Five of whom had just been blown away on the street outside.
Alex gritted his teeth as plaster exploded from the pillar around his head, shredded by shrapnel. Blinking the sting from his eyes, he looked around at the others crouched in the parking lot, breathless and filthy after their long cross-country ride. They’d had only seconds of warning, having flung their horses and themselves under the first cover in sight. Oppenheimer’s party had been moments behind, but they had arrived from the other direction and hadn’t been so lucky. The narrow city street had funnelled the convoy into a neat line stretching directly before the enemy skyscraper, right into the firing squad’s line of sight.
It was a turkey shoot.
“Sons of bitches!” Marek Johnson roared over the racket, inches to Alexander’s right. “Cowards, rotten cowards.” The tendons in his thick neck tensed, and his face screwed into an ugly mask of burgeoning fury. Thickset and powerful, he looked absurd crammed between a ticket turnstile and the rusted carcass of an old Audi. His grip on his rifle tightened, as if he were preparing to leap from cover.
“Stay down!”
“I’m not leaving them out there.”
“There’s nothing you can do.”
“Bullshit!”
He was scrambling to his feet when Alexander risked losing a hand, reaching out across the two feet of open ground between them. Marek easily had twice Alexander’s mass and was twenty years his junior, but nevertheless, Alexander felt the usually stoic protector yield under his hand. Such were the way of things when you were heralded as the Messiah who would save civilisation.
Marek’s eyes were ablaze, but he stayed put.
Alexander was reminded of Lucian, and a pang of anguish ran through him. In the firefight he had almost forgotten about his own brother. He was out there in the wilds somewhere. They had raced in aid of New Canterbury only a day ago and had spent a mere hour with boots on the ground at the suspected site of the enemy stronghold. It had been a false alarm; no shots had been fired. Yet still the silver-haired Lucian McKay had disappeared. They had searched for hours amidst the massacred corpses of countless slaves and innocents, but he hadn’t been among them.
Alex wished he were here now.
Gunfire still smacked with jarring jolts against the other side of the pillar, but its rate was ebbing. He tore his rifle from around his shoulder and swung around onto his toes, signalling for the others to do the same. Ignoring the aches and pains in his tired old body, he listened with practised patience until the lull reached its zenith, and then cried, “Now!”
They leapt from cover and fired a return volley as one, peppering the weathered glass of the enemy position until it was fine spray, leaving a gaping hole all along one floor of the skyscraper. Perhaps once, such destruction would have seemed a scar upon the face of perfection, when the world’s economy had been managed from these very buildings, but not now—not among the mosses, the creepers, the fallen ceilings and walls, and all other the signs of Father Time’s work.
They kept shooting until Alexander was certain the streets were empty, that whoever had survived from Oppenheimer’s party had taken shelter, and then waved to cease fire. They waited in ringing silence as plaster dust rained down on their shoulders and the tinkling of broken windows settled in the distance. Alexander’s legs were screaming from the effort of holding his crouched position—
Christ, I’m old, he thought.
But so long as the others were behind him, he would never show weakness, not if it killed him.
“What’s the situation down there?” came the voice of a guard up on the compound walls. “How many injured?”
Alex glanced around at the taut, determined faces beside him, and all the smoking barrels of as many rifles. “None!”
“Mobile?”
“All.”
“Can you make it to the gate?”
Alex darted his head to peer at the stretch of shattered glass on the distant skyscraper. Only blackness met his gaze, the enemy nowhere in sight, for now. They might start firing again the moment they stepped into the light. But so many counted on his strength, and they were so close to safety. They couldn’t afford to be beaten into submission. He trusted every man and woman in his party with his life, but even now he felt pressure on the back of his neck. All the long years he had trained his inner circle to lead others, to be his emissaries—his very flesh incarnate—and