stickie’s cheek pressed against the door and the huge black eye began to bulge out of its socket through the gap. Mildred put her fists on her hips. “Oh, hell, no.” Mildred pointed a condemning finger at the self-compressing mutation. “Jak?”
Jak’s knife glittered through the air. The bulging black eye popped like a cyst as the blade passed through and sank into brain. The albino teen lunged and retrieved his blade as the mutie sagged. The stickies outside hooted and cooed. The dead stickie left far more violently than it had tried to enter. Its bones snapped and cracked as its brethren yanked its body back through the gap and fell upon it in a feeding frenzy.
Mildred whirled and waved her arms at no one in particular. “You see that? You see that? Little bastards are doing yoga now!”
No one in the room knew what yoga was. J.B. hadn’t liked what he’d seen, either. He’d never seen a stickie pull a circus stunt quite like that before. “Jak, keep an eye on the door. If one can do it, then mebbe another can, too. We don’t want them oozing in while we’re asleep.”
Jak nodded and squatted on his heels in front of the portal. He began walking a throwing knife across his fingers like a coin trick as fresh, rubbery white hands began wiggling, pulling and probing at the door.
It was going to be a long night.
RYAN SLOGGED ASHORE, dragging Doc’s limp, coughing body with him. The felucca had broken up on the rocks between the gateway crag and the islands. He had seized a piece of wreckage in one arm and held Doc in a death grip with the other as the wind and waves had had their way with them for an hour before depositing them on the beach. Ryan gazed at the empty rolling dunes. He and Doc were on the wrong island, and his snapped rib ached like fire. He hauled Doc a few feet above the tide line and dropped him exhaustedly to the sand. Ryan was cold down to the bone and soaked through, but his mouth was nothing but dry salt. He took out his canteen and took long slow gulps from it before bringing it down to Doc’s lips. The old man sucked at the canteen in semiconscious greed. Ryan let him drink his fill. They’d seen campfire smoke. Where there was campfire smoke, there’d be water. “You all right?”
Doc flopped back to the sand like a fish. “A bit battered, but I must say battling the ocean was strangely invigorating.”
Doc didn’t look anything remotely invigorated. He looked more like a dog left out in the rain to—“Dog!” Ryan’s hand was numb with cold and ached with the hooking from Captain Roque’s gaff, but his blaster was in his hand rattlesnake quick.
He blinked as a dog stood atop the dune and wagged its tail at him.
During the time of the skydark the family dog had become an immediate source of food. Packs of wild strays that had taken to eating their former human masters had been ruthlessly trapped, shot and eaten in return. Ryan had seen pictures of predark house pets, and the idea of people keeping animals that couldn’t earn their keep, much less deliberately breeding so many useless mutations into an animal was beyond his comprehension. For the most part only dogs of the working, sporting and herding groups had survived into the age of the Deathlands. Whatever working specialty a dog might have, whether hunting, herding or hauling, their primary function was still guarding. They were both alarms and the first line of defense against mutant marauder and night-creeping norm alike. Most had been bred up in size and savagery, and all were trained to attack strangers on sight. This dog was a shaggy black color with a mop of hair falling over its eyes. At fifty pounds it was a bit runty by Deathlands standards but still had good lines. The strangest thing about the dog was its attitude. It gazed upon Ryan and Doc in tail-wagging, tongue-lolling, happy stupid expectancy.
Doc creakily pushed himself to his feet. “Cao da Serra de Aires.”
Ryan kept his 9 mm blaster leveled. “What?”
“An Aires Mountain Dog. A shepherd dog from the Aires Mountains, north of the Tagus River.” Doc nodded knowingly. “A Portuguese breed.”
“So why isn’t it trying to chill us?” Ryan shook his head in mild disgust at the happy dog. “It’s not even barking.”
“I suspect it does not regard humans as enemies.”
Rustling was alive and well in the Deathlands, and a herd dog that didn’t bark at strangers struck Ryan about as useful as bird shit on pump handle. He looked up at the sound of bells. The bleating sounds carried over the sound of the surf. A girl came over a dune being followed by a flock of snowy-white goats. The girl stopped at the sight of the two strangers, then shocked both Ryan and Doc by waving happily at them. Ryan observed her as she and her herd waded through the waist-high beach grass. She had long, unbound golden-brown hair, golden-brown tanned skin and golden-brown eyes. The effect was made more dramatic by the simple, chestnut-colored homespun shift she wore. Leather sandals shod her feet, and she wore a simple leather purse over one shoulder and a bota bag over the other. Ryan noted the corpse on the escarpment had been wearing the same outfit and kept his eye on the shepherd’s crook she carried. Looks were deceiving and he had been on both ends of a skillfully wielded piece of wood.
The girl approached them guilelessly. Up close her slim arms and legs belied a chest that strained at the homespun enclosing it. She smiled with big white teeth and in every way was the healthiest specimen Ryan or Doc had seen in quite some time. Doc nodded in a friendly fashion at the dog. “Cao da Serra de Aires?”
“No…” The girl’s nose wrinkled delightfully. “Boo.”
Ryan regarded Doc dryly. “I think the dog’s name is Boo, Doc.”
“Hmm…yes.” Doc scratched his chin. “Boo.”
Boo thumped his tail in the sand at Doc. The girl beamed and pointed to herself. “Vava!”
“Vava!” Doc bowed. “Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner, at your…” Doc trailed off as the girl stared at him blankly. He sighed and smiled as he pointed at Ryan and himself. “Ryan…Doc.”
The girl’s smile spread across her face like the sun. “Rian…Doke.”
“Doc?” Ryan shot the old man a look. “The dog doesn’t bark and the girl likes strangers.”
“I must admit it is unusual,” Doc agreed. “Even in my time a lone shepherd girl and her dog would be wary of strange men. Clearly neither has been exposed to any sort of predation.”
“Or it’s some sort of trap. I’m thinking—” Ryan wasn’t often shocked but even he was taken aback when the girl softly wrapped her hands around his. She ignored the blaster he held and raised the gaff wound to her lips and kissed it. The huge golden-brown eyes gazed upward at Ryan with an innocence that bordered on the erotic as she said something soothing in her own language.
Doc gave Ryan a wry look of his own. “All better?”
“Uh, yeah…” Ryan forced a smile onto his face. “Doc? You tell her to take her hand off my blaster or—”
The girl tossed her crook to the sand. “Boo!”
Boo picked up the stick and happily trotted off. The girl kept Ryan’s hand in one of hers and took Doc’s hand in her other. Ryan and Doc exchanged looks. “Doc?”
“Like lambs to the slaughter?” Doc suggested.
Vava gave their hands a slightly impatient tug. “Dunno,” Ryan said. He had learned the hard way to read a trap. The
