the chill out of the fire. Stop that rad-blasted stink.”
The albino grabbed the corpse by the heels and pulled it from the blaze. Then he kicked dirt on its smoldering head.
“Who was he?” Ryan asked the woman. He put his hand on her arm and gave it a gentle shake. “Mildred?”
“Cannie I shot,” she replied in a barely audible voice. “The others decided not to let him go to waste.”
Doc loomed over the sole cannie survivor, holding the LeMat’s shotgun barrel against his temple, and down angling the load of bluewhistlers so as to empty his cranial vault, top to bottom. As the old man cocked the black-powder blaster’s hammer, Alpha twisted his head around so he could look his executioner in the face.
“Prepare to meet your maker, Devil spawn,” Doc said.
The wounded cannie pursed his lips and blew Doc a juicy, gray-smeared kiss.
Suddenly, Mildred came to life. “No!” she cried, lunging forward with arms outstretched. “Don’t chill him!”
Chapter Three
“Forgive me, my dear,” Doc said, decocking his antique weapon. “I didn’t mean to presume. You will, of course, wish to do the honors yourself.” As he stepped away from the wounded cannie, he made a sweeping gesture with his ebony swordstick, gallantly inviting her to have at her revenge.
Mildred advanced on the monster with gun drawn.
Ryan was gratified to see her back in action.
His relief was short-lived.
“When you gonna tell ’em, Mill-Dred?” cannie said, sneering at her. “When you gonna tell ’em our little secret?”
Instead of immediately shooting the cannibal through the head as Ryan and the others expected her to do, Mildred braced her feet, and, grunting from the effort, started pistol-whipping him with the barrel of her ZKR 551. She literally beat the evil grin off his face, in the process knocking out several of his filed teeth, and cutting deep slashes in both his cheeks with the Czech blaster’s front sight.
No one said a word. Her longtime companions looked on in astonishment. In the space of a couple of minutes, Mildred had gone from devastated to near-demonic, and in the process, turned her physician’s oath on its head.
“Get him up on his feet!” she shouted to J.B. and Jak.
The two men scrambled to hoist the cannie from the cave floor.
Raising her arm, threatening to continue the beating, Mildred backed the monster against the post. “Tie him tight, Jak,” she said.
The albino teen cinched wrists and ankles to the rough-hewn pole.
When the cannie was immobilized, Mildred’s fury seemed to ebb. She viewed the blood on her gunsight with deep, deep disgust; she scooped up a dead man’s rag of a shirt and quickly wiped the muzzle clean.
“I need to talk to Ryan,” she told the others.
“So talk,” J.B. said.
“I need to talk to him alone.”
“We’ll wait outside the cave, then,” Krysty offered.
“No,” Mildred said. “Ryan and I have got things to do here, just the two of us. It’s going to take a while, and it’s going to get loud before we’re done. I don’t want the children to hear and be scared all over again.”
Jak stared at the battered, bound cannie, his ruby eyes glittering with menace, certain that rough justice was on its way.
“Take the kids back to the ville, Krysty,” Ryan said. “Find their parents, if they’re still alive. Jak, Doc, J.B., go with her.”
“Not a good idea for you two to stay here by your-selves,” J.B. said.
“I concur most emphatically,” Doc said. “We either should all go, or all remain, for safety’s sake.”
“We’ve got plenty of ammo,” Ryan said. “Daybreak’s not far off. We’ll be fine. We’ll catch up with you in the valley.”
The companions didn’t like leaving them behind, but there were no more protests. Mildred had earned herself a private face-to-face, and private payback, if that’s what she wanted.
“We’ll see you back at the ville, then,” J.B. said. With a wave of his arm he led the others out of the cave.
Krysty touched Mildred on the hand as she herded the wide-eyed children past her. “You saved them,” the redhead said. “You saved them, and you survived. You did great, Mildred.”
After the companions had filed out, Ryan threw another hunk of wood on the glowing coals and watched it slowly ignite. “What’s going on, Mildred?” he said.
“Something real bad.”
“Figured that.”
“I wanted to tell you about it first,” she said, her voice tight, her words clipped. “I need you to make me a promise. I need you to give me your word on something.”
“Of course.”
“Before you and the others got here,” Mildred said, “the bastards force-fed me cannie brains.”
Ryan felt the bottom drop out of his stomach. The puzzle had been solved, albeit horrifically. Now he understood why she had acted with such uncharacteristic savagery.
“They were infected brains, Ryan,” Mildred said. “Terminal stage oozies. Three of them ganged up after they had me tied to the post. They made me swallow a plateful. Afterward I vomited up as much as I could, but chances are I’m infected.”
Ryan reached out to comfort her, but she backed away.
“I don’t know how long it’ll take for the oozies to manifest,” she told him. “I don’t know what will happen when the infection starts to spread through my brain.”
“You didn’t have to keep this from the others.”
“Yes, I did,” she insisted. “We’ve been together too long. Covered too much ground, been through too much hell. I trust every one of them with my life, Ryan, but not with my death. I’m afraid they might wait to do what needs to be done, out of friendship or love or misplaced sympathy. I won’t risk that. I don’t know how long I can fight off the disease. I may not know I’ve lost the battle until it’s too late for me to do anything about it. What I’m saying is, I may be too weak or too crazy to eat my own gun. Ryan, I want you to promise me you’ll do the job when the time comes. Without hesitation or mercy. Will you do that for me?”
It wasn’t a deed Ryan wanted on his conscience, it made his head reel to even contemplate it, but he couldn’t refuse her. He concealed his reaction behind a mask of stone, looked her straight in the eye and said, “You got it, Mildred.”
“And there’s
