Deathlands 117: Desolation Angels Read Online Free PDF Page B

take the lead in the hasty retreat, Ricky found himself half-disappointed and half-relieved. It wasn’t that he was afraid to put his life on the line for his friends—he did that all the time. It was that he was a bit on the near-sighted side and hated leaving his friends’ survival dependent on senses that were far less keen than the albino’s.
    He carried his DeLisle carbine in preference to his Webley handblaster. The big top-break, double-action revolver, converted by his uncle Benito to fire the same .45 ACP cartridges the longblaster did, was handier to use in a close-in fight, and faster, too. But he already knew the Detroit ruins hosted muties with bad attitudes toward norms. And the green growth that exploded through the broken pavement here and there, or sprouted in more or less orderly rows in the cultivated plots they sometimes passed, provided enemies with excellent cover. The sturdy, stocky DeLisle made a far better melee weapon than a handgun did.
    They were running down the northwestern edge of the great half-ruined building. Even as he looked around for potential enemies, Ricky took in more of the extent of its ruination. He realized quickly why the big space they had glimpsed through the side door was full of crops and the daylight that gave them life. Something had taken off or collapsed the roof of the blocky center from twenty or thirty yards down from the entrance, all the way back to where an elevated track or walkway to a circular parking structure had been taken down by the same catastrophe. Or a similar one. The parking structure itself, mostly open, had survived intact, at least as far as Ricky could see. Open structures always seemed to have survived nuke blasts better than closed ones.
    Another cultivated plot grew at the building’s far end, where the elevated track had gone down. From there, several figures in dark vests jogged into the street in front of Jak and Ricky. One of them, with brown hair hanging to his shoulders, knelt and aimed a longblaster at Ricky.
    A sharp crack punched at his left ear. He yelped and swerved.
    The man with the longblaster dropped the weapon and folded over backward. What Ricky had heard, as his rational mind belatedly informed him, was the miniature sonic boom of a longblaster bullet going by him faster than the speed of sound. But it was fired from behind him. Ricky recognized the boom that reached him as the enemy gunman fell as the sound of Ryan’s 7.62 mm Steyr Scout.
    Not that Ricky was accustomed to hearing it from way out in front of its business end.
    Jak swerved right into an intersection. Ricky followed, even as he heard Ryan yell, “Covering fire!”
    Jak reached a concrete building corner. He hunkered down, leaned around and fired an ear-shattering blast from his Python.
    Ricky joined him a few heartbeats later. He pressed his shoulder against the wall. Wishing he were a lefty so he could shoot without exposing almost his entire body, the youth stepped out enough to get a look at the new pack of pursuers. They seemed to be coming out of a gap in the wall of the big building. Long slabs of the fallen track lay behind them, tilted at random angles amid thick, low vegetation.
    He laid his iron sights on the bare chest of the man running in the lead and pressed the trigger. His hefty longblaster fired a pistol cartridge, so it didn’t have much of a kick, and the suppressed weapon barely made a sound.
    The shot took the man at the upper-right top of his rib cage arch. Ricky could tell because he saw the blood splash red from beneath his target’s right nipple. The man took a header, dropping his long-barreled single-action revolver and rolling over and over on the cracked blacktop.
    Jak’s big .357 Magnum Colt Python made more than enough noise for both weapons. When he cranked off another shot, three of the vest wearers hit the pavement. Ricky had no idea if his friend had even hit one of them. There was no way he could’ve nailed all three,