End Day by James Axler

Author:James Axler
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Worldwide Library Series
Published: 2015-05-24T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

His Steyr in hand, safety off, Ryan ran up the three granite steps under the sign that said 18th Precinct and through the double doorway. Four feet ahead of him, the foyer ended abruptly in a block wall. The building’s exterior wall was on his right, so the only path was to the left. He swung the longblaster in that direction and turned down a cramped corridor lit by a flickering bank of ceiling fluorescent lights.

The carnage started just inside the turn. It reminded him of what the enforcers had left behind at the nameless mountain ville.

How many people lay dead in the narrow entry hall, he couldn’t even hazard a guess. Detached arms, legs, torsos and heads lay in a sprawling, gory jumble on the floor—creating a bottleneck of the slaughtered. Some were in black uniform; others in civilian clothes. Some of the dead hands still clutched blasters, the slides locked back on empty mags. Some of the victims looked male; others were obviously female. Once enforcers commenced their chilling, they stopped only when they ran out of victims. Up to the border with the acoustic-tile drop ceiling, the grimy walls—and the posters pinned on them—were splattered with blood and other bodily fluids.

Although the decapitated heads could be avoided or nudged aside with the toe of a boot, there was no way to advance past the entrance without stepping on a severed limb or two.

The heavy glass doors to the station proper lay in huge, crazed sheets on the floor beneath their emptied frames—this was the barrier that had sealed the victims’ fates. With locked doors to their backs, they had nowhere to run. Wherever Ryan placed his boot soles, fractured glass crunched under his weight. Thankfully, the body-part carpet stopped at the station’s inner doorway.

What Ryan saw instead was clear evidence of a fighting retreat. Spent blaster casings littered the scarred tile floor. Hundreds of them. The walls were pocked with sideways bullet holes from ricochets off armored hide. The floor farther down the hall, as far as he could see, was dotted with more casings. It looked as if the precinct’s defenders had fallen back room by room from a wave of enforcers.

Were they acting in desperation? Panic? Or were they trying to lure the attackers into a trap? Did they have a contingency plan? Maybe a cross-fire or massed kill zone deeper inside the building?

Neither was a good idea in this situation. Any kind of trap could backfire if the things being targeted didn’t stay trapped. Bullet impacts could keep enforcers at a distance for a while, but when the firing stopped, when the ammo finally ran out, there’d be a one-way ticket on the last train west.

Good strategy or not, the spent brass the defenders had left behind was like that trail of bread crumbs Vee had talked about. He figured it would lead straight to the monsters they were chasing.

Jak leapfrogged ahead down the hall, Colt Python in his right hand and a thermite gren in his left.

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