James Axler - Red Equinox

"I know, Rick," she replied. "One in south Texas, one up near where the Lakes were."

"Duluth, Minnesota. Ryan knows as near as I could tell him. Could be worth a look."

Ryan walked around the second floor, carefully checking out of every window, keeping himself flattened against the walls so that nobody outside would see him. It worried Ryan that the land was so much in deep shadow, with ditches and folds in the ground creating blind spots.

He stepped out of the most westerly room and saw four skinny kids approaching the top of the main stairs.

"Fireblast!" he roared.

Ryan fired four quick shots at the invading wolf pack. One was a clean kill through the side of the head, sending the young girl tumbling down the wide staircase.

One clipped the leader of the gang in the left shoulder, spinning him around as he uttered an eerie shriek of pain. The boy grabbed at the wound and dropped the garrote in the dust.

The other two rounds missed completely. Streetwise fighters almost from birth, the kids' reflexes were startlingly fast. One microsecond they were there, the next they disappeared. It flashed through Ryan's mind that the young 'uns were cut from the same cloth as Jak Lauren — reared as killers, with no fear and no pity.

Before the tangled corpse of the girl had reached the hall below, two out of the other three had darted to safety. The leader, despite his shoulder, slid down the oak balustrade, tumbling into a somersault to vanish into the shadows of the first floor. The other girl vaulted the rail and dropped lightly to land on her feet and race away. The second boy was marginally less agile. So he died.

He stumbled as he landed, twisting his ankle. Ryan shot him through the back of the neck with a single round from the SIG-Sauer.

Apart from the breathy death rattle of the boy below, the house was suddenly, creepily silent. Ryan crouched near the top of the stairs, assuming he would hit them before any of them had managed a bridgehead on the second story. But he had no idea at all how many of the marauders were lurking on the floor below him.

Ryan's normal fighting calm and confidence had been shaken. It had never occurred to him that the enemy could infiltrate the house so easily, without being spotted. He'd imagined that there would be time enough to climb into the ruined attic and shout down to the others at the bottom of the winding stairs. But now...

It was a classic horns of a dilemma. If he risked going up to warn J.B., Krysty and Jak, then the gang might come swarming up after him and he'd be overwhelmed by numbers.

If he stayed where he was, the kids might bring in reinforcements and take him out before J.B. and the rest even knew there was danger.

Being the man he was, Ryan picked the third option. Blaster in hand, he slowly began to pick his way down the stairs, toward the ground floor where the wolf pack was hiding.

"Not much more. Check that the color-contacts are all connected, slide the replacement board in and cut the element force chips. Crosscurrent on the supplementary command and instruct modules. Good. Hell's bells! Let me down a little. Lay me against those gas cans. Support my back."

Rick was well into borrowed time.

Krysty was astounded at the delicacy of touch that Doc showed as he worked with microfibers and contacts, deftly repairing broken circuits where possible and looping around them when the damage was too severe. Without his scientific skill she doubted that the work would ever have been completed successfully.

But now they were nearly done.

She'd been concentrating all of her attention on helping Rick and trying to flood him with her own healing powers. Now, for a moment she could relax and open her mind.

Krysty felt it immediately.

"Gaia!" she shouted.

"What?" J.B. asked, swinging around to face her, eyes widening in concern when he saw her shocked expression.

"They're in. Oh, Ryan, lover..."

Ryan racked his brain, trying to remember whether any of the street brats in the gang they'd watched in the ville had been carrying blasters. Certainly none of the four at the top of the stairs had been toting guns. There'd been enough moonlight through the cobwebbed windows to see clearly, and Ryan's night vision had always been good.

But a knife could chill you just as surely as a full-metal jacket. And it was a knife thrown from the darkness of one of the rooms that confirmed Ryan's suspicion that the pack hadn't fled the building.

His eye caught the flicker of movement and he ducked, hearing the steel whisper through the cold air. The blade thudded point first into the paneling that flanked the stairs.

It wasn't a good idea to be caught halfway up and halfway down. Feather-light on his feet, Ryan ran down the last few steps into the hall and knelt, waiting for someone to make a move.

Despite their reflexes, the children weren't all that good at this kind of game. Give them a mutie gimp to mock, chase, trip and throttle, and they were experts. But put them in a silent house, against a man with a silenced blaster, and their nerves began to turn ragged.

Ryan tested what he could hear, smell and feel, using all of his hunter's senses: shuffling feet and a faint whisper from the large back room, the smell of sweat and fear, rank and heavy, from the same place.

And the feeling.

Ryan had lived through hundreds of such moments all over Deathlands, with friends and alone — the feeling that the scythe hung suspended in the air above your neck, that people would begin to die within a handful of heartbeats.

That feeling was as familiar to Ryan Cawdor as breathing. But the street gang wasn't used to it. They were urban hunters and chillers, used to running down weaker prey through ruined alleys and using their superior numbers to take them out.

This was different.

Two of them already lay dead, out in the stillness of the shadow-laked hall. Their leader, Dmitri, was wounded, blood leaking from the bullet hole near his shoulder. And there was an avenging angel waiting for them, still and patient. They huddled in the cavernous corners of the big room, gripping their knives and razors, trying to hold their breath.

There was the faintest creak of a floorboard behind Ryan. Someone descended the stairs. Moonlight flickered off something like polished metal or glass.

"Ryan?" The word was softer than a sigh.

"J.B.? In main back room. Could be five or six, probably more. Kids. Figure they're all shit-scared by now. Mebbe no blasters."

The voice of the Armorer was so quiet that it scarcely disturbed the tiny motes of dust that floated in the spears of moonlight. "Then let's go get 'em. I gotta mag-gren. Blinder. Been saving it for something like this."

"Ready," Ryan whispered.

That was all he needed to say.

Zimyanin had been watching the house through a pair of borrowed field glasses. He pulled away the eyepieces with a curse. "What the!.."

A sudden dazzling flash of burning white light had erupted somewhere inside the dacha. Even at that distance it was enough to almost blind him, making him blink and rub his eyes to try to remove the tiny specks of crimson that blurred his vision.

Then came a spattering of spaced shots, some desultory cries and a single scream, which was followed by darkness and silence.

"That's it," Zimyanin crowed in triumph.

The mag-gen was only the size of a hen's egg and made of dull metal. A colored strip ran around its top to differentiate it from shraps, implodes, frags and stuns.

Ryan closed his eye, covered it with the flat of his left hand and turned his head away from the impending explosion. The effect of a mag-gren at close range was, quite literally, blinding.