height so quickly he couldn’t raise the machine pistol, let alone track the target. He glimpsed a blur of brown, and got the impression of a sleek, banded body. Many legs. Powerful, jointed legs. There was a scraping sound, but the bright flash of sword he was anticipating never came. The blur bounded high in the air. He thought he saw a turned-up butt, like a deer’s, an instant before it vanished into the blackness ahead.
Then something warm and wet splashed his good arm.
As Ewald turned, Tolliver’s torch dropped to the floor. Sheets of blood poured out from under the man’s beard. He staggered, slamming back against the control panels, and upon impact his head fell off. It didn’t roll away, like the guttering torch. It flopped to one side, toppling from his cleanly sliced neck, and hung there upside down, connected to his body by a strip of skin. Tolliver’s legs gave way, and a blood waterfall became a blood fountain.
Even though he couldn’t see anything to shoot at, Ewald cut loose with a burst of autofire. In the strobe light of muzzle-flashes, slugs sparked off the generator housings, and the ricochets zipped around the room.
“Other way!” he shouted in Willjay’s face.
Reversing course, they sprinted along the wall. Ewald didn’t want to return to the hallway, but he had no choice. He had given up trying to find a quick way out. All he wanted now was cover. Some kind of cover.
They found another metal door fifty yards down the corridor. It was unlocked. Ewald and Willjay stepped into a narrow, low-ceilinged room crammed with with tall metal storage cabinets and open frame shelves. It looked safe enough. The exposed walls were free of weeping holes. They slammed the door and pushed shelves in front of it.
“What’re we gonna do?” Willjay sobbed. The teenager had pissed himself. The insides of both trouser legs were dark, from crotch to cuff.
“Let me think,” Ewald said. “Just shut up and let me think.”
Then he made the mistake of looking down at his arm. And his brain vapor-locked. The heaviest muscles—deltoid, tricep, bicep—had begun to slough off the bones, like overcooked meat. Where his fingertips had been, red bone peeked through.
A sudden, frantic, scrabbling noise made him forget all about his ruined arm.
“Where’s it coming from?” Willjay shouted, looking wildly around the room.
Walls, ceiling, floor, Ewald couldn’t locate the source. But it was close. It was very close.
One of the cabinets behind Willjay shuddered, tipping forward, then crashed to the floor. Ewald blinked and the boy was gone.
Gone.
His torch lay on the floor.
Above the toppled cabinet was a gash in the wall.
Ewald lunged for the hole, the Uzi up and ready in his fist. He saw the boy’s face a split second before he disappeared around a bend in the burrow. A face blanched white with fear. Elbows wedged against the slimy walls, fingers desperately, futilely clawing.
Ewald thrust the muzzle forward and pinned the trigger, firing full-auto until the weapon locked back empty. Gunsmoke filled the gash; his ears were ringing. He couldn’t tell if he’d shot through Willjay and hit whatever had snatched him away. Tossing the Uzi aside, Ewald turned his full attention to the barricade. After he cleared the door and opened it, he bent to pick up the boy’s torch.
As he straightened, the thing climbed out of the hole, head first, uninjured, and in no apparent hurry.
It wasn’t like any mutie he had ever seen.
It had a crop of thick, bristling hairs, like spikes on top of its broad, flat skull. Its widespread eyes were solid black and huge. When it rose from a crouch, he saw the banded segments of its abdomen. It had six legs. The top pair were short, with talons at the ends; the second pair was longer, and the last two the longest of all. Standing on its back legs it was as tall as he was.
The open doorway was a foot from Ewald’s back. The creature stood fifteen feet away. Before it could step closer, he made his move. A pivot started, but never completed. The thing was across the gap and in his face just as his hips started to turn.
Ewald was expecting a slash from the daggerlike horns that studded its rear legs, not a straight thrust from one of the stumpy arms.
The flesh above his right nipple dimpled around the shaft of a black thorn, a long stinger that protruded from the top of the creature’s wrist. Its talons and arm flexed rhythmically, and he felt the pressure of a massive injection. At once, cold flooded his torso. Numbing cold. The small arm jerked back, withdrawing the stinger.
Ewald clutched at the wound in his chest, the numbness spreading to his legs. Before he could take a step, his knees gave way. He slumped to floor on his back and lay there, paralyzed.
As he struggled for breath, the creature leaned over him, clicking. The noise came faster and faster, becoming a single, earsplitting tone. Then the thing opened its jaws impossibly wide and, puffing its abdomen in and out, began to dry-heave in his face.
Chapter Five
While they waited for Jak to return from the canyon bottom, Ryan and the others took a rest break. With the sun almost directly overhead, there was no shade. Every surface reflected blinding light and withering heat. To keep their heads and shoulders out of the sun, they made canopies of their coats, stretching them between the tops of low rocks. As they sat on the hard ground, they tipped back their canteens and sipped at the Anasazi sludge. The thick, gritty liquid rasped down their throats. Once swallowed, it lay in their bellies like bags of wet cement.
They’d all drunk worse.
Ryan coughed to clear the mud from the back of his tongue. Through a shimmering curtain of heat waves, he took in the canyon’s far rim. The valley had widened to about half a mile, and its depth was more than four hundred feet. There was no sign of a reservoir. No sign of the river that had been plugged to create it. In the low spots there were no standing pools, stagnant or otherwise. Nothing green.
There was blue, though.
A tiny clump of bright blue, visible to the naked eye in the distance below.
The plastic, antifreeze jugs stood out against the unrelenting beige of the canyon floor, flagging the water thief’s abandoned campsite. The bastard had lit himself a fire down there, and tossed away his empty containers before moving on, in the direction of the dam.
Jak had scaled the canyon wall, and when he reappeared on the rim a few minutes later, his bloodless face was slick with sweat, his white hair plastered to his skull, and his breath came in ragged gasps. Even Deathlands’s wild child was starting to show the effects of their ordeal. In a gravelly voice Jak said, “Fire pit cold. Nothing left in ashes.”
If the chiller had food, he didn’t need to cook it, Ryan thought. Maybe something dried or smoked. Something the dead travelers had brought with them. Berries and nuts pounded into a paste, then set out in the sun to harden. Or strands of jerky. One thing for sure, the bastard wasn’t living off wild game. Aside from the buzzards, whose guts and body cavities were usually so packed with yard-long flat worms that even a starving man wouldn’t touch their meat, the companions hadn’t seen anything alive. Not so much as a fly. The landscape had been scoured
