of weather.
They couldn’t use the cans of 5.56 mm bullets, since they lacked blasters that fired them. But there was a cache of 9 mm, 12-gauge, .45 ACP and 7.62 mm ammo that took care of replenishing their stocks for most of the armament they carried.
They found no .38 Special cartridges for the Czech ZKR 551 target revolver Mildred insisted on toting, even though that caliber was relatively common, nor anything for Doc’s enormous LeMat. “If we find blasters, will we trade them?” Ricky asked.
J.B. grunted. “Locals favor black-powder blasters,” he said, “mostly single-shot break-action shotguns or even muzzle-loaders. I kind of like the edge our firepower gives us over their smoke-poles, myself.”
Ryan nodded.
“They’re not that friendly,” he agreed. “Anyway, if we find modern blasters, they’ll be well worth humping out of here when we shake the limestone dust of this place off our boot heels.”
“Not soon, I hope,” Krysty said. “The work here’s hard, but at least we have a sheltered spot to live while we’re doing it.”
“Think this would be a good place to put down roots, Krysty?” Mildred asked in a bantering tone.
The taller woman shrugged. “It’s always been my dream,” she said, a faraway look in her emerald-green eyes. “To find someplace we can make a life.”
“Node’ll play out soon enough,” Ryan told her. “And I don’t see us as dirt farmers, anyway.”
To his surprise he saw sadness in her face. “Sorry, lover,” he said. “I know that’s a sore spot for you. Reckon I shouldn’t go poking it.”
Mildred made an apologetic noise in her throat. “Yeah. My bad. I shouldn’t tease you about it, Krysty.”
She shook her head, making the beaded plaits in her hair clack together.
“The fact is,” she said, “we could all use a break.”
“What do you think this is, Millie?” J.B. asked.
She scowled but, for once, couldn’t find an appropriate comeback.
“What about our mysterious friends up there?” Ricky asked, uneasily waving a hand.
“They’re probably just figments of our overworked imaginations.”
She stopped speaking abruptly, gazing upward, her eyes growing wide.
Something grazed Ryan’s cheek on the blind side.
* * *
“GET DOWN!” KRYSTY heard Ryan shout. She wheeled to see him following his own command, diving to the rubble-choked slope with his SIG Sauer in hand.
“Oh my God, I see them too!” she heard Mildred yell.
That was more than enough for Krysty. She whipped out her Glock 18C with the efficiency of frequent habit and threw herself down, as well. She was glad for the halter top confining her breasts offering at least some protection from the corner of a chunk of concrete that dug into her left one.
The bushes surrounding the pit were thrashing. Rocks and sticks were flying from them, thrown by unseen hands at the group. Unfortunately, despite the trees shielding them from casual discovery, the excavation was approximately the worst possible tactical situation to put themselves into. Everybody who knew where they were and wished them harm had the high ground.
Grinning, Jak reached into his jacket. His right hand came out wrapped inside the knuckle-duster hilt of a trench knife. The left whipped one of his butterfly knives open in a blur of precision. He started to move toward the attackers. “Jak, no!” Mildred yelled. “They look too much like you! We might shoot you by mistake!”
The young man froze. Right then Krysty caught a flash of a face peering at her from a gap in the screen of underbrush. To her shock it looked like the bleached-bone white of Jak’s face, and the eyes staring at her from beneath matted white locks were the same blood color as their friend’s. But Jak, despite the prejudice he frequently encountered—and tended to dispute loudly and forcefully—was no mutie himself, but an albino, subject to a genetic condition that predated the skydark by many generations.
The face Krysty saw, staring at her, was not right, somehow. The nose and jaw seemed pushed too far forward. It was a mostly human visage, but not entirely.
Then it was gone, and she saw other pallid bodies flitting out of clear view behind where it had been.
“What do we do?” J.B. called as a foot-long branch with green leaves still on it bounced harmlessly off his fedora.
A fist-sized stone bounced past Krysty’s right cheek. “Blast them!” Ryan shouted.
The head-splitting roar of Jak’s .357 Magnum Colt Python was the first response to Ryan’s command. As a storm of blasterfire roared around her, the prone Krysty raised her Glock, but she had little to aim at. Doc’s “pallid shadows” continued to live up to their name, flitting just outside of clear sight behind the brush or among the boles of the trees around the sinkhole. Especially not knowing whether or when they might face a concerted rush by their unknown foes, she was happy to take single shots as a hint of target revealed itself.
A scream rang out from above to Krysty’s right, long, shuddering and unnervingly humanlike. It startled her, but it was no big surprise: plenty of muties were human, for all practical purposes, their “taint” notwithstanding. Some of them were indistinguishable from norms.
Like Krysty, whose mutant traits—with the exception of her sentient red hair—were hidden. As quickly as it began, the barrage of thrown debris stopped. The flitting ghosts vanished. Or at least Krysty abruptly lost all sight of them, even the furtive glimpses she’d been getting since the attack began.
“Cease fire!” Ryan roared. “That means you, Ricky. Don’t waste ammo.”
“Sorry, Ryan.”
“Everybody fit to fight?” Ryan called.
“I’m fine, lover,” Krysty said, catching his eye and throwing a wink. The others affirmed they hadn’t received so much as a bruise from the pelting.
“So what just happened?” Mildred asked.
Krysty glanced at Ryan. Her lover didn’t suffer fools gladly, or at all, and was sometimes inclined to be curt with Mildred when either her sharp tongue or her archaic sentimental notions got on his nerves. And on the surface, the question seemed pretty obtuse.
Seemed. But Krysty found herself unsure, as well. Had they staved off a more serious assault? Had they overreacted? She wasn’t too concerned over the latter possibility—if you played pranks on a heavily armed party out in the wilderness, you had no gripe coming if you suddenly acquired a few more holes in your hide.
Ryan shook his head. “No bastard clue,” he said. “Everybody try to find a position with halfway-decent cover and stay tight with eyes skinned. We don’t know if and when they might be back.”
He didn’t say “with reinforcements,” but Krysty heard the words loud and clear anyway.
