James Axler - Red Equinox

J.B. lobbed the small grenade across the hallway, underhanded. It bounced once into the rear chamber, then exploded with a muffled plopping sound.

Despite all his precautions, Ryan was conscious of the burst of stunning light that the mag-gren released on impact. It filtered through his hand and through the closed eyelid, like the glow of a distant forest fire. He could hear J.B. counting in a quiet, controlled voice.

"Four and five and six and seven and eight. That's it, Ryan."

He opened his eye, stepping to one side of the doorway. The grenade had blazed through its phase of devastating white light, and was now burning with a steady red glow. J.B. moved into place on the other side of the doorway.

The gutter brats were all there. Ryan counted around a dozen, scattered about the room. All were crouched and huddled, hands pressed against streaming, blinded eyes. If you weren't ready for a mag-gren, the intensity of the light could literally burn out your retinas. Some of the kids were crying, others staggered about, waving their weapons helplessly in the empty air. Not one of them posed any sort of threat to J.B. or Ryan.

"Bullets cost," the Armorer reminded him.

"Fuck that," Ryan snapped. "No different than chilling a pack of rabid dogs."

The executions took less than a minute. Each man walked carefully around the chamber, avoiding the desperate lunges of the children with their homemade knives and boned razors. Getting behind them, one by one they put them away with a single round through the back of the head.

The leader was last to go. Hearing the single, spaced shots, and the thumping sounds as the corpses of his gang hit the floor, he retreated into a corner. Blood leaked, forgotten, from the wound to his shoulder. Eyes squeezed tight, he waved a bone-handled knife with a serrated edge toward the sound of the approaching men, trying to hold them off.

"Like a trapped polecat." J.B. leveled his blaster and squeezed the trigger once.

The 5.6 mm round hit the teenager through the temple, kicking his skull back against the wall. As the boy slid sideways, he left a smear of dark blood and brains in a gruel on the faded paint. Tiny splinters of bone gleamed white against the crimson.

"Thats it," Ryan said.

"Like fish in a barrel," J.B. agreed. There was no regret in his voice for the bloody massacre. He knew why the children had creepy-crawled into the old mansion. He and Ryan had beaten them by being much better. It wasn't a game, not when losing was terminal.

"Gren's near finished," Ryan observed, carefully reloading his pistol.

"Caught in the floor." J.B. walked across the room, stepping over one of the corpses, the soles of his combat boots peeling stickily from the blood-soaked wood. He nudged away the molten remnants of the grenade with his toe, stamping out the circle of glowing charcoal.

"Don't want the whole place going up in smoke," Ryan said, holstering the silenced blaster at his right hip.

"Not yet. Mebbe when we get out of here. After the jump. Be good way to leave it for the Reds. Handful of ashes."

"How's the gateway?" He paused. "And how did you know there was trouble?"

"I felt it," Krysty said from halfway down the stairs.

"How's the work?"

"Getting there." She walked into the hall and looked into the back room, where the grenade had almost burned out. "Gaia! Seems like you chilled a whole kindergarten in here."

"Them or us, lover."

Zimyanin waited another thirty minutes on the chance that someone might come from the dark bulk of the mansion and tell him what was going on. But in his heart he knew what had happened. Ryan Cawdor and his terrorist gang had been far too good for the wolf pack. He felt no grief for the murderous gang of young thugs.

"They who live by the sword shall surely perish by the sword," he said to himself in English. His 1911 phrase book had a section devoted to popular proverbs and sayings.

"What are we to do, Comrade Major-Commissar? We have collected many local villagers, as you instructed."

Zimyanin tugged thoughtfully at the drooping ends of his mustache. "Time to remove the glove of velvet and use the fist of steel. We will attack in force."

"Not that long to dawn," Doc said, glancing at the sky through the crooked timbers of the roof. Old beams, fire-marked, some with the original shingles, were still nailed in place.

Nearly a half hour had passed since the explosion of the mag-gren and the butchery of the killing pack of teenagers. There'd been no sign of any further hostile activity from the dark fields, though Ryan was certain that there was a sizable force hiding out there. Probably less than a mile away.

Only Krysty remained down in the basement with Rick. The work on the gateway was nearly done. The main wiring had been repaired, and the damaged metal hammered and pressed back into something approximating the proper shape. Some final work remained replacing lock plates and checking the fittings on the main gateway contacts. Krysty could handle that with some guidance from Rick.

Jak and Doc had joined J.B. and Ryan on the upper floors of the rambling dacha, each with his blaster at the ready. Both J.B. and Ryan had fetched their assault rifles, hoping to deter an initial attack before it got too close.

"Light'll help us more than them," Jak said, squinting at the distant village. He was wearing his fur coat, and his white hair floated about his shoulders like living frost in the cold wind that winnowed in from the east.

"Sure. We can pick them off from cover. If they don't use any heavy-ex they'll have to get close to shift us." Ryan glanced at the secret door, knowing that once they retreated inside it, their options became limited.

They could make the jump successfully, surrender... or die.

"Send them in," Zimyanin ordered. "Hold the sec patrols in reserve back by the wags. I want to keep the chillings to a minimum among our men. Tell them to hurry. It'll be first light before long. Then the advantage will lie with them."

"Here they come," J.B. said. "From toward the river. Anything on any other side?"

"Nothing," Jak replied from the rear.

"No." Doc's voice floated from the attic. "Not a creature is stirring. Not even a mouse."

"Nothing this side," Ryan added. "Looks like a one-in, all-in attack then. How many?"

"Around thirty or forty, straggling. Can't see sec men. Most got muskets and old blasters. Don't seem in too much of a hurry."

Ryan walked around to the front and called Jak to join him and J.B., leaving Doc to watch the other sides from the roofless attic.

"Zimyanin's using stupes as a first wave to draw fire, use up ammo. Mebbe take one or two of us out if they're lucky. Cold bastard!"

Zorro, tucked inside Doc's fur coat, whimpered.

The peasants were strung out across the field in a rough skirmishing line. They had proved so reluctant to follow the wolf pack toward the sinister dacha that Zimyanin had been forced to use a handful of his precious trained sec men to push the villagers along with the threat of a bullet in the back.

He watched them begin to advance, then turned to order the heavy wags to warm up their engines and to have the two gren launchers broken out and set up. He suspected that they might soon need them.

"Time to slow 'em," J.B. said. "They're inside six hundred paces."

"Close enough," Ryan agreed.

His Heckler & Koch G-12 caseless rifle bragged a laser-enhanced sniper scope. He pressed the butt into his shoulder and squinted along the barrel, seeing the slow-moving serpent that wound its way toward them. A faint mist was rising from the river, drifting lazily across the fields. It enveloped the feet of the advancing Russians, rising to their waists, so that they seemed to be wading through water.