Chrono Spasm (5 page)

The wolf tilted its head as if listening. Ricky watched, amazed by the performance. It was almost as if Jak had an instinctive bond with the animal. Something about his manner seemed to calm the angry beast, cowing it despite its greater size.

Jak had prior experience of taming animals. One time, a few years ago, he had been partnered with a mutie mountain lion, their curious bond inexplicable to his human companions.

For a long moment, the two faced off, Jak’s gaze never leaving that of the wolf, his hand held close to the .357 Magnum Colt Python he wore holstered at his hip. If it came to it, Jak would shoot the beast, but something that size might take more than one shot, and Jak didn’t like his chances of outmaneuvering a hungry wolf.

The wolf snarled once again, and Jak replied, his own lips pulling back from his teeth, a noise of warning issuing from deep in his throat. Then, magically—or it seemed so to Ricky—the wolf backed away, hunkering down as if in supplication to Jak.

The albino turned back, a cunning smile on his lips as he walked toward Ricky and the staked-out victim. It was at that instant that they heard the gunshot cut the air.

The wolf went down in a hail of bullets and Jak and Ricky dived for cover as that same stream of bullets clipped the ground close to their feet. They were under attack.

Chapter Four

“What the nukeshit was that?” J.B. cursed as the distant sound of bullets cutting the air echoed across the landscape.

“It came from down there,” Doc said, using his swordstick to point past the tree cover toward the distant, snowcapped hills.

Nyarla scrambled to her feet, unwrapping the blanket to free her arms. “Papa?” She was going to run, Krysty could see it in her eyes.

“It’s okay,” Krysty said, reaching for the young woman’s wrist. “We’re safe up here.”

Nyarla shook her head, the fear clear in her wide eyes.

Mildred and Ryan had joined J.B. and Doc as they peered through the trees at the northern edge of the clearing. More gunshots were coming from that way in ones and twos, abrupt rattles echoing through the silent air.

“How far?” Mildred asked.

“Close,” Ryan replied, drawing his SIG-Sauer. “And I’ll bet scrip for ammo it’s Jak and Ricky.”

J.B. pulled out his mini-Uzi as Ryan led the way through the trees, with Doc and Mildred following.

Krysty remained behind with Nyarla, holding an arm over her shoulders to try to calm her and to keep her warm. “It’s okay,” she encouraged. “Shh. It’ll be okay.”

* * *

D
OWNSLOPE
, J
AK
AND
R
ICKY
were scrabbling for cover as a fifth shot cut the air close to their hiding place. With the first shot they had dived for the nearest clump of bushes, their shaken leaves sprinkling loose the snow that covered them like dandruff.

Ricky had his DeLisle carbine in his hands, its black barrel pointing ahead of him like an extension of his body. “Where are they, Jak? You see?”

Jak looked calm, but he was roiling inside. He was pushing his senses to their limits, reaching out with sound and smell and sight and touch to try to detect from which direction the ambush was coming. “Up there,” he said as another bullet issued from the distant blaster with a muffled burp. “Ridge.”

Ricky watched where Jak had indicated, his eyes tracing the snowy line that mounted an undulating curve of ground. The stretch of ground was dotted with occasional trees, maybe just one or two every twenty square feet, with a further line of trees capping its highest point—an ideal spot to hide with a scoped rifle and wait for prey, Ricky realized. Between here and there was open territory, the snow-covered ground looking pale blue beneath the night sky, twinkling ice crystals shimmering here and there like tea lights.

The eviscerated man still lay staked on the ground a little ways to the left, moaning. Jak realized what he was now—he had been staked out to attract bigger prey, like leaving a steak or string of sausages to distract a dog. The mutie wolf was someone’s dinner, most likely several someones given the bastard size of the brute, Jak thought, and he and Ricky had just stumbled into the chill zone at the wrong instant. But now that they were in it, it was going to take some quick talking or quicker chilling to get them out alive.

Jak eyed the distant tree line again, watching for the muzzle-flash of the longblaster. The echoes were muffled, making it hard to triangulate just where their distant chiller was. Jak waited.

“I don’t like it,” Ricky whispered, looking up at the trees.

“Cover me” was all Jak said in response. Then he bolted from the cover of the bush, sprinting in a rapid zigzag pattern, scrambling past the twitching corpse of the wolf and up and around in a long arc that would end at the distant trees.

A flash came from the tree line followed a split second later by the loud report of a longblaster. An instant later, a bullet whipped past Ricky, kicking up a plume of powdery snow as it impacted with the ground close to the gutless victim’s foot. Ricky hunkered down behind the snow-covered bush, rattling off a blast from the powerful DeLisle. A .45 bullet whizzed away from the weapon’s silenced barrel with just a whisper of parting air.

Ricky was already moving, scrambling across the icy ground toward another cluster of bushes, not waiting to find out if he had hit their opponent. The answer to that question came a moment later when another thunderclap echoed through the air as a bullet flew down the slope. A 9 mm round hacked through the bush behind Ricky like an arrow, cutting through the space where he had been hiding not three seconds earlier.

In a swift, long-practiced movement that he had learned from his Uncle Benito, Ricky brought up the DeLisle and rattled off a second shot, sending the bullet hacking through the undergrowth and up into the line of trees. The bitter tang of cordite hung in the air, but Ricky was on the move again, his legs pumping as he scrambled to the next patch of cover, close to the fallen body of the mutie wolf.

After a moment, another bullet whizzed back in response, clipping the hindquarters of the wolf just a couple of feet from where Ricky hid.

Damn, he thought, this guy’s using night lenses. There was no other way he would be able to track Ricky with such accuracy on the night like this.

Ricky moved again, scampering away from the body of the wolf as his foe sent another bullet downslope in his wake. All he could do now was keep moving, seeking new cover until Jak made his move.

Jak, meanwhile, was still running up the slope, taking a circuitous route. He had his Colt Python revolver in his hands, six rounds chambered once more after his battle with the ill-tempered caribou outside the redoubt doors. He was close to the trees now, and grimaced as another muzzle-flash illuminated the darkness with the snap-bang of a longblaster’s discharge.

Then Jak was weaving into the group of low trees, his Colt Python stretched before him like an accusing finger.

He saw the chiller immediately—a man wrapped, like the others, in rags, his face and head covered in scarves. A pair of night-vision goggles lay beside him, a few spots of snow settling on their cool titanium frame. The man was lying in the dirt, snow melted around him from his expelled body heat, his battered Mosin-Nagant longblaster propped on a low outcropping. The weapon was a two-hundred-year-old design, featuring a rudimentary crosshairs arrangement, a raised circle of steel at one end, in which the target could be ringed and then shot. Jak was impressed that the man had managed to hit the wolf at that distance.

The shooter turned as Jak appeared amid the trees, alerted by the crunch of his boot heels on the snow. Jak brought his Colt around in line with the shooter’s head, squeezed the trigger, watched emotionlessly as the man’s head kicked back and to the side with the impact of the bullet. The man went down in a flail of limbs, his Mosin-Nagant slipping from the outcropping, a red blossom flowering across his head scarf.

But before Jak could acknowledge his victory, a second shooter appeared, dropping from the branches above his head and landing on Jak’s shoulders. Jak crashed down to his knees, releasing his grip on the Colt Python as he slammed into the dirt.

“Tough break, meat bag,” the man atop his body snarled as Jak’s head reeled. “You should’ve looked more careful afore you jumped in.”

Jak heard the familiar sound of a handblaster being cocked as he sprawled in the frost-speckled soil. He struggled to move aside, driving his body away even as the half-seen shadow brought the weapon around in a tight arc. Then Jak felt something hard strike his head—the butt of the blaster—and he felt the bile rise to his throat as his head went crashing to the ground once again.

* * *

R
YAN
, J.B., M
ILDRED
and Doc fanned out as they emerged from the tree cover. They could hear the shooting from close by, and ran with heads low, searching for its source.

“Jak?” Ryan called quietly. “Ricky? Where are you?”

Ricky’s voice replied on Ryan’s second urging. “Over here,” he responded. He recognized Ryan’s imposing silhouette moving among the shrubbery from his latest hiding place behind a fat tree stump. “On your left.”

Ryan took a half-dozen strides and met with Ricky a moment later where the lad was crouching beside the dead tree.

“You okay?” the one-eyed man asked. “We heard shots.”

J.B. joined them a moment later, and Mildred and Doc followed, giving the area a once-over as they hurried to join with their companions.

“Nice bit of roadkill out there,” Mildred said, indicating the mutie wolf.

“More over there,” J.B. added, pointing to the naked figure lying in the snow.

“The man’s still alive, J.B.,” Ricky stated, keeping his voice low and his eyes on the distant line of trees. “We found him when the shooting started.”

“Fireblast!” Ryan muttered. “Seems we can’t go five minutes without someone or something trying to chill us.”

“Listen,” Mildred said, raising her empty hand for quiet. “Hear that? Shooting’s stopped.”

The friends listened, but all they could hear was the insensate moaning of the staked man.

“Means one of two things,” Ryan said. “Either your shooter’s been decommissioned, or Jak has.”

“It’s not Jak,” Ricky said insistently. “Shooter knew I was here. We were exchanging fire up till a minute ago.”

“Could be reloading,” J.B. suggested.

“Or could be coming to chill your asses,” an unfamiliar voice snarled from behind the group.

* * *

S
TILL
HIDDEN
in the shadowy copse of trees overlooking the redoubt, Krysty kept Nyarla close to her, trying to share her body temperature with the freezing young woman. Nyarla was slipping back into shock, Krysty knew, could feel the way her body shook not from cold so much as sheer terror
. What is she so afraid of? Krysty wondered.

The sounds of the nearby firefight seemed to have ceased. It had been almost two minutes since the last shot had echoed through the snow-daubed trees.

Another thought plucked at the edge of Krysty’s mind, something Nyarla had said just before Ryan and the others had responded to the gunfire. Could it be possible? she wondered. Could a place become so cold that time itself would become frozen? It seemed incredible and yet Krysty had seen many inexplicable things in her journeys across the Deathlands. One more would be nothing less than par for the course.

As she pondered that, Krysty saw a shape moving through the trees toward her. “Ryan?” she asked, her hand automatically going to her hip holster.

The figure didn’t answer, and Krysty subtly relaxed her grip on Nyarla, pushing her behind her protectively. Even as Nyarla changed position, the figure emerged from the wooded curtain. It was a man dressed in snow-dusted furs that made his body seem huge and round like a balloon. His face was masked with wrappings of dirty cloth and he held a slim, blowback blaster with a matte black finish in one gloved hand.

Krysty had unholstered her .38 Smith & Wesson by then, and she swung up its snubby barrel where it could be seen. “Freeze,” she commanded, unaware of the irony of her statement as snowflakes swam through the air around her.

The man reacted instantly, snapping off a single shot from his Russian-made PSM blaster even as he ducked behind one of the trees. The bullet whizzed past Krysty’s side, embedding in a tree behind her and her charge.

She moved, scampering toward the fur-wrapped figure as he darted behind the line of trees, her breath coming through clenched teeth and hanging in the air, where she had been in foggy little markers. The figure in the trees shouted something Krysty didn’t quite understand, and then his blaster barked again, launching another shot past the side of his tree cover toward the open area. Krysty fired back as he broke cover, cursing as her shot clipped a branch in a shower of falling snow, missing her quarry by a foot.

Krysty pushed herself harder, running for the man in the trees as another bullet clipped the air close to her left ear. Then she heard a scream, and she turned just in time to see Nyarla struggling in the bear-hug grip of a second attacker, this one dressed in similar ragged furs to the first.

Krysty turned, swinging around her Smith & Wesson, trying to get a bead on the man as he pulled Nyarla off her feet. The woman shrieked, her hands bunched into fists, her feet kicking as she tried to pull herself free. She was moving too much, Krysty knew; there was no way she could make the shot. Mildred maybe, or Ryan, but not her. Not running like this.

Behind Krysty, another shot rang out. She flattened against the nearest tree trunk, her head turning left and right as she sought multiple targets.

“On your knees,
bitch,
” the first man shouted in a gruff voice from somewhere behind Krysty’s right shoulder. Nyarla and her captor had disappeared, sinking back into the darkness beyond the open area of the copse, leaving behind the woollen blanket that Mildred had loaned her as the only evidence of their passing. Krysty scanned the trees, searching for their silhouettes in the ill-lit woods, looking for a moving shadow among shadows. She heard a scream, abruptly muffled by a man’s hand, but the trees and the faint illumination from the stars were contributing to disguising the source, the falling snow adding an extra layer of confusion. She just couldn’t narrow down their position.

As Krysty peeked out from her hiding place, her emerald eyes darting left and right, another shot rang out close to her head. She leaped back as the bullet clipped the tree she was using for cover, kicking up a shower of broken bark just six inches from her skull.

It was too dangerous. There were at least two of them out there, both of them armed—plus the trapped woman was a factor, too. Krysty had promised to protect Nyarla, not get her shot in the cross fire of some ill-judged scuffle over nothing.

“Okay, okay,” Krysty called out. “I’m putting my blaster down. Just don’t hurt the woman.”

“Na koleni,”
the now-familiar man’s voice called from his hiding place. “On your knees.” He sounded close to Krysty—real close.

“Okay,” Krysty said again, stepping out from behind the broad trunk of the conifer, her arms raised with her blaster still in her right hand, pointed into the branches.

“On your knees,” the man repeated, peering out from tree cover just eight feet from where Krysty had been hiding. His colleague stepped forward into the clearing as well, still clutching the slender form of Nyarla; she was no longer moving.