James Axler - Crater Lake

Jak carefully checked his satin-finish .357 Magnum, peering along the six-inch barrel at one of the overhead lights. Slowly he reloaded it, not taking any chances that someone had tampered with the heavy pistol.

Doc Tanner swung his sword stick, the thin steel blade hissing and whistling as he cut and parried like a fencing scarecrow, shuffling and dancing, muttering to himself from some archaic guide to fighting.

"Punto and reverse, stoccata and imbroccata. Passada. Parry and lunge. By the three Kennedys, but we'll purge this place, my friends."

Ryan held up a hand for silence. "We've been lucky so far. Let's realize that. Seems these people are too damned busy with their experiments and research to watch what's going on. But there's still a chance that someone might look at the security vid screens. So we still move quick and quiet. And from now on we take out anything and anyone we see."

"Main thing's to get in and find what we can use to blow this mother a mile into the sky," the Armorer said. "We'll have to string out a little."

"Yeah," Ryan agreed. "I'll go point. Krysty second. Then Jak, Doc 'n Lori, with you and Finn holding the rear. From now on there's no stopping. The security in this section is old and all fucked up. Once we reach the research sections, I guess it'll be harder."

J.B. gave directions from his map as they moved toward the core of the complex. Each person had a favored blaster in hand, ready for instant fire. It was one of those situations, as Doc had pointed out a couple of minutes earlier, when those that weren't for 'em were ag'in 'em.

There was no danger of accidentally shooting down a friend.

There were no friends.

Just then two helmeted mutie guards stepped simultaneously from a side corridor only thirty short paces in front of Ryan. Standing close together, they began to turn slowly and awkwardly.

The caseless G-12 was already at Ryan's hip. He took lightning aim, leveling and squeezing, bracing himself even though the H&K automatic rifle was virtually without recoil. It was set on triple burst, the three bullets so close together they sounded like a single round.

Ryan squeezed the trigger twice, shifting his aim slightly from one sec man to the other. The two corpses slid and kicked on the blood-slick tiles of the corridor.

"Nice," Jak said, just behind Ryan.

The sec man on the right had been hit by all three rounds in the center of his chest, five inches below the thorax, the bullets within a finger's width of one another. The force of the impact had lifted the mutie clean off his feet, hurling him backward. Another three rounds, again tightly grouped, had hit the second guard a touch higher, knocking him sideways, his helmet rattling and spinning, still rolling after both sentries were dead.

As the seven began to move on, the loudspeaker above them crackled to life. "Sec report terminal malfunction? Query intruders? Report? Report?"

Somewhere behind them, apparently at some distance, a siren began to wail. The lights above them flickered. Ahead, a door was slammed shut.

"Chill's on," Finnegan muttered.

"Let's go," Ryan said.

Moving quickly but with stealth, they approached the nearest entrance to the research section, which was just around the next turn. Oddly the screeching siren had stopped.

Suddenly around the corner came the two pretty young women they'd seen on the day of their arrival at Wizard Island — Louella Hall and Angie Pflaug. A sec man walked behind them, carrying cleaning tools, ready for the two blue-eyed blond girls to have an antisocial accident.

"Central be with you," Dr. Pflaug said, already starting to giggle at the sight of Jak's bleached hair.

"White head was for anthrax-derivative testing at C in amber," Dr. Hall said, her fingers working nervously at the collar of her cherry-red lab coat. "Why with you? And uniformwise unorthodoxy?"

Ryan had the ruthless instincts of the true killer, but even he hesitated at chilling these poor, mentally deprived girls. They were merely victims of a crazed policy of research and inbreeding.

"Terminate them all," Dr. Pflaug said, hardly able to speak to the sec guard due to her rising laughter.

"They're mine," Jak said.

And they were.

Ryan admired the careful way the fourteen-year-old braced his right hand with his left, steadying the heavy pistol against the inevitable kick. The boom of the shots was deafening in the narrow corridor.

The first bullet pierced the front of the guard's helmet, carrying splinters of black plastic with it into pulpy brain tissue. Blood spurted all over the cream colored walls. For a moment, as the powder smoke drifted around them, the two young scientists continued to snigger, holding onto each other, their laughter as bright and tinkling as drops of crystal.

The double crack of the big Magnum drowned out their chuckles.

One bullet went through the neck of Dr. Angie Pflaug, sending a torrent of blood gouting from the burst artery, patterning the ceiling in cherry-red splashes.

One bullet went through the open, laughing mouth of Dr. Louella Hall, exiting at an angle three fingers above her right ear and tearing away a clump of summer-wheat hair and a chunk of bone the size of a man's fist. The force of the impact sucked out most of the woman's diseased, distorted brain.

"It's a good beginning," Doc Tanner said quietly.

The sirens started up again, wailing and shrieking, the pitch rising and falling.

And rising and falling once more.

Ryan was beginning to think it was almost like some lunatic dream. They were moving through this redoubt, buried deep under the waters of Crater Lake, in what had once been the beautiful state of Oregon. They were killing security men in handfuls, even wiping out the protected scientists.

And there was no comeback.

Only one sec man guarded the main entrance as the seven friends came within sight of it. His back was turned, a laser rifle slung across his black-clad shoulder. The dark mirrored visor stared blankly away from them, toward a moving pattern of colored lights that danced over the top of the door. Near him was a sign that read, Absolutely No Admittance Without Authorization and Accreditation.

"That one's fucking mine," Finnegan hissed, baring his teeth delightedly at such an easy target.

At that moment the speakers around them clicked to life. "All security operatives go to condition red. Repeat condition red. Weapons into full termination mode. Repeat condition red. Any person without clearance to be eradicated without warning. Condition red."

Ryan glanced at the others. "Got to be a quick decision."

"What?" Krysty asked.

"We can run for the elevator. Mebbe steal one of those boat wags. Doubt they'll come after us."

"But we must destroy this nest of evil and corruption," Doc Tanner protested.

"Sure," Ryan agreed. "But it's not up to me to order everyone to risk their lives. Chances are we can get away free if we run now."

"I never run from fucking nobody," Finnegan said. "And you don't get better chances than this, since it's a hundred to one their fucking blasters don't work."

"We go in and try to blow the complex. Or we get out now. Who stays?"

The only one to hesitate was Jak; the others immediately raised their hands. The albino sniffed. "Sure. Why not?" And he also lifted his hand.

"You don't have to, kid," Ryan said. "This isn't your fight."

Jak shook his head. "Wrong. If it's your fight, then it's mine."

"Then we go. Finn?"

"Sure," he said, hefting his Heckler & Koch submachine gun. "I'll take him out on triple-shot."

"Don't take any risks," Ryan warned.

The blaster's chubby face creased into a broad grin. "That's way weird, old friend. Have you ever known Thomas O'Flaherty Fingal Finnegan ever do anything as fucking stupid as take a fucking risk?"