back. The women had J.B.’s jacket and shirt off. He was propped up against Krysty as Mildred wound duct tape tightly around the makeshift patches of plastic wrapper that covered the holes in his chest and back, and the pads of relatively clean spare clothing folded up for bandages. Ryan winced.
“That tape’s gonna sting when it comes off,” he said. “I don’t envy J.B.”
“I’ll settle for being alive to feel the sting, Ryan,” J.B. said weakly. He had a bit of a wheeze to his voice. Ryan glanced back at him, startled. The wiry man gave him a thin smile.
“You hush up, now,” Mildred said sternly. “Save your breath. We’ve gone to a lot a trouble to keep it from leaking out.”
Ryan’s lips twisted in a brief smile as he looked to the north again. This time he glimpsed a flicker of motion, left to right, behind heaps of rubble on the street’s far side. He started to raise his rifle, then halted the motion and regretfully lowered the longblaster.
No target, he thought. He didn’t have a single round to waste on shadows.
“The nuke-suckers are starting to get restless,” he said. “Make a move soon, mebbe.”
“Okay, I’ve got it from here, Krysty,” Mildred said. “Why don’t you take J.B.’s scattergun and help watch our little friends out there.”
“Good idea, Mildred.” Ryan heard the crunching of footfalls on dust-covered rubble as the redhead took up position between him and Doc.
Time passed. The day got hotter. The clouds grew thicker, more clotted, more orange and threatening. Occasionally one of the other set of besiegers would pop off a shot as if to remind the companions they were still out there. None of Ryan’s crew was stupe enough to shoot back.
At a soft-voiced request from Mildred, Doc helped her shift J.B. up close to the short wall on the west side, where there was some shade. Doc had a surprising wiry strength to him. The Armorer had lapsed into unconsciousness again. Mildred poured water on a hankie from her canteen and bathed his face.
“How’s it look?” Ryan asked her.
He could feel her shrug. “I’ve done all I can do. Doesn’t seem to be much internal bleeding, thank God. He’s tough, but I don’t give him even odds of living to nightfall if we can’t get him some kind of better care by then.”
“Dear lady,” Doc said softly, “do I understand you give any of us even odds of living until nightfall?”
“You got me, Doc,” Mildred said. She was too depressed and worried even to rise to the bait. Under normal circumstances she and Doc spent plenty of time sniping good-naturedly at each other.
“You know,” Doc said, “one would certainly think the base of the elevator shaft and the stumps of the structural members in these collapsed buildings should have survived the blasts. Yet many have become little more than mounds.”
“Elevator probably went to a basement level,” Mildred said.
“But structural members usually survived at least partially, even near ground zero,” Krysty said. “I’ve seen pillar stumps standing right next to craters.”
Ryan bit down on a caustic remark about wasting air on speculation that wouldn’t load bullets in a blaster. Under the circumstances idle chatter was far preferable to thinking too deeply about their situation.
“Why don’t you take over the scattergun, Mildred?” Krysty asked. “You’re more comfortable with it.”
The physician shrugged. “Sure.” Krysty passed the weapon, then drew her more-familiar Smith & Wesson 640.
As she did, a storm of blasterfire erupted from the north. Bullets struck sprays of concrete powder off the top of the low circular wall and whined mournfully overhead as they tumbled through the thick, hot air. A short burst from an M-16 snapped over Ryan’s head like a sail in a brisk wind.
“Get ready for it,” he said during a lull in the shooting. “They’re nerving themselves to make their move.”
“No doubt they sense the immediacy of the impending storm,” Doc said. “I can smell the rain and sulfur already.”
“Hear that?” Jak called from the south wall.
“Hear what?” Krysty asked.
Ryan was switching his vision back and forth between the scavvies lying up in the weed-grown field to their west and the forted attackers to the north. Though the western bunch weren’t firing, he was pretty sure they weren’t sharp enough to have backed off and left without him or one of his sharp-eyed friends spotting them. Apparently they were biding their time and awaiting events.
“Whine,” Jak said. “Triple high. Like giant mosquitoes, you know?” He winced and shook his head. “Not like.”
“I can’t hear it,” Krysty said.
Mildred and Doc said they heard nothing out of the way, either. Of course with the blasters cracking off from not so far away that was perhaps not so surprising—the wonder being Jak could. But he had the sense of hearing of a white-tailed deer.
Ryan heard a loud rattle from his left. He risked sticking his head up to scope it out. Flashes and billows of smoke were coming from the pancaked structure.
“Black-powder blasters,” Ryan said. A ball sailed over his head. “Shooting at us.”
“They want to help the other bunch crack us,” Krysty said. “Then roll in, take them down, get all the swag themselves.”
“But why, dear lady, would they act now? Why not let us and our pursuers settle things and then eliminate the victor—in accordance with the ancient Oriental adage that when two tigers fight, one dies, the other is wounded?”
Mildred had turned away to check J.B. His cheeks were pale, his eyes closed, his breathing shallow. Now meeting Doc’s eye, she jerked a thumb upward.
“That’s why.”
Thunder split the sky. Something wet struck the back of Ryan’s left hand. It stung like an ant bite.
He looked up. “Shit.”
A blue-white crack appeared in the roiling orange and black clouds above, jagged and blinding. It pulsated three times. A sound like a colossal explosion beat down on them, a sound so loud Ryan could feel it.
“Acid gully washer on way,” Jak called.
“Tell us something we don’t know,” Mildred said, hastily moving to shield the wounded Armorer’s face with his hat. No other raindrops fell in the vicinity. But none of the companions doubted it was only a question of time.
“Here they come!” Krysty called.
Ryan raised his Steyr again. An acid downpour was no joke; it could bubble unprotected skin in minutes, sizzle muscle away to leave yellow bone in a shockingly short time, depending on the strength and length of the downpour. But the really virulent falls tended not to last long.
Ryan laid the rifle’s iron battle sights on a goggled figure
