As in slow motion, I saw and heard, all at the same time, as Petra began a high-pitched unearthly screaming. Her arm flew into the air, there was a mysterious floof of sound, the manacle around her wrist glowed a brilliant cobalt blue, and her hand broke free from the end of her arm. There was no blood to speak of, only the raw red ending of flesh, the purple of veins, and the pinkish white of bone.
The end of my arm was going to look the same way in another second. I knew it. As soon as the boyfriend hit the switch.
Here at last came Teagun. Not through the front as every one of us had expected, but running from the hall where the private family rooms were located. He skidded to a halt, catching Petra as, freed from the desk in a way generally only detailed in nightmares, she hurled herself at him. They both fell to the floor and started crawling down the hall. Petra was holding the bloodless stump of her arm out in front of her.
Like an avenging angel, Teagun rose up, lunging over the top of his mother with the big Weatherby Accumark CFP held in one hand. Barely taking time to aim, he squeezed off a shot, the recoil kicking his hand upward. But by then it didn’t matter, because I heard someone howl—only the howl broke off in a bubbling sob. Then nothing.
Petra and Teagun continued their mad scramble toward cover.
My tormentor, callously pressing the gadget in his hand that would cause me to fry, lunged after them. He had a glowing laser tube already pointed, its red beam falling dead center in Teagun’s back.
“Dill! Look out!” I heard Caleb’s stentorian bellow, parade ground stern.
Where was he? What was he doing, besides yelling a warning to the Dills?
He was racking a full-load of buckshot into the boyfriend from a distance of less than six feet, that’s what. Coolly, he let go with a second load. The volley reverberated under the atrium’s glass roof like a bomb. I think the grout holding the waterfall together shivered under the concussion.
When the noise died away, my hand was still attached to my arm and Caleb was throwing himself onto the floor below the rim of one the planters. Leaves fluttered to the ground, settling in a camouflage pattern across his black duster. The nearly silent plumph of a laser tube sheared a few more as I watched.
I know it doesn’t sound like I accomplished a thing, sort of sitting, sort of hanging to the edge of the chair the way I was doing. But in my own defense, the charge from the manacle had temporarily paralyzed me. Feeling already stirred in my legs. Needles and pins, sharp as darts, seemed to be using my shoulders and both arms for target practice. Meanwhile, I was a sitting duck.
There was an outlaw who knew it, too.
One of those red beams, playful as a ray of sunshine, shifted from the indistinct target Caleb made and came to rest on me. Almost languorously, it tracked the rise and fall of my every breath
I looked up, slowly and with tremendous effort, for my eyes weren’t working quite right. A flash of light blue fabric, a length of bright auburn hair, a woman, tall and lithe is all I saw. Adainette, enjoying her sense of domination, was toying with my life.
CHAPTER 21
“Boothenay?” Caleb’s whisper sounded agonized. I felt an intensity in the way he said my name, as though he would lift me out that chair with sheer force of will. “Jesus Christ. Move, sweetheart!”
I wished he could lift me. God knows I hadn’t the strength to move myself. But maybe, just maybe, gravity could do the moving. I let my head fall to one side. My shoulders tilted next, and with the momentum begun, I urged my whole body to go along. I toppled, too slowly it seemed to me, what with that red sight beam already pin-pointing my heart. But as I fell to the side, crashing heavily to the floor on one hip, the back of plastic chair I vacated disintegrated into a million semi- melted shards. One shard clung, burning, melting through the fabric of my jumpsuit into my skin.
I couldn’t walk, I discovered, or even crawl as Petra had done, but I could roll, so roll I did. Right over to where I could hide under the overhanging lip of the waterfall. Red beams charred dots into the floor, chasing me the whole way.
Caleb was partially visible from my vantage point, a dark blob between bushes. He couldn’t see me, though, without poking his head around the side of the planter.
“Boothenay? You hit?”
His low inquiry drew a beam shot burning toward him, hitting no more than two inches from his nose.
“I’m okay,” I said, my tongue slurring the words. I was panting a little because the electronic stun made it hard for my lungs to pump air. That, and the sheer terror of knowing those red beams had me pinned, as well. “Stay put. She’s too far away for you to reach with the shotgun.”
“She?”
“Yeah,” I said, louder now. Loud enough for the glass roof to bounce my words around the upper story. “The horror queen of 2120 is on the second floor with her little flashlight, playing around.”
Caleb quietly chuckled, saying, “You sure it’s wise to egg her on, sugar? She doesn’t appear to have a whole lot of humor in her—or to like you very much.”
“Hah!” I heaved air once or twice, more deeply than before. “No humor, for true. She’s a bunch of piss and wind, ripe and rotten.
Caleb downright laughed. “Piss and wind? You’re getting pretty rough!”
Adainette didn’t care for my opinion. At our words, she lay a pattern of shots between Caleb and me, a pithy reply to our viewpoint. Damn. She couldn’t hit us, whether we were out of her line of fire or because she plain couldn’t shoot, but she surely did have us pinned down. Caleb waved a hand, indicating he had her position marked now. I knew he was thinking up a variety of stupid, precipitous actions that would bring him into her sights.
“You let me know when you’re ready to move,” Caleb said, his voice low enough to nearly fade away. “I’ll pump a couple of rounds in her direction as soon as you start running. Lets see if we can team up with your friends.”
“Like hell,” I told him. “I’ve got the LadySmith. It’ll be better if I cover you.” What a joke. I hadn’t been able to so much as draw the LadySmith as yet.
Oh, his idea was good. We were four against four now. I didn’t think I’d count Petra out yet either, no matter if she had left part of herself at the front desk. Get us all in one bunch and this outfit would never know what hit them. The problem is, I wasn’t going anywhere at this particular moment. There was no “run” in me.
As though to confirm that diagnosis, my tingling body suddenly began a St. Vitus Dance in reaction to the electronic jolt, the abused nervous system discharging energy like an angry electric eel. My hands shook, my innards shook, my head shook, too. The foot on the same side as the manacle began jerking and jiggling like a puppet flittering on a string. Uncontrollable, it danced into plain view before I could draw back.
“Ah.” Understanding flooded Caleb’s soft voice. “I see. Doesn’t look like you’re in shape to do a whole lot of anything.”
“It’s the manacle,” I said through chattering teeth. “Screwed up my control.”
Taking stock, I found the skin beneath the electronic bracelet burned, puffed and raw. Every throb of my heart seemed to center on that one area, and I have to say, it hurt to beat hell. My hip, the one that had taken the brunt of my fall from the chair was letting me know it didn’t appreciate such treatment. In comparison, a sprained ankle seemed minor.
“Give me another couple of minutes,” I lied, “and I’ll come roaring out of here like a bat out of hell.”
“I’ll be waiting.” He fell silent.
“Hey, you. Outlanders.” Adainette took us by surprise when, after a tense few minutes, she called down to us from above. “You want to leave? I’ll let you go. You have nothing to do with this quarrel. A business deal gone bad. That’s all. You go.”
She was being very careful, staying well away from the railing of the open, second floor hall. About all I could see of her was the light blue suit. Even had I been physically capable of such a thing, she’d left me no clear shot.
Caleb’s slow answering chuckle was mirthless. “Yeah? You folks got a funny way of doing business in these parts, if you ask me. Believe I’ll stick around, pick up a few pointers.”
Adainette became coy. “You want to join my group, outlander? Become a business associate? Come up. We’ll talk.”
“Thanks, but I’ll pass.” Leaves parted. One of Caleb’s eyes peered briefly through the opening before he burrowed low again.
“Where you get that old gun, hey? Shooting lead.” Duncan spoke from the other side of the lobby, and from my vantage point, I saw Adainette take a step forward and make angry shushing motions at him. They’d been working to put us in the pinchers of a trap. A plot to take us off guard and he had spoiled it. If she only knew, that old strategy would never take us by surprise anyway. Not in a million years.
But surprise or no, the underlying strategy still worked. Get themselves in the right position and they could hold a regular little turkey shoot. Easy stuff, with their advantageous possession of the upper ground, but at this moment, playing the role of the turkey didn’t much light my fire.
Caleb didn’t answer Duncan’s question. During the talking, he’d taken the opportunity the give-and-take gave him to slide a few feet further away from me, and a little closer to the open area beneath the staircase. My breath caught. If he could only get there, out of this trap, he’d have enough freedom of action to take the fight to them. I had to help him.
“You’d be better off by asking where he learned to shoot,” I sang out, making another try at reaching around myself for the LS. “Unless you’d rather not know.” What they’d better do is wait until I invented a plausible story.
There. Almost. I felt the cold touch of steel. Why’d the damn pistol have to be centered right in the middle of my spine? A couple of inches one way or another and I’d have had it in hand before. I paused, set myself, and tried again.
The next time when I reached, straining every weak and woozy muscle to the limit, the LS slid into my hand slick as glass. It took the combined strength of both my thumbs to wrench the hammer all the way back.
“Army.” Duncan’s growl recalled me. He’d moved again. I could barely see him now, prowling like a caged cat on the upper deck. He was looking for a clear opening, disconcerted when he didn’t see a target.
I laughed, the lie slipping easily off my tongue as I made the correction. “Naval prison, Duncan. I’ll bet you know all about prisons, naval or not.” Not so wild a guess, considering the scar on his chin and the anchor tattoo I’d glimpsed on his arm. There are some things that never change.
What with my eyes darting back and forth between Duncan and Adainette, and a good-sized dose of shock-induced dizziness, a full minute must have passed before I became aware all my arms and legs and fingers worked properly again. I don’t know about my brain; not too swift, apparently, but I didn’t think it was totally fried. Only stuck, tracking with single-minded stubbornness on the idea of escaping this trap before I ended up like Petra Dill. Becoming a one-handed gunsmith wasn’t a professional challenge for which I felt qualified.
Anyway, the sheer relief in being freed of that electronically induced paralysis was almost my undoing.
Caleb, roaring my name, pulled me from the wonder of counting all my fingers.
“Boothenay! Look out! Behind you.”
He’d seen what I could not. At his yell, I spun about, expecting to find Diego, or maybe Adainette creeping down the stairs, but I’d have been wrong. It was Kirsten, flitting like a quick, dark-colored bird across the lobby to the man Caleb had hit.
“The controls. For God’s sake, Boothenay, don’t let her get the controls. She’ll zap that thing on your wrist.”
He didn’t need to tell me twice. The LS .357 bucked once in my hand. Lord, but I was weak. Limp-wristed like you write home about. The bullet smashed into the front of the desk directly opposite me, missing Kirsten completely.
She yelped with healthy fear and without so much as a sympathetic ave for her very bloody, very dead boyfriend, stooped, snatching wildly for the control still clutched in his hand.
I popped another round at her, using both hands to hold the gun. Another miss, barely short of her flying feet, although this time the wood floor took the brunt, casting splinters six ways from hell. A couple of them penetrated the fleshy part of her leg, causing blood to flow as copiously as a real gunshot wound might have. Certainly she screeched loud enough.
She quit trying for the control and latched onto her leg instead.
“Get her,” she yelled imperiously at Duncan. “Burn her.”
Needing no further urging, he let loose with wild abandon.
Adainette, emboldened by Duncan’s luck in pinning Caleb and me down, came forward and added a few rounds to the general mayhem. That soon ended as Caleb let fly both barrels with the 12-gauge, firing straight up through the floor beneath her feet. The shot scattered, stuck in the wood and doing no harm, although they made her pull back. He’d have done better to save his ammunition.
As for me, thanks to Kirsten’s warning, I curled up small and burrowed under the biggest, strongest rocks while Duncan tried for all he was worth to “burn me.” Orange fire lashed furiously around the opening to my inadequate shelter. Mortar crumbled from between the stones, until they broke apart, nearly burying me in the process. I covered my head with my arms, trying to avoid a concussion. The LS slipped from my numb fingers and horrified, I saw it spin and fall beneath the rush of debris piling up beyond the lip of the waterfall. Dust rose in a cloud, chips flew at every angle, one catching me below my right eye. One thing I discovered; these damned lasers evidently never needed to stop for reloading.
When the barrage ended, Kirsten had disappeared—along with the control.
And so, too, had Caleb, melting into the shadows beneath the stairs, then vanishing along the hall leading into the hotel interior. I have never felt as alone as I did when he had gone.
An absorbed, waiting silence held the hotel and everyone in it in thrall. Nothing and no one moved. I knew every—or nearly every— room was occupied, yet not a single person poked his or her head around the corner to see if the fight was over, if anyone had won, or more importantly, if anyone had died. They may not have cared. More than likely they were, with a great deal of justification, much too afraid to interfere.
But I knew now why Teagun had been forced to manipulate time in order to find help—to find me. No one in 2120 gave a tinker’s damn about anyone except themselves; a sorry state of affairs if I’ve ever heard of one. Sorrier yet, I had to wonder if, like everyone else, the Dills now considered me expendable.
Time made a slow passage as we waited, one side against the other, for the next step toward the end.
SUNSHINE BEAT down where I lay, burning through the atrium’s automatically darkening glass. Years of ultra violet rays and blistering heat had turned the glass hazy and unstable, until I found looking upward to be like looking through dark purple waves of water. I was sweating as I cowered in my little hidey-hole, pinned there by a barrier of shattered stone and mortar, but I was still alive. So, too, I felt sure, having heard nothing to indicate otherwise, were Teagun and Caleb. I took courage from that. Petra, I wasn’t so certain about.
We were, all of us, like players on an abandoned chessboard. Adainette made the opening move in the new game.
“Kirsten.” She was standing almost directly over my head, and sounded as flat and mean as a cornered wildcat.
“You got the control?” she asked.
“Got it,” Kirsten promptly answered, putting an end to my wish one of those splinters had stabbed deeply enough to penetrate an artery. She’d gone to ground in the tiny room beyond the reception desk. It was the same place she’d been earlier when she hit the switch that took Petra’s hand off.
“Well, hammer on the juice,” Adainette demanded. “If the woman is alive, she’ll squeal.”
That was all the preparation I had before anothe
r charge clawed through me. My muscles cramped, shockwaves of pain hitting like icy hot currents of acid carried through my blood. The ring around my wrist, already burning, burned ever more fiercely.
I went faint, the world pulsing in and out, but when she let up on the control, I was still alive, still in possession of my hand—and I hadn’t squealed.
My wrist bled a few more drops near the clasp before the moisture sizzled away, emitting an unfamiliar combination of metallic and ozone odors. The bracelet popped and sputtered, the shimmer no longer rising from it. With astonished relief, I realized that my blood had shorted out the electronics. The bracelet had gone dead. The problem was, my whole body still vibrated in reaction while I wished for numbness.
After listening for my nonexistent squeals a little longer, Kirsten laughed. “La morte. I had thought she would be stronger. I wanted to watch her die.”
“Find the body. Be sure she is dead before you crow victory.” Adainette started down the stairs, hugging the wall. “I want her gun.”
She moved quietly. I wondered why she didn’t hear my teeth chattering over her cautious footsteps. At the halfway point, she stopped on the middle landing.
“Duncan,” she called to her second-in-command, who remained on watch from the upper floor. “Did you see where Deane went?”
“Gone. Under the stairs, he was. Last I saw, he was heading for the back. He is afraid. Running for the nearest exit. He will die in the desert.”
“Not him.” She seemed very sure. “I smelled power on him. He is not afraid. Come down, Duncan. Go after him. Find him and you will have his gun.”
The stairs creaked under his weight as he came to join her. “These guns,” he said, and I could tell he was intrigued by their unexpected presence, but worried, too. “So many. Where have they come from? The kid, the woman’s son, he has one, too. Why didn’t you tell us, Adainette? Alphonse and Turner, some of the others, they are dead because we didn’t know.”
Crossroad (The Gunsmith Book 3) Page 24