Amber! My babies! Then the body was sprawled atop her, blood gushing from the gory hole between the shoulders.
All around, her house was coming apart. Pulse rounds rained down through the ceiling, in through the doorway and what seemed like every window.
She cried out in anguish, trying to push the headless corpse off of her. There was no way her kids would live through this. There was no way any of them would live through this!
They would all die.
***
Amber had been showering when her extra-sensitive ears had picked up the distant gunfire. The sound of Three gunning down Dailey and Rivers would alert her to the coming danger. The merc’s merciless arrogance would be his undoing.
Something … or someone … the Amber she didn’t recognize but, at the same time, seemed very familiar with, now instantly took over. Her eyes seemed to change, grow colder, focused. A calm came over her. She knew what was happening. Knew what was needed. Now, it was just a matter of doing it.
Calmly, she rousted the children from their beds and herded them to the bathroom closet. She then took some bed sheets from the shelf above them and threw them in the bathtub and turned the water on. Saturating the linen with water, she tossed one dripping-wet bed sheet over the half-asleep siblings, who were still rubbing their eyes and wondering what was going on. That woke them with a start, and both cried out in protest. But a finger to her lips and the look on her face shushed them immediately. She signed to Brittain that they were to stay put and stay quiet, no matter what happened. Grabbing the other wet sheet from the tub, she covered herself with it, concealing her heat signature from the infrared scan she knew would be coming.
Picking up the two rail pistols lying on the bathroom counter, she charged both. She’d taken them off the Frost’s mercs a few days earlier when she’d ambushed them just outside Tex’s neighborhood right after the battle at the Spaceport Inn. Now, she was going to use them on the very people they’d once belonged to.
Irony. It could be fatal sometimes.
She closed her eyes and relaxed, allowing her senses to take over. She smelled the fresh coffee. A mockingbird was chattering on an oak branch in the front yard. A squirrel was sitting on the simulated wood fence in the back yard. Tex was balls-deep in Lulah. Her eyebrow furled. Hmmm. It seemed the old Ranger had more firepower than just that Westchester.
And outside, a gun drone moved into position above the house, and a black AC hovered out front, low to the ground, getting into position. She could hear the sound of rubber-soled boots hitting the ground and moving fast in different directions.
Six men. Three teams. One team had been dropped in the backyard. That meant one team coming hard through the front with the last team providing backup.
She was moving calmly into position when the Doorbuster round was fired from the AC. As expected, the mercs stormed in immediately afterward with their “crash and trash” tactics, dressed in black, faces masked, pulse rifles at the ready. Lots of smoke. Lots of yelling and profanity. All intended to disorient and confuse. These methods were most effectively executed in the early morning hours when people were sound asleep or heavily intoxicated. They had little effect on someone who was expecting it … or wasn’t intimidated by the noise and theatrics.
Amber was waiting in the dining area, guns trained on the doorway to the kitchen and the foyer. She would be able to see her attackers in either door before they saw her.
They came in, moving toward the kitchen, where Lulah was out of her line of sight, but screaming hysterically for the kids. This had upset the children and caused them to disobey Amber’s instruction to remain quiet. Both were now calling for their mother. Everything was going to shit quickly.
The lead operative exposed himself in the doorway, moving to Lulah, shouting and cursing and berating her. Amber squeezed off the round as casually as she might’ve slapped away a mosquito. This one was an asshole, a misogynistic, sadistic brute. He reminded her of the men who’d come for her and killed Master. Hell, for all she knew, he might’ve been one.
She felt not one shred of remorse and no small amount of satisfaction as his head disappeared.
Behind him, his partner cried out. He hadn’t seen that coming.
He started firing through the walls, calling for backup as he did, but she was already gone. Moving to her left, she flanked him and came around through the hallway into the foyer. He never saw the round that struck him in the side of his head, incinerating half his skull and cooking his brains instantly.
Calmly walking over to where Tex had been sitting earlier, Amber picked up his Westchester and levered a round into the firing port. She turned her attention to the two out front, unleashing a hailstorm of rail fire onto Four and Six.
Then, from above, the gun drone opened up, and it seemed everyone was either crying, shouting or cussing.
At least everyone who could talk.
***
About the time all hell was breaking loose at Lulah’s, Gideon and his band of gun thugs had driven up to the gates of the subdivision, where the security guard Rivers lay severely wounded and bleeding out, his partner Dailey already dead.
Gideon drove his old antique pickup. Junior rode shotgun and Ollie rode “bitch” in the middle. Behind them, a procession of hovercars followed. Gideon’s brother Josie and his gun hand Worm were in the Free Flyer behind Gideon’s old rubber-tired dinosaur. Crawdad, Papa Doo and several of their Demon Posse comrades brought up the rear.
Once they’d heard Gideon
