full-tilt. She couldn’t see the cannies, but she could hear them ahead, crashing through the stands of brush. Burdened by their struggling prizes, the flesheaters were gradually losing their lead.
From the darkness beyond the limit of her vision came nearly simultaneous thuds and yelps. Mildred’s fingers closed around her holstered gun butt.
A moment later a pair of terrified little boys blundered into her path. As she reached out for them, they took to their heels, scattering to either side into the night. At least they had a chance now.
“Run and hide!” Mildred shouted over her shoulder as she raced on.
The fleeing cannies had each jettisoned a child to lighten the load and make better time. Carrying one small victim each, they quickly pulled away from her, their footfalls growing fainter and fainter. They weren’t circling or splitting up, trying to throw her off the trail or to catch her in an ambush. Afraid of losing their way in the dark, they were beelining for the foothills. The only signposts were the stars overhead. Mildred guessed they had picked a constellation on the horizon and were running toward it. She did the same, determined to play out the hand she had been dealt, but with fast-fading hope. Ahead was a vast maze of potential escape routes.
The extreme northeast corner of Oregon had avoided the leading edge of Armageddon, the all-out U.S.-Soviet nuclear exchange of January 21, 2001. There had been no military installations or population centers to attract the nuke-clusters of Russian MIRVs. Since the mountainous, heavily forested area was three hundred miles from the Pacific Ocean, it had also dodged the great tsunamis, spawned by worldwide thermonuclear detonations that had devastated the coastline. Northeastern Oregon had drawn a pass for everything but the earthquakes and a terrible firestorm that had swept through mountains and valley, burning out the little towns in its path; and of course the nuke winter that had gripped the entire planet. Even before the end of civilization it had been a rugged place, thinly colonized.
A little farther to the east, the landscape got even tougher.
One hundred miles away was Hells Canyon, the deepest canyon in the world, deep enough to hide twenty battleships, stacked one on top of the other. Hells Canyon also hid a predark redoubt, a vast bunker and storage facility, complete with a functional mat-trans unit. The mat-trans network was intended to move people and matériel across vast distances instantaneously. It was thanks to that system that Mildred and her companions had emerged unscathed into the wilds of Oregon.
Most of the predark interstate highways in Deathlands led to uninhabitable ruination: miles-wide, nuke warhead impact craters, skeletonized cities, poisoned water, air and soil. Highway 84, which cut across northeastern Oregon, through the Grande Ronde valley, was an exception. Sections of its crumbling roadway still connected minor habitations and nowhere villes; out of necessity it had become a corridor of life and trade.
Where there was life in the hellscape, there were predators. Two-legged, four-legged, winged and slithering…
Running in the dim half-light, Mildred wished that Jak Lauren had been by her side. The ruby-eyed, white-haired, wild child could track a rabbit fart in a hurricane.
The base of the foothills stopped Mildred’s advance. Above her the slope’s blackness wasn’t quite absolute. Faint starlight reflected off basalt bedrock, making it look wet. It was not. Ancient lava dikes and arches radiated trapped day heat like a furnace. Above the bedrock were densely treed slopes, fully recovered from the wildfires of more than a century earlier. If the cannies had climbed into the tree line, she knew she would never find them this night. And by morning it would be too late to save the children.
Mildred scanned the rocky flanks of the hills while her heart thudded in her throat. Come on, you bastards, she thought. Come on. Where the hell are you?
Then she saw something odd—a flicker of light bouncing off the black rock a couple hundred feet up the hillside. It was there, then it was gone. Not from the stars, because it was the wrong color. Pale yellow, instead of dead white. Had she imagined it? Were her eyes playing tricks?
Breathing hard, she watched. After a minute or two the light reappeared. Then vanished. It was real. The Wallowa Mountain basalt was riddled with caves. Some were little more than shallow dishes. Others were long and winding. A campfire set deep in a cave, perhaps around a bend or two, would give off that kind of weak light. Light that could be completely blocked by some kind of barrier.
At least she knew where they had gone.
Mildred started to climb, careful not to dislodge any loose bits of rock. If there was an established track to the cave, she couldn’t see it. The sound of the gun battle was far behind her now. There would be no backup. And no going back.
The cave entrance, a low arch in the basalt slope, would have been hard to find even in the daytime. Without the intermittent flicker of light, she might have climbed right past it. No one stood guard outside. The cannies thought they had lost her.
Mildred brushed the sweat from her eyes with the back of her hand, then wiped her fingers dry on her BDU pants. By feel, she broke open her revolver, replaced the single spent shell, then softly clicked closed the 6-shot cylinder.
She didn’t know how many flesheaters were in the cave. Cannies usually ran in hunting packs. They used footspeed and the cover of night to snatch away the weakest, the dumbest, the easiest chills. This night the no-name ville had been hit by multiple packs simultaneously, all competing for the spoils. Cannies didn’t like to share. And when push came to shove they ate one another.
Mildred reached into her right pants’ pocket. With her fingertips she counted four, full speedloaders. She took one out and palmed it in her left hand.
The ZKR ready to rip, she stooped to enter the cave. Inside the arch, the ceiling was eight or nine feet high. The walls were about that far apart, too. There was no guard on duty. Moving quietly, Mildred followed the faint light around a bend. Beyond it, the cave walls necked down and a ratty, brown-polyester blanket blocked her path. It hung from the ceiling to the dirt floor, leaking yellow points of light from a hundred holes and small rips.
From the other side, she heard voices. And soft whimpering.
Mildred stepped up and peeked through a hole in the blanket. It took a couple of seconds for her eyes to adjust to the glare of light, which came from a stone-ringed firepit in the middle of a wide chamber. She counted four cannies. She couldn’t tell whether the cave went on or dead-ended. Strewed in a corner was a pile of fire-blackened human bones. From the angle she had she couldn’t see the children, but the whimpering was definitely theirs.
With a sweep of her hand, Mildred pushed back the blanket, looking over the ZKR’s sights. She caught the cannies flat-footed.
The Czech target pistol boomed deafeningly in the tightly enclosed space. The closest cannie, a tall man with a bushy, foot-long chin beard, took the up-angled round through his left eye-socket. His hair, skull and brain matter splattered the cave ceiling and he toppled over, rigid from head to toe with shock, like a felled tree.
Two others leaned over a boy and a girl who were huddled in a corner. The cannies whirled at the gunshot, the slivers of fileting knives flashing in the firelight. Unblinking, Mildred shot them both rapid-fire, placing one slug below each breastbone.
Heart shredders.
Muzzle climb was her old and trusted friend, and she rode it onto the fourth target who had grabbed up a blaster and was coming at her fast. As the cannie charged, he swung the side-by-side scattergun from the hip. The full-length weapon came around slowly. Way too slowly.
