Free Deathlands 117: Desolation Angels by James Axler Page A

or she would invite a reflex shot from one of the Angels ready to lay down covering fire. Or from one of the coldhearts about to break in.
    He duckwalked to the front wall to avoid extreme-angle fire from the Angels’ covering force. He drew his panga in his left hand. It would be ideal to keep the bastards from getting in at all.
    Real was dealing with whatever actually happened.
    “Jak!” he called. “Keep an eye on that west window.”
    Then they hit them.
    A man rushed through the door. Prepared, J.B. stuck out a leg and tripped him. The attacker fell hard on his face and skidded, his long hair flying. Then the Armorer stuck his shotgun around the doorjamb and pumped out two quick blasts.
    Men screamed. Ryan shot the fallen man in the side of his head as he blearily tried to push off the concrete floor, blood streaming from his face.
    He plopped back down. He had a cowboy-style handblaster, similar to the one the wrinkly in the market had used.
    Ryan shifted back two steps along the side wall to give himself an angle on the front door and window. He was gambling that there now would be too many Angel bodies in the way for there to be much risk of somebody sniping him from out in the weeds. The men lying out there were still shooting, which put Ryan back in his earlier frame of mind about not envying the assault force.
    It was time to make the ones getting shot in the backs by their buddies look like the lucky ones.
    A man swung a leg over the sill between the crouching Krysty and Mildred. Krysty promptly stabbed her knife through the back of his calf above his boot. He shrieked as she forced the knife out, cutting his hamstring. The leg was sucked right back over the wall and out of sight.
    More bodies suddenly appeared, clogging the window and door. The Angels were so eager to get inside they were getting in one another’s way. Ryan shot a man who’d gotten stuck in the middle of the door in the belly. Nothing like having a downed comrade thrashing and howling in intolerable pain to take the rod out of an enemy’s pecker.
    The Angel sagged back, screeching. A wild-bearded man to his left tried to throw him out of the way and barge in. Straightening, J.B. wheeled around the doorjamb and postponed the steel-shod butt plate of his M4000 right into the middle of the angry black-fringed face.
    Both of them fell back against the crowd pressing them from behind. The man who had been on the gut-shot Angel’s right raised a remade 1911-model .45 blaster at Ryan. The one-eyed man shot him through the bare chest. He dropped to the floor.
    Doc’s under-barrel shotgun roared. A man who had dived through the window, rolled and come up with a short-barreled revolver in hand screamed as the shot charge exploded his face, ripping off the skin on the whole upper half, knocking chunks of flesh from the cheekbone and blowing open that side of his skull. An exposed blue eye rolled wildly in its socket, then rolled upward as the man fell onto his back.
    Concussed or not, it seemed, the old man still could focus his mind on the task at hand when the shit and the bullets began to fly.
    * * *
    K RYSTY KNELT BY the wall. She and Mildred angled their fire into the bodies and faces of Angels trying to climb in the big front window. Blood fell on her face like torrential rain.
    The 5-shot cylinder of her 640 was rapidly exhausted. She looked around. Several handblasters and a double-barreled sawed-off shotgun lay inside the window where their former owners had dropped them.
    She grabbed the shotgun. Another man swung a leg over the sill. The scuffed cowboy boot with the badly separated sole barely missed clipping her head. She jammed the twin barrels into his gut and squeezed a single trigger.
    He screamed so loud she could hear him over the shotgun’s roar. His leg flew backward over the sill.
    A hand appeared above her head, holding what Krysty thought to be some sort of military-style handblaster. The wrist was bent to aim the barrel