She smiled, herself. She was glad Doc had that escape from the hard realities of the world from time to time. She did fear, though, that someday he’d stray off down some mental pathway and never find his way back.
Ryan brought up the rear, longblaster in hand. The weapon didn’t quite have the long-range punch his older Steyr had. But the sniper rifle was just that: a specialized tool that wasn’t much use at closer ranges. If anything jumped out at them from the dense walls of rain-wet vegetation, he was ready to blast the hell out of it.
J.B. had point for a change, with Ricky walking right behind him, then Mildred. J.B. toted his Smith & Wesson M-4000 scattergun. The local boy had his peculiar longblaster. Neither Mildred nor Krysty had weapons in hand.
Jak was doing what he usually did in unknown country: ranging out front, along their flanks, hanging back to keep their back trail clear. He’d been especially edgy about that the past few days, although he wouldn’t explain why.
Not even Ryan pressed him. Jak had a feeling. If he
knew
anything, he’d say as much. And while he was far from stupe, expressing himself in words wasn’t his strong suit. When he just felt something, and people tried to pump him for specifics, he got sullen and defensive and clammed up.
She smiled. They were a family, as tight-knit as any she’d known. Yet they were also a unit, in the old military sense. Each had a role, each functioned smoothly in it, and they all knew one another well enough that they anticipated the others’ actions without much need for words.
Mildred compared them to how a jazz band played. When the time came to improvise, any one of them might take the lead, confident the others could follow. Krysty had never heard a jazz band herself, but she caught the drift.
Krysty frowned. Something had just tickled the edge of her peripheral vision. She felt the hairs prickle at the back of her neck.
She didn’t have Jak’s senses, honed taut as a wildcat’s by a life prowling in the bayou, hunting the deadliest of beast, human and mutie prey. But she had her own bond with the natural world—with Gaia—a sense of connection to earth and what lived on it.
“Ryan,” she said softly over her shoulder. She felt a strong desire not to speak aloud. She didn’t want to alert whatever was out there that she was aware of it. She would have passed the word through Doc, but the old man was still in his own little world. “Something’s out there.”
“Triple-red, people,” Ryan said, in the soft speech that was much more stealthy than a whisper’s hiss. “Stay sharp.”
A shape appeared beside J.B. One moment the armorer was shouldering past a branch that ended in a clump of leaves like a sharp green shellburst. The next heartbeat he had something right alongside.
Krysty had already started slipping her snubby handblaster out of its holster at her belt. Ahead of her, Mildred already had her heavy ZKR held muzzle-up in both hands. Then she relaxed—a hair. It was Jak.
“Something,” he said softly to J.B. without looking at him. “Hunting.”
Unfortunately Ricky Morales wasn’t yet attuned to them. “What?” he asked, his voice shockingly loud in the rain and all this still. “What’s going on?”
With a loud rustle of brush a hairy shape leaped on him from the right. He yelped and went down beneath its weight.
Before Krysty could react, something sprang from the right, jaws wide and yellow teeth gleaming to tear out her throat.
Chapter Twenty
Krysty turned and shot. She didn’t need to aim. The lunging shape was almost touching the short barrel of her .38-caliber handblaster when she triggered it.
The little revolver bellowed. She caught a whiff of scorched wet fur then heard a squeal of pain and rage as the bullet punched home.
The creature hit her in midchest. The rotten-meat stench of a carnivore’s breath filled her nostrils. A furry muzzle snapped at her face. She grabbed the animal by its breastbone and threw it over her head, using its momentum as well as her own strength to hurl it shrieking and writhing into the surrounding jungle.
It was a dog, the size of a big coyote, about thirty or forty pounds. Feral dogs were a widespread menace in the Deathlands.
Snarls and barks crackled through the sounds of raindrops hitting leaves and limbs. Gunshots boomed as her friends blasted the attackers lunging at them from both sides.
“Pack!” Ricky screamed.
The boy was lying on his back, his attacker nowhere in sight. Ricky’s face was flushed with sudden violent effort beneath the coating of sweat the humid jungle heat had lathered over all their skins. She guessed that, like her, he had thrown the beast off, probably with his legs.
“Protect yourself,” he shouted. He scrambled to his feet and butt-stroked a snarling attacker across the muzzle with his DeLisle. “Don’t let them bite you.”
Reacting instantly, she swung her pack off her back. She heard the roar of Doc’s shotgun.
The charge of buckshot took a dog in midleap, striking its breast bone and peeling it open in a spray of blood. The dog fell yelping and gasping into the foliage from which it had jumped.
Krysty got her pack clumsily in front of her just in time to catch something whipping toward her belly. It struck with a fistlike impact: a brown-and-yellow knot at the end of a dog’s jointed tail. The creatures looked like German shepherds or small wolves, with rough, shaggy hair that spiked around their raised hackles and shoulders. But their tails looked like a scorpion’s.
The creature snarled as it tried to tug its stinger free. The tails were longer than the torso and head combined, allowing them to strike targets to their front, again, like a scorpion. She shot the animal in the face.
The bullet ripped off the front of its muzzle. Squealing, it cringed away.
“Run for the tall timber!” Ryan yelled. “Now!”
She glanced back to see him slamming his Steyr like a riot baton horizontally into the gaping maw of one beast springing for his face.
“Ryan, behind you!” she screamed. But he had the sixth-sense of a stray tomcat. He was already spinning, his left hand coming off the longblaster’s foregrip. As a stinger arced over to inject its load of venom into his leg, Ryan sidestepped and slashed through the tail with a savage stroke of his heavy-bladed panga.
The tip fell beside him. Ocher liquid dribbled from the raw stump. The needlelike sting tip was black, and a brighter yellow fluid pulsed out of it.
“Get a move on, girl!” Doc thundered up hard behind her with his long gangly legs pumping comically high. He held his swordstick in his left hand and his big handblaster in his right. As usual, crisis had snapped him back to reality.
Krysty could only turn and obey. She held up her heavy pack in her left hand, her S&W 640 in her right. At least she could hold her pack up one-handed and swing its mass to bat away another scorpion dog, which sprang straight back into the bush.
Ahead of her, Mildred was pushing forward, holding up her pack with both hands and clutching her wheelgun at the same time. She wasn’t able to shoot that way. But she was probably smart all the same, since she could use the pack as Krysty had, both as shield and weapon to knock attacking muties away.
The problem was, no amount of hiking could ever make Mildred’s legs, powerful as they were, a millimeter longer.
She was still making respectable speed, though. Krysty bit down an impulse to bolt, and instead shot a dog that tried to hamstring Mildred with a snap at her heel.
The monsters were all around them. It was a big pack. They were yipping excitedly now, trying to coordinate attacks. With the branches close enough to brush the party’s shoulders, dumping loads of accumulated rainwater down their backs and sides at every step, the scorpion dogs could keep attacking from close range.
Whether the spiky growths at their shoulders were just bristles or actual spines like the mutie monkeys had, Krysty couldn’t tell. One way or another, the creatures seemed able to slide through the brush like eels through water. Their numbers made them brave and lethal. Those venom-packed tails made them extremely dangerous.
J.B.’s shotgun boomed from the front of the little column. He was using it to blast the dogs that got close and bash the ones that got closer. Behind him, Jak ran shoulder to shoulder with Ricky, his white hair streaming behind him.
Jak parried tail strokes with his bowie knife in his left fist. His Python was in his right hand, vent-ribbed barrel pointed skyward. He preferred blade to blaster when the chips were down.
Ricky held his fat-barreled carbine in his left hand, using it mostly as a shield. In his right, he carried his big handblaster. As Krysty watched, he fired the Para-Ordnance to his right at something she couldn’t see.
Ahead of them soared the big trees of the rain forest, their broad-leafed crowns a hundred or more feet above the forest floor. Krysty was only vaguely aware of them; her attention was on keeping her front—and Mildred’s back—clear of the attacking muties. And not tripping over a root or twisting her ankle on a rock slimy with rain and decomposing vegetation, which would get her quickly dead and probably doom Doc as well when he tripped over her.
After furious running and more furious fighting, J.B. and the rest broke from the dense jungle growth into the rain forest.
“Twenty yards in and form circle!” Somehow Ryan found the breath to bellow the command from the rear.
J.B. put on a burst of speed. His sprint took him well out in front. He reached a spot roughly sixty feet in, wheeled, knelt and brought his M-4000 to his shoulder.
It bucked, vomited noise and yellow fire. Ahead, to Krysty’s left, a scorpion dog squealed. Briefly.
The two teenagers dashed free of the brush and took up positions flanking J.B.
“Don’t shoot your pals!” the armorer snapped. The two raised their weapons and aimed straight back along the path. Even running and fighting for her life, Krysty felt a flash smile as she caught the shamefaced expression they shared.
She knew what to do. Throwing her pack into the face of a dog that tried to dart at her legs—she thought she heard a skinny leg snap, and the creature gave a piteous shriek—she accelerated. She grabbed Mildred’s right arm as she dashed past and towed her, in a sort of high-speed forward stumble, across the mostly open forest floor, past Ricky’s left shoulder.
She let Mildred go. Yelping, the physician tumbled, landing on her face in the slimy mulch of decaying leaves. She slid a good ten feet, plowing a furrow in the sludge.
Krysty slipped around to just behind Jak’s right shoulder. Then, holding her .38-caliber blaster in both hands, she shot down a dog that was running on Ryan’s left, looking for a chance to strike. Doc ran past on the far side of J.B. and Ricky.
Then Ryan reached the circle in the open ground.
And that was the key: open ground.
It offered little concealment for beasts the size of the scorpion dogs. Especially against seven humans who had blasters and knew how to use them.
They’d laid a ferocious hurting on the pack on their desperate dash through the undergrowth, but the monsters pressed their attack.
The companions were a tempting target. This much meat would last even a pack this size for days, before their chills liquefied completely in the high-speed rain-forest decomposition process, and the last of their nutrients drained into the humus in a reeking yellow ooze.
A half dozen scorpion dogs went down howling in the volley the group fired when they formed a circle in the relative open. And that ended it. The survivors turned chitinous tail and fled.
Krysty heard them barking to one another as they receded into the distance. They sounded disappointed.
“Hold steady, everyone,” Ryan said. He knelt facing away from the brush wall, into deeper woods. They needed to maintain a circle in case the pack decided to return. “Sing out—everybody fit to fight?”
Though Mildred and Doc sounded down to their last breath, all were.
“Nobody got stung?” he asked. When all confirmed they hadn’t, he said, “Now we wait to make sure the bastards are really gone.”
“Good call, Ryan,” J.B. said. He sounded hardly winded from his exertion. He might not look like much, but he was tough as boot leather. And not just in his wiry little body. “Bastards might be up to tricks. Just waiting for us to let our guard down.”
No, Krysty thought. They’re done. They had taken their best shot, and like any hunting pack, they knew when it was time to cut their losses—and slake their hunger on their own chills and crips, likely.
But she said nothing as she broke open her snubby handblaster and ejected the five cartridges into her palm. They were all emptied out and still warm from ignition. She tumbled the brass into a shirt pocket and was reaching for her pack when she realized she’d jettisoned it in the brush. She’d retrieve it later. Instead, she took a speed-loader from another pocket and injected five live rounds, then sealed the piece.
Waiting to make sure the monsters are gone may not be necessary, she thought, but it’s a good habit. And keeping up the right habits, she knew, made all the difference between being on your feet—and, thank Gaia, unpoisoned—and staring lifelessly up at the faraway green ceiling.
* * *
“Y
ES
,”
THE
HEADMAN
SAID
, nodding gravely. “I know of that place.”
The ville was a handful of huts that seemed to Mildred to consist mostly of bundled grasses and brush, cleverly bound together and connected by intricate basketwork. It clung to a steep mountainside of dark purple dirt and red-tinged black lava, with green tufts and blue flowers sticking out here and there. Some terraced fields, mostly given over to lettuce and bean plants, straggled up and down the slope.
The grandest building was a kind of longhouse in the middle of the ville, with walls and roof beams of hardwood cut in the forested valleys below and dragged laboriously up winding trails. The headman had been sitting there at his ease, smoking a pipe that smelled suspiciously of ganja, when the party entered the tiny ville.
“I, myself, saw such a cave, in my youth. I was more adventurous then, and had not yet taken on the responsibilities of a chief.”
He spoke Spanish, which Ricky duly translated for those who needed the help. It was a bit hard to understand him, not because of any accent, but because a scalie’s mouth was shaped differently from a human mouth.
Mildred wondered if it gave her friends the same creeps it did her, to stand here surrounded completely by scalies. These were a fairly advanced variant of that mutation, roughly four feet tall when adult, with large patches of scales on skin that had a greenish cast in the hot morning sun. The chief’s eyes were huge wet gleams in the shadow of what Mildred couldn’t help thinking of as a coolie hat, although she suspected that was racist. Not that anyone alive today would have the faintest conception what she was talking about if she brought that up.
From Ryan’s frozen expression, Mildred suspected he found the situation no more natural or comfortable than having a yellow jacket perched on his nose.
If the scalie headman noticed the humans’ unease, he gave no sign of it. Mildred guessed that, even if the mutie understood human expressions and body posture—as he might from regular dealings with the breed—he still might not get that
he
was the cause of Ryan’s discomfort, as opposed to what he was saying, the humid heat or jock itch.
In the days they’d been here, they’d definitely gotten to see up close and personal both reasons the outsiders called the place “Monster Island.” Humans and muties, or the high-functioning humanoid branches who at least approximated human intelligence, coexisted so commonly and smoothly that the island’s inhabitants might well find the mainland’s pervasive fear and hatred of muties incomprehensible.
“We have a ritual of passage into adulthood,” the ville boss said. “Our young must prove their worth by making a journey up into these mountains. To the very heart of the monsters’ lair.”
“I’m hating where this is going, okay?” Mildred said to no one in particular. “Anyone else with me on this?”
“Shush,” Ryan said evenly.
The senior scalie ignored them both. “I was there in the valley, at nightfall, hiding. And I saw the creatures coming out of the very rocks above me as if the earth herself was giving birth to them. I was able to creep up behind a pile of rocks and climb a rock face, where the horrible things would surely expect no one to go. And I saw them coming out of a hole in the mountainside. But it was no normal cave, my friends. Oh, no. Inside the narrow crevice I saw a rectangle.
“It was a door. There could be no mistaking. Someone made that entrance into the earth. And now the
chupacabras
dwell there!”
Ryan sighed. “Bingo.”
* * *
“S
O
WHY
ARE
WE
JUST
assuming,” Mildred asked, “that where we’re going is the same place these freaking
chupacabras
hang out?”
“That’s how our luck runs?” J.B. suggested helpfully.
They labored up a steep path on a forested mountainside. It was midday, and the broad-leafed green trees to either side offered little shade from the sun.
Krysty resisted the urge to flick a look back at Ricky Morales. The boy was bringing up the rear with his DeLisle tightly gripped in both hands, his head seemingly on a swivel and a stern yet proud expression on his narrow face. This was the first time Ryan had allowed him the important duty of rear guard.