Deathlands 117: Desolation Angels (16 page)

Ryan grunted. Morgan acted angry and contemptuous all the time—about the world in general, but them in particular. Still, the intel he’d given them on their various targets had been first-rate. He might not have liked the companions any more than they liked him, but he used them like valuable tools, not cheap throwaways.

Not that I trust him to keep doing that indefinitely, Ryan thought.

“Speaking of which,” J.B. said. “Reckon he’s not getting any more patient.”

They picked up the pace along the fancy marble floor. As they approached the door beyond which the belligerent and overbearing Captain Morgan waited like a cranky bear in his cave, a familiar voice called to them from behind.

“Ryan! Krysty! So good to see you all!”

It was Lieutenant Mahome, striding toward them along the corridor. His blond head was bare, and he had a dark smudge across one cheek.

Ryan nodded.

The officer came up and shook Ryan’s hand, then each of the others’ in turn.

“You really did a great thing for us out there yesterday,” he said, “saving our boys and girls from those Rock City enforcers.”

“Freaking Juggalos,” Mildred muttered. “I hate Juggalos.”

Mahome frowned at her. Obviously the word didn’t mean any more to him than it did to Ryan.

“She’s not from these parts,” Ryan explained.

“You’re looking good these days,” Krysty told the lieutenant.

“They tell me I’m in line for a promotion,” Mahome said. “Right after the big push that’s supposed to be secret but everyone in the department knows about.”

“Try everyone in Detroit,” Ricky said.

Mahome shrugged. “As long as nobody outside the department knows the details, it’s all ace.”

Krysty gave him a brief hug. “It’s good to see you, too. You take care out there.”

He blushed, thanked her and headed on his way. He seemed to be stepping out even more briskly than before.

“You getting a soft heart?” Ryan asked with a grin. “Developing a taste for handsome young sec men?”

She shook her head of glorious red hair. “He’s a good boy,” she said. “I can tell. They’re rare, especially among sec men.”

“Seems to be,” Ryan replied without sarcasm.

“Let’s hope he survives the fact,” J.B. said.

* * *

“
T
HAT’S A PRETTY
impressive piece of construction,” J.B. stated.

“Yeah,” Ryan said.

He was impressed, too. Even at that early hour it was a hell of a sight, silhouetted against the unfeeling glow of the Milky Way. It looked like a weird giant mushroom, with a flat-topped funnel-shaped head unfolding from the top of a squat cylinder perhaps thirty feet in diameter.

“Rainwater collector,” J.B. said. “Up on top of their storage tank. Wonder what it’s made of?”

“We’ll never know,” Ryan said. “We weren’t asked to build one of the nuking things. We’re here to break it.”

“Shame.”

The companions lay spread out on their bellies on a slope choked with low weeds and head-size concrete rubble, looking across a narrow gully at the big, bizarre structure. Downhill to their left a few stray gleams of light showed from the usual crude shanties of a little ville, and beyond them shone the sporadic lights of midtown and downtown. To their right, up the slope, rose vast abandoned buildings, their looming walls blank and sinister.

Morgan had sent them farther afield than they’d ever been, a couple miles to the north and west of Hizzoner’s HQ. The city as a whole inclined gradually upward from the river in the southeast. Their current lie up, and their target, stood on a butte or hill that stuck out of the main slope.

That location was high enough to make digging wells difficult. Plus, they had been informed that other factors precluded that option. Morgan hadn’t bothered elaborating on what they were, and nobody had asked. Doc had cleared his throat suggestively, but Ryan had turned and glared him into silence.

The key was, this storage-tank-cum-collector represented most or all of the water supply that supported what Morgan said was a belligerent gang called the Jokers. They had been conducting increasingly bold and brutal raids against villes and neighborhoods loyal to Michaud’s self-styled City of Detroit.

Depriving the Jokers of their water should make them a lot more amenable to listening to reason, as preached by Hizzoner and his sec boss, Bone. Or barring that, to being knocked flat by them.

The whole thing sounded sketchy to Ryan, but it wasn’t really his place to care if the plan made sense. He and his friends had to take care of business until they had an opportunity to get out of there. A pair of Jokers patrolled around the tank’s base. One had a pump shotgun, the other a hunting-style bolt-action longblaster sans scope. They acted tired and bored, beyond the point of even smoking and joking to pass the watch.

Ryan checked his chron. Getting the sentries in this condition was a powerful reason to wait as late as possible before making their move, little as he liked to be crowded for time. Two and a half hours into a four-hour stint that began after midnight did the trick nicely.

“Right,” he said. “Got an hour to sunup. You sure you and the kid got enough time to do the deed?”

J.B. chuckled. “No problem with that part,” he said.

That
kind of went down Ryan’s spine, as undoubtedly his best friend and right-hand man had intended. Everything they’d done so far for DPD had gone remarkably well. Not always according to plan, but never seriously off the rails. They’d been in control throughout.

Ryan wasn’t superstitious. He didn’t believe some magic hex was attendant to such a run of lucky strikes that would suddenly bring the whole entire world of hurt down on their necks to compensate. He knew very well there was no kind of magic force that balanced things out. If there were, half the barons on Earth would be staring at the stars right this moment, and all the rest would be a day or two behind them.

But he also knew the odds were very strongly against the forays continuing to go well, even though they weren’t terribly high risk—at least compared to what he and his friends were used to. This job looked less challenging than their usual daily life. What they mostly had been were tasks that required more flexibility and lateral thinking than was common in the regimented ranks of DPD. And probably more than was permitted.

Still, J B. was also right that the demo phase was the simplest and lowest-risk part of the entire plan. If the world of hurt was going to land, it would likely hit at a different time.

“You sure you’ve got enough explosives to do the job?” Ryan asked.

“Sure,” J.B. said. “It’s not like we have to knock the whole thing down. Just put a big enough hole to let all the water out before they can patch it. They’ll get thirsty in a hurry.”

“I was being sarcastic,” Ryan said. “You two took enough C-4 and blasting caps to level Hizzoner’s whole palace.”

J.B. and Ricky exchanged grins.

“Did we now?” the Armorer asked.

Ryan chuckled.

“Jak,” he said softly, “move out. I’m right behind you.”

The albino youth didn’t acknowledge Ryan in any way. He was like a cat that way; he just rose from where he lay in the weeds and artificial breccia and ghosted forward. He vanished into the arroyo as if phasing out of existence. Ryan started to follow.

“I still say I could take them from here,” Ricky said.

“Noted,” Ryan replied. Really, there was no overpowering reason not to play this the way they had the snatch-and-grab they’d put on Tommy Ten-Inch. Ricky
could
have sniped one down and Jak throat-cut the other.

But Ryan felt a need to keep his own hand in.

“Here,” Krysty said. She grabbed Ryan’s long hair and cranked his face around toward hers. Then she planted a fast but firm kiss on his lips.

“For luck,” she said.

He nodded and was gone.

* * *

T
HE HUMAN BODY
, allegedly, reached a sort of low ebb in its circadian rhythm at around half an hour before dawn. So did a person’s mental state and morale. At least, that’s what Ryan had heard, and nothing in his experience had given him reason to doubt it.

Also, half an hour before sunup—or after sunset—was said by combat types he’d encountered to be the worst time for visibility. The human eye supposedly had more trouble resolving images and making visual sense of them with a little light to work with than in total darkness. Ryan had no idea if that was really true, but he’d never come across any reason to doubt it.

Both of those facts were why that period was favored for sneak attacks.

When Ryan came up out of the brush-choked cut in the slope with his panga in his hand, it was still well shy of that golden time. The sky was still dead black. The night was quiet but for some crickets singing and some sleepy voices that occasionally drifted up from someplace downhill, not too close.

But that was what the timetable given them called for. They were to blast the water tank fifteen minutes before the sun came up. Ryan wanted to leave the actual move, starting with the sentry takedown, as late as possible to reduce the chances of detection. Their briefing said the Jokers were pretty punctual in their changes of watch, and their own observation from shortly after last night fell tended to confirm it.

But of course, a person could never tell. Some early-rising body might think to bring the watchmen coffee or some other hot drink to help keep them awake for the crucial final half hour before they were relieved of duty. Or somebody’s squeeze might sneak up for a little illicit nooky—something Ryan had personally known to happen. The point was, he wanted to cut it as fine as possible.

The sentries passed by, not thirty feet away. They carried their blasters in their hands, not slung, which meant they hadn’t gone completely slack. But they hung their heads and seemed to be dozing from the way they shuffled their feet.

Ryan sprinted forward as fast as he could and still keep quiet. Jak seemed to materialize in front of him, running full out without generating any noise.

Jak slowed as he reached the tank, then flashed a grin at Ryan.

The one-eyed man slowed, too. Jak would take the man nearer the rusty steel wall of the tank. Ryan would get the outside man. The sentries were wearing rough clothes, sturdy but shabby shirts and trousers—new manufacture, not scavvy. They looked more like everyday working men than gang members. Maybe this was shit detail for the junior Jokers, Ryan thought, or the ones not fit for serious fighting.

They struck. Ryan banished all awareness of Jak and his target and let his predatory senses take over. Jak’s man was the albino’s problem, not Ryan’s.

Ryan would have sworn he made no noise as he sprinted toward his prey, but even as he reached to grab his man by the bearded chin, the sentry suddenly whipped around.

Through the dark Ryan saw the scuffed steel buttplate of the bolt-action blaster right before his eye.

Chapter Sixteen

Ryan threw himself onto the ground, tamped hard and worn bare of grass by the feet of many sentries. He had no choice; a crack on the head from the longblaster’s butt would make things go bad triple fast.

The Joker was as fast as he was alert—or lucky. As he spun violently clockwise, the longblaster’s butt passed mere inches above Ryan’s head.

But Ryan wasn’t merely ducking for his life. As he went down, he kicked hard with his right leg, scything from the left. The back of his calf caught the guard’s left leg right below the knee and swept both feet right out from under him.

The Joker landed on his back almost beside Ryan.

Before the sentry could suck in enough breath to yell or do more than turn a wild eye toward his attacker, Ryan swung the panga across his body and down with frantic, vengeful fury.

The thick but keen blade cut through skin, cartilage, veins and muscles—and right on through the bones of the man’s neck. The dark-bearded head rolled away from its neck as if propelled by a final gush of blood as his heart gave one last convulsive pump.

Jak was crouched over the headless body. He held his trench knife poised to strike.

“Noisy old man,” he said.

“Fuck you,” Ryan told him. “And thanks.”

But he refused Jak’s offer of a hand to help him up. He wasn’t a man who stood on pride often. But now was definitely one of those times.

* * *

“
I
DON’T THINK
I’m comfortable with this,” Mildred said.

Mildred was just talking to distract herself from how nervous she felt for J.B. The Armorer and his shadow, Ricky, were hunched down at the base of the tank on the side closest to the ville it served, laying their explosive charges. The fact that the two guards lay near the pair, cooling down to air temperature, did nothing to reassure her. Their presence emphasized the risk that somebody could come up out of the ville and blow their surprise. A risk that she felt increasing with every beat of her hyperkinetic heart.

“What’s not to be comfortable with?” Ryan growled.

“The men you and Jak killed,” she said. She didn’t feel like using euphemisms such as “took out.” She was more acutely aware than usual of the fact that what they were doing was pure murder for hire, something they had always avoided, no matter how richly the victims might deserve it. Sure, they had done security work in the past for money, but they weren’t “mercies.” They drew the line at that. She knew that they had to do what was necessary to survive, but now they had crossed the line and she didn’t like it.

“They didn’t look like gangers,” she said. “Not to me. Did they look like it to you?”

“No,” Krysty replied.

“What are you talking about?” Ryan asked.

“They look like just, you know, working stiffs.”

“Well, what do gangers look like?”

“Not like them,” Krysty said. “In a place like this people usually join gangs so they won’t have to do hard manual labor.”

“So what—do they have uniforms?” Ryan asked.

Mildred and Krysty exchanged glances.

“Is this just a girl thing?” Mildred said. “Can it possibly be a girl thing?”