James Axler - Crater Lake

"Yeah," Ryan said, grinning back. "Too many fucking times, Finn."

He watched the man move out around the corner, pausing to flatten the smooth black fur collar of his gray leather coat. The sec man turned to face Finnegan, leveling the stubby laser-blaster on him.

"Identification or termination now," the mutie's voice box croaked.

"This here SMG's all the fucking identification I need, you mutie bastard," Finnegan growled.

"Chill him now, Finn," Ryan called urgently.

"Now," Krysty cried, her voice edged with sudden panic.

Finn half turned to reassure them, just as the sec guard fired his blaster. There was a piercing hum, and a dazzling streak of amethyst light hit Finn squarely in the chest.

He screamed, something that sounded, through the shock and agony, like "Hundred to fucking one, Ma!"

It was a hideous passing.

Over the bloody years Ryan Cawdor had seen many men and women meet their Maker. Few of them had gone peacefully into that long night. But he had never seen anyone chilled in such an appalling way as his friend Finnegan.

The blind perversity of the fates had dictated that the laser rifle of the sec man functioned perfectly — for just long enough.

Unlike a single bullet, the beam of light from a high-power military laser acts more like a directional, narrow strip of extreme heat. A bullet drills a hole through flesh, the exit hole generally markedly bigger than the entrance wound. Not so with a laser. It is precisely the same size as it exits the human body as when it entered.

Also, light has no mass, so there is no impact. As the laser struck Finnegan, it didn't lift him off his feet, or throw him backward, nothing initially as dramatic as that.

But the power was so awesome that in the instant the blaster came to life its vivid blue beam had penetrated clean through the helpless Finn, hitting the wall only a couple of paces to the left of J.B., who immediately threw himself flat on the floor, hands over his head as chunks of liquid concrete and charred wood fell from the side of the corridor.

Along one wall, Ryan watched the termination in impotent horror, seeing that nothing could be done for the doomed man.

Stinking smoke erupted from the front and back of Finn's coat, tiny flames flaring red and yellow. Every staggering movement of the dying man only increased his horrific suffering. His skin was scorched black, the flesh broiled by the immense power of the blaster. The heat was so intense that the wretch's intestines began to explode and melt, and his blood boiled instantly where the laser had touched him.

As Finn dropped, his own blaster clattering on the tiles, the sec man kept the trigger down, almost slicing the beefy man into segments with the blaster's ferocity.

"Oh, no, no, no, no..." Krysty moaned softly, one hand resting lightly on Ryan's arm.

As the body lay smoldering on the floor, the blue light stopped as suddenly as it had started. The sec mutie looked down at the blaster and banged his fist on the control dial, frustrated that the weapon had ceased functioning.

"Mine," Ryan said. He stooped and put his G-12 caseless down, placing the SIG-Sauer 9 mm pistol alongside it. Then he moved out of cover, and walked toward the helmeted guard, loosening the white silk scarf from around his neck.

"Don't, lover," Krysty said, trying to pull him back around the corner.

"I'll chill him from here," J.B. said.

"No," Ryan said very quietly. "This is what the good Dr. Tardy might call a hands-on termination, revengewise. Got to be."

He shrugged off their warnings and stepped toward the sentry.

Closing in on the mutie, Ryan carefully avoided the stinking corpse, where bodily fluids still bubbled and seeped. The guard backed clumsily away until his helmet rang against the door.

Ryan looped the silken scarf in his hands carefully, his eyes locked on the reflective visor of the sec man's black carapace. The lower edge of the mutie's helmet didn't quite settle on his squat, muscular neck, leaving a couple of inches of pallid flesh exposed.

The muzzle of the blaster rose to cover Ryan's groin and lower belly. Despite his limitless courage, the one-eyed man winced. Having seen the shambles that Finnegan had become would have been enough to make any normal man fall to his knees and bury his head in his hands, weeping.

Not Ryan Cawdor.

"You just chilled one of the best, bravest men I ever knew," he said in a normal, conversational voice. "Friends are rare. Good friends rarer. And you chilled him, you heartless mutie bastard!" he shouted in sudden anger as he stepped closer.

He swung the weighted end of the scarf so that it lashed out and whipped around the guard's throat, the end coming back into Ryan's ready fingers.

The sec man tried to get his gauntleted hands up, but he was too slow. The scarf tightened and began to bite into the tender flesh of his neck. Ryan jerked hard at it, pulling the guard forward, so close he could smell the rank sweat on the mutie's body. The helmet bobbled off, and he looked into the dull eyes of the creature who had butchered Finn.

" Die, you fucker ." Ryan kneed the guard in the groin, feeling the satisfying jarring as he caught the mutie's genitals against the bone. As the man slumped, Ryan crossed his wrists, making the silk tighten like fluid steel, immovable, inflexible.

"Die."

The mutie's tongue swelled, his hands fell limp, and his eyes burst from bloodied sockets. A thread of bright crimson blood wormed from his lips and nostrils, and as the creature's body relaxed, Ryan could smell the noisome voiding of bowels and bladder.

Ryan unwound his scarf from the guard's neck, prizing it from the deep furrowed folds in the corpse's flesh. He wrapped it back around his own neck, feeling better for the killing, not stopping to mourn for Finnegan. There'd be time for that.

Later.

A piece of plas the size of a button, a five-second fuse and a tiny copper detonator, that was all it took for the six to blast their way inside the holy of holies at the Wizard Island Complex for Scientific Advancement. The small explosion shook their ears, and then the outer door swung back.

The scientists, finally realizing they were under serious attack from the primitive outsiders, had taken precautions.

A handful of sec guards, blasters ready, were lined up to meet the intruders. There were six of them, but not one managed to fire his laser rifle. Each was gunned down on the spot in a hectic burst of shooting from the corridor.

Leaping over jerking corpses, nearly slipping in the spreading pools of turgid blood, Ryan led his friends in.

"Fireblast!" he exclaimed, stopping dead inside the doorway, the others nearly knocking him over.

They'd realized the research part of the complex must be enormous, but even in their wildest imaginings they hadn't figured on anything quite as massive as this.

Spidery scaffolding rose thirty stories high, interlocking in a delicate tracery of dulled metal. A viper's nest of colored conduits and pipes wound in and out, so far above them that they seemed like thin wires. Red and green and orange and vivid blue. There were three basic sections within the research area, marked simply Land, Sea and Air & Space. Each one seemed to vanish into the diminishing distance. Each was bigger than fifty aircraft hangars.

A long list on the wall showed the innumerable subsections of research.

A catalogue of inhumanity and megadeath:

Chemical.

Medical.

Nerve toxins.

Sight.

Audio-destroyers.

Neural synapse breakers.

RPV.

"What's that?" Ryan asked.

"It stands for Remotely Piloted Vehicles," Doc Tanner answered. "It was big around the end of the century."