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slicing through her lungs and heart, killing her instantly.
Ryan fired a second time, aiming at the kneeling man. But the woman's corpse
staggered a few disconnected steps, arms flailing, and dropped the blaster.
She fell into the line of fire, and his shot hit her under the left arm as she
toppled, the full-
metal jacket tum-bling and distorting, ripping through the ribs and chest
cavity, angling upward and bursting out through the top of her left shoulder.
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For a starving man, Jerry Park was fast in his re-flexes and faster on his
feet.
He dived away, rolling behind the fallen debris from the church roof and wall,
managing to snap a shot off in the general direction of his attacker. The
bullet whined fifteen feet past Ryan's face, making him throw himself flat.
The woman was dying noisily, thrashing around, moaning and weeping, pink
frothing blood choking her as it erupted from her open mouth.
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"Bastard!" the young man screamed, firing twice more, the shots going high and
wide.
Ryan lay still and said nothing, knowing that J.B. and Jak would be closing in
from the other side.
"Ryan!"
"Stay where you are, Krysty. Everyone keep inside. It'll soon be over."
Another shot whistled by, closer this time, aimed at the sound of his voice.
J.B. and Jak still hadn't showed their hands. Ryan stared into the darkness
where he expected to see them appear.
"Come out, son," Ryan called. "Got no chance. Throw down the blaster and just
walk away. Keep walking."
"No food and water. And you butchered Gemma, you shithead bastard!"
"You were aiming to chill us, boy."
"Wanted to steal some food and a couple of horses. That was all."
There was the familiar note of self-pity that Ryan had heard in dozens of
voices, the voices of men who knew they were soon going to die.
"Come out, Jerry."
"You'll chill me. Don't trust you."
Ryan half smiled. The young man was right. If he'd come out and thrown down
his blaster, Ryan would have shot him down without a moment's compunc-tion.
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It wasn't a game.
For several long seconds, nobody spoke. The woman had died, lying sprawled
near the small pit where the blasters had been concealed.
Ryan caught a glimpse of something white at the far angle of the church's
wall.
Jak's hair. That meant J.B. would be there, as well.
If they all opened fire, the young man would have no chance. But it meant
wasting a lot of ammo. And ammo in Deathlands was more valuable than a
hand-ful of jack. Be like dropping a brick of gold to crush a rat.
"Give you a count of five, Jerry," Ryan called. "Then it's finished. One, two,
three& "
Though he must have realized his position was totally helpless, the skinny
young man made a try for it. He came out firing, jinking to left and right,
then sprinting straight toward where Ryan was lying in the dirt.
He stretched out the SIG-Sauer, holding his right wrist in his left hand for
extra steadiness and accu-racy. Jerry was around fifty feet away from him, his
own blaster blazing.
Ryan put two spaced bullets into the young man, one into the stomach, just
above the belt, the second a hand-span higher.
The first shot would have killed Jerry Park. Slowly.
The second one did the job a whole lot faster.
His handblaster went flying into the night sky, landing thirty yards behind
him. It seemed like Jerry's feet had broken away from him, moving under their
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own control, sending him staggering to his left, arms flail-ing, mouth open. A
scream rose from his chest into his throat, never quite making it as far as
his mouth. The blood that flowed from the two mortal wounds was as black as
jet in the threads of moonlight.
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"Done for," Jak said, stepping out into the open at the far angle of the
church's walls.
"Why?" Mildred asked, emerging with the others from the doorway.
"Guns. Horses," Ryan replied.
"You had no choice? You had to kill both those distressed and hungry young
people?"
Ryan holstered the SIG-Sauer. "No, Mildred, I didn't have to chill them both.
I
could easy have let them chill us."
He turned away from her and walked back into the adobe building.
Chapter Nineteen
Dean Cawdor was the first of them to go out, with the earliest light of
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