Carter’s voice was muffled through his sleeve. “I thought the generals lived on Level…Three. Didn’t we just take care of them all?”
“They do, but Afana may have sent some of them down if there was a Mad breakout, so there could be Mad and generals.” Ryder shrugged. “Fuck, there could be Mad generals, for all I know.”
Clint stepped forward. “Sounds like the kind of fight I like.”
Ryder drew an arrow from her quiver and nocked it, then motioned toward the level with her bow. “Be my guest.”
They were momentarily blinded when the lights flickered back to life. The advisors on Level One had turned them back on. Everyone shielded their eyes, their night vision destroyed by the harsh glare.
Ryder blinked the pain away, and when she opened her eyes, she was met by the barrels of the generals’ weapons. Shit.
Her bow was already raised, so she shifted to aim at the general in front of her, and the others did the same. The standoff was tense. The numbers were even, and the weapons were pretty well matched. Ryder knew all the generals. The one in front of her was one of the slimier jerks, General Finn. Ryder looked around for General Murray, the highest-ranking general. He wasn’t there. Maybe he’d finally gotten what was coming to him.
Ryder peered through the glass floor when movement caught her eye. It was Terrier, and he was grinning up at her. Beside him was General Murray. That greasy flea on a rat’s back! What the hell is he doing down there? And why hasn’t Terrier killed him?
They were standing together like friends, for fuck’s sake! General Murray had put most of them in the bunker, and now the bastard was standing with them? Ryder shook it off. She couldn’t let herself be distracted, not when she was so close to her goal. She had to focus on the task at hand, which was getting rid of the assholes in front of her.
That split-second lapse had cost Ryder the advantage, and the generals opened fire on the Merry Men. Ryder and the others dived out of the way. She hit the floor and rolled to her feet, then scanned the others. No one had been hit, thankfully. She’d have to deal with General Murray later.
The Merry Men didn’t have much to use as cover other than the tables and chairs in the middle of the Level Five common area, but then they weren’t planning on staying there very long.
Ryder bobbed up and loosed an arrow, and the fight was on. The generals had no combat skills to speak of. They’d been trained to rely on their guns to keep order. Ryder knew this and made a game of aiming for the generals’ gun hands. The light caught Willard’s knife as it flew through the air and landed in the throat of one of the generals. “Nice shot!” Ryder called. “A few more of them and we’ll be golden.”
Ryder retrieved her arrows as she worked her way around the common area. Each one she pulled from a dead general she sent off again to make another dead general. She was finally getting her revenge on the fuckers who’d kidnapped her when she was a kid. They aren’t going to do it to anyone else, Ryder thought.
“Kill them. Kill all of them!” Ryder yelled, not that the Merry Men needed the order. They were doing a fine job without her instruction.
General Finn had escaped Ryder’s arrows so far. “Get that fucking bitch!” he screamed, red-faced. His bleeding hand was shaking with so much rage he was unable to keep his gun straight. He fired and missed, shooting one of the other generals by mistake.
Ryder grinned. “Nice, Finn. If I’d known you would do the job for me, I wouldn’t have bothered coming back to this shithole.”
General Finn’s face turned purple. “You shouldn’t even be up here! Get back down to Level Six with the other whores!” He pulled the trigger four times in quick succession. “Or you can die!”
Shit! Ryder dropped and rolled out of the way of the oncoming bullets. Three flew over her head, but one left a hot line and a trickle of blood on her arm. She’d had worse. Her adrenaline was high, and she wasn’t going to let a little scrape stop her.
The Merry Men weren’t going to take that.
Vicky swung her shovel and General Finn collapsed unconscious to the floor, bleeding profusely from the gash across his face. They turned their attention back to mopping up the nearby generals. Vicky used her shovel to block the bullets fired at her, then swung it to impact with the closest general’s head. There was a crunch when it connected with his skull, and the force lifted him off his feet and onto the floor, never to get up again.
Graham yelled, “Watch your back, Vicky!”
Another general had turned to shoot her. Graham sent his axe spinning through the air to land in the general’s shoulder. It embedded itself deep into the muscle, and only stopped when it got wedged in his bone. The thought of the pain made Ryder wince, but he’d deserved it.
They all deserved it.
The general stumbled sideways and reached up to pull out the axe, but before he could get his hand on it Vicky’s shovel met his face with a sickening crunch.
Vicky kicked the general on his way down and smiled gratefully at Graham.
The Merry Men drove the rapidly-dwindling group of generals back. Ryder and the others with knives were making quick work of killing them. Ryder knew that soon the generals would be out of bullets. They just needed to last that long.
Carter danced in a circle with a tall, thin general and they traded blows, Carter getting his
