by James Axler
Mildred spun her face back counterclockwise. “What the fuck?” she yelped as she found herself staring into the yellow eyes of a furry little dinosaur-shaped predator with blood leaking from its shut mouth.
Krysty watched just long enough to see her friend swing her right arm back around, still outstretched, with her blaster clutched in her fist. The weapon slammed into the side of the mutie’s head and knocked it sprawling.
By sheer combat instinct Krysty was already gripping her spear near the end of the haft with both hands and swinging it in a high arc like an ax. It knocked down another spear being thrust at her by a charging mutie.
She heaved it back up. The creature’s momentum impaled its throat on the sharp steel tip. Blood sprayed over Krysty’s arms and face.
She yanked the spear out. Planting the butt against the ground inside her left armpit, she began to lever herself upright. The ground seemed like a safe place to stay; she couldn’t fall any farther. Her left leg was obviously weakened by the wound, and she was losing blood. That would weaken her overall and slow her down.
But she knew the haven offered by staying on the nice, warm ground was false. The muties weren’t showing any signs of letting up their assault, and neither were their numbers decreasing. Her group’s sole chance of surviving lay in somehow fighting its way out of the death ground, which meant first that Krysty had to be mobile, and second that she and Mildred had to help the others by fighting their way to join up with them.
Using the spear as a crutch, her powerful right leg and what strength remained in the left—more than she thought—Krysty levered herself upright. She swayed, a bit light-headed from shock and the blood she’d already lost. Shots cracked from behind her and from her companions.
She didn’t feel any pain yet, just numbness. She knew the pain would come—if she lived long enough for the adrenaline to begin wearing off.
But for now she found her leg would support her as she raised the spear to block another attack, then buttstroked the mutie across the left forearm, breaking the bones.
All she could do now was fight as long as she could. And hope and pray to Gaia that was enough.
* * *
RYAN DREW THE SIG with his left hand and fired into a mutie’s chest. It fell back among its comrades.
Another darted in from the left, stabbing with a knife. It thought it was attacking from Ryan’s blind spot, but it failed to account for the way he constantly kept his head turning, right and left. The Deathlands warrior turned to blast the mutie, then used his knife to knock aside a spear flashing toward his face from the front.
Another mutie sprang from the right. Ryan had no time to react.
A deafening roar filled the clearing. The mutie’s body crumpled, erupting feathers and blood.
“Coming up on you, Ryan,” he heard J.B. call.
A moment later the Armorer and Ricky had joined Ryan. They arranged themselves at the points of an outward-facing triangle, J.B. at Ryan’s right shoulder, Ricky at his left.
“Ace,” Ryan said. “Save ammo as much as you can.”
“Teach an old fox to hunt rabbits,” J.B. said good-humoredly.
For a moment the muties fell back from the trio. They continued to screech, shake spears and clubs, and snap their toothy jaws at the embattled humans.
“Doc,” Ryan called, “join up. Then we can fight our way to the women as a group.”
He could see that Krysty was back on her feet, towering above the feathered mutie bodies swarming through the thirty yards separating them from Doc. His heart had nearly stopped when he’d seen her go down. But from the way the muties who pounced on her went flying back, trailing blood pennons and despairing squawks, he realized she’d put too much weight on the wounded leg, using it to support her weight for a kick.
The muties melted back like mercury before a finger as they and Doc moved toward each other. Great, Ryan thought. They didn’t dare shoot to clear the way for fear of hitting each other. The same with Krysty and Mildred.
“Why aren’t the dinos running?” Ricky asked in tones as puzzled as desperate. “We’ve chilled and hurt so many of them!”
“Indeed,” Doc called, “they have incurred sufficient losses to dishearten most tribal groups and send them running. Arrgh!”
The last was a sort of strangled battle cry, uttered as he flourished his sword and his its sheath crazily at the mutie mob swirling between him and his three friends. The dinos parted abruptly. Doc straightened his lapels with his thumbs and took his place with his friends, between J.B. and Ricky.
“Enough to rout most disciplined army types, too,” J.B. said.
“Something’s got them hot past nuke red,” Ryan said. “Reckon they got more grievance than just hating on us for invading their domain.”
“That structure J.B. and I were looking at,” Ricky said. “It looked like a shrine. Mebbe this is holy ground to them?”
“That seems eminently possible,” Doc said. “Very little stirs rancor as much as religious wrath.”
It was possible, Ryan thought. Ricky was the only one in the group who still actively believed in any religion—if you left out Krysty and her veneration of Gaia, the Earth Mother, and that wasn’t religion so much as a sort of working relationship.
“The ‘why’ doesn’t find us any more bullets for our blasters,” Ryan muttered. “What we need now’s a way to get out of this with all our parts intact.”
“A little help here, boys,” Mildred called. “They’re starting to get frisky again.”
The muties surrounding Ryan’s group were also pressing closer. Cries from the Wild around them suggested more dino muties were flocking to the scene.
“We’re coming,” Ryan yelled back to the two women standing back to back. Both of them carried spears. “Just hold out.”
Then to his immediate companions, he said, “Hold off shooting as long as you can. Once we form up we can try blasting through the kill zone.”
He started forward, taking small steps. The nearest muties, who had begun racing around them in both directions, probably to make themselves less obvious targets, stopped and shrieked menacingly at them. They prodded at the air with their spears.
“Why don’t they just stand off and throw those spears at us?” Ricky asked.
“They like the taste of hot blood on their tongues too much, I reckon,” Ryan said.
“They are pack predators,” Doc added. “Far more humanlike than stickies. But far more primitive than we—far closer to the truly feral.”
“Not closer than all of us,” Ryan said with a grit-toothed smile. “They want to fight up close? On my call, charge the bastards!”
As if they understood him—a bit too late it struck him that they might—the muties lunged forward instantly to the attack. At once they were pressed to furiously defend themselves. Ryan used his SIG to parry with and struck with his panga, crushing lightweight bones and sending out great red sheets of blood. Doc used his sword and its sheath in lethal combination. J.B. had his shotgun gripped by the barrel; it was a full-on riot and combat scattergun, built for this kind of rough trade. Ricky had plucked out a spear that was stuck in J.B.’s backpack and was using it mostly as a quarterstaff.
To Ryan’s sick horror he saw the muties surge toward the two women as well. He could see reinforcements springing from the thicket now, dozens of them, crests erect, screaming their war cries, feathered warriors, fresh and vying to be in at the kill.
And then a storm of blasterfire erupted from back along the trail.
Chapter Twenty-One
The blue-gray ranks of feathered warriors faltered as bullets sleeted into them from some source still unseen by Ryan and his companions.
“Krysty! Mildred!” Ryan shouted. “Now’s your chance to join us! Run!”
Th
e muties nearest the four men kept on attacking, even more savagely than before. Ryan launched himself among them, smashing with the butt of his handblaster, swinging his panga in whistling, death-dealing arcs.
But as he did, he heard a triumphant shouting voice coming up the trail. The blasterfire continued to rake laggard muties away from either side of the two women.
At Ryan’s shouted command Mildred and Krysty turned toward the men and began to race forward.
Krysty’s left leg, weakened by the wound and unchecked blood loss, gave way beneath her. She folded to the ground with a faint cry of despair.
“Krysty!” Ryan shouted, louder this time. He tried to lunge ahead, into the phalanx of mutie spears still waiting for him.
He felt a hand like an iron claw grip his right biceps. It halted him dead in midlunge. He swung his head to snarl an order to let him go or die and found himself looking into J.B.’s steady gaze. The Armorer characteristically didn’t even say anything. He just shook his head once.
The suicidal frenzy driving Ryan suddenly vanished. He actually sagged at the knees. Briefly.
Then he straightened and looked back.
Krysty, obviously more weakened by the bleeding than he’d thought, waved a feeble hand at him.
There was nothing wrong with Mildred’s voice, despite the fatigue evident even a hundred feet away in the gray cast of her features.
“Go on!” she yelled, waving her arm frantically. “You can’t help us!”
A man wearing the red-white-and-blue armband of a Second Chance marshal bounded into view. He had a large-frame revolver in his fist, though he wasn’t Cutter Dan. He was tall but ganglier, with a shock of dark-brown hair over a long face.
Ryan snapped a shot his way. He had to aim high so as not to risk hitting Mildred, but the man dived into the vines anyway.
The marshal began to curse furiously at the thorns puncturing his flesh.
His heart feeling like lead in his chest, Ryan turned his back on the woman he loved and his loyal companion.
“This way,” he told the other three males, gesturing past the vine-branch shrine to where an opening in the briars revealed the game trail’s continuation north. “Power it out of here, now.”
Instead Ricky tried to hurl himself back toward Mildred and Krysty. “No!” he raved. “We can’t abandon them! The sec men will shoot them!”
Already following his own command and running like hell, Ryan risked a glance back. Doc and J.B. had the kid by his arms and were holding him back.
“Son,” he heard J.B. say. “The one thing we know for stone certain is that those coldhearts won’t shoot them. They wouldn’t risk cheating Santee of his fun.”
Whether it was the Armorer’s calm authority, or the sense of his words, Ricky gave up his futile, harebrained struggles and turned to run with the rest of them.
The last fan-tipped tails of the mutie horde were vanishing into the scrub. As always the long, slender lizard-like bodies could move through the thorny vine snarl like eels through seaweed. Sec men came boiling out of the mouth of the trail from the south to surround the women. A couple tossed blaster shots after the fleeing quartet.
The last thing Ryan heard from them before he vanished with his comrades into the cover of the Wild, and a trail that fortuitously bent quickly to the right, was the buffalo-bull voice of Cutter Dan bellowing, “Cease-fire, you dickheads!”
* * *
“SON OF A gaudy slut,” said Edwards, emerging from the vines where he’d pitched himself for cover from Ryan’s blaster shot. “Why’d you make us stop shooting, C.D.?”
“You wasn’t shooting no-how, Edwards,” Belusky said. “All you was doing was flailing around and cussing up a storm.”
“Well, yeah,” Edwards said aggrievedly, holding up forearms bared by rolled-up shirtsleeves. They were each twined with thin trails of blood from numerous small punctures.
“Shut it,” Cutter Dan ordered. He slowed from an easy lope as he came into the clearing. He held his burly Smith & Wesson Magnum revolver in his hand.
His men had secured the women already, tying their hands behind their backs, briskly and with no funny business. For their part, the two women, hellcats though they undoubtedly were, didn’t put up much of a fight. They did glare green and brown murder at Cutter Dan, though.
“They ain’t so much,” Edwards said dismissively. “After what they put us through I’da thought they woulda fought us tooth and claw.”
“Don’t lie, Edwards,” Scovul told him. “You don’t think.”
“They’re smart enough to know it won’t do them any good at this point,” Cutter Dan said. He smirked at their angry faces. The black woman was on her knees, the redhead lying on her side on the ground. “Also smart enough to know we got strict orders to bring them back alive, and we don’t want to disappoint the Judge on a matter like this, do we?”
“Don’t forget the part where we want to stay in good shape to drink your blood later,” the black one said. “After Ryan Cawdor rips your heart out!”
Cutter Dan laughed. He was riding a natural high of triumph. He could afford to be magnanimous with the captives just now.
He knew the fate that awaited them. So did they.
Then he noticed the red pool spreading beneath the red-haired witch. “Speaking of blood, somebody best jump on getting a tourniquet on that leg pronto. Or be the one to explain to Judge Santee why he let one of his prize gallows ornaments bleed out in the middle of the nuking Wild.
“And don’t get any bright ideas about copping a feel. Either woman, any time. Or I will personally chop off the offending hand and toss it into the vines for the deathbirds to cook for dinner.”
“Deathbirds” was what the human residents of the Wild mostly called the cantankerous, weird half-bird, half-lizard, mutie tribe that dominated the western end of the giant thicket. Nobody actually knew if they ate human flesh or not, though they certainly had a taste for ripping at it with their teeth when they were trying to take you down. But everybody just naturally assumed they did.
“Aww, boss,” whined one of the sec men Santee had grudgingly dispatched to replace the men chilled and wounded at the debacle at the abandoned farmhouse. “Ain’t you gonna let us have any fun?”
“Put a sock in it, Evrard,” Yonas ordered. “These two are strictly off limits. Or did you think the chief marshal was joking, you disgusting maggot puke?”
Cutter Dan grinned indulgently. “Thanks, Yonas. But you can ease back off the trigger of the blaster. We’ll run into some more caravan rats on the trail soon. Then you can get your jollies on.”
He walked over to where the women were surrounded by sec men. The marshals were all facing outward now, gripping their weapons. The muties had flown off like frightened birds when they found themselves unexpectedly caught between two fields of fire, but Cutter Dan’s men weren’t fooled. They knew the creatures were still out there, watching like the hawks they vaguely resembled, looking for the slightest sign of inattention and weakness.
“You all did an impressive job on the deathbirds,” Dan said, surveying the broken and shot-up bodies heaped throughout the big clearing.
“Just wait and see what we do to your thugs and you, you stoneheart scum sucker,” the kneeling woman spat out, “after our friends come for us.”
The smile dropped away from Cutter Dan’s face to be replaced a heartbeat later by another, far less pleasant smile.
“Talkative one, aren’t you,” he said to Mildred. “For that, I’ll see if I can put a word in with the Judge to make sure you get to see all your friends swing before you feel the noose shut the words off in your own bitch throat.”
He turned away; he’d let the woman get past his composure.
Cutter Dan blamed her for that.
But he’d already told her
how he meant to make her pay. So rather than wasting any more breath of his own on the subject, he started pointing at his men.
“You, you and you—yes, you, Evrard—get the women up and heading back for Second Chance. Scovul, you take charge of the detail.”
One of the men was Evrard, but he was the only one in the crew from among the men Cutter Dan had spotted looking eager when the man bitched about not being allowed to make free with the female captives. Scovul would be able to handle him during the trip.
“Yes, sir,” his lieutenant said, but he looked dubious.
Cutter Dan put a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t worry, friend,” he said. “You just drop them off, give a quick report to the Judge, and you’ll be back in no time.”
Scovul nodded.
“You mean for us to carry this red-haired one the whole way?” Edwards asked, as the women were dragged to their feet. Krysty’s head lolled, and the woman’s arms hung as if she were barely conscious.
She was sandbagging now, Cutter Dan reckoned.
“She’s powerful large,” Edwards said. “Meaning no offense, ma’am. For you are beautifully proportioned.”
“I should make you tote her yourself,” Scovul said, “for being such a pussy.”
“They say you are what you eat, Lieutenant!”
“Then you’re shit, Edwards,” Belusky said.
“Hey, now. Be nice. It’s a hero wounded in the line of duty you’re talking to here, bro.”
“A stupe who got holes poked in his ass diving out of the line of fire, more,” the sec man said dismissively.
“You know what?” Cutter Dan said. He ticked off one of the men he’d first detailed to the escort mission with his finger. “You stick with us, Millz. And you—”
He pointed to the largest of his marshals, a six-eight giant built like a buffalo and with certain facial similarities behind a mighty walrus mustache.