James Axler Earthblood 03 Aurora Quest

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Romero just below and between her full, sagging breasts. It angled slightly to
the left, then struck the center of her spine, distorting and flattening.
Driving to the right and upward, it blew a hole the size of a coffeepot
beneath the woman's left shoulder blade.
Her mouth opened, and she staggered back six or seven paces, the automatic
dropping from her fingers. A huge spray of blood and splinters of shattered
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bone burst out behind her, splattering in the mud.
The jolt of the Ruger Blackhawk Hunter ran through Jim Hilton's wrist, clean
up to the shoulder, while the dull boom began to echo out toward the
surrounding hills.
Before Alison's knees crumpled and sent her sprawling and dying onto the
ground, Jim had fired two more times at the group of men with her.
Sly had yelped once at the sound of the first shot, hands going over his ears
while he dropped to elbows and knees, keeping well out of Jim's line of sight.
The tallest of the attackers, who'd been close to the woman on her left, took
the .44 slug through the middle of the chest, a few inches above the belt
buckle. It doubled him over and sent him down to his knees, a thin cry of
shock and agony leaking from his open
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EarthBlood mouth.
By now, though only a second and a quarter had passed since Jim lifted the
revolver, the gang was on the move. The third bullet hit the outside man below
the ribs, going straight in and through and out, carrying on to hit the wall
of the barn with a dry, splintering crack. He tottered a few unsteady paces to
his left, but remained upright.
The Ruger held six rounds.
One of the men was diving forward, opening fire as he went down. A window
shattered behind Jim, yards along to his right. In return he put his fourth
bullet into the gunman's right cheek, a finger's width from his nose. Since he
was lying in the dirt, the .44 round drove through the top of the man's mouth,
ripping away five upper teeth and penetrating into the center of the skull,
where it ricocheted off the thick bone and bounced around and around, puddling
the brain into bloody gravy.
A shutter rattled on the top floor of the house, and Jim was relieved to hear
the silk-
ripping noise of Nanci's Port Royale machine pistol.
The last of the unwounded men went spinning and dancing, the 9 mm bullets
creating puffs of pale dust and clumps of blood wherever they hit.
There was only one of the quartet still on his feet, both hands clasped to the
wound in his side that was leaking a steady trickle of blood, black in the
moonlight.
"No, mister," he pleaded. "I don't know fucking nothing about all of this.
Ally said the dummy was her kid and you stole him from her. I'll move on.
Don't want any part of it.
Truth, mister. Gimme a chance."
There were voices from the house shouting to Jim Hilton. Most seemed to be
telling him to kill the wounded man, but he ignored them all.
He listened to the shaky voice of Sly Romero, now on hands and knees. "He was
one hit me."
The fifth bullet from the Ruger hit the last survivor of the raid through the
throat, blowing away most of the cervical vertebrae and almost severing the
skull from the spine. The head flopped backward, the tongue protruding,
becoming invisible in the gusher of arterial blood that pumped from the gaping
wound in the neck.
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"One still living," called Nanci Simms. "On hands and knees there."
Carrie Princip's little .22 cracked three times, and the crouched figure in
the yard rolled slowly over on his side and lay still, eyes white in the
moonlight.
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"Purse guns are still useful," she called.
But Jim wasn't listening. He had gone straight to Sly, holstering the warm
revolver, and put his arms around the quivering boy.
"You did brilliantly, Sly," he said, his own voice sounding cracked and harsh
with the released tension. "Brilliant the way you warned us."
Sly was crying, great gobbets of tears rolling down his plump cheeks. "Mom was
always horrid to me, Jim. Slapped me and man hit me in belly and they said me
was to get you to open the door. Me knew they want to hurt you with their
guns." He wiped his eyes and sniffed. "Me tricked them, yeah?"
"By God, but you sure did, son."
"Steve be& ?"
Jim hugged him tight, choking off the question. "You can bet your last dollar
on it, Sly.
Steve's about the proudest man in the whole wide universe right now."
To his surprise and passing embarrassment, Jim Hilton found that he was also
crying.
Chapter Thirty
It was a little after five o'clock on the morning of December 26.
John Kennedy Zelig was awake in his narrow canvas bed, running through all the
options in his mind. All the strands of future possibility. Where might James
Hilton be now?
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EarthBlood
Where might the dead Flagg's whoremongering mistress be? What had happened to
the
Chinooks? The reports that they'd received from their informants had all [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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