Devil's Vortex (19 page)

Chapter Twenty-Six

Krysty saw a head topped with a blue and pink dyed Mohawk appear at the foot of the stairs on the landing below. It looked upward at her.

Dark eyes with yellow stripes painted beneath them went wide in a dark face—a heartbeat before Krysty shattered that face with three point-blank 5.56 mm slugs.

Through the ringing in her ears she heard startled curses, then worried shouts. She could also hear muffled shots and other noises that she guessed came from the bottom floor. Apparently some of the defenders continued to hold out down there. But just as obviously the coldhearts were focused on being the first to grab the prize, even with the mopping up in progress.

She shouted, “Back!” as a hand holding an MP5 with its stock folded poked its way into view and cut loose blindly, straight up the well.

The unseen shooter ripped off three bursts, somehow keeping control of the weapon despite using one hand, and that with the wrist turned in an uncomfortable, weak position. Or so Krysty guessed, because none of the bullets came up through the floor or even hit the railing.

Then during a break came a yellow flash, a single echoing shot and a thump.

“Hold your fire, you taints!” a man’s voice yelled. “We want the girl alive and unharmed. That means no blasters!”

“But Loco,” another male voice protested. “They’s waitin’ on us up there, with machine blasters and shit!”

“Who said you were gonna live forever, Wings? Now—
Bloods, draw blood!
”

Evidently the little inspirational speech, such as it was, worked better on the Bloods than it would have on Krysty. Or maybe the lust for glory and renown—and even a warrior’s death—helped switch whatever common sense members of the Plains’ fastest-growing crew of coldhearts possessed in the first place.

Because here they came in a rush, swarming into view from beneath her feet, trampling the body that had slumped on its back with half a face staring up with a single, perpetually astonished eye. The first few slipped on blood and brains spilling out of the shattered cranium.

She dropped the lead man with a burst to the head to the top landing and fired right into the face of the coldheart now in the lead from not much more than six feet away. He toppled backward onto the two right behind him. Krysty got a brief impression of the man’s face looking as if its bearded features were being sucked into a black hole where the nose used to be. Then the two struggling with the floppy deadweight chill went down screaming and spraying from multiple hits from bursts fired by Doc and Mildred in hellish counterpoint.

For a moment the Bloods kept pushing on, clambering over the dead and thrashing wounded. A confused tangle of leather and sweaty skin writhed to halfway up the stairway, like a mating ball of giant rattlesnakes. Krysty switched to single shot after a second burst. So did Mildred and Doc, who was a fast learner despite his appearance as a doddering old man. There was no point in wasting cartridges.

The rush faltered, then stopped. A couple of injured Bloods were dragged back moaning and howling. At least six stayed motionless on the steps. The bodies were too intertwined for Krysty to count.

“Time to reload,” J.B. advised.

“You first, John,” Mildred said. “Yours takes longer.”

He grinned at her and pulled up his Mini UZI on its sling. “Fastest reload,” he said. “New York carry.”

“Not usually applied to longblasters,” Mildred said, popping the partially spent magazine out of the M16 and pulling a new one out of a jacket pocket.

“Everything holding?” Ryan asked, slipping out of the room right behind Krysty.

“So far,” she said. “Only tried once yet.”

He nodded and crossed the hall to check the west side for ambitious wall climbers. Beyond him she caught a glimpse of Mariah crossing the other direction. She had a pink spot on her cheek and a big smile. She seemed to be having fun.

It was a game for her. For now.

Gaia, please help me keep it that way for her.
But in her belly Krysty knew that was a prayer even the Earth Mother couldn’t answer.

“This time, hang back,” she said. “Wait for my word.”

Doc and Mildred looked at her in momentary confusion. “I like the way you think, Krysty,” J.B. said with a quick grin.

He had let go of his Mini UZI to reload the shotgun after all. He finished, chambered a shell, then topped off the tubular magazine.

A rising pitch and volume of shouts from below clued Krysty to the next rush. She clicked the selector switch back to 3-round-burst mode and on they came.

This time she let the lead, a gaunt, incredibly tall black woman, scramble up the hump of chills that remained of the first attempt. Other coldhearts followed hard on her moccasined heels. When she was within a few steps of the top floor, Krysty shouted, “Now!”

J.B. pivoted onto the top-floor landing and fired his recharged M-4000 into her chest so close her vest was smoking when she toppled backward.

Krysty, Doc and Mildred ripped short bursts into her followers.

Already burned once, the Bloods recoiled almost at once, leaving one form writhing and three chills atop the heap. The stairway looked as if somebody had doused the walls with a couple gallons of red paint. The bodies were slimed with gore.

The well had already filled with that old, familiar smell, half slaughterhouse, half unlimed outhouse. Krysty, at least, had never gotten used to it, no matter how many times she came across it or how much time she spent in its unwelcome company. And it would only get worse until it got better.

Somebody was shouting authoritatively from out of sight on the floors below. The chill on the bottom started to slide out of view from overhead as a Blood snagged an ankle and hauled on it. J.B. threw a shot that way, but the coldheart ducked back too fast.

The chill vanished. The pile slid down. A leg flopped out of sight onto the second floor. Somebody had to have grabbed it, too, because that body vanished, as well.

The rest of the pile of casualties slid and tumbled to the base of the stairs. Despite a few shots and dark muttering from J.B., the rest were cleared away with hoes and a rake, presumably looted from a trading-post shed.

“How’s it going?” Ryan called from behind.

Krysty looked back. He smiled and gave her a wink. She winked back.

“Still breathing,” J.B. said.

“They’re up to something down there,” Mildred stated.

“I expected them to resume their headlong assault up the stairs,” Doc opined, “once they had gotten them cleared of bodies.”

“That’s what I mean,” Mildred said. “Somebody wised up.”

“What else can they do?” Doc asked.

“If they look long enough, they’ll find something,” Ryan said. He waved at Jak, Ricky and Mariah, who had come out into the hall to see what was going on. “Back to window watch. Trying to outflank us is the most obvious thing to do.”

Jak pointed right at Krysty.
“Gren!”
he screamed.

She spun. Sheer reflex or Gaia’s subtle prodding caused her to bring up her left hand, fast, in a protective gesture. By luck she whapped something round and hard with the back of her hand, causing it to fall back down to the second floor.

“Flash-bang!” J.B. yelled. “Duck and cover!”

Letting her M16 drop—her sling kept it from hitting the floor—Krysty turned her face to the wall and pressed her hands against her ears.

The flash-bang went off with a splintering crack. The accompanying flash lit the grimy fly-specked wall in front of her. That species of gren was intended not to harm, but to stun its victims with a combination of a blast of intense high-frequency sound and a dazzling burst of light.

Even though she avoided the direct brunt of those effects, the sheer shocking power of the blast made her focus waver ever so slightly.

Not for long, though. She grabbed the longblaster again and started turning back to the well. Even though the flash-bang had gone off in the Bloods’ own faces, she expected those who weren’t stunned to charge up the steps immediately.

She heard Ricky shout, “More grens!”

Then motion blurred out of the stairwell before her eyes. Something exploded against the right side of her head.

It was as if a shaped charge had gone off in her head. She fell against the wall, dazed and half-conscious.

* * *

T
O
 
HIS
 
COMPLETE
 
SURPRISE
,
Ryan saw a big half-naked Blood vault the banister right in front of Krysty and, with his body almost horizontal, kick her in the side of the head with a massive black boot.

“Krysty!” he shouted. He turned back from the door of the bedroom he’d been going into, bringing up his SIG handblaster in his left hand.

The big coldheart landed directly in front of him, grabbed the SIG’s muzzle with his right hand and, by twisting it toward the back of that hand, tweaked in straight from his grip.

“You are worthy opponents,” the man said with a huge white grin splitting his boot-leather colored face. He threw the blaster down and struck at Ryan with the steel-handled hatchet he held in his left hand.

Ryan fell into the bedroom and slid back into the bed. The gleaming blade cleaved air. The big Blood paused with his head and upper torso inside the door while several more flash-bangs went off with a ripple of thunder cracks that dwarfed the blasters that had been firing in the enclosed space.

The bedroom and the coldheart’s own bulk shielded Ryan from the worst of the effects. The coldheart barely blinked.

Instead he drew a second one-piece steel hatchet from a brightly beaded holster at his right hip and charged at Ryan.

The one-eyed man brought his boots up and fired a double heel kick just below the Blood’s beadwork belt. The shot hit true. It wasn’t aimed at the big bastard’s nuts, but rather against his pelvis.

Ryan did not feel bone break, which was a shame, because that would have meant the coldheart’s legs would quit working altogether—they just, mechanically, wouldn’t pick him up again. But he achieved the desired effect: he shot his assailant’s center of gravity right out from under him. His legs shot out behind, and his big block chin and a bare right shoulder slammed the floorboards pretty much in unison.

As he jumped to his feet, Ryan heard blasters going off in the hallway and a tumult of confused shouting. He saw bodies thronging behind the fallen coldheart, and his heart dropped to the bottom of his stomach.

But the Blood bounced right straight up, still grinning, though his big white grin was rimmed and twined with blood. He rushed Ryan, aiming a long, looping overhand swing of the hatchet in his right hand at his opponent’s head.

Without having to form conscious thought, Ryan realized the Blood warrior’s intent was that Ryan block the skull-splitter stroke with his panga. Or get his skull split. Either one.

If Ryan did block with his heavy knife, the coldheart was going to chop off or break his right arm with his left-hand hatchet. And after that, he had pretty much clear sailing to however he wanted to chill his enemy.

Instead Ryan skip-stepped to his left, not crossing his feet in the process. He aimed a backhand cut at the coldheart’s right shoulder.

The big bastard was fast. He twisted and went down to his left knee, catching the panga in his crossed hatchets. Steel sparked on steel.

The Blood snapped his hands apart, attempting to scissor the panga between them to pluck it from Ryan’s grasp, much the way the man had his blaster. Ryan saw that coming. No sooner had the blades rung off each other than he turned clockwise, pulling the panga blade straight back out of jeopardy.

He made use of his turning momentum to launch a thrust kick with his left boot. The Blood tucked his right forearm against his chest, taking the blow there. Propelled by Ryan cocking his own pelvis back as he kicked and turning on his plant foot, it wasn’t so much hard as forceful. It knocked the coldheart sprawling on his side.

He rolled away from Ryan’s attempted heel stomp and scrambled to his feet facing him. Ryan swung the panga backhand for his enemy’s face. The man brought up his right-hand hatchet vertically to block. Then he lashed out with the weapon in his left hand.

Ryan danced back. He found himself teetering briefly as the edge of the bed caught him at the backs of his calves.

Seeing his opponent’s momentary loss of balance, the coldheart bull-rushed him.

Ryan snatched up the scratchy wool blanket and threw it over the coldheart’s head and shoulders, then he dodged to his right.

The Blood, blinded, blundered into the bed, tripped on it and fell on his face on the straw-filled mattress. Resilient and agile as always, he immediately pushed up on his brawny arms.

Ryan reversed his hold on the panga. Holding the hilt in both hands, he plunged the broad blade down between the coldheart’s left shoulder blade and spine with all his strength and weight.

Though it did come to a point, of sorts, the massive African knife was not really meant for stabbing. But it punched through skin, muscle and bone, to gash open the left lung and cut the heart almost in two. The man’s body heaved once, then he uttered a gargling roar that ended in a bubbling whistle. He slumped down lifeless, half on the bed, half off.

Putting a foot on the middle of the chill’s back, Ryan wrenched the panga free. He turned back to the door.

The room exploded in blue-white light and a sound so loud it was painful.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Eye dazzled, ears deafened by a ringing like gigantic temple bells, Ryan swayed. He barely felt whatever hard thing it was—rifle butt, table leg, or bat—that clubbed him down to the floor and pounded him mercilessly on the ribs. The panga was yanked out of his hand as more blows landed on his skull.

He was dazed, nauseated and tasting blood when he was dragged by a male and female pair of Bloods out into the hall. He saw several of his companions lying pinned beneath several coldhearts apiece, including J.B. and Krysty. Doc lay slumped against a wall with the visible side of his face a bruise. A Blood woman danced around swearing and flapping her gashed and bloody palm as a burly man hammered a laughing Jak to the floorboards with the butt of a Mossberg 500 pump shotgun.

All this Ryan made out through balloon-like purple patches floating in his vision. Gradually his eye cleared. The intolerable ringing dwindled to a sort of roar.

From the last bedroom on the west side, a large male Blood with black leather straps crossed over his hairy chest like fetish suspenders came out dragging Mariah by both pigtails clutched in a paw. He stopped and called something. Ryan heard blobs of sound but no words.

Mariah grabbed the Blood’s wrist with both hands. He ignored her, laughing. Somehow she twisted her head around and sank her teeth into the hand that held her hair.

Ryan heard the coldheart’s roar of surprised pain, although dimly, as though he had a blanket on his head. He yanked his hand away, then used it to backhand Mariah to the floor.

“Bad call,” Ryan heard himself say inside his own skull.

The girl instantly sat up. Blackness streamed from her eyes. It spun itself around the big Blood, who was so startled he froze.

In an eyeblink a cocoon of swirling blackness enveloped him. Bits of pale skin and swatches of blood whipped around the cloud.

Ryan’s hearing returned almost fully in time for him to hear the coldheart’s shriek of unendurable agony.

Two scraps of black leather, still joined by a steel buckle, bounced off one wall with a musical sound.

“Stay down!” Mariah shouted.

Ricky, who was being held up by a pair of Bloods while a third punched him in the stomach, sagged abruptly to his knees. The cloud jumped up, gouged through the ceiling into the attic and swept forward with its base at a height of five feet.

This time it cut all three coldhearts apart and dropped their lower halves intact to the floor. Ryan wondered if she meant to do that, or if it was even something in her control.

Both hands that had been holding Ricky’s wrists fell to the planking. The youth threw himself down on his face and covered his head with both hands.

The coldheart who sat astride Jak, pinning his arms to his sides with her leather-clad thighs and methodically punching his face, had turned her spike-haired head at the sound of her comrade’s dying scream. Now she saw the cloud plunging toward her face and opened her mouth for a scream of her own.

The cloud took her head first. Somehow it sucked her right up off the supine Jak, shredding her as it did.

“Mariah—” Ryan croaked.

She didn’t hear him, or if she did, she gave no sign. The girl was on her feet now, her right arm stretched out in front of her, controlling the devil vortex’s dance with a hand like a white spider. She had a feral light in her eyes and a slight, twisted smile set on her lips.

He rotated his head the other way. The coldhearts were beginning to galvanize to life. It was already too late. Ryan saw one man with long hair and an eagle feather at his nape jump off one of Krysty’s arms and bolt into the nearest bedroom. Ryan faintly heard glass shatter as he evidently flung himself right through the window.

The cloud expanded until it was as wide as the hall and swept down it to the stairs at waist height. A few legs and hands and weapons hit the warped planks. A chunk was gouged out of the west-side wall as Mariah stalked by Ryan. Then the cloud had shrunk down to scarcely larger than the girl herself. It passed over the rail, hovered briefly, then dropped out of sight as she began to walk down the stairs.

“Ryan!” he heard Krysty say. That restored energy to his limbs, if not stability to his gut, nor his brain inside his head. He staggered up and lumbered down the hall toward her like a grizzly bear loaded to the eyelids on speedballs.

She sprang up, too, and stumbled toward him. Their foreheads came together with a crack.

His head spun freshly and his stomach did a slow roll. Involuntary tears streamed from his eye as he hit his knees hard.

She was on her knees face-to-face with him. They leaned their foreheads together, more gently this time, and both began to laugh.

“Are you two good to go, or are you having a romantic moment?” he heard Mildred ask.

“I’d say neither,” Ryan said. “But I reckon we’ve got to go anyway.”

He was aware there had been screaming downstairs. Now that had stopped. Instead he heard wild shrieks pealing from the street to the east, a crash. A
whoomp
of igniting fuel.

“Fireblast!” he exclaimed. Krysty was already back on her feet. Well, she was younger than he was. She stretched down a hand and reminded him how strong she was by hauling him right up onto his pins as if he weighed no more than Mariah did.

“Here’s your blaster,” Ricky said shyly from behind. Ryan turned and the youth pressed the grips of the SIG into his palm. He closed his fingers around it. “Jak’s got your panga.”

“Thanks,” he said. “Now everybody grab what weapons you can, because we need to get downstairs in a hurry.”

* * *

“D
ARK
 
NIGHT
!”
J.B. said.

They were in what had served for the lobby of the hostelry and the main trading-post floor.

It was now well on its way to being open air. The whole east wall was simply gone, along with some of the ceiling. The rest of the ceiling sagged alarmingly.

“I sure hope this whole place isn’t about to come down on our heads,” Mildred stated.

The ruined room was full of chills. Sadly Krysty recognized some of the Spotted Elk clan among the dead, although most were clearly coldhearts. Helga herself lay facedown across the counter, pinned there with a bayonet through her broad back.

The presence of several dismembered bodies suggested that the cloud had done its work before bursting through the wall.

“Clear,” Jak called, crouched just inside what remained of the wall to the street. Then, “Out here!”

Despite the possible danger, Krysty sprinted out. The sky had clotted with clouds, dark and convoluted and menacing. But they didn’t approach the darkness or the menace of the black funnel cloud, now as tall as the trading post itself, that was walking down the dirt street. It was sucking in the chills and debris as it went. In its wake the bottom half of a Blood wag burned with orange and blue fire. Its top had been sheered clean off, along with the top halves of several Bloods.

The girl followed her nightmare creation. She had her arms out to her sides and was skipping and dancing.

“Fireblast!” Ryan exclaimed. “She’s enjoying this!”

He shouldered his Steyr Scout. Krysty grabbed the short barrel and shoved it up. “Ryan, don’t!”

“Don’t tell me you’re still protecting her.”

“No.” She looked him in the eye. “You.”

He nodded, then lowered the longblaster.

The cloud clipped through the southern end of the gaudy, then cut through the storage area and yard behind the compound building.

“Our wags!” Ricky exclaimed. “They’re back there!”

“We can get new ones,” J.B. said. “Not so easy getting a new
us
.”

The girl vanished, dancing through the ruins. Krysty trotted after her. After a brief hesitation, she sensed her lover following her.

“Eyes peeled, everybody,” Ryan cautioned. “That cloud may be the worst threat in the ville, but it’s not the only one.”

Nevertheless they moved rapidly in the open to the end of the street and around the corner. They steered well clear of the half-eaten annex.

Not even Jak seemed eager to lope ahead as he usually did. He stayed just behind Ryan, alongside his friend Ricky.

The devil’s vortex stalked straight west through the ville, leaving a path cleared almost to the ground and on either side slumping ruin. Mariah skipped behind it, waving her hands gaily in the air.

“Where are the coldhearts?” Doc asked, blinking myopically in the morning sunlight, cloud filtered though it now was.

“Living ones?” Ryan asked. “It looks like they’re bugging out.”

Krysty could see wags driving west across the prairie in apparent panicked flight. What she could see of the mass of fighters, horses and machines beyond them had already started moving in the same direction.

Four people burst out of a collapsing house—a man, a woman with a baby in her arms and a little girl. Krysty could see their fear clearly.

Unfortunately they bolted directly into the path of the black whirlwind.

“Ahh, no!” Mildred cried out. “Those’re civilians.”

The cloud subsumed the fleeing family without slowing.

“What is she doing?” Ricky moaned, as childish but insane-sounding laughter pealed to the sky.

“I know what she’s doing,” Krysty said in a broken voice. “She’s hitting back. Making the whole world pay for every blow she’s taken, every groping at midnight or out behind the shed. Every contemptuous word. The being kept like a slave but treated with less love and respect. She’s trying to make everyone feel her pain.

“I know that feeling. Even if I’d never give in to it.”

Ryan came up and placed a gentle hand on her shoulder.

“Krysty...”

She turned and rested her head against his shoulder. “I know. And you’re right. But for Gaia’s sake, don’t try to chill her yourself. Promise me you won’t—and J.B. either.”

“Do I look triple stupe to you? J.B., mebbe.”

“Count me out. Got precious little hankering to see that cloud from the inside.”

“Oh, boy,” Mildred said gustily, shaking her head. “You guys. Joking at a time like this—”

“You know a better time, Mildred?” Ryan asked.

“I guess not.”

“Come on,” Ryan said. “We need to follow her. At a safe distance.”

“Can there truly be such a distance?” Doc asked.

“I don’t know. Let’s stay back fifty yards and hope for the best.”

He started forward. The others followed.

“Ryan,” Krysty asked, “what are we going to do?”

“Wait until she gets enough of it out of her system to settle down on her own, I guess. Unless you got a better idea?”

Krysty shook her head. Her sentient hair had uncurled itself from the tight cap of curls it usually formed around her head in times of immediate danger. But its tips lashed nervously across her shoulders, like agitated snakes.

“What if she doesn’t settle down,” Mildred asked, “and decides to make that ‘making the whole world pay’ thing all too literal by—I don’t know—having her cloud eat the whole damn planet?”

“Good question,” Ryan said.

He worked the action, opening the bolt far enough to catch a glimpse of dull yellow cartridge brass inside.

“At that point, I guess we do what we can. Because it won’t be like we got a lot left to lose.”