Chapter Five

 

 

Ryan fired three rounds into the woman's belly, blowing her guts out. The woman started to scream, forcing more of her intestines outside her body.

 

Ryan left her to it. The screams might prove distracting and hold off the other brushwooders for a few seconds more.

 

J.B. finished up with the last man remaining in between them and the path leading to the ledge. Expertly he moved his Uzi subgun in a tight figure eight that chopped his target down.

 

Ricochets whined off the square-cut rock as Ryan knelt to examine the second brushwooder who'd been standing there. He kicked the man over onto his back, surprised there was no exit wound from whatever had hit him.

 

The silvery chill of moonlight bathed the dead man's face. A neat, round bullet hole was centered between his wide, staring eyes.

 

The gut-shot woman finally died, and all her painful shrieking died with her.

 

"Problem?" J.B. asked, ducking behind the rock.

 

"He's been chilled." Ryan dropped the head. "But I didn't chill him."

 

"It could have been an accidental shot, what with all these rounds flying."

 

"Square between the eyes like that?" Ryan shook his head, then raked his gaze over the ridges surrounding the forested valley. The distance was too great and the shadows drawn too deeply to allow him to see much. And getting more adventurous in looking wasn't a good plan; the brushwooders were hitting the square-cut stone regularly now. "I don't think so."

 

"Me, neither," the Armorer stated. He leaned over and put his fingers on the dead man's face. "Big round. Thirty-aught-six mebbe. And for it not to penetrate the head, means it had to have been a subsonic round." He flinched from stone splinters driven from the rock by a fresh salvo of bullets. "Hanging around here has about run its course."

 

Ryan nodded, his mind still working at the man who lay before him. He didn't care for mysteries or puzzles. He broke for the path leading to the ledge.

 

 

 

"ANYTHING?"

 

Ryan shook his head, scanning their backtrail along the climb while they took a breather. "Brushwooders are coming up behind us, but they're losing ground."

 

"How many?"

 

"Thirty, mebbe."

 

Kneeling beside him, J.B. lifted his fedora and brushed an arm along his forehead. He grimaced at the sweat stains on his coat sleeve. "We keep moving like this, sweating this hard, we're due for a bad case of hypothermia."

 

Ryan nodded. Through the binoculars he could occasionally see the line of brushwooders winding around the turns. Sniping would get a few of them, but then they'd have his position, too, which might make it bad all the way around.

 

He pushed himself to his feet. "Let's go."

 

The cloud cover had wiped away the moon, dimmed the light they had to move by. If it wasn't for the reflective quality of the snow, they wouldn't have been able to see in the dark at all. Their progress had slowed considerably.

 

"The ones who don't fall and kill themselves on the climb, or we don't shoot if they come up on us, the storm may take," Ryan declared.

 

The wind had picked up, and it had turned colder.

 

"Their man isn't a leader," J.B. said. "He gets enough of them chilled tonight, they'll turn on him. They must be good and afraid of him to come this far."

 

Ryan kept a hand in contact with the stone wall at his side as he pressed forward. The snow flurries increased, burning cold into his face except where the scar tissue had robbed him of sensation. Though he couldn't feel his face so much anymore between the old injuries and the fanged cold, he couldn't keep his teeth from chattering like a desert rattler in full threat.

 

Without warning, his boot skidded out from under him. The edge of the abyss to his left yawned open suddenly. Wrapping around him like a demanding lover, the wind sucked at him, trying to pull him from the wall.

 

"Fireblast!" he swore, getting his balance back enough to fall against the wall behind him.

 

J.B. reached for him.

 

"Got it," Ryan said. The hunger and the cold had hollowed him out enough that he knew he was running on adrenaline. He pushed himself up, feeling the dark anger moving around inside him. Dying quiet, frozen to death on some mountain, had never been in the cards for him the way he had it figured. When he caught the last train West, it'd be with a blaster in his fist and his blood mixing with that of an enemy.

 

"We can rest," the Armorer said.

 

"We can rest when we're dead. Something here." Ryan scraped at the ground with his boot. Thin black liquid covered the stone in odd-shaped clots. As they tore under his boot, some of them tamed red.

 

"Blood," J.B. commented.

 

Ryan nodded. "Somebody's." His eye lit on the awkward shape at the bottom of the sheer rise in front of him. The wall ahead bore one of Jak's signs, letting him know to keep going straight.

 

The shadow turned out to be a dead beast that had been blown apart by bullets. The eyes had dimmed, but there was no mistaking the deadly way the tail was barbed. One of Jak's leaf-bladed knives was thrust between the creature's eyes.

 

"You ever seen anything like this?" Ryan asked.

 

"No."

 

"Trader always said a man could live out his whole life in Deathlands just looking at what there is to see and never see it all. As soon as a man passed on, mutie genes tickled by all the radioactivity breezing across the Deathlands would make up something new."

 

"And more than likely it'd be something hungry," J.B. finished.

 

Ryan pulled the throwing knife from the dead mutie beast. "Guess Jak left this as a message."

 

J.B. grinned. "It isn't hard to understand. You see any of these, kill them quick."

 

Ryan slung the creature out over the abyss and let go. He never heard it hit bottom. He cleaned the knife with the snow and put it in his gear. "Step careful around the blood. I'll help you up first." He put the Steyr against the wall and made a stirrup of his hands.

 

J.B. stepped into Ryan's hands and scrambled up as he was pushed along. He reconned the top, then gave Ryan a thumb's-up. "Ace on the line. We're clear." He offered his hand down.

 

"In a minute," Ryan said, unbuckling his pants. "Got something to take care of." It was almost too bastard cold to piss, but he managed. His urine smoked as if it were on fire, splattering the ground in a wide puddle. When he finished, he buttoned up his pants again, then took the hand the Armorer extended.

 

At the top of the wall, Ryan looked back down on the puddle of piss. It was barely noticeable under the cover of shadows.

 

"A few minutes at this temperature," J.B. said, "that's going to freeze up real nice."

 

"Hope so. Be a nice surprise for the first brushwooder or two who happen up on it. If we get lucky, mebbe it'll take out the ramrod."

 

He found Jak's next mark, then turned his steps in that direction. Krysty and the others couldn't be much farther ahead.