after Yuki! We gots t'do somethin'!"
Dawg looked at him hard. "Ain't much we can do about that, T! Gotta take care of ourselves now! Besides...you and I both know those fuckers goin' downstairs are
gonna be dead, one way or the other! They just don' know it!"
At one end of the hallway was Danny Choi, who knew a clarity of purpose he couldn't have imagined before. He had heard the half-second scream, and knew it was good.
Delilah heard the same from the other end of the hallway. She also heard the heavy
gunfire above. She simply thought to herself: Okay, if anybody's coming downstairs,
it'll be any time now. She clenched the piece of metal in her left hand, concealed it behind her slender hip from the view of anyone who would come down the stairs at her end. The dancer thought, Anything for you, Yuki. I'll die for you.
I'll kill for you.
She only had to wait another few seconds.
On Danny's end, two enforcers rushed down the stairwell, guns drawn. Both saw the man in the cream-colored suit waiting only a few paces away from the bottom.
One of the men, beefy with a half-ass crewcut, shouted, "Danny, what the fuck's going on?! We need to get to the boss and get -- !"
The slob with the crewcut never had the chance to say another word because Danny closed the distance between them within a second, and with no preamble his right hand flashed forward. The two-finger thrust drove into the man's throat, crushing it. The guy dropped his gun and his hands groped at a windpipe that wouldn't work anymore. The other man said, "Shit!" He should have used the split-second chance he had to train his pistol on Danny. It wouldn't have mattered because he was already in motion, and his right leg flashed into a side kick that smashed into the gunman's chest. He might as well have been hit with a sledgehammer: he was knocked backward a few feet into the wall next to the stairwell, and bounced off it like he was made of rubber. He stumbled toward Danny, who with a grim expression
caught the man's head in his hands, and with a brutally efficient motion snapped his neck. The guy fell to the ground in a heap as his partner with the crewcut crashed to
his knees...his lips turned a deadly shade of blue. He managed to look up at Danny
with an almost childish expression of surprise.
Down the stairwell at the other end of the hallway came the third man, gun drawn, his left shoulder bleeding. All the enforcer could think of was to get to Pucci, help him if he was still alive, and kill whoever was responsible for this shit. He completely
ignored the young woman in a red robe standing not far away from the stairs as he reached bottom. He strode past her and looked down the hall. He saw Danny next to the men who he sent to go down the other side of the hall...one seemed to be dead and the other, while alive, didn't look much better. In his furiously racing mind the bleeding enforcer managed to put two and two together...whatever was going on, that
Chinaman was a part of this! Danny noticed him from the far end as the man raised his gun. The bleeding enforcer wanted to scream, "Kung-Fu THIS, motherfucker!"
He never had the chance because Delilah, still standing behind him, had lifted the piece of metal the man didn't see into view. The .41 Magnum, previously the property
of T-Bone, which Yuki had given to the dancer earlier. Delilah switched the weapon to her right hand, pointed it at the man's back, and without hesitation fired five times.
All five heavy-caliber bullets found a home. One glanced off his right shoulder blade, exiting as quickly as it entered and taking a chunk of flesh with it, and another smashed into his right elbow, destroying it. The other three bullets had more fortune.
One cleaved into the man's lower spine, another into his right kidney, and the last shot
drilled into the back of his neck, exiting mushroomed and at dramatically decreased
velocity through his throat in a gory explosion of blood. He was dead before he fell on his face.
The guy with the crushed windpipe on the far end finally did the same.
Yuki stepped out into the hallway, as stained in blood as her sword. Danny and Delilah converged on her position. The man in the cream-colored suit asked, "What
happens next?"
Yuki's power flowed from her like ripples in a pond. Ripples of invisible eldritch energy given form and purpose by her will. The energy reached out, hungrily sought to find what she wished for it to devour. Time was a critical factor, and she found it
ironic considering that before she came to this world, time held literally no meaning...
she had to earn as much time as possible to do what was necessary. Yuki had to be
ruthless and efficient in all things for her enemies would be legion and she and her servants needed every advantage possible. It was her way, the only way she had known for as long as she could remember, which was a very, very long time. Hers was a way forged in a realm beyond shadow, where indescribable tortures and unspeakable evils reigned.
Those of this world had taken so much for granted. Among them were the gifts they gave themselves...the technology that drove this world, drove their very lives. That which ran by electrical currents and digital code. Those gifts were marvels to be
sure, but those who lived in this world, especially God's Country, seemed to forget
what it meant to subsist without such things.
And they were ill-prepared for what would happen if those gifts were taken away.