The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 2

Thom Chastain still wore a gold-trimmed scarlet robe. A soldier had ripped away the chain and pendant Tyl remembered vaguely from earlier in the morning. Thom smiled like a porcelain doll, a hideous contrast with the tears which continued to shiver down his cheeks.

The tears were particularly noticeable because one of the gang bosses beside Thom on the altar had been shot in the neck. He'd been very active in his dying, painting everyone nearby with streaks of bright, oxygen-rich blood. The boy's tears washed tracks in the blood.

Bishop Trimer and three lesser priests stood a meter from the Chastains—and as far apart as turned backs and icy expressions could make them.

Father Laughlin was trying to hunch himself down to the height of other men. His white robes dragged the ground when he forgot to draw them up with his hands; their hem was bloody.

The prisoners weren't willing to sit down the way the Slammers did.Butnobodywas used to a scene like this.

"I never saw so many bodies," said Charles Desoix.

"Yeah, me too," Tyl agreed.

He hadn't seen the UDB officer walk up beside him. His eyes itched. He supposed there was something wrong with his peripheral vision from the ozone or the actinics—despite his face shield.

"Water?" Desoix offered.

"Thanks,"Tyl said, accepting the offer though water still sloshed in the canteen on his own belt. He drank and paused, then sipped again.

Where the calliope had raked the mob, corpses lay in rows like flotsam thrown onto the strand by a storm. Otherwise, the half of the plaza nearer the seafront was strewn rather than carpeted with bodies.You could walk that far and,if you were careful, step only on concrete.

Bloody concrete.

Where the plaza narrowed toward the main stairs, there was no longer room even for the corpses. They were piled one upon another . . . five in a stack . . . a ramp ten meters deep, rising at the same angle as the stairs and composed of human flesh compressed by the weight of more humans—each trying to escape by clambering over his fellows, each dying in turn as the guns continued to fire.

The stench of scattered viscera was a sour miasma as the sun began to warm the plaza.

"How many, d'ye guess?" Tyl asked as he handed back the canteen.

He was sure his voice was normal, but he felt his body begin to shiver uncontrollably. It was the drugs, ithadto be the anesthetic.

"Twenty thousand, thirty thousand," Desoix said. He cleared his throat, but his voice broke anyway as he tried to say, "They did, they . . ."