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Alpha broke the stalemate, sucker-punching her in the stomach. The others exploited her moment of weakness. Baldy pulled down her bottom jaw, Rebar Head forced a thick stick crossways, between her back molars.
Mildred couldn’t snap the stick and close her mouth. She couldn’t dislodge it by shaking her head. She flexed her throat muscles, shutting her gullet, her eyes wide with panic.
Then came the metallic taste of the plate on her tongue, followed by warm goo flooding her mouth. Before she could cough out the pureed brains, hard fingers pinched off her nostrils and a callused palm covered her mouth.
Mildred’s stomach heaved violently, but she couldn’t expel a single drop. The resulting explosion of pressure only drove it up into her sinuses.
“How do you like it?” Alpha inquired, pinning the back of her head to the pole and holding it there.
The taste of death was shrill, feral, fecal. The stench in her nose burned like battery acid.
With the hands shutting off her air, it was either swallow or suffocate.
She wanted to suffocate, but the choice wasn’t hers to make. Her nervous system’s hardwiring wouldn’t allow it. Just before she passed out, she swallowed.
When Alpha released her, she gasped a breath, then projectile vomited across the cave floor.
The cannies brayed at her dry heaving, and her frantic coughing and spitting. “You been dosed good,” Baldy said.
“You’ll be hungry for long pig in no time,” Alpha added, wiping his leaking nose on the back of his hand.
“The oozies might chill me, but it won’t make me a rad-blasted cannie,” Mildred said defiantly.
“You think cannies are born that way?”
The monsters laughed some more.
“Which came first, the cannie or the oozies?” Alpha asked her. “Guess you’re gonna find out.” Then he glanced over at the children, his good eye narrowed to a slit. “Throw some more wood on that fire,” he told his packmates. “Let’s get something cooking. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m fuckin’ starvin’.”
Chapter Two
Ryan Cawdor followed in Jak Lauren’s footsteps, trying hard to keep up, his SIG-Sauer P-226 blaster in hand. Behind Ryan in a tight single file was the remainder of the companions. Krysty Wroth, Ryan’s red-haired, emerald-eyed lover, was wrapped in a long, shaggy black coat, and carried a Model 640 .38 Smith & Wesson revolver. John Barrymore Dix, Ryan’s comrade since the days of riding with Trader’s convoy, had his trademark fedora screwed down on his head; his military-style, M-4000 shotgun swung on a shoulder sling. Theophilus Algernon “Doc” Tanner, Oxford scholar circa 1881 and reluctant time traveler, brought up the rear in his tattered frock coat and cracked riding boots. In one fist he held a massive Civil War relic black-powder handblaster; in the other an ebony walking stick that concealed a rapier blade.
One of their number was missing.
They wouldn’t rest until they recovered her.
Krysty had watched Mildred vanish into the night, chasing a pair of cannies who carried off two young children each. Pinned belly-down by withering blasterfire, the tall redhead couldn’t go to her friend’s aid, and in the deafening clatter of the exchange couldn’t summon the others to help. It wasn’t until almost half an hour later, until after the attack had been beaten back and the cannies driven out of the ville’s berm, that Ryan and the companions had regrouped and begun the pursuit.
They had covered less than a hundred yards when Jak called a halt to the advance. Kneeling, he holstered his .357 Magnum Colt Python and carefully examined the narrow strip of churned-up ground.
“Cannies dropped kids,” the albino announced.
“No bodies here,” Ryan said as he looked around. “They must have been alive. Looks like they got away.”
Jak walked on a few more yards. “Cannie tracks both heavy on one leg,” he said.
“They’re still carrying a kid each,” Krysty said. “I saw them take four from the ville.”
“I wonder why our Mildred did not stop to round up the escapees?” Doc asked.
“They probably hit the ground running,” Ryan answered. “Even if she saw them she couldn’t catch them in the dark.”
“That way,” Jak said, pointing due east.
The companions resumed the chase. They moved triple fast and triple quiet. There was only the soft hiss of their bootheels on sand as Jak led them across the valley, toward the dark screen of mountains.
As Ryan ran, he thought about the ville they had just left, and the dozens of bodies strewed in its rutted dirt lanes. How many of its folk had died fighting? How many had been carried off to meet a worse fate than a bullet? How many women and children had either been suffocated by smoke or burned alive in their underground hiding holes? The exact cost of victory was impossible to count until after daybreak, which was still hours away. The shambling shacks could be rebuilt, of course. The stacked logs and heaped earth of the defensive berm could be repaired, and its design much improved. But Ryan knew it would take years to restore the human population to its former size.
All the while with flesheaters hammering at the gates.
Taking the battle to the cannies, finding their dens and chilling them one by one, was the only way to tip the balance. It was a daunting task, given the mountainous terrain and their apparent numbers. Even before the attack there hadn’t been enough ville folk to handle the job. Unlike Deathlands numerous mutated species, cannies were still essentially human beings. Humans gone psycho-renegade. They fought with blades and blasters instead of teeth and claws. This night they had been particularly well-armed with semiauto and full-auto centerfire weapons. Several of them weren’t remades.
Over the years, after numerous skirmishes, Ryan had cannies pegged as cunning, cowardly adversaries. Their normal strategy was hit and git, like true pack-hunting predators. Cannies worked a vulnerable territory until it could no longer support them or until they were chilled or driven out.
Because they looked human, cannies sometimes infiltrated villes and mingled with norms, then struck without warning. Children and the dimwitted simply disappeared overnight. Cannies were blood traitors to their own species, universally despised and feared. The happy downside to the cannie lifestyle was the oozies, a horrible, wasting disease that ultimately claimed them, one and all. It was widely assumed that they got it from eating the infected brains of their own packmates.
No one knew their exact origins. From the time-honored campfire tales, it appeared cannies had been around since skydark, when nuke winter had forced the surviving humans to make awful choices about protein sources. Although the companions had come across isolated small bands that roamed Deathlands interior, Ryan had never seen or heard of cannies unleashing a coordinated, mass attack on a bermed ville. Their organization had always stopped at the pack level, the primary hunting group.
The hellscape was full of mysteries. Explanations, when they came, were usually incomplete.
Jak somehow picked out Mildred’s trail in the weak light, leading the companions across the high desert valley on a near dead run. How the albino managed the feat was a puzzle to Ryan, especially after Mildred had explained her twentieth-century understanding of albinism to him. Before the Apocalypse it had been a well-documented genetic disorder, caused by a random mutation that stopped production of a chemical vital to normal development of skin pigmentation, eyes and brain. According to Mildred, predark albinos always had poor vision, were susceptible to sunburn and had blue-gray or brown eyes. Jak had exceptional eyesight. He never sunburned. And his eyes were ruby-red. The youth vehemently insisted that he wasn’t a mutie—those with mutie blood were Deathlands untouchables, often chilled on sight—but the evidence said otherwise. Whether he was seeing the bootprints in the sand, or smelling out the track, or using some other extra-norm sense that had no name, Jak was bird-dogging. The pace he set was grueling, but no one complained, and no one asked for a rest.
Ahead, the impenetrable black of the mountain crags loomed larger, the landscape tilted underfoot, and the companions began to climb the gradual incline of the valley side. As the physical effort increased, body heat built up. Sweat peeled from Ryan’s hairline, down his forehead, burning into his good eye. The other socket was an empty hole, covered by a black leather patch. A livid scar divided that eyebrow and split his cheek, a secondary wound from the knife slash that had half blinded him. Ryan ignored the growing ache in his thighs, pushing the pain aside as though it belonged to someone else.
Mildred Wyeth was more than a treasured friend, more than a trusted comrade in arms; she was a resource the companions couldn’t afford to lose. Mildred had been a physician; she understood the workings of predark science and technology. She had come from a time not only with different knowledge, but very different values.
Would any of the other companions have taken off on their own to rescue the children?
Mebbe.
Mebbe not.
When the five reached the base of the mountains, they paused for breath, faces upturned, searching the black vastness above.
“Where’d she go?” J.B. said softly.
Jak tugged on Ryan’s sleeve.
“There,” the albino teen said. “Cave mouth.”
Above them, weak firelight flared against bedrock, then it was gone. They all saw it.
“How can you be positive that’s where Dr. Wyeth has gone?” Doc asked.
“Can’t,” Jak said.
“That fire didn’t start itself,” Krysty said. “Got to be cannies hiding inside. Nobody else would be out in the bush around here.”
“Nobody in their right mind,” J.B. added.
“We need to have a look-see,” Ryan told the others. “Spread out, take it slow, make sure of your footing. We don’t want any rockslides on the approach.”
The companions climbed the mountain flank, closing in on the cave entrance with blasters raised, safeties off. They saw no movement and met no resistance. The cannies weren’t expecting company. Probably because they considered themselves well-hidden and figured no one would try to hunt them down before dawn.
As Ryan neared the cave mouth, he smelled wood smoke, charring meat and burning hair. His stomach twisted into a knot.
Not Mildred, he thought. For nuke’s sake, not Mildred…
He ducked under the low arch, entering the outer chamber, where the trapped smoke and stench hung like an evil fog.
When all companions were inside the arch, he led them through the smoke, toward the source of the flickering yellow light. Around the cave’s bend, they spread out on either side of the blanket that served as a door, weapons aimed, fingers resting lightly on triggers.
Holding the SIG-Sauer braced against his hip, Ryan leaned forward and peered through a rip in the fabric. He saw two men, one bald and the other with a badly scarred face, crouched on the far side of a roaring fire. There had to be a vent in the ceiling, he thought, a fissure in the rock drawing most of the smoke up and out. The cannies were eating with their bare hands, pulling greasy strips of charcoaled meat off the shoulders of a human corpse. They had removed the dead man’s clothing but hadn’t bothered to cut up his body. They had simply shoved it into the fire like an oversize log, burning it at one end, flame-roasting the head and upper torso.
A third cannie stood with his back turned to the entrance, urinating torrentially against the cave wall. When Ryan saw Mildred tied to the post, the weight on his shoulders lifted. She was still alive. The children were huddled in a corner. Still alive, too.
Ryan turned to the companions and held up three fingers. Three targets.
“Mildred?” J.B. whispered.
The one-eyed man gave the thumbs-up.
At his signal, Krysty ripped down the tattered blanket. Ryan and J.B. burst into the death chamber, shoulder to shoulder.
Before the bald cannie could stand, J.B. blasted him full in the face with a load of double-aught buckshot. The cannie jerked violently backward, a plume of skull and brains flying; J.B. cycled the M-4000’s action and fired again. The scar-faced cannie was already moving sideways, lunging for a nearby weapon. J.B.’s buckshot missed its intended target by a foot. Instead of taking off his head, the blast slammed the cannie in the left shoulder, bowling him over as a cloud of dirt and rock dust rained from the ceiling. The creature landed hard and stayed down.
The remaining flesheater lunged toward the children through the swirling dust, his knife blade drawn. Leading him, Ryan squeezed off two shots with the SIG-Sauer. And hit the ten-ring. A pair of tightly spaced, 9 mm rounds in the head blew the cannie off his feet before he could cut throats. He crashed into a pile of bones at the base of the wall, and lay there, twitching.
Doc rounded the firepit and covered the wounded cannie with his double-barreled LeMat. Krysty gathered up the children, who were bawling with relief.
Drawing his eighteen-inch panga from its leg sheath, Ryan stepped over to Mildred. There was blood on her chin. The glistening stripe ran down the front of her neck and onto her T-shirt, which was speckled with pink bits of bone. She reeked of vomit.
As Ryan cut her bonds he said, “Are you okay?” When she didn’t answer, he added, “Are you wounded?”
Mildred shook her head minutely, but she wouldn’t meet his gaze.
Ryan had fought side by side with this woman in countless pitched battles. Under fire, Mildred was intense, determined, fearless. He had never seen her like this in the aftermath of combat. Numbed. Shellshocked. What had the bastards done to her?
He wasn’t the only one who noticed the change.
There was concern on J.B.’s face as he returned Mildred’s revolver to her. “You did good,” he assured her. “It all worked out.”
Mildred holstered her revolver. She let her arms drop to her sides. Then she slumped back against the wooden post, utterly deflated.
“Mildred?” J.B. said. He stared helplessly at the dazed, blood-smeared physician.
“For nuke’s sake, Jak,” Ryan snarled over his shoulder, “drag 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.”
