“I told you I’d try to make it to your party,” he said.
Even in the midst of the ongoing nightmare, I was irritated. “You did no such fucking thing! I left you about a hundred messages.”
“I wasn’t talking to you, I was talking to the kid.”
“Thanks,” said Clarence.
I decided to let the matter slide for now. “Let’s get going before we destroy any more of our priceless cultural heritage, people.” I wasn’t really making a joke—what had happened to the West Asian collection was pretty horrifying,
Oxana was still unconscious if not worse. I unbuckled her empty silver nitrate tank, then lifted her. She let out a moan of discomfort as I threw her over my shoulder, so at least she was still alive. “Light ’em up!” I shouted. “We’re getting out of here.”
Sam swung his Glock toward the thinnest part of the wall of ugliness before us. I don’t know what kind of suppressor he had on it, but for something that looked like it should be mail-ordered from the Big Jim Steele catalogue, it worked damn good. Even right next to him, I could hardly hear the sound of the shots, but I could see what they did, and I liked it. When they went off inside the gelatin-monsters, the monster blew to bits. Some shots cut through the nearest bugbears without exploding, but then blew up others farther back. Blazing jelly was flying everywhere, and some of it landed among the remaining Nightmare Children, who scurried away in flames.
I was heading us toward the nearest exits through a minefield of squirming swastika-monsters and quivering Jell-O bits trying to reform even as they smoldered. Keeping our break-in secret was now a lost cause, but I was still hoping to get out without setting off any alarms, just to improve our chances of escape. That said, there was no way I was going to fight all the way back up to the top floor. I still had bullets in my automatic: if worse came to worse, we’d blast our way out through a ground-floor window.
Sam’s Glock began clicking on empty chambers when we were only halfway across the room. Several bugbears were following us, hunching along the floor like elephant seals or waddling on distorted legs like mutant turtles, wide and low to the ground. The remaining Nightmare Children were also massing again, this time at the far end of the hall, spread between us and the exits. I was hoping that Halyna’s flamethrower would be enough to get us through the whole mess, but there was still another short hallway to cross before we would reach the door, and I didn’t think we’d make it past all those obstacles even if we had enough diesel fuel to set the entire museum on fire. I was using my own gun to try to clear some space in front of us, but the silver-tipped bullets weren’t very effective against so many enemies. I wished I’d thought of incendiaries like Sam had.
Swastikids began to drop down on us from the ceiling. Halyna screamed that one of them had got between her tank and her back.
In other words, things were really looking shitty.
Then three human-shaped figures stepped out of the shadows of the hall beyond, right in our path, but on the far side of the bugbears and the way-too-many Nightmare Children. These newcomers had guns—big ones, military assault rifles—and they were pointing them right at us. I put Oxana down so I would have my arms free.
“Drop your weapon,” said the tall one, pointing that wicked barrel not at me but at Halyna. It was my neo-Nazi Norwegian friend Baldur von Uruk von Dickhead, of course, dressed in some kind of formal black commando wear, wearing a massive medallion that, with his high collar, made him look a little like a Nehru-jacketed swinger in some old movie. So, all the time the creatures Sitri had taught him to control did his dirty work, the bastard had been waiting to step in when things were safe. I wished I’d killed him back at his little racist storefront.
“Drop it now, Robert Dollar, and do not try your disappearing trick again or I kill your girlfriend.” His two chums Timon and Pumbaa were with him, done up in some kind of homemade stormtrooper drag. They looked excited enough to piss themselves, but their barrels were steady, and I didn’t doubt they could take us out pretty easily. Four or five more Black Sun stormtroopers stepped up from the shadows, all armed with automatic weapons. That made more than half a dozen of them all together, and with much better guns than we had.
I didn’t want to risk Halyna getting killed just so this cheapjack, would-be Hitler could make a point. I held my Glock out carefully so he could see it, then tossed it away.
“And your sword, too. All of you. Throw away the weapons.”
I dropped my machete, then kicked it away. Sam and Clarence and Halyna followed suit. I was hoping von Reinmann would forget Halyna’s flamethrower, admittedly a long shot, but he made her take it off. Timon carried it back out of range, then he and Pumbaa looked it over like a couple of kids inspecting a video game they’d heard of but never seen.
“Now, Mr. Dollar,” said BvR, “the horn.”
“I told you, I don’t have it.”
“We are going to search you, anyway.” He nodded to Pumbaa. Instead of coming to me, the blond one grabbed Halyna and shoved her stumbling toward von Reinmann, who put the muzzle of his weapon against her head. “And do not be cute, Mr. Dollar.”
“You know, I just can’t help it,” I said as Pumbaa returned to frisk me. “Cute is part of my nature.”
He made me take off my backpack and kick it over to Timon to inspect. Timon found my backup gun immediately and slipped it into his own pocket, the little fucker. I’d had that.38 revolver for a long time, and the idea that some fascist punk was going to walk off with it burned me almost as much as anything else that was happening. Then Timon patted me down and removed a couple of more blades, some mags, and once again the cosh sewed into my sleeve lining. He slit the jacket and squeezed it out, waving the little cylinder for his friend to see, like he’d found gold.
“Man!” Timon announced as he found my last sharp thing, the razor blade in my boot heel. “This guy thinks ahead.” They’d clearly decided not to skip my shoes this time.
“Too bad you don’t,” I said, “or you wouldn’t be knee deep in felonies and probably selling your immortal souls in the bargain, just to push some tired old Nazi bullshit.”
“The Nazis were well-meaning amateurs,” declared Baldur. “We have bigger goals. But I am not bothering to explain to you. Where have you hidden the horn?”
“We didn’t hide it. We don’t have it.”
“Really? We did not give you time to find it? You are disappointingly slow, Mr. Dollar.” He looked at me for a long moment. Our Boy Baldur had very shrewd, very intense eyes. If you’d passed him on the street you wouldn’t have given him a second look, except for his height, but I’d seen enough of him now to recognize the gleam of real madness. “Then you will find it for me now, because I know that is what you came for.” He looked across the room to the hidden stairwell beneath the mosaic, now visible to all. “What is down there? That is not on the floor plans.”
I was disgusted. The bastard knew almost as much about what we were doing as we did. “Nothing,” I said. “It’s an office. We didn’t find anything.”
“Well, then,” he said, “you will not mind searching again, Mr. Dollar. Because we are very keen—that is the word, yes?—to find that particular item. We have a buyer who will pay us with something much better than money.”
“And what if we won’t help?”
“Then you will watch your companions killed one by one—starting with the young women. You see, I know something about you, Mr. Dollar. I know what you are. But I wonder, do all your companions have the same unusual background you do? I think not. And I think you will find it painful to watch them being shot to death, one at a time. So I suggest you get to work.”
I hesitated, trying desperately to think of a way to stall them, to confuse them, or just distract them long enough for us to try and get away. But I came up with exactly nothing. Zero. Which seemed like a pretty good indicator of our chances.