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guys did somethin' to him, took him off from someplace. But he never said
where, when, why. Can't understand the guy sometimes, talks to ya like he's
talkin' to a buncha kids. Shit, I dunno, Ryan that's it."
"What about this fog?"
"Oh, yeah. He's lookin' for a fog." Teague tried laughing, but then thought
better of the idea. "Thass what he says, lookin' for a fog, special kind of
fog. I dunno what the hell he means, Ryan. He says that on the other side
life's better. He's burned out. Rads've eaten his brain away."
"Didn't look like he had the Plague to me, Teague."
"No, no. He's fit enough, yeah. Brain-fucked is all."
"Those two balls. Eggs."
"S'all he had with him, Ryan, when he came into town. Y'gotta believe me.
Didn't have nothin else. Some kind of metal, goes crazy when you take 'em off
him.
Cort gets off on doin' that, takin' 'em away from him. Guy has a fuckin' fit."
Koll suddenly reappeared. His face was set.
"Nothing out back, but there are lights heading up this way."
Samantha the Panther came through the curtains.
"J.B. says& "
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"Lights. Yeah." Ryan gestured at Teague. "Take him out front, where we came
in."
He ran back to the entrance hallway, then up the stairs to the second story.
Rintoul emerged from the shadows and pointed to a room. Ryan padded across to
where
J.B. was hunched against a window frame.
"Two trucks and a buggy. Could be Strasser."
Ryan peered out. The arcs were still flickering, but in their nervous
illumination
Ryan could see what J.B. had seen. The trucks had reached the front of the
house below and were stopping, the buggy sweeping in from behind. A tall,
gauntly built man, bareheaded and black garbed, emerged from the front of the
buggy, followed by two sec men.
"Yeah."
Strasser was staring around, peering to the left and right as though looking
for someone.
"And they don't know we're here. He's looking for the guards we iced."
Ryan rerigged the LAPA and brought out his SIG-Sauer. He sighted on the roof-
mounted spotlight of the buggy and put a round into it. There was a crash of
glass, a sharp metallic clang and the light went dead. Strasser jumped, his
head jerking up as his hand reached at his coat.
Ryan shouted, "You're dead first, Strasser. Whatever happens."
Strasser stared upward, his skull-like face expressionless.
"Ryan. Might've guessed you'd still be loose. But what can you expect when you
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employ imbeciles."
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J.B. muttered, "I'll go down. Get Henn and the rest. Get the door open."
Ryan called out, "You killed a lot of our people, Strasser."
The bony man shrugged but said nothing.
"Tell the trucks to beat it, and tell them not to mess up when we come out.
Get your men out of the buggy."
"Why should I do that, Ryan?" Strasser's voice, like his face, was
expressionless.
"We got Teague."
Strasser pursed his lips, then shrugged again and nodded slowly. He began to
turn away.
"And don't move from that spot, shithead."
Strasser stood still, pointed at the trucks, began talking quickly to the two
men with him. One of them went to the buggy, his voice a mutter of sound. Ryan
watched as goons began climbing out of the buggy, five in all. The trucks
revved up, backed off from the house and turned, disappearing down the
driveway into the darkness beyond the arc lights' beams. Ryan could see their
headlamps cutting into the blackness. The men who had come from the buggy
began to back away from the vehicle onto the grass.
"J.B.!"
Below him he saw light spill out from the opening door and he turned and raced
back across the room, into the corridor, down the stairs, the SIG still
clutched in his right hand.
"Let's go."
He shoved the SIG at Teague's head, and Teague whimpered as they moved out of
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the house toward Strasser and the buggy.
"We go to where the Trader is, we go to where the train is, and then we go."
Strasser said, "Fortunes of war, Ryan," His hands came out in a wide-armed
shrug. "So near, and yet so far. Ah, well& "
There was something wrong here, but Ryan couldn't figure out what it was. He
knew Strasser. Strasser was too cool far too cool. Then in the same moment
that he saw muzzle-flash from the buggy interior, Teague's head exploded like
an overripe fruit, spraying him with blood, brains and homogenized bone. The
double crack of the shots came a microsecond later. Teague lurched, collapsed
into him soundlessly, and the dead bulk of the man shoved him groundward,
knocking the SIG from his grasp. There was another, longer, burst of fire and
a crazed yell from behind, then Strasser was screaming, "
Hold it
!"
Ryan heaved at Teague, rolled him off, as icy phantom fingers insinuated
themselves into his stomach. What a jerk-off, he thought disgustedly. Then
Strasser was above him, a handgun gripped in his gloved hand, its barrel
inches from Ryan Cawdor's good eye.
"Don't twitch.
Shithead!"
The gaunt man's voice was a crow of delight and malevolent triumph. "Thought
you had an ace, hmm? Tough titty. Now you're going to be telling me about all
those ingenious boobies you have." He laughed softly. Chillingly. "Jordan was
redundant, Ryan. So are you."
Chapter Nine
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THEY HADN'T BOTHERED to take his watch, and the thought pounded his brain like
hammer blows that time was running out& running out&
running out
.
But they'd take the SIG, the LAPA, his grenades, the contents of his belt
pouches
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and the four sticks for the LAPA. All the obvious stuff. And although they'd
left him his belt, they'd checked it thoroughly.
But they had not checked his boots, his thick-soled combat boots, and they had
not checked his long fur-lined coat. Oh, sure, they'd gone through the
pockets, all of them, the obvious places, but once they'd finished that task,
under Cort
Strasser's gimlet gaze, they had handed it back to him.
"Where you're going, Ryan, you might get cold. And we wouldn't want that."
Very funny.
And they had not checked his scarf, the white scarf of thick silk he'd found
in a trunk in an attic in an old abandoned house on the borders of the
Swamplands down south. It was a fine scarf, an elegant scarf, a scarf that had
once surely belonged to a man of substance who had used it for those very [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]