“Slow down,” I said, and the car reluctantly did so. I looked around me.
“Where has everyone gone?” said Molly. “Do they know something we don’t?”
“Almost certainly,” said Frankie. “Word gets around fast when the Casino’s in town.”
“Incoming!” shouted the car.
I leaned forward, peering up through the top part of the windscreen, and discovered that the sky overhead was full of prehistoric flying reptiles. Massive creatures with twenty-foot wingspans, grey-green scales, and long, toothless beaks ending in sharp points. Their narrow, vicious heads were balanced by long backwards-pointing bony crests. Their huge wings cupped the air as they glided back and forth above us.
“What the hell are those ugly-looking things?” said Molly.
“Hush,” said Frankie, from the back seat. “They might hear you.”
“They’re Pteranodons!” I said, grinning despite myself. “I used to love dinosaurs when I was a kid. Though strictly speaking, Pteranodons are reptiles, not dinosaurs. . . .”
I broke off, as I realised there were people riding on the backs of the winged reptiles. Sitting bolt upright in silver saddles, controlling their Pteranodons with glowing silver bridles and reins, were large blonde warrior women in SS Nazi uniforms. All of them perfect Aryan types, with harsh, laughing faces. Even as I watched, they dug silver spurs into the scaly sides of their mounts, and drove them down out of the sky, heading straight for us.
The warrior women all had heavy-duty machine guns mounted securely at the front of their saddles, and every single one of them opened fire on the Scarlet Lady as they swept past us, hitting us from every side at once. The car threw herself back and forth, while all around us sustained gunfire chewed up the road, blew up lengths of pavement, and blasted great holes in storefronts on either side of the street. Fires blazed up, and black smoke billowed out of gutted buildings. Some of the bullets must have been incendiaries. The flying reptiles punched right through the black smoke, and went banking up and around in a great turn, to come round at us again. Their riders reloaded from bulging panniers, while the Pteranodons screeched back and forth in the air above us, riding the thermals, sweeping round and round in great arcs. The flying reptiles screamed rage and fury as their riders forced them into long machine-gunning power dives again.
There were more of them than I could count, coming at us from every direction at once, guns blazing.
“Who are these crazy women?” shouted Molly.
“Pan’s Panzerpeople!” Frankie shouted back, from where he was lying prone on the back seat. “Fourth Reich Femmes, the Bitches From Hell!”
“You know them?” said Molly.
“Everyone knows them!” said Frankie. “Mayhem for hire, all proceeds going to fund the return of the glorious Fourth Reich!”
“Mercenaries . . .” I said. “Who sent them?”
“How should I know?” said Frankie. “I only just met you and I wish I hadn’t. It could be anybody. . . . And no, I am not going to sit up and talk to you. I am staying down here where it is relatively safe. If there was a glove box back here, I’d be hiding inside it.”
“Control yourself!” said the Scarlet Lady. “I don’t care how frightened you are, you make a mess on my upholstery and I will make you clean it up yourself!”
“Could be worse,” said Molly, peering out the windows. “Could be dragons.”
“How could dragons be worse?” said Frankie.
“Dragons breathe fire,” said Molly.
“Everything they say about you is true,” said Frankie.
“If someone’s paying mercenaries to kill us, even before we get to the Casino,” I said, “does that mean someone knows who I really am?”
“Why do you keep asking me questions, when you must have figured out by now that the best you’re going to get is an educated guess?” said Frankie, just a bit shrilly. “Somebody might know, or they might not. It’s a Casino! Place your bets! Choose whichever answer will make you feel better. I’m going to keep my head well down and sob for my life.”
“When I find out who wished you on us as our local contact,” said Molly, “I will riverdance on their head.”
“Fine by me,” said Frankie.
“Death from above!” howled the car, throwing all of us over to one side as she charged down a side street, and then plunged back out onto a main street again. The Pteranodons stuck with us, chewing up our surroundings with long strafing runs. The odd bullet ricocheted from the Scarlet Lady’s reinforced exterior, but didn’t even slow her down. The car radio started playing “Ride of the Valkyries,” while the car hummed happily along. Molly and I braced ourselves and hung on to our seat belts with both hands, as the car rocked this way and that. From somewhere deep in the back seat came plaintive noises of distress.
The Scarlet Lady roared up and down half a dozen back streets, taking lefts and rights at random, trying to shake off the Pan’s Panzerpeople. But the Pteranodons wheeled majestically overhead, tracking us easily from above, raking the streets with vicious gunfire. Buildings blew up as we shot past them, flying debris bouncing off the car. A lamp-post was cut in half by savage fire, and the top end crashed down onto the car’s roof. The metal didn’t even buckle under the weight, and the steel post fell away in a series of sparks as the car pressed on, laughing savagely.
I couldn’t help noticing that while all the cars and trucks and other vehicles had disappeared, there were still any number of pedestrians still walking up and down the pavements, who didn’t seem to be paying any attention to the end of the world going on all around them. Fire and bullets and collapsing buildings to all sides, sometimes right in front of them, but never any reaction from the poor souls caught up in it.
Even when some were shot dead, or brought down under falling rubble.
“Frankie?” I said.
“I’m not coming out!”
“Why are all the pedestrians blind to what’s happening?”
“Casino Infernale has half a dozen major league telepaths just sitting around their basement, doing nothing but broadcasting Don’t Notice Anything Out Of The Ordinary, very loudly, in eight-hour shifts. All of the day and all of the night, until Casino Infernale is over. Huge payoffs take care of everything else. The price of doing business in a tourist town.”
“But people are dying out there!” said Molly.
“No one will give a damn,” said Frankie. “No one will even notice anything, until much later. By which time Casino Security will have cleaned up the mess and hauled away the bodies, and silenced the relatives. One way or another. At best, there’ll be some vague story about terrorists, for the outside media. No one wants to scare off the tourists.”
“Could the Casino be behind the Pan’s Panzerpeople?” I said.
“Stop asking me about this! I don’t know!”
“Don’t make me come back there,” I said.
“All right! All right, let me think. . . . It’s unlikely. If Casino Security knew who you really are, they’d have blown you away the moment you arrived. Taken you out with a nuclear grenade, or a hit demon. Made a real mess of you as a warning to others. But, I mean, come on! No one with any sense would try to take down a Drood with bullets! Shaman Bond, on the other hand . . . This kind of overkill has all the hallmarks of a pre-emptive strike, by some other gambler who sees you as a threat.”
The Pteranodons slammed down out of the sky in waves, again and again. Ugly flying reptile things with gun girls on their backs, sweeping in from left and right to try to catch us in a crossfire. The Nazi warrior women called out to each other in harsh guttural voices, laughing raucously, their bony Aryan faces full of the joy of battle and slaughter. They didn’t care how many innocent people they killed, how many pitiful corpses and broken bodies they left lying in the streets. Heavy bullets slammed into the Scarlet Lady’s chassis, over and over, rocking the car back and forth but never breaking through.