They needed speed now, not another blaster. Jak would just be another rabbit in the trap if the closing jaws snapped tight. Nuke it, if they
did
get pinned down they might have a jolt-walker’s chance if one of their people stayed free to do some well-placed back-shooting—or, being Jak, stabbing.
But Ryan preferred not to find out.
They pounded up a slope, risking brief exposure crossing a bare hilltop. That drew blasterfire from the south, even farther away than the bunch that was now northwest of them. The two patrols were burning lots of powder, but that was to be expected. Even for a halfway army like the EUN, good fire discipline usually meant they might let off single rounds or short bursts instead of blazing through a whole mag every time they touched a trigger.
Then Ryan was pounding down the far side. He crashed through a shin-high bush, judging that gave him less chance of putting a boot wrong than vaulting it. The rest of the way was open with loose gravel down to a trickling stream about twenty-five feet away. But his sense of balance could manage that.
He risked a look back. Krysty was helping Mildred down the scree. He was glad to see neither woman had a blaster drawn.
After Krysty and Mildred came Doc, holding his swordstick by the middle. His eyes were clear and his cheeks were flushed by the afternoon heat, though the humidity had finally dwindled as they worked their way higher up into the
cordillera
. But he didn’t seem to be laboring or breathing hard. His endurance was one thing that hadn’t suffered during his travails. Then again, the miles they’d hoofed over the years since he joined up, some at similar rates of speed, would either keep you fit or chill you.
Ryan led them down the stream. No point in avoiding obvious routes right now. The coldhearts knew where they were, close enough to be all over them in a heartbeat if they slowed. He was hoping to gain distance.
The converging EUN teams were still shooting and shouting. At what, Ryan had no clue. None of them was currently within eyeshot of their prey, although that could change in a heartbeat.
Where the stream dribbled into another, slightly more enthusiastic one, Ryan cut to the right. He saw Jak jump out of a weather-twisted scrub tree at the crest of the next rise and crouch at its base. He was staring right at Ryan.
A red mist of anger boiled up inside of Ryan, and he opened his mouth to yell at the albino teen for his disobedience. Ease up off the trigger, a reasonable voice said in his head.
The adrenaline crackling in his blood had him hyped up and on the razor’s edge. Fortunately, some keen part of his brain was always working. Jak had a rebellious nature but tended to follow Ryan’s orders, especially when the shit-hammer was quickly descending. The only reason he’d have headed back from breaking a safe trail for his companions was if he’d run into something up ahead that was even worse than what was fast coming up behind.
What, Ryan couldn’t think of.
But Jak’s soft one-word call gave him his answer in spades.
“Monster.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
“Fuck me,” Ryan murmured, more to himself than the albino youth lying up at his side. “Will you look at that bastard?”
Time pressed hard. Their friends were holed up in the rocks at the top of the outcrop where Jak had come back to meet them. With any decent luck they’d pulled out far enough ahead of the pursuit that the coldheart teams had flowed together into one, chasing straight after them. Even if they got the same luck the Deathlands usually dealt—bad—they had decent cover as well as concealment on three sides and could stand off both jaws of the trap.
For a spell.
But the sight that greeted Ryan through a scraggly wisp of bush was the sort to give the strongest man pause. And it did.
The beast stood on a high brow of bare granite.
“Armor cat,” Jak said quietly.
“Yeah. A big one,” Ryan said.
Even at a good sixty yards, its mere presence was terrifying. It was huge, the size of a wag. It was built more like a wolf than any cat Ryan had ever seen, with a deep chest and high back. But its face was clearly feline, like a bobcat’s. Or a tiger’s.
True to its name, the bastard was armored. Really armored. Its body, face and limbs were covered in dark brown plates that shone like metal in the sun, but Ryan thought they were more like a bug’s chitin. The plates looked thick and tough, accentuated by little tufts of fur that bristled out of the joints here and there. Ryan felt a sinking surety that those plates would shed even the pointy-nosed copper-jacketed bullets that left his longblaster as easily as a duck’s ass shed drizzle.
The cat also had sharp, bony spikes protruding from its shoulders. Just in case it looked too cute and cuddly without.
“Bastard must go a thousand pounds without even allowing for that shell of his,” Ryan said. “Don’t know how you’d even down something like that, without a wag-chiller missile. My best advice would be to aim for an eye and hope for the best.”
The eyes were big and yellow. Standing still, the creature was an easy shot for Ryan at that range, even with a fairly brisk breeze blowing crosswise down the sliver of valley that separated them. But the monster’s head never stayed still, and the armor plates that formed its brows looked extrathick. All the cat had to do was lower its head and there went your eye shot. A creature that size generally had a skull hard enough to shed a glancing shot, even without all that hard shell.
“What do?” Jak asked. He was practically quivering with eagerness. Ryan wasn’t sure for what. To run? To fight the thing?
Both, mebbe
. Ryan quirked a grin. “Listen close,” he said. “I’ve got a plan, if you’re crazy enough to try it....”
* * *
J
AK
WAS
,
OF
COURSE
.
He had crept to the base of the slope above which the armor cat still stood, arrogantly surveying its domain. It hadn’t yet seemed to notice him. Fortunately, the wind still blew crosswise, meaning it wouldn’t carry his scent to the cat. Otherwise he’d have been attacked already.
The albino teen judged it was trying to figure the meaning of all the noise going on off to the west. The shooting had gotten more concentrated, somehow. Jak could tell it was now going both ways. His friends were shooting it out with their pursuers.
He didn’t fret about them. They could look out for themselves, and they had Ryan with them, which shifted the odds in their favor.
Anyway, he had all the worrying he could handle about his
own
skinny ass. Especially since he was about to lay it on the line in the most triple-stupe manner imaginable.
He stood up.
“Hey, fuckface!” he shouted, waving a hand over his head.
The monster looked down at him, an almost puzzled look on its face.
Stooping, Jak grabbed a chunk of lava and threw it at the creature. The rock bounced off its low, armor-plated forehead.
“Pussy!” he yelled.
The big yellow eyes blinked once, slowly, then the armor cat roared and sprang.
It was an impressive leap, a terrifying leap.
A fatally surprising leap. The mutie’s enormous mass flew the whole thirty feet straight to where Jak had been standing and taunting it.
Fortunately, Jak had not only moved the instant it did, but his reflex was to move at an angle away from the axis of the armor cat’s jump, the way he’d avoid a punch or knife thrust by dodging at right angles.
He actually felt the earth shake as the creature crashed down right where he’d stood, by which time he was flying down the narrow valley at top speed.
The armor cat bounded after him. Jak dodged through a stand of saplings, hearing them splinter as the monster rushed into them, hot on his heels.
The cat could easily run him down. But Jak could change course like a rabbit, which the thing proved it couldn’t when it slammed side-on into another boulder pile. Shaking off the torrent of lava rubble and dirt that fell on its head, it roared in annoyance and launched after him again.
Also, while it could run him down like a coyote taking a three-legged gopher on the flat, that didn’t seem to be its preferred mode of hunting. It liked to get close and spring. The cat couldn’t be bothered to take less than a good twenty-five feet at a shot, which gave Jak, who kept glancing back over his shoulder, ample time to change course while the beast was in midflight and couldn’t switch direction.
Hunter as he was, he could see why. When the mutie cat fell from the sky like that, it would just pulp anything less sturdy than, well, itself. Or maybe a light war wag.
He sensed frustration in its snorting, panting breaths and the way it kept shaking its head, as if trying to loose a horsefly from an armored earhole. Just when he reckoned it had finally figured out its strategy wasn’t working, Jak ducked behind a big moss-grown granite boulder.
The monster blundered past, its huge clawed feet digging giant furrows in the purple dirt as it realized its quarry had vanished.
Jak, meanwhile, had scrambled up and over the rock and gotten a head start. “Missed!” he yelled over his shoulder.
The mutie cat bellowed with rage and bounded after.
The albino teen led the chase around to the north of the heights where his friends were. If sound were any clue, they were holding their own in a brisk firefight. It sounded to Jak as if the two pursuing forces had, in fact, joined up; most of the shots seemed to come from the same general area southwest of him. It was only a matter of time, though, before whoever was in charge of the combined patrols sent out a squad to flank the now-pinned-down party and deliver the kill shot.
In fact five men were just setting out around the north side when Jak burst out of the brush several yards in front of them, running directly toward them. Beyond the men, he could see the rest of the party firing up at the promontory from behind rocks and stunted trees.
Their faces lit with sadistic glee as the slight albino youth suddenly appeared, running right up on their blaster sights with his white hair flapping behind like a banner in a breeze.
Their abrupt shift from triumph to pants-filling terror gave him his cue. He dived to his left into a bush. Putting down a shoulder, he rolled and came up with his Python in his left hand and his big bowie in his right.
It was a gesture of utterly futile defiance; whichever foe he wound up facing would make short work of him.
But he wasn’t facing any enemies at all. As he expected—hoped—the armor cat had caught one glimpse of the coldhearts and thought that many prey were better than a single skinny one. When Jak came up on one knee, the armor cat was already in the air, trailing a joyous snarl.
Jak watched in fascination as the men, frozen solid in terror, gazed up at the armored bulk of the monster falling on them like a meteor.
Jak’s estimation of what the armor cat landing on an enemy would do turned out to be far weaker than reality. Basically, all five coldhearts burst like big, ripe bags of blood and guts when the creature came down on top of them. They were so completely squashed the monster didn’t slow down, although its claws slipped a little in the blood and guts as it charged straight into the remainder of the EUN patrol.
Jak watched a moment in happy fascination. Then, making sure to keep out of the way of a stray round, he trotted back around the rise where his friends were holed up. The sweet sounds of futile gunshots and even more futile shrieks was like his own personal fanfare.
* * *
“S
OMETHING
.”
Mildred came awake to Ryan’s soft word. He was hunkered down between her and Krysty.
She sat up. By reflex she had her ZKR 551 revolver in hand.
“El Guapo’s bunch?”
Ryan gave his head a shake as Krysty sat up. “They’d be crawling all over us if it was them. Those boys aren’t subtle.”
He gave Krysty a quick kiss and straightened. He had his Steyr in one hand. On the far side of the camp, Doc was still sitting in his bedroll, yawning and stretching.
J.B. was squatting by their fire. To minimize their chance of being detected, they had kept it small and banked it when they turned in. Now, as the yellow flames began to grow and crackle, Jak materialized out of the darkness between Mildred and Krysty.
“Out there,” he said quietly. “Watching.”
Skeletal fingers walked down Mildred’s spine, leaving frost.
“Who? What? How many?”
“Not know.”
They had pitched the camp just down the north side of a ridge. Trees screened them from below. Clumps of rock and brush hid them from the sides. Of course, as it meant that they couldn’t see an approaching enemy until he was right on them, either, they always had someone on guard duty.
“Up there.” J.B. pointed his jaw at the top of the ridge.
Ryan stood with a brand burning in one fist. He raised it high. Even before he got it all the way up; two circles of red light gleamed back at them from the crest.
“Chupacabras!”
Ricky hissed. He started to raise his carbine.
“Hold on,” Ryan said.
“Why?” Mildred said. “Why not shoot it?”
“I want to see what it’s doing,” Ryan said. “Jak, keep your eyes skinned to back and sides.”
“Right.” The youth didn’t sound resentful. He’d
seen
chupacabras.
Mildred wondered if he suspected—as she unhappily did—that the others he sensed out there watching in the night were the mutie’s kin.
The brand flared as a soft mountain breeze fanned it. Mildred saw the creature clearly now.
“Why not just chill it?” Mildred asked again. “It might attack.”
“That’s why I have all of us except Jak pointing blasters at it,” Ryan said.
The creature was about the size of a small man or teenager, with long powerful back legs, a scaly tail, smaller arms. The limbs ended in wickedly curving black talons. Its shape and dimensions vaguely suggested a kangaroo gone horribly wrong. The eyes were big and seemed to glow red.
The creature looked as if it had been gene-spliced out of nightmares.
The hair rose on the back of Mildred’s neck as she heard curious trilling sounds from several directions. They might have been night birds. Or bugs. Even up here in the cooler, drier mountains, Puerto Rico never seemed to lack for bugs. But Mildred couldn’t make herself believe that was what was making the sounds.
The
chupacabra
began a strange sidling dance, left and right, erecting and lowering the long black spines that covered its body. The motion was hypnotic, which was the mutie’s intent. If it could mesmerize its victim, then it could strike without opposition, sink fangs into flesh and drink living blood.
J.B.’s M-4000 scattergun roared. The creature rocked back on its tail then toppled to the ground, as the buckshot pistoned into its chest.
But the heavy, densely grown spines provided the
chupacabra
a rough-and-ready form of armor. The creature hissed and sprang onto its big hind legs again. A forked tongue darted from between tooth-lined jaws.
Mildred’s shot blew out its left eye. The narrow spine-crested skull snapped back. A heartbeat later a .44-caliber slug from Doc’s huge handblaster smashed into its narrow chest.
It went down with a limp finality that made it seem unlikely the monster was playing dead.
Shadows began to move visibly around them. “Form a circle, everybody,” Ryan said. “Blasters up.”
That trilling—insistent and sinister—grew louder.
As though the blackness was taking solid form around them,
chupacabras
began to appear from the night.