“Shut it,” Ryan said quietly, but not whispering. He knew that a whisper carried better than soft words—and also generated a hint of
suspicion
. He didn’t know whether the coamers—might as well call them that if anything—knew human speech, or if they did, if it was even English, but he was assuming worst-case scenario here.
He stuck the shovel into loose dirt to one side, turned toward a rude table they’d made with a scavvied door and a couple chunks of concrete, picked up a canteen with his left hand and drank. His longblaster, like Ricky’s carbine and J.B.’s scattergun, were propped against it. The Armorer’s Uzi lay on the table.
They all wore their sidearms, and if close work suddenly became necessary, Ryan had his panga, too, in its holster offsetting his SIG. He reckoned he could do some good work with the shovel, if it came to that.
Around him the others acted as if they were knocking off for a quick break themselves. Straightening, they wiped their faces, looking as if they hadn’t a care in the world.
From somewhere above them came a strange scream, an inhuman ululation, rising, falling, like a hand-cranked siren.
Working hard not to show it, Ryan braced for the inevitable hailstorm of rocks and branches.
Instead, what burst from the top of the pit all around them was a wave of screaming, white, red-eyed bodies.
* * *
W
ATCHING HIS BROTHER-COUSIN
Vurl smear grits and mashed peas in his thinning hair, Buffort Sumz remembered what he really loved about family dinner at home: he wasn’t the dumb one at the table.
Poor triple-stupe Vurl was older than him by all thirteen fingers on Vurl’s hands.
“This possum sure is good,” Yoostas Sumz said, sucking the meat off a boiled foot.
“Well, it’s been gettin’ fat off eatin’ our slops and garbage,” said Paw-Paw, who was named that to be funny in the family because he was his own stepdad. “So we’s just gettin’ our own back, is why it tastes so good!”
Buffort laughed until tears ran down his cheeks and pounded his fist on the table until Sister-Maw told him to knock it off on account of he was rattling the tableware and threatening to spill everybody’s homemade Towse lightning. But it was triple funny! Even Vurl laughed, after looking around blankly with a sprig of boiled collard green trailing down his bulging forehead for a full minute.
He was comfortable with the smells of home: wood smoke, familial sweat, food boiling on the stove. And the pigs, dogs and chickens that jostled and brawled and squalled between the legs of the diners at the big central table, and by the various other tables dotted around the big common room of the sprawled main house, hunting for discarded bones and such. But not many scraps, because very little escaped the voracious appetites of Buffort’s
family, of which there were many more than he could count.
Of course, Yoostas liked to point out that didn’t take a double-large family. Buffort loved his brother, but sometimes he hated that the smaller man was so fast and shifty, and could use those traits to elude the head-thumpings he earned from Buffort. Most of the time.
“Betty Jo,” Paw-Paw said, ladling up some boiled possum into a wooden bowl, “give Grammaw Allis her share.”
A pudgy pigtailed black-haired girl nodded and carried the steaming food to the shriveled old woman who sat bent all over in a corner by herself, singing an endless song without words or notable tune.
“That constant noise drives me crazy,” said Buffort’s Aunt-Sis Sallee. “We should feed her to the hogs and be done with it.”
“Here, now, Sallee,” Paw-Paw said indulgently. “She’s family, and one of the better lays I’ve ever had, in her day. We should at least wait until she gets sick or breaks somethin’. That’d be the charitable thing.”
“Gertie-May!” Sister-Maw exclaimed, turning back from the stove where she was stirring a kettle of grits with a long wooden spoon. She was a sturdy woman wearing a dress that seemed sewed together entirely of patches, and a grimy apron on which squiggles had been hand-embroidered, years before. Yoostas, who could read some, said they spelled out “Worldz Best Cuk.” Buffort didn’t know whether the little weasel was funning him or not.
“You stop diddlin’ your brother underneath the dinin’ table! What will the neighbors say?”
Bobby-Joan, who was a ragged-haired blonde girl,
hooted laughter. “Black dust, Aunt Momma, they all know she’ll do anythin’ with any boy from miles ’round!”
“Nevertheless.” Sister-Maw turned back to the hot stove shaking her heavy, gray-bunned head. “Folks’ll think we’re no better than muties.”
“What’s that?”
It was Johnny-Blue, one of Buffort’s more distant cousin-brothers, not much younger than him or Yoostas but a half-pint even compared to the redheaded wiseass. He was skinny and had a shock of jet-black hair that fell over big black eyes. He had an eerie touch to him, and no lie. But he also had the keenest senses in the whole extended clan. That mebbe came from his mother, Buffort thought, an outland woman from the flats clear over to the hollow. She had sadly not been smart in the ways of the wood, and got killed by a bear before Buffort could even get a crack at her.
“Don’t you go rilin’ up your brother and sister cousins with none of your nonsense,” Sister-Maw said.
But Yoostas had stiffened with his spoon halfway to his mouth. Laying it back on his tin plate, he sat up straight in his chair. “Crickets stopped,” he said. “Is that what you heard?”
“Part,” the black-haired boy replied.
Somebody screamed. It came from outside the big house, clearly.
A couple of the diners jumped to their feet. Paw-Paw reacted more deliberately, taking off the greasy napkin he had tucked under his multiple chins like a bib. It wasn’t as if it did him much good, anyway. As much grub wound up on the front of his shirt or in his lap as on the napkin anyhow.
“Easy, now,” he said. “It’s probably nothin’. If there was trouble about, them hound dogs’d start barkin’ up a storm.”
The hound dogs, penned over by the barn for their supper, commenced to barking up a storm.
“Well, now,” Paw-Paw said, pushing back from the table. “Ain’t that a thing?”
As quick as it had begun, the barking stopped. A lone dog voice rose in a sudden shrill series of yips, then it cut off.
Paw-Paw stood up ponderously. Bits of food cascaded off his swinging gut. Chickens crowded around his feet and began pecking furiously at them.
“Somethin’ on the roof,” Yoostas said.
Buffort heard it too, a shuffling
thump, thump, thump
, with a sort of scratching to back it up.
“It’s nothin’,” Aunt-Sis Sallee scoffed. “Just a big old ’coon up on the roof.”
Johnny-Blue sat staring straight ahead, his scrawny face set in concentration. “Double big for a ’coon,” he said. “Too big.”
It sounded then to Buffort as if a second set of feet had joined the first, climbing uninvited onto the roof. Paw-Paw turned and picked up the old muzzle-loader shotgun he kept leaning by the back door.
“Time to go see what’s what,” he said. “Mebbe we’ll have more meat for the pot soon, huh?”
A rain of small dust particles began to fall on the table.
Buffort looked up. Larger flakes of crud started coming down from between the greasy, smoke-stained rafters. One landed in his left eye. He cussed out loud, looked downward and commenced to try to get it out.
“Don’t go rubbin’ at your triple-stupe eye, Buffort,” Sister-Maw scolded.
Then the ceiling fell in.
* * *
FOR JUST THE
thinnest-shaved sliver of an instant, Ryan froze.
Naked bodies erupted from the scrub all around the rim of the dig site.
He recovered fast though. “Fire them up!” he shouted, drawing his SIG Sauer P226 as the white bodies slid down the sides of the pit, raising wakes of earth from their bare feet.
Ryan flung out his arm to full extension, the front sight lined up on a naked sternum. He squeezed the trigger. The handblaster bucked and boomed.
The figure fell to the ground, its feet flying up in the air, and skidded several feet down.
So many, so fast, Ryan thought. He hadn’t expected the pale shadows to attack in such numbers.
“Thin them out!” J.B. called. He grabbed his Uzi from the table and, holding the machine pistol in one fist, swung it left to right, pumping the trigger to rip the closing circle of white cannie bodies with short pulses of full-metal-jacket slugs.
Ryan saw cannies go down, blood spraying from sudden holes. Behind him, he heard the snarl of Krysty’s Glock 18C handblaster firing on full auto in the other direction from J.B.
At least three had fallen in Ryan’s limited field of vision, perhaps four, squalling and thrashing and tripping the others. But the full-auto blasterfire didn’t break the white-skinned charge.
It did slow it up a step, though, enough so that the unexpected
coamer-wave attack didn’t simply swamp the companions grouped by the entrance to the scavvy site.
Instantly, anyway.
Ryan blasted another mutie between small but flat and flopping breasts—a woman, if such a term was applicable. She screeched and gurgled and fell on her back, dirty claw-toed feet kicking air not four feet from Ryan.
He yanked out his panga with his left hand and thrust it straight out in front of him. Its broad tip rammed through the sternum of another cannie, this one male, with a sound like rotting floorboards giving way underfoot.
Even as Ryan committed himself to the thrust, another coamer darted howling between him and J.B., who was in the process of letting his Uzi, its magazine exhausted, fall to the end of its sling so that he could grab up the shotgun leaned against the table. There was nothing between the creature and Krysty’s unprotected back.
And there was nothing that Ryan could do about it.
In times of stress a human tended to do that to which he or she was most accustomed.
During her predark life, Mildred had spent hundreds of hours practicing to acquire the skill necessary to become a member of the U.S. Olympic shooting team. That included turning her right side toward her target, placing her left hand on her hip, extending her pistol to arm’s full length, taking deliberate aim and carefully squeezing the trigger.
But sometimes the stress was so great you just had to say to hell with that.
With monsters with chalk-white skins, yellow fangs protruding from wide-open, shockingly doglike jaws, and eyes the color of fresh blood racing balls-out toward her and her friends, she didn’t have the inclination to engage in the niceties of the Olympic firing line. She took her usual two-handed grip on her Czech-made ZKR 551 target revolver, but she took aim fast, and squeezed off shots as quickly as she could the millisecond the blocky front sight post lined up something paper white.
Mildred got off six shots in a handful of seconds. She was sure she hit at least three of the devils, possibly four, but she could only be sure she saw two go down. There was no time to confirm any of it, no attention to spare. The way the albino chillers leaped and skidded and cavorted
down the loose-dirt slope meant she knew for a fact she’d dropped the hammer with only empty air in front of the blaster’s muzzle at least twice.
The cylinder empty, she tipped the barrel up while releasing the catch that allowed the cylinder to fall out to the side. Spent .38 Special cases cascaded out, smudged with powder burns and stinking with the salty odor of burned propellant. To her right Krysty had emptied her own extended magazine, and dropped the empty out of the well of her handblaster even as her left hand snagged a fresh mag from a back pocket of her faded jeans.
Naturally Mildred was already reaching to her own pocket for a speed-loader containing six nice, new cartridges. Or at least unfired ones. But then she realized something that made her blood run cold.
The damned things were on them
right now
. If she tried to reload, fast and expert as she was, the cannies would be clawing at her with their long hooked fingernails or biting her face off the way they had that poor child’s.
As the horrified thought flashed through her mind in the fraction of a second, she made a decision that ran contrary to all of Ryan and J.B.’s preaching as well as her own well-schooled habit. She rolled her wrist clockwise, causing the cylinder to fall closed and snap back into place, and then shoved her blaster hurriedly back into her holster without trying to reload it.
The hand that would have been fishing out the reloads, the left, was already reaching blindly for the table behind her. As she holstered her revolver, she turned to look where she was grabbing—and saw one of the cannies, buck naked, hair flying and cock and balls just swinging
wildly between skinny pallid thighs, elude both J.B. and Ryan and race right for Krysty’s back.
Mildred’s hand found what it was reaching for: the handle of a pick propped against the makeshift table on this side of the entrance to the dig. She yanked up the heavy tool with fear-crazed strength, cocked it back over her shoulder and only when she launched it in a blurring arc got her other hand onto the hardwood haft.
She didn’t have much experience swinging a pickax against a moving target. She wasn’t sure
anybody
did, even these days when murder was the number-one sport.
But with fiendish satisfaction she saw the heavy, downward-curved tine of the pick stab through the matted hair right above the charging cannie’s forehead. The creature’s hands, raised to grab and rend, flailed wildly as random electrochemical impulses blasted through its brain.
Momentum carried it forward. Its convulsing put it onto the ground right beside Mildred’s left boot. Unwilling to let go of the haft, Mildred found her arms cruelly wound around into an unnatural position.
As she tried frantically to turn the right way to untangle herself, she saw a pair of cannies closing in fast on Krysty, with a third behind. The redhead was still going for the reload. She wasn’t going to get it done in time to keep the horrors from closing in on her.
“Krysty,
shovel
!” Mildred cried.