Ryan, Krysty and Doc entered the ruin. Jak was already inside, leading the way. Mildred followed.
As she stepped inside she heard J.B. murmur something behind her. She glanced back to see Ricky nodding and grinning.
“Best keep moving,” J.B. said to Mildred.
The interior of the fallen-in building alternated shadow and shafts of sunlight from holes in the overhead. It stank worse of death than the stickies’ parking structure had.
As she followed immediately behind Krysty, Mildred quickly found out why. The path Jak led them on wound down hallways and through broken walls. A bloated torso lay against a wall inside a room next to one they passed through. Mildred couldn’t tell what sex it had been. A head with long, dark hair was turned away from them.
She reckoned that was fortunate. Along with being mottled red and yellow and green from rot, the chill had neither arms nor legs. The wounds visible through big tears in the gray-on-gray plaid flannel shirt gave Mildred the impression it had been partially eaten.
By something big.
To her physician’s eye those marks had been inflicted postmortem. She didn’t find that terribly reassuring.
To her relief she was quickly outside in the sun again. Almost immediately her relief vanished. Her group had come out on the south side of the building—meaning they were now headed back toward their pursuers.
Then she realized they were east of the street she’d last seen their enemies on. And the sight lines between were blocked by fields of high weeds. In the middle of it stood the remains of a small shantytown. The small, frail constructions, knocked together from random bits of rubble, trash and scavvy, were all the more pathetic for having obviously been trashed and abandoned. Some were no more than burned-out skeletons of charred tree limbs and twisted metal rods.
As they headed southeast, Ricky trotted out of the ruin to join them. “Did you do like I asked, Ricky?” J.B. said to him.
Ricky nodded vigorously. “Yes, sir!”
“Good man.”
Jak led them through the weeds toward a dark gray building that showed them a long, blank face. No windows were visible, only some intact ducts on the level above the street.
He moved toward the northeast end of the mostly blank wall, near an abutting building that had several more stories with glass in the windows. It might have been an annex of the first one. A loading bay door stood open between shrubby trees. The albino slipped up a ramped walkway to the bay’s far side. He crouched next to it and looked in.
Then he looked back at his friends and nodded. But he held up a hand in the sign for caution.
A crackle sounded from behind the companions. It quickly expanded into a storm of gunfire. Mildred reflexively ducked, then turned back. She saw nothing but the weeds, the shantytown and the red-faced ruin.
“Fireblast!” Ryan exclaimed. “What the nuke?”
“Ricky left them one of the little surprises he’s been working on,” J.B. said, as proud as a new poppa.
Ricky blushed. “Nothing lethal. Just a string of black-powder firecrackers with a tripwire and a pull initiator left in the front door of the place we just left. It works just the same as a firefight simulator.”
“That does not sound simulated,” Doc declared as the blasterfire continued to rage from the direction of the derelict building.
“It’s not,” J.B. said, “now.”
“Triple clever,” Ryan told them. “Now get your asses in gear. That won’t keep the bastards busy long.”
Ryan went up the ramp to where Jak still hunkered down by the yawning bay. The albino gave way for him to take a quick look inside. Then the taller man straightened and walked in.
“Because the walk-in-like-we-own-the-place thing worked so well last time,” Mildred said grumpily.
“Have some faith,” Ricky said earnestly.
“Famous last words,” Mildred replied. But she followed her friends into the relative darkness.
* * *
“COMPANY,” JAK SAID QUIETLY.
Ryan halted a few steps inside the loading bay. As he had ascertained, not much mileage could be gained by skulking. The bay opened into a large open space two stories high, with a gallery running along the far end. The stained concrete floor had been picked bare of everything except scattered trash.
It smelled of concrete and decaying greenery. At least it didn’t smell as if any chills had decomposed in here recently, Ryan thought.
His hands were empty. As risks went, it was carefully calculated. If whoever was in here was hostile and started blasting from ambush, if they did or did not have weapons wouldn’t make much difference. But whether or not they showed blasters might make a major difference as to whether anybody in here started shooting at them.
Ryan’s gamble was based on a simple judgment call. Should they go into a potential hiding place where they might find trouble, or stay outside where they knew trouble was actively hunting them?
As J.B. and Krysty stepped up to flank him, a voice called down to them from the gallery.
“Well, well, well. What have we here?”
It was a man’s voice, sarcastic but nonthreatening.
“Name’s Cawdor,” Ryan called back. “We’re outlanders just looking for a place to lie up a bit.”
A man stepped out of a darkened doorway on the upper level. He was average height, broad across the shoulders but not carrying much extra weight that Ryan could tell by his dark T-shirt and black cargo pants. His mustache and the shock of black hair hanging over his forehead made his face look pale. A handblaster rode in a flapped holster at his left hip. Ryan couldn’t make out the kind.
“Lie up, huh?” the man said. “Sounds to me like you might have something to hide out from.”
Ryan shrugged. “It’s easy finding trouble in a ville this size. We’re not looking for any.”
“I think they’re trying to jump our scavvy, Nikk,” a second voice said.
It belonged to a woman who emerged from the doorway behind him. She was about the same height as her partner and had short brown hair sprouting from a grimy camo headband. She wore a rust-colored halter top with overstuffed cargo shorts, and an MP5-K machine pistol rested in a right-hand cross-draw holster strapped in front of them.
“Always the cynic, Patch,” he said as she took her place at the railing alongside him.
She shrugged. “Realist.” Her manner was as cool as it was skeptical. “Somebody’s gotta be, with a dreamer like you in charge.”
He chuckled indulgently. “At least they were smart enough to come in with their hands empty,” he told her.
Then to Ryan he said, “We’ve got blasters on you.”
“I figured,” Ryan said. “So it doesn’t look as if you’ve got much to fear from us, does it?”
“Could be a trick,” the woman said.
Nikk laughed out loud. “It could always be a trick,” he said. “That’s what makes it a game.”
“Razor Eddie’s reporting from the rooftop, Nikk,” another man’s voice called out the door. The speaker didn’t appear. “Says a gang is heading this way. Well armed. Thinks they’re the Desolation Angels.”
