sky. It dominated the devastated downtown. South of it a solitary flying creature kited on huge wings.
Sweat ran down Ryan’s face from the line of his long black curly hair. His mouth felt as if it had a prickly pear lobe lodged inside it. The long ragged scar that ran down the side of his face throbbed.
He ignored his discomfort. Minor pains meant nothing to Ryan Cawdor. A person could never tell from looking at him that he’d been raised in privilege and comparative luxury in the prosperous eastern barony of Front Royal. He was a creature of the Deathlands; and like the Deathlands everything had been stripped away from his six-two frame but the hard and the tough. He was the ultimate adapter. The ultimate survivor.
Perching on a tilted chunk of concrete with rebar protruding like twisted fangs, he halted to let his small party pass. Jak, taking a quick swig of water from a worn canteen, headed back out in the lead, skipping over the treacherous footing like rocks in a stream. Ryan used his brief halt to grab some relief from his own tearing thirst, swirling a tiny bit of water from his own canteen around his mouth and swallowing. It went down his throat as if it had knives in it.
At least we know where we are, he thought. J.B.’s sextant had identified the anonymous mass of cracked blocks and twisted steel as St. Louis, by the great river most people now called the Sippi.
He tried not to react to the furtive flickers of movement, visible through gaps in standing walls or past man-high heaps of debris that stank of concrete dust and rotting flesh. He waited until their rear guard, a short man with wire-rimmed spectacles and a fedora he used to cover the steady retreat of his hairline, came up to him.
“So you saw our little shadows,” John Barrymore Dix said as he approached. He carried his heavy 12-gauge Smith & Wesson M-4000 shotgun easily in front of his hips. There was a lot more strength in his wiry little frame than there looked to be.
Of course, that could be said for all of them. The truth was, no one looked tough enough to live through what they had.
“Jak’s got them,” Ryan said quietly.
“What do you reckon they want?”
Ryan’s mouth tensed up. “Hard call,” he said. “Can’t read much ’cause they haven’t hit us yet. May just be looking for the best spot to make their move.”
J.B. showed him a quick thin smile. “Chill or enslave, doesn’t matter much, does it?”
“Sure doesn’t,” Ryan said, lengthening his step to move up through the rest of the group.
He made no move for the P-226 blaster holstered on his right hip, or the big-bladed panga scabbarded on his left, or even the scoped, long-barreled bolt-action Steyr sniper rifle strapped on his back alongside his bulky backpack. He didn’t want to alert their shadows that he was onto them. He trusted his cougar-keen senses and rattlesnake reflexes to get a weapon into play in plenty of time when things went south.
Ignoring the increasing sense of unease crawling up his spine, Ryan drew alongside an apparently elderly man who walked with the aid of a gleaming ebony cane. The man resembled a bag of bones held together by a worn frock coat.
“Doc,” Ryan said conversationally, “how’s it swingin’?”
“As well as ever, my youthful friend.” Although he looked a hard-traveled sixty with his pale blue eyes sunk deep in a well-seamed face framed by long straggly silver-hair, Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner was chronologically in his thirties, a couple of years younger than Ryan.
Then again he looked pretty hale and hearty for a man who was well north of two hundred years old. Born in 1868, he had been trawled out of his own time by a late-twentieth-century secret experiment, then heartlessly dumped in a desolate future by the hard-hearted white-coats who had decided he was too difficult to handle.
“I take it you’re aware of our furtive friends?” Doc said, covering the question with a cough and a raised hand.
“Yeah,” Ryan grunted. He touched the old man briefly on the shoulder. He wouldn’t insult Doc or any of his people by telling him to be ready.
They were always ready. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t be alive. Ryan was utterly devoted to keeping his companions together and breathing, but they still had to do their parts…none of which was easy.
He moved up, falling into step alongside Mildred, a brown-skinned woman a head shorter than he was, with dark hair swinging and tinkling gently in skinny beaded plaits. She wore baggy cargo trousers, a green T-shirt and an overall sheen of sweat. Despite perpetual trudging on perpetual short rations, her figure remained on the stocky side. She carried a ZKR target pistol in a holster hung from her web belt.
“Got company,” Ryan said softly.
Her eyes got wide. “Really?”
“Easy,” he said. “Don’t let on we know—”
Jak darted to his left. His right arm struck like a snake. It came out holding the scruff of a flailing tangle of long matted hair and naked limbs turned almost uniform gray with concrete dust stuck to a long accretion of grease and grime. The figure wore a foul-looking loincloth and squalled like an angry bobcat.
Ryan saw sun flash on the blade of a hunting knife in Jak’s chalk-white hand and heard a clash of metal on something hard. The captive had stabbed Jak with a knife whose filth-crusted blade had been ground down to little more than a sliver. It had struck one of the random bits of glass Jak had sewn to his camou jacket.
Jak’s knife hand worked in a blur of speed, stabbing his wildly writhing captive twice in barely a second. Then he tossed the scrawny figure away.
A second creature, larger than the first but still stick-skinny and smeared with grease, launched itself at the albino teen’s unprotected back.
A boom crashed out from behind Ryan’s left shoulder. The noise was like a thumb gouging his eardrum, and the blast wave slapped the side of his head. It was J.B.’s big scattergun going off.
Even with the shot’s aftermath ringing in his ears Ryan heard a soggy, chunking sound as the charge of double-00 buck slammed home. Blood sprayed black in the sunlight. The figure fell short of its target, kicking the grit with bare heels and groaning.
Another sound of impact and a surprised grunt came from behind Ryan. More shots rang out from his right. Drawing his own handblaster, he looked that way.
A big-busted, slim-waisted woman with long slender legs knelt on a pile of busted brick and concrete, firing a snub-nosed hammerless revolver with two hands. Brilliant red hair was curled into a tight cap at her nape. When he’d glanced that way a few moments before it had hung past her shoulders.
J.B. was also on one knee, looking down at his fallen glasses. Nearby, his fedora lay upturned on a round-edge chunk of concrete. Behind him a nearly naked man with hair and beard fringing his face like a brown dandelion was spinning down in reaction to being hit by Krysty Wroth’s .38-caliber slugs. Apparently he’d just hit J.B. from behind with a thrown chunk of pavement.
Another figure reared up from behind a waist-high broken section of wall at the top of a slope of rubble. Ryan snapped a shot at him from his 9 mm Sig Sauer. The man’s head jerked as the bullet smashed the outside of his right cheekbone.
But he shook himself, shedding blood like a wet dog,
