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  The stairwell opened up on the south end of the hall, on the left-hand, or eastern, side. It was built to rely on the wall of the structure itself for support, probably to economize both on space and building materials. Like the kitchen and gaudy annexes and the rest, the upper stories had been added onto the Bodacious Creek Trading Post and Hostelry over the decades. That was plain to see.

  The fact played both for them and against them tactically. A freestanding case that switched back along the north-south axis rather than one wall would have allowed room for all of them to stand around and blast downward, possibly clear down to ground floor. But it would also allow the invaders more scope to shoot up at them. And while Ryan was slide-lock certain the Bloods wouldn’t try any of the tricks that would have been obvious had they just been looking to rub out the little group, like filling the floor below with blasters and just shooting upward through the wood floors until they could be sure they’d riddled everything larger than a particularly lucky mouse, he couldn’t feel confident they wouldn’t open up if they saw clear targets that clearly weren’t a little girl.

  There was just room for the four people with full-auto blasters to line up, either leaning over the rail or at the head of the stairs: J.B., Mildred, Doc and Krysty.

  “Eyes skinned,” Ryan said to Ricky and Jak, who waited with him in the corridor back from the stairs. “The only way the bastards can come is up those stairs, so—”

  “No!” It was Jak, his ruby eyes blazing. “Climb outside!”

  “Fireblast! What was I thinking!”

  The answer is, you weren’t, he told himself savagely. But in a brief thought he realized that was another example of what he’d meant to Mariah, that they couldn’t come to rely on just one person. Not even him.

  “Right. We need to spread out and start cycling through the rooms and the far end of the hall, checking for somebody trying that.” It wasn’t likely, he calculated, but he didn’t want to get back-shot because of relying on what he thought the enemy would do, rather than on what they could. And if they got frustrated at taking casualties trying to bull up the stairs...

  “Mariah? Can you give us a hand on this?”

  She nodded so hard her pigtails whipped up and down. She was painfully eager to do her part, even if it didn’t entail any terrible reality-distorting mutie power.

  “Then let’s start rolling,” he said, then turned to move to the window of the bedroom where Krysty and he had spent most of last night not sleeping.

  Would it be their last night? He couldn’t help but wonder.

  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.
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br />   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.

  * * *

  TO 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 tha
t 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.