James Axler - Ice and Fire

Jak was at the top of the stairs and he turned, catlike, his red eyes seeming to glow with a smoldering fire.

"Now?" he asked, responding to Ryan's nod and taking the lead down to the first floor.

Doc and Lori waited there, one at the front of the long hallway, the other in the entrance to the kitchen, watching the rear of the house.

"Are the redcoats coming?" Doc asked in a hoarse whisper.

Ryan didn't try to guess at the strange allusion. The meaning of the question was plain enough. "Yeah. Out front. Hiding behind a big wag. Be at the front door in four or five minutes."

"Can't we blast some and stop them down?" Lori asked eagerly.

"No. Best plan is to keep them guessing. If it's dark and quiet and there's no sign of any of us, they'll be uncertain. That means frightened. Nobody wants to be first up the ladder or number one through a closed door. It'll slow them."

They padded through the kitchen in single file, past the antique pots of copper and brass and the scrubbed tables. Jak looked at the rack of old knives with bone handles. Ryan caught the glance.

"Leave them be."

Ryan eased the back door open a couple of inches and saw the stocky figure of J.B. standing close to Carla.

"They're coming out front, pushing a wag ahead of them. Still don't figure they're likely to rush at us out of the darkness."

The Armorer grinned, his teeth showing white in the night. "Guess not. I haven't heard a gnat fart out back. If they got it covered, then they're either very good or they're keeping themselves way, way off there."

During their whispered conversation, Ryan had been peering down Ruby's trim garden, past the neat rows of okra and beyond the outhouse to where the brush began. And where the steep-sided draw ran behind Main Street.

"We go now?" Krysty asked.

Ryan hesitated. "What can you hear?"

Krysty shook her head. "Wind's blowing this way. All I can hear's the gas plant. Drowns anything else out."

"Jak, you got the best night seeing of any of us. You make anyone that way?" He pointed toward the desert.

Jak stood silent for a long moment. "Think there's one or two about fifteen feet left of outhouse. Crouched behind heap of cut wood."

Ryan strained his eye to try to see what the albino had spotted. But it was all a dark, swimming blue to him.

There wasn't time for any more doubts. Behind them, at the front of the hotel, the night exploded with the dull, heavy sound of scatterguns and the busy crackling of pistols. And the distinctive chatter of John Dern's M-16.

Glass broke and wood splintered, and above the noise they heard the angry screech of Ruby Rainer's voice protesting the ruination of her property.

"Let's go," Ryan hissed, leading the way with his pistol in his left hand and the eighteen-inch steel blade of the panga in his right.

Jak had been partly correct.

Zombie had placed Mealy in charge of the rear guard. Six men were sitting down, talking quietly, behind the cords of kindling. Two more were crouched at the side, keeping watch for signs of movement in the building.

They had been warned to look out for anyone sneaking quietly out of the darkness, but they weren't prepared for the utterly ruthless speed and violence as Ryan and the others hit them.

"Fastest and hardest," had been another of the Trader's endless number of homilies — most of which concerned better ways of chilling.

Mealy had time to set his finger onto the trigger of his shotgun but he didn't have time to pull it. The long cutting edge of the panga opened his throat in a screaming, red-lipped cry, nearly slicing his head from his broad shoulders. As the biker fell in a welter of blood, Ryan was already among the circle of relaxing men, his steel blade hissing and singing, jarring on bone, ripping through flesh.

J.B. took out one of the men who had been watching the rooming house, his Tekna knife driving forcefully into a soft stomach. The Armorer twisted his wrist brutally hard, letting the saw edge spill the sentry's intestines into steaming coils about his feet.

Doc's swordstick flashed and stabbed the other sentry neatly through the center of the chest, between the upper ribs and clean through the heart. As he withdrew the delicate rapier, the man slithered to the dirt, eyes wide in shock.

"Touche, " Doc said.

Any cries of fear or pain were totally drowned by the bedlam from the front of the small hotel. By now every window in the Rentaroom had been smashed by lead.

Nobody out front heard the muffled sounds of eight of their fellows departing from this life.

It all took well below a minute.

"Anyone hurt?" Ryan asked, panting from the exultant burst of adrenaline energy. He stooped and wiped the blood from the panga blade on the long duster coat of one of the corpses. "No? Good. Then let's go down into the draw and get moving."

"Hell's bloody bells," Rick gasped. "I don't believe it. Seven, no, eight men. You just ran at them and killed every last one."

"The longer it takes before they realize we've gone, then the better chance we got."

J.B. agreed with Ryan. "And we've just brought the odds down some on our side. They find these good old chills, and they'll lose some balls for the fight. All helps."

Baron Edgar cleared his throat. "I'm not sure that I can lend the dignity of my office to this butchery. If it wasn't so dark I'd know all these men. Probably once called them my friends."

"Shut up, Baron," Ryan said, coldly dismissive of the old man.

"But this is my ville. I must insist that..."

Ryan grabbed him by the collar, lifting him up on the tips of his toes. "Shut up, Brennan. It's not your ville. Never will be again. And you don't insist anything. Not now and not ever. Just shut your mouth tight and do what you're told."

Carla took his arm. "Don't speak to him like that, Ryan. He's an old man."

"And he won't get any older if he doesn't stay buttoned."

"You got a cold heart, Ryan," she said quietly.

"Yeah. But I'm alive. Now, let's move."

The moon vanished behind a swooping bank of dark chem clouds, which brought with them a distant rumble of thunder and the threat of rain.

Visibility dropped from adequate to nil. Even Jak, with his heightened night sight, couldn't see more than a couple of paces ahead of them.

After Rick — and then Lori — had fallen on the rough ground of the valley bottom, Ryan called a halt. "Go on like this and we'll have a broken ankle. Best stop awhile."

"They'll catch us," Carla protested.

They could still hear the crackle of small-arms fire behind them. By now Ryan guessed that someone in the attacking group would have figured that the birds had flown the coop. From what he'd seen of Zombie he didn't figure the bikers' leader was a great tactical fighter. But surely they would have moved in on the hotel when there was no sign of life.

"We go on we're in trouble," J.B. said, peering up at the sky.

"If we're making for the old park, I can lead us."

"What?" Ryan couldn't believe what he was hearing. "That you, Brennan?"

"Sure is. I'm as mad as fire day about all this. Sure I was kind of shocked for a while back there. Now I want to go and beat the living shit — pardon me, Carla — out of the Motes. I used to play in this draw when I was a kid. I know every rock. Let me go first, and you keep in tight."

"I don't know, Ryan," J.B. said doubtfully.

"Me too," Jak added.

"It's not that much of a risk," the baron insisted. "I mean it. I feel like someone who has been through a long, dark tunnel. Snakefish is my ville. I can get us there. I've sat it out for way, way too long, Ryan. Not anymore."

It was a difficult decision. Ryan didn't relish hanging around only a half mile from the hotel. He wanted to move along the draw and circle around to come up behind the headquarters of the bikers. But to let the diminutive, elderly man lead them? That was something else.