them, after their companions.

      Though another large, cultivated field opened to the north, Jak had led them not toward it but along the street, back toward the jagged but looming ruins of downtown. Ryan understood his reasons—and knew the albino youth was right. Once the Angels had stopped shooting holes in the air in response to Ricky’s makeshift firefight simulator, they almost certainly had fanned out from the fallen-in building Ryan and his team had ducked through. So they probably had men heading for the field and to the building Nikk’s scavvies claimed for their own. Above all, the fugitives needed to put as much distance between them and the Angels as possible and as fast as possible.

      After he’d run a couple hundred yards, Ryan stopped and turned back. Once again he dropped to one knee.

      People were just starting to emerge from the yellowish cloud of smoke. The air was still, so it was still mostly intact, dissipating only slowly in the humid, heavy air. Once more he drew a quick bead on the nearest, a tall black man with the sides of his head shaved. Ryan shot him through the chest and ran after his friends as the other Angels in sight opened fire.

      So far none of them had turned out to be marksmen, which was lucky. But throw enough lead in the air, a person was bound to hit something eventually. This battle could not be allowed to go on.

      At least they still had some air between themselves and the baying, blasting pack. Ryan and his crew needed to find either escape or cover to stand off the Angels until nightfall.

      He ran past the exposed base of a white skyscraper. It appeared to be propped up by the remnants of a building it had crashed into. The bottom floor was an open wound of structural steel and broken concrete.

      Jak had already turned the group north-northeast up the next street to take them out of their pursuers’ line of fire. Ryan followed, with J.B. just ahead of him.

      “Head right at the next intersection!” he called.

      “Blocked!” yelled Jak, who had sprinted ahead to scout escape routes. He was ace at his job—the best, as Ryan and his friends had learned, and learned hard some weeks before, when simmering resentments between Jak and Ryan had sent the younger man heading in one direction and the rest in another. That had gone disastrously for them all.

      Jak kept running the way he was going. Up ahead Ryan glimpsed what looked at first like another shantytown, but in a fairly open space between a perilously leaning skyscraper on one side and a long, low white building on the other. This one was somehow much more colorful than the sad collection of burned out and abandoned shacks they had passed before. Also it was anything but abandoned; it was occupied by a throng of people.

      A few heads started to turn as someone noticed Jak running toward them, with Krysty, Doc and Mildred close behind.

      “¡Nuestra, señora!” Ricky yelped. He was just crossing the next intersection, the one with the white skyscraper toppled right across it. “Angels!”

      “Bastards die hard,” J.B. said.

      “Just run!” Ryan yelled.

      J.B. fired a burst left as he entered the intersection without even slowing. Ryan had slung his Steyr and drawn his SIG.

      Sure enough, a passel of the vest-wearing coldhearts was moving fast through the shadowed canyon of the broad east-west street. The white building lay tilted at somewhere south of forty-five degrees. It had crunched into a sinister-looking brown-and-black building across from it and had domino toppled into the building north of it.

      Chunks of rubble big and small had fallen from the crazy-angled building. The Angels had to slow to pick their way over, around and through that, but no more than they had to. Ryan snapped a couple shots their way.

      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

      “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