Without pause, Ryan swung to the right and heart-shot the man with the bottle. The man choked out an "Uggh!" quietly and hit the wall behind him, slid down it, arms wide, coat riding up to his shoulders as he sank. The bottle had already left his nerveless fingers and now lay on the floor, its contents soaking into the worn carpet.
Her right hand remagging the MAC, Hunaker sprinted across the room, silently hurdling the bodies. She reached the end door with Ryan at her heels. Again he gripped the handle, twisted, this time pulling it open. Hunaker sprang through the gap before it was fully opened, Ryan jumping through after her, his SIG left-handed now.
A passage, short, one door at the end half open and light streaming through the gap, though mostly blocked off by a man standing in the opening holding a tray with bottles on it.
Ryan snarled, "Shit!" and two-rounded him. It was the only thing he could do. The guy flew backward through the door and the tray crashed to the floor, glass shattering. There was a shout from the room beyond, more of surprise then alarm, but already Hun was flying down the passage, her boots almost not touching down, her short loose coat billowing out behind her like bat's wings. She leaped into the room on the turn and the MAC-11 was spitting even as her feet hit carpet. Ryan, pounding after her, heard glass smash, metal clang and whine, and a sound like someone coughing loudly and very fast.
He reached the doorway, saw Hunaker lowering the machine pistol, a savage expression on her face.
She said "Damn" in self-disgust and turned away from him.
The room was a kitchen. The only guy there had been butchering meat on a block in the center of the room with a cleaver. He'd taken most of the MAC's mag, had been powered back into a table with glassware and copper pans and skillets on it, and now sagged backward, feet in the air, arms hanging, most of his chest blown out and blood splashed over floor and walls.
Hunaker was muttering curses in a harsh undertone. Ryan knew she was cursing herself as much for butchering one single guy who hadn't even been truly armed as for making such a row.
"You had to do it blind," he snapped. "Could've been a garrison in here."
The room stank of powder and blood. It smelled like a slaughterhouse. Ryan touched the young woman on the arm, then clasped her to him, his eye taking in the fact that the windows all were shuttered and there were three doors off to one side. He could feel her trembling slightly.
Hunaker said in a tight voice, "Shit, she was such a sweet kid, Ryan. I'll miss her, dammit. You dunno what it's like."
"No. Probably not."
She shook herself, clenched her eyes, then opened them again and said, "Okay, let's go. I'll get us all killed at this rate." Her smile was terrible to behold.
Ryan checked out the three doors. Storerooms. Nothing there. They went back along the passage, through the big room, still smelling strongly of cordite, warily out into the hallway. Koll gave them the thumb.
Ryan muttered, "You hear anything?"
"What's to hear?" The tall blonde gestured at the door through which they'd just come. "Good paneling there, Ryan. Thick as hell. You make any noise, then?"
"Clearly not so's you'd notice."
He glanced up, saw J.B. at the head of the stairs, alone, holding up his left hand, four fingers extended. His expression was deadpan.
Four kills. Everything jake.
Ryan shot a look at Hunaker and discovered that she was staring straight at him. He inclined his head toward the right-hand door under which no light could be seen and raised an eyebrow. Hunaker nodded almost eagerly as she slipped a third mag into the guts of the MAC-11.
Ryan said, "You sure?"
Hunaker hissed, "For Christ's sake, Ryan!"
He shrugged. It amused him how people still invoked the name of a deity, or, as he understood it from his reading way back in... well, when he wasreading, some kind of secondary deity who seemed to be a son of the primary deity. But he did it himself, when cussing or expressing shock or anger, often using words that had no meaning for him whatsoever, although that of course was a legacy from his father who'd done exactly the same, and probably his father before him, and so on back to pre-Nuke.
For a second, as he thought like this, the image of his father began to form in his mind. But he blocked it off quickly, the hand that held the SIG clenching involuntarily, so that he nearly squeezed off a round into the floor. He shook his head to clear the image finally, shake the memories away. These days it was easier, thank God.
A brief smile twitched his lips as he caught that. There you are, he thought thank God!
He stepped to the right-hand door, thought about powering in as before but something he didn't quite know what stopped him. His gloved hand took hold of the knoblike handle, twisted it firmly, though tugging at it so that no hint of a sound came from the movement. He gently eased the door open slightly. Two inches. There was only darkness beyond. The smell of incense was much stronger here, a positive assault on the senses. He could hear the faint murmur of someone talking, but as if from afar. He pushed the door more, slipped through. He sensed that Hunaker was behind him and half turning his head he muttered, "Close it, but not tight."
He stared at the warm blackness, half closing his eye, then opening it again, wide. Over on his left, in front, was a narrow smear of murky light in the air, which at first he could make no sense of. The light danced, a flickering glow. Then gradually he began to sort out details of the room.
Or half room. It was big, high ceilinged. There was no furniture, but the floor was carpeted. Across the room, from wall to wall, hung some kind of thick curtain. Two curtains, actually, pulled together. Hence that chink of light in the center where the inner folds of the two draperies didn't quite meet.
He slid the SIG back down into its belt rig and reached for the LAPA, holding it one-handed as he silently stepped across the room toward the curtain. There was no point now in using a silenced piece. He'd reached his goal. The voice he could hear beyond the thick draperies belonged to Jordan Teague.
He reached the gap in the curtain. It couldn't have been positioned better if some guy had actually set it up for him. Eye high. Breathing through his mouth, the LAPA held down at his side, he peered through.
One bizarre scene.
One bizarre goddamned scene.
There were candles everywhere, their flames fluttering and guttering in the drafts. It seemed as if there were a thousand candles at first, ten thousand, seemed as though the room itself was vast, extending way beyond the bounds of sanity. But of course it was a mirror effect. Long mirrors on all the walls, to the front of him and to the sides, even fixed down over the closed shutters of the windows on the right-hand wall. Ryan glanced up, his eye widening. Even covering the ceiling.
For the rest, there was not much furniture in the room although the place could not be said to be bare. On the floor were thick rugs, all sizes, all shapes and patterns and colors or combinations of colors. There were two potbellied stoves on the right, doors wide, heat belching out; pipes from the top of each rose into the air, sagging drunkenly in badly welded sections, disappearing into the mirrored ceiling. A couple of small tables, both of which seemed to Ryan's mildly discriminating eye to be more than just well-carved really old period pieces, probably stood toward the center, smoke rising from large bowls on them. He couldn't see what was burning, but it was sure as hell the source of the rich, cloying stink that permeated the room.
It was what reared uphigh, center stage but toward the far end, that dragged the word "bizarre" into his mind. A kind of stepped pyramid, twice the height of a man, maybe more, and flat on top. Ryan couldn't see how it was constructed because it was covered with a piece of rich red material, tacked in so that the step treads were tight and thus climbable without getting his boots tangled up in the folds. Atop it, a wide, high-backed wing chair, plain wood from what he could see, although that wasn't much, because of its occupant and the fact that it was partially covered in more material that, as he stared at it, became vaguely familiar, then all at once, after a few seconds searching his memory, became entirely recognizable. He could just make out white stars on a patch of blue, vivid red bars on white. A real relic from pre-Nuke days: a huge version of what they'd called the national flag of this land when it had been a unified country, a power in the world.