Dorden pursed his lips and blew out a long breath as he shook his head.
“Don’t take this wrong, Wymie,” he said. “We’re with you—we’re all with you. Especially after what we just saw. You’ll have the whole county with you, sure. But that is a power of country to search. Could take some time, yet.”
She sighed. “You’re right,” she said, her shoulders sagging. She felt tired. Though her purpose—and her rage—never faltered, she was suddenly filled with a sense of the hopelessness of it all.
“But what else can we do but search?”
“You set up base camp at the road, that’s what you do,” old Vin said. Though still cracked, his voice and blue eyes were unusually clear. “Send out your searchers from there, but keep the road blocked. They’ll come that way, sooner or later!”
“He’s right,” Dorden said. He looked at the oldie in something like amazement, and something like admiration. “They’ll want to trade their latest scavvy at Stenson’s Creek. To be honest, I didn’t think you had it in you, Vin.”
“Even a blind squirrel finds a nut sometimes!” Vin exclaimed. He seemed fully the senile old wrinklie again.
“Wymie!”
The shout came from up the side road to the main thoroughfare. Everybody looked that way. Edmun jogged toward them with a couple kids from Sinkhole in tow, his usual dishwater-dull manner replaced by swaggering self-importance. He got that way, sometimes, on those rare occasions when he thought he might be doing something grand.
“What is it?” she called back. She felt annoyed at him strutting in like this, right on the cusp of her own triumph. “We’re busy here.”
“Not too busy for this. You know how you sent Gator, Lem Sharkey and his brother, Ike, into the ville last night to round up reinforcements?”
“I do. I wondered what became of him. Until we found…what we did at the Sumz place.”
“Well, what he did was find one of his pals, Tupa Mafolo.”
Dorden shook his head disapprovingly. “He’s nothing but trouble, that one. Heck, Lem and his crowd are trouble.”
“Not anymore!” Edmun declared, practically bursting with significance. “Four of ’em went to put the hard arm on old Mathus Conn. Leaned so hard they chilled his cousin Nancy flat dead, messed up one of his bodyguards pretty bad. Then who should come strollin’ in behind them but that big, fat Potar Baggart his own bad self. He and Mathus chilled the four, between the two of them.”
“That’s a lie!” Mance shouted.
Edmun smirked and shook his head. “Carlos, Marky here and Missus Haymuss were arrivin’ to start their workday and saw it all. It’s true. It’s all over the whole entire ville now.”
Dorden grunted unhappily. “I believe it,” he said carefully. “Lem’s always been triple eager to shed blood when he thought he could get away with it, and Ike Sharkey would follow his brother into a live blast furnace.”
Wymie moistened her lips. “You’re right,” she said. “It was my fault for trustin’ Lem with somethin’ he might’ve took for power. But we got no time for this now. We got work to do. We’re finally in sight of avengin’ poor Blinda!”
“What about Conn?” Mance asked.
“If he wants to take his vengeance for his own kin on me,” Wymie said, “I won’t resist. Otherwise, it’s the same as it always was.
“Whether you’re Mathus Conn or anybody else, if they’re not with us on this, they’re with the baby-killing cannies!”
* * *
J
AK WAS SLIPPING
through brush—noiselessly as the pale ghosts who so unnervingly resembled him—when he smelled them.
Not coamers. Not the distinctive reek of cannies—
whose man-eating ways manifested not just through their rotting-meat carnivore breath, but through the very pores of their skins in the form of sweat and body oils—but the locals, rural laborers and ville-rats alike.
They didn’t smell any sweeter to Jak’s well-tuned nostrils, but were at least unmistakably different.
He froze. The breeze was light, but enough to carry the smells to him from the west. They were in the woods and the scrub on the south side of the major road that transversed the area locals knew as the Pennyrile. The same side he was on.
He held his breath for a moment. Sure enough, he heard them: rattling brush, crushing fallen vegetation beneath their boots, even a gut rumbling, presumably longing for a missed breakfast.
They were soft sounds. The sounds of people who were trying to be sneaky, but weren’t particularly good at it.
Through a screen of bayberry branches just beginning to fruit out, he dared a glance west along the road, to where the Stenson’s Creek gaudy house lay, and beyond it the ville of Sinkhole. Sure enough, nobody was there.
They were hiding. He couldn’t know for sure why. But then again, when somebody lay in wait hidden by a well-traveled path, when did they ever mean someone good?
He grinned a feral wolf grin. Not when
he
did it, that was for sure.
His grin widened. He smelled the sharp stink of tobacco burning. Somebody was actually smoking a cigarette, and to go along with that, the hiss of whispering.
There was no question now: he’d just blown an ambush, and the ambushers were making every stupe mistake in the book.
Now to get back to report to the others. Ryan would know best how to handle it. Somehow Jak had the unmistakable crawling sensation in the pit of his lean belly that the people to be ambushed were him and his friends. He had no evidence of that, but he had learned to heed his gut—and so had Ryan and the rest.
As he started to turn back, he heard someone whisper from not twenty feet farther along the way he’d been headed. “Nuke this. I need to piss right now or I’m gonna burst.”
Before Jak could slip deeper into the scrub, a man appeared through a screen of brush. The only thing between them was some lower bushes. Jak was as plainly visible to him as he would have been on a predark pool table in a high-price gaudy house.
The man stopped. He was obviously a local, a ville dweller by his scavvied pants and jacket, which most of the local farmers and other country types might have reserved for special occasions. He also had a longblaster in hand, which he whipped up to aim at Jak. Even with his wiry catamount strength and reflexes to match, Jak knew he didn’t have time to whip a throwing knife from his sleeve and drill the local with the blade before the man raised the alarm. Most likely Jak would run right into the full blast of whatever was stuffed in the weapon’s lone, long barrel. Instead he dived out of the line of fire, drawing his Magnum revolver as the longlaster barked.
The .357 Magnum discharged its head-shattering roar and puked yellow fire, the barrel riding up. Because he was no quick-shot artist like Ryan or J.B., Jak triggered off a second round the instant he acquired the falling target.
Even though the big revolver promptly kicked up
again, Jak saw the upper right—his left—corner of the man’s head fly right off, accompanied by a spurt of pink. The man was already folding to the ground, suggesting Jak had already chilled him or the guy had croaked on his own of a heart attack.
Cries erupted farther up the road, from both sides. “There they are! We got ’em now, boys!”
Crouching in the brush with his handblaster at the ready, Jak yelled, “Ambush!”
He realized his friends knew that already. He just wanted them to know he was fit to fight.
By the time she heard Jak yell, “Ambush!” even Mildred—who didn’t fancy herself the keenest tactical mind in the bunch—knew already that’s what was happening. The gunshots and cries of what she reckoned were going to turn out to be premature triumph had told her as much.
“Ditch the chill and take cover,” Ryan yelled. “Defensive positions—cover the road.”
Obediently, Mildred shrugged out of the front end of the rope harness and dropped the dead cannie in its blanket shroud on the rutted roadway. She had been cursing herself for her eagerness to show that she could pull her own weight, which led her to volunteer to take over for Ryan when they were barely out of sight of the dig.
Ricky, who had volunteered to help her, continued to stand there, bent forward under the not-enormous weight of the corpse pulling on his own shoulders.
“But what if it gets lost?” he asked plaintively. “How will we prove our innocence?”
The yells from ahead were getting closer fast.
“Son,” J.B. said, “from the way they’re all screaming ‘chill the baby-chillers,’ don’t you kind of reckon we’re past that point?”
* * *
A
T THE SHOTS
, Wymie straightened behind her clump of scrub oak. As usual, she wasn’t carrying any weapons
herself. It just seemed unnecessary, surrounded as she was by dudes with blasters and an evident hankering to use them.
As the second shot still reverberated through the woods, Dorden and Mance both looked at her.
“Well?” she demanded furiously. “What are you waitin’ for?”
The two looked at each other, then back to her.
“The ambush, Wymie,” her cousin said. “Isn’t it, well, kinda blown?”
“We got to strike while the iron is hot,” Vin said.
“For once I agree with the crazy old coot,” Wymie said. “We finally got my sister’s coldheart killers where we want them!”
She stood upright, waved her hands, and at the top of her lungs, screamed, “Let’s get ’em, everybody! Chill the baby-chillers!”
With a cheer her whole posse, its numbers swelled to at least fifty from new volunteers streaming in as word of the Sumz horror filtered through Sinkhole and the surrounding countryside, roared to their feet and out of cover to attack straight down the road at their enemies.
* * *
I
CAN
’
T BELIEVE IT
, Ryan thought. They’re running right down the road at us.
He had gotten his people into the best available hasty defensive positions on both sides of the dirt road. One thing he knew for sure: they were smart and seasoned enough not to cross fire each other. It was one of the edges they had over most opponents.
Then he started wondering what was taking the ambushers so long to attack. From all their hollering it was
pretty clear they weren’t planning on bailing and trying their luck at a different time and place.
Yet here they came: a mob dozens strong, waving weapons from a Mini-14 blaster to a leaf rake, running toward them in the open around a bend. All of them were screaming for blood at the top of their triple-simp lungs.
He didn’t need to tell his companions to hold their fire until he gave the word. They knew to do that, too, just as they stood ready to open fire on their own if it proved needful to defend themselves, or one another.
Ryan, like Jak on the far side of the road, was lurking a ways off the right-of-way, handblaster in hand, to ward off attempts by the ambush party to flank them. He had made sure to put himself in a position where he still could see pretty much what the others could, through a light screen of brush.
One young man with a pale face and wild black hair led the charge, waving a double-barrel shotgun over his head and hollering. Ryan drew a quick bead on him with his SIG Sauer P226 and fired a hammer into the middle of his chest, followed by allowing the handblaster to fall back into line with his eye again and firing the millisecond it came to bear, without acquiring a second sight picture.
The young man was a moving target, but happened to be moving almost directly at Ryan at that moment. The one-eyed man couldn’t actually see where his rounds hit, but was confident at least one struck near the sternum. The kid dropped, flopped and was trampled by the person right behind before half a dozen more stumbled over him and one another and hid him from view.
With Ryan’s shot for a signal, his companions opened fire as well, in a shattering torrent of sound. Ryan had
cut it fine, taking a big risk by letting the mob get within about twenty yards of his concealed friends before cutting loose. But they were never going to shoot them all. He wanted to maximize the moral effect, the shock of a close-up volley by powerful, smokeless magazine firearms.
He wanted the enemy to run, and preferably not stop until he and his companions had escaped from the Pennyrile.
He saw J.B. coolly step into the road and fire a medium burst from his Uzi with the folding stock extended and snugged to his right shoulder. A man to Ryan’s left of the one he’d shot, a surprisingly portly middle-aged man with a high forehead and a Ruger Old Army black-powder revolver in his hand, screamed and clutched his paunch as a line of red dots was suddenly stitched across it. He fell howling and kicking his boots at the ground.
Ricky, crouched next to Ryan, raised his Webley handblaster to aim at the wounded man. Ryan leaned forward to grab his arm.
The youth turned and stared at him in shock. “Move on to someone else, kid,” Ryan told him. “That bastard’s down and out of the play. Let him howl and discourage the rest.”
Ricky nodded his understanding. When Ryan let go of his arm he shifted targets and fired. Another man fell.
The chill joined at least a dozen others fallen in the roadway. Some were flopping around like beached fish. Others lay still, doing nothing and not looking likely to ever move again. The others were faltering.
At the rear of the mob, which had lost momentum and begun to mill about, Ryan saw a lone figure, just visible before the bend. It was a tall woman—the only reason he
could spot her at all—with raven-black hair and creamy skin. She looked shocked, and her eyes were wide.
It was Wymie, the woman responsible for all their problems—including the fact they were now fighting for their lives against what seemed like half the population of the ville.
“Fireblast,” he said, and lowered his aim to shoot a young man trying to point some kind of flintlock at them right beneath his grimy red bandanna.
“Why didn’t you chill her, lover?” Krysty called from the cover of the nettles across the road.
She had glimpsed his initial aim—and seen him change it. Somehow. He didn’t know sometimes whether she could read his mind, as part of her mutie powers, or just knew him that well.
“She’s the leader,” he called back. “She’s beat. She’ll spread it to the rest, once we chill or drive off the hard-core.”