splicer’s head off.
Someone nearby stopped running—and turned into a statue, coated with ice. A lobbed grenade blew up the splicer that had done the freezing—but more were coming.
“Yippee ti-yi-yo!” howled a splicer, somewhere above. “Gene Autry’s riding to the rescue!”
A prolonged rattle of machine-gun fire, and a spider splicer screamed and fell from the ceiling. A ball of fire roared from a figure dimly seen in the shadows near the far corners of the wharf, the splicer up to his waist in water. Bill winced from the heat as the ball of fire burned meteorically past, striking a man behind him in the face, scream burbling as his face boiled away. Bill fired his tommy gun at the silhouette near the wall as another fireball raced toward him, streaming black smoke. He saw the spider splicer jerk and fall with machine-gun bullets, blood splashing against the wall as a fireball went into a spiral, seeming to lose control of its direction when the spider splicer died. It veered crazily above him and then down again and hissed itself out in the water.
A thudding rattling banging booming of gunshots—shotguns thundering, machine guns clattering, pistols snapping off shots—as rising gunsmoke clouded the scene, making it all the more like hell. The blue smoke reflected red muzzle flashes and bomb blasts, explosives chucked from ceilings, from behind pylons, from under the wharfs, blowing Ryan’s men into flinders, the splicers shrieking nonsense and mockery—
Lots of them. And they’d been waiting, expecting them. They’d been done over—Bill was sure of that.
A man in front of Bill went rigid and jerked about like a marionette dangled by a palsied hand, electrocuted by a lightning-throwing plasmid. As he fell, Bill fired a burst past him at the splicer: a black-haired, dark-eyed woman in shorts. She was half-hidden behind a stub of pylon, aiming her electrically sparking hand at Bill. But the tommy gun split her chest and face asunder, and she fell backward into the water, which was clouding up with crimson billows—the blood of fallen men and women; human and rogue splicer.
But a woman spider splicer on the ceiling fired a pistol at him, the bullet grazing his ribs, and he returned fire without hesitating—because he had to. The woman leapt from view.
On the deck of the little boat tied up near the wharf was a wild-eyed, patchy-haired woman pushing a baby carriage with one hand. She reached into the carriage, snatching out a hand grenade of some kind, tossing it in the air. Cavendish rushed her…
The bomb stopped in midair, then came arcing telekinetically toward him—and he threw himself down behind a stack of fish-reeking wooden crates. The crates caught most of the explosion, sending splinters rocketing like javelins—and someone behind him wailed in pain.
Bill got to his knees and peered through the smoke in time to see the woman’s head vanish in a cloud of pink and gray in the near-point-blank double-barrel shotgun blast fired by Cavendish. The woman sagged—
But someone else stepped from the small cabin of the little tugboatlike vessel—Frank Fontaine himself.
Fontaine had a revolver clutched in his hand, was grimacing and wild-eyed as he fired it almost randomly at them—who did he think he was, John Wayne? Didn’t seem like Fontaine’s style.
“I’ll take you all down with me!” shouted Fontaine. “You’ll never bring Frank Fontaine down without a fight!”
There was something weirdly theatrical about the way the man did it.
Fontaine reached into his coat, drew another revolver, and now he had one in each hand, was firing with both, his teeth bared, his eyes wild. A constable went down, shot through the neck by one of Fontaine’s rounds.
A splicer cackled in murderous delight. “That’s it, make ’em spout pretty, Frank!”
Bill took a shot at Fontaine and missed.
A constable rushed from a cloud of gunsmoke, shouting at Fontaine—and Fontaine dodged back behind the superstructure, circled it, came around behind the constable, shot the man in the back of his head. Then Fontaine dropped his pistol and scooped up the fallen constable’s tommy gun—turned and fired both his guns, a pistol in his left hand, the machine gun in his right.
Bill noticed Cavendish slipping through the water, wading, head low, toward the boat. Bill fired at Fontaine to try and distract him from Cavendish, who’d slipped around to the back of the boat—then Bill had to flatten as Fontaine loosed a burst his way. Bullets strafed just over his head.
“If Frank Fontaine goes down, you’re all goin’ down with me!” Fontaine shouted.
Then Cavendish stepped around the superstructure of the vessel and shoved his shotgun in Fontaine’s belly and—grinning—pulled the trigger, blasting Frank Fontaine off the boat, back into the water. The shotgun blast nearly cut him in half.
Cavendish turned to them and shouted in triumph, waving the shotgun over his head. “I done it! I got Frank Fontaine!” Then he ducked behind the pilothouse of the boat to avoid a bomb flying at him. Bill lost sight of him behind the smoky explosion, ducking as a blade flashed by. He turned and fired his tommy gun at the blade-flinging splicer, who ducked for cover.
Bill spotted Sullivan farther down the wharf, backing up from a leadhead. The gun-toting splicer was a barefoot man in overalls leaping about the wharf with unnatural agility, seeming to dodge Sullivan’s bullets— moving so fast Sullivan couldn’t get a bead. Leaping, the leadhead fired at Sullivan, who caught a round in his left shoulder and staggered with the impact.
Bill was already tracking the splicer with his weapon, and he fired the last of his rounds, shattering the splicer’s head as its body twisted from the top of a pylon and fell through the thick gunsmoke to splash awkwardly into the water.
Sullivan, grimacing with pain, turned to Bill with a look of gratitude. “Come on, retreat goddammit! It’s an ambush!”
Cavendish came rushing out of the smoke, coughing out, “Sullivan—I got Fontaine!”
“Just retreat, goddammit, there’s too many splicers!”
A short spear of ragged wood flew by, and Sullivan turned to fire his pistol at a leering splicer. Bill jumped over the bodies of two men, stepping up beside Sullivan, and used the butt of his tommy gun to knock down a babbling splicer who was slashing a curved blade at Sullivan’s face. Sullivan turned, stumbling up the wharf, and Bill followed close behind, pausing only once to duck a passing fireball.
A swag-bellied spider splicer in stained underwear, its face a welter of ADAM scars, clambered buglike on all fours along the wall above the door. Doggish yelping sounds rang in their ears as they ran toward the exit, the splicer alternating barks with phrases like, “Mommy, daddy, baby! Mommy, daddy, baby! Folks’re all here! Blood in my ears!” Sullivan fired at him and missed. The spider slicer pointed a pistol down at them just as Redgrave stepped into view. From behind a pylon he fired his shotgun, blowing the splicer off the wall. The body spun heavily past them and bounced off the nearest pylon to splash into the water.
Sullivan, staggering now, led the way through the door, back into the corridor. And then they were through the door—Sullivan, Bill, Constable Redgrave, followed closely by Cavendish and several other men, one of them with his clothes on fire from a splicer fireball; another with an eye missing, the socket smoking from a lightning strike; and two others staggering with gunshot wounds…
Bill gave the grinning Cavendish points for nerve as he and Redgrave posted themselves at the open door, firing to cover the retreat, blasting at splicers through the doorway. Bullets pinged and Electro Bolt blasts crackled from the metal doorframe. Bill took a pistol from a collapsed constable and fired it almost point-blank into the upside-down face of a spider splicer coming across the ceiling from nowhere… The man dropped like a dying bat…
“Come on, keep moving!” Sullivan yelled. “Back!”
Then Sullivan’s Special Weapons Backup Team was there, coming from the rear of the corridor, the planned second wave; they rushed between Sullivan and Bill, charging the pursuing splicers: nine constables with chemical throwers, icers, flamethrowers—clumsy weapons spewing corrosive acid, frozen entropy, and burning chaos into the onrushing splicers.
Sullivan had kept the backup team in reserve, afraid they’d hurt his own troops with their imprecise weapons. They were a bloody welcome sight to Bill now. Ryan’s new weapons wreaked havoc on the splicers, making heads pop open like popcorn, faces slide off skulls in bubbling acid…
