They walked in silence, except for the occasional scrape of boot soles. There were no more piercing screams for Ryan to home in on. The screamer had either been chilled by the pack of predators, or it was laying low in the wake of the gunfire, waiting until it sussed out the shooter’s intentions.
When they reached the kill zone, Ryan immediately signaled for the others to fan out and secure a perimeter. He and J.B. quickly tracked the wounded animal to a narrow opening in the lava. From the blood trail it had left on the rocks, it wasn’t likely to ever crawl out of the hole. Or live long enough to starve.
“Better have a look at this, Ryan,” Krysty called out. She and Mildred, wheelguns in hand, stood over the body of his first victim.
“Now that is what I call butt ugly,” J.B. said.
The spindly-legged corpse’s gray fur was mottled with yellow; amber-colored eyes stared fixedly into space. Its bloody canines were a good two inches long, and a purple tongue drooped out of its mouth. The .308 round had blown a cavernous hole crossways through its chest, sending a plume of pulverized flesh, bone, fur, and blood spraying across the hot rock behind.
Ryan could see things squirming in the puddles of gore. Thin, wiry things.
Parasites.
None of that was the “butt ugly” J.B. referred to.
Ryan dropped to a knee beside the body. The patch of color on its overlarge skull wasn’t composed of hair after all. From above the ears and eyebrows to the back of its head, the creature had a cap of brilliant, reddish orange skin; naked skin, wrinkled and seamed like a peach pit. He gingerly poked at it with the muzzle of his SIG.
Spongy.
The hairless patch rose to a massive sagittal crest, the anchor for jaw muscles powerful enough to crack the long bones of an elk.
“Look at the muzzle and the shape of the eyes,” Krysty said. “It’s not a wolf, it’s a coyote.”
“Part coyote,” Ryan said. “Definitely part somethin’ else.”
“A four-legged, nukin’ buzzard,” J.B. spit.
Ryan looked up when Jak appeared from behind a slab of basalt. He held a battered combat boot by the toe. It dripped thick blood off the heel; the laces were still tied and it still had a foot in it. The splintered
end of a shin bone jutted out the top. “Rest over here,” Jak said.
The rest was quite a mess, and spread over a wide area.
“Sweet merciful Lord!” Doc said as he took it all in.
Spirit reduced to flesh, Ryan thought. And mercy had had no part in it. He had seen many terrible deaths in his time. This one was right up there with the worst.
The head had been torn from the neck and was missing, no doubt carried away, as were the four limbs, which had been gnawed off at the elbows and knees. The belly-up torso was nothing short of a wag wreck. And the wag wreck was what Ryan had seen the coyotes fighting over. The body cavity was chewed open, neck to crotch, ribs clipped to angry stubs, the organs and guts yarded out through the gaping wound—perhaps while the poor, luckless bastard was still alive. The torso was wrapped in a few bloody rags, the remnants of clothes. Gobbets of bone and flesh, drops of blood and hanks of long brown hair were spread over the ground.
Ryan sensed how quiet it had become in the crater. The weight of the silence seemed to press in on his eardrums. Then he got a whiff of superconcentrated funk. Rotting meat. Vile musk. Ammonia-stinking urine. In that instant he knew the mutie coyotes had doubled back on them, keeping out of sight by following the deep crevices in the rock. Pulse pounding in his throat, Ryan thumbed off the 9 mm SIG’s safety.
“They’re comin’!” Jak exclaimed, putting his back to the others and swinging up his Colt Python in a two-handed, fighting grip.
There was no time for a further warning.
A unison banshee howl was followed by a scrambling of claws and a concerted rush from all sides and all angles. The coyote pack relied on panic and confusion in a confined space to get the job done. Surprise, overwhelm and dismember. It probably worked champion on dumb animals and lost triple-stupe droolies, but the companions were a different breed altogether.
For Ryan and his companions the ambush drill had become second nature. Even as their weapons were coming up, they moved into a tight, back-to-back circle. This gave them clear firing lanes and reduced the span of those lanes to a mere sixty degrees, ideal for snap-shooting multiple near-targets.
Coyotes launched themselves from the tops of rock slabs. They shot out through gaps in the lava, their fangs bared, their amber eyes gleaming with blood lust. They had no more than twenty feet to cross to reach their victims.
Ryan swung the SIG’s sights from left to right, squeezing the trigger as fast as he could. Instant killshots weren’t required. The idea was to break the oncoming wave; any incapacitating hit would do.
To his right, J.B.’s M-4000 shotgun boomed as he cut loose from the hip. The high-brass load of buckshot blew an airborne animal off-course, into Ryan’s firing lane. As it twisted in the air, he punched a 9 mm round through its exposed underbelly. Before that creature hit the ground J.B. had jacked the pump gun’s slide, found a second hurtling target and fired again. With the same result: a sideways-flying coyote, like it had been snap-kicked by a giant’s boot.
There was no way and no time to count the attackers. There were too many of them. And they were coming too fast. No time to think, either. Ryan aimed for chests and heads, firing like a machine.
With Mildred, Jak and Krysty similarly cutting loose behind him and Doc blasting away on his blind side, the din of gunfire was deafening.
As Doc’s black powder LeMat barked into Ryan’s left ear, it sent forth successive gouts of dense gray smoke, which partially obscured the battlefield. The Civil War antique shot lead-ball ammo from its nine cylinder system, and a single shotgun round through a shorter underbarrel. After Doc emptied the cylinder, the shift to fire the shotgun chamber required moving a lever down on the end of the hammer.
Which meant a momentary pause in his stream of fire.
“Release me, you bastard!” Doc howled.
Ryan half turned at the cry and saw a flurry of movement beside him. A coyote had Doc’s right boot clenched in its teeth and was shaking its head, trying to tear off the foot at the ankle. The old man stood balanced on his left leg and the tip of his ebony swordstick, which he held behind him. Doc aimed the LeMat point-blank at the top of the animal’s garish skull. With a rocking boom, two feet of flame and a tremendous rush of smoke enveloped it.
Ryan didn’t know what the hell Doc had packed the shotgun barrel with this time—he usually favored metal scrap and shards of glass—but smidgens of skin, like wet shreds of orange peel spattered the front of the old man’s knee boots and slapped into Ryan’s thigh. The
blast flattened the coyote and set its back and shoulders on fire.
It was the last blast of the battle.
The air was choked with the stench of blood and spilled guts, of burned cordite and flaming fur. Through the haze of gunsmoke, Ryan could see a ring of sprawled, four-legged bodies, a few still breathing laboriously.
They had discharged more than fifty rounds in a matter of seconds.
Ryan’s ears were ringing as he replaced the SIG’s spent magazine. Behind him, Mildred, Jak and Krysty dumped their empties and recharged their revolvers. J.B. thumbed fresh 12-gauge shells into his combat scattergun.
As the smoke thinned and lifted, Ryan glimpsed a couple of the coyotes making for the horizon. They kept looking over their backs, perhaps to check for pursuit. When the animals neared the crater rim, he shouldered the Steyr and sent a 7.62 mm round zinging after them.
A reminder to keep on running.
“It was almost like they were on a suicide mission,” Mildred said as he lowered the longblaster.
“Didn’t want to abandon their kill,” Ryan told her. “Fresh meat has got to be hard to come by around here.”
“It appears we have more than enough, now,” Doc said. He jabbed at the remains of the animal smoldering beside his boot with the tip of his walking stick, then added, “Such as it is.”
“Nearly blew off your own foot, didn’t you, Doc?”
J.B. said. “How many times do I have to tell you, single actions suck.”
“I’m alive,” Doc said. He gave the corpse another poke. “And that hideous thing is not.” From the side pocket of his frock coat, he pulled out the leather pouch that held his black powder reloading gear. He then sat himself down on a nearby rock and with a quick, deft hand began charging and recapping each of the revolver’s chambers.
J.B. looked over at Ryan and shook his head.
The one-eyed warrior shrugged. At times, Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner could be infuriatingly stubborn and cantankerous. And there was nothing they or anybody else could do about it. The twentieth century whitecoats who had time-trawled him away from the bosom of his family in the late eighteen hundreds, his beloved Emily and his two young children, had gotten so fed up with his contrariness that just to be rid of him, they’d sent him forward in time, to Deathlands. Despite the considerable downsides to the 250-year-old sidearm Doc carried, the truth was, only if and when the LeMat blew up in his hand would he ever consider replacing it.
As Krysty and Jak were finishing off the wounded animals with close-range head shots, a muffled voice called to them. “Is it safe to come out now?”
Ryan and the companions swung up their hand-blasters, searching for the source of the sound with gunsights.
“Help me, puleeeeeeze!”
It was a man. Very close.
“Are they all dead?” came an even louder holler. “Make sure they’re all dead!”
“Keep your pants on,” Ryan shouted back.
“I do believe I recognize that voice,” Doc told the others.
“How is that possible?” Krysty said.
“More ghosts from your past?” Mildred asked. “An Oxford don circa 1882? Is your merry old brain vapor-locking again, Doc?”
“Neither a supernatural occurrence, nor a mental aberration,” Doc said, refusing to rise to the bait, “but certainly a coincidence of note.”
“Help me! Puleeeeeeze, help me! I swear I won’t run off again.”
“‘Run off again’?” Krysty said. “He thinks we’re somebody else.”
“Somebody he’s scared to death of,” J.B. said, “or he’d have shown his rad-blasted face by now.”
Jak moved quickly and quietly toward a vertical fissure in the bedrock about forty feet away, his .357 Magnum ready to rip. Like a bird dog, he stood there on-point. Ryan and the others slipped into position on either side of him, in front of the narrow cave’s entrance.
“Come on out,” J.B. said. “Now.”
“Leave your blaster behind,” Ryan said.
“Coming out, got no blaster.”
The pancaked crown of a waxed-canvas fedora appeared in the crack in the rock, then a prosthetic right hand—ivory-colored, it had articulated fingers and a big knob on the back of the wrist for tightening them into a fist. The man whimpered mightily as he tried to squeeze his big body sideways through the gap.
He was halfway in, halfway out of the cleft when J.B. said, “Well, I’ll be nuked!” and drew a tight bead on him with the M-4000.
“Are you back for another trouncing, you traitorous dog?” Doc demanded, stepping forward and brandishing his ebony cane.
When the wedged-in man looked up and saw who his rescuers were, his jaw dropped. Grunting from the effort, he quickly retreated, squirming back into the fissure, out of sight.
“I told you I recognized that voice,” Doc said to Mildred.
Ryan recognized him, too. The man in the hole was none other than Big Mike, also known as Mike the Drunkard, and the “Tour Guide from Hell,” a turncoat huckster who had sold his services to the she-hes, the would-be colonizers from Shadow Earth. Riding around in a gaudily painted bus, he had conned gullible villefolk with free joy juice, free jolt, free sex and promises of a much easier life in Slake City. It was a nonstop rolling party until they arrived at the site, then the awful truth was revealed: they had been gathered up to slave until death in the nuke mines.
Ryan, his son Dean and the companions had themselves toiled in the sweltering, poisonous shafts at Ground Zero. Although they had eventually fought their way free, they had been unable to stop the she-hes from escaping this reality and Deathlands’ brand of justice. They had, however, waylaid and beaten one of the invaders’ vilest puppets to within an inch of his life.
That puppet was Big Mike.
They had decided to let him live because he was
already an amputee. He had only the one hand, which made his surviving in the hellscape a constant, and ultimately losing battle. After all the pain and suffering he’d inflicted on innocent folk, simply chilling him would have been too much of a kindness. Ryan was surprised he’d lasted so long.
“Come on out,” the one-eyed warrior said. “We’re not going to beat you again.”
“Swear to it?”
“Come out now, you tub of shit,” J.B. ordered, “or we’re going to leave you here to rot. Put your hands up and keep them up.”
Big Mike obeyed, moaning as he forced himself out of the cave, holding his arms above his head.
“You seem to have lost something else since we last crossed paths,” Ryan said, gesturing with the muzzle of the SIG.
Big Mike glanced up at his left arm, which now ended in a stump. It was cut through clean, like it had been sliced off with a bandsaw.
And recently.
The massive scab was black and the skin around it an angry red.
“In a place as hard as Deathlands,” Krysty said, “a man who’s missing all you’re missing is in one hell of a pickle.”
“Hell, pickle ain’t the half of it,” Big Mike said. “Lookee here.” He held out his artificial hand. “Only way I can grip down on something is if I use my teeth on the fucking knob.”
“What happened to the other one?” Ryan asked.
“From the looks of that stump, it wasn’t mutie coyotes who took it.”
“You must’ve really pissed somebody off,” J.B. said, making no attempt to conceal his amusement.
“My former bosses, the cockroaches from alternate Earth,” Big Mike replied. “The bastards are back at Slake City, working the mines again, only this time they’ve cut out the middleman. They’re rounding up their own slaves. They took me for a slave, too.”