“Don’t say that until you’ve proved yourself, sweetie,” she replied with a crack in her voice that gave the words sinister import.
Doc raised an eyebrow, but was too concerned with protecting himself from the last few stickies to answer immediately or to ponder on what she may have meant by that last remark.
Meanwhile, Jak had been almost fatally distracted by the appearance of the woman in his dream. He had been grappling hand to hand with a stickie who had launched itself straight at the albino. Jak’s left hand formed a cup that smacked under the stickie’s chin, forcing its head back and up, while the albino’s other hand fished for a leaf-bladed knife, those he had previously held having been lost within the guts of now-chilled stickies. Producing one from within the myriad folds of his patched camou jacket, he used it to gut the stickie as calmly and efficiently as he would gut a fish. He released his hand when he felt the stickie’s head cease to resist against his arm, instead falling to a deadweight in his palm.
As this stickie dropped to the earth, the whirling dervish that was the dream woman came nearer, and for a second their eyes made contact. Her features were as sharp and defined as he could recall, and her eyes as large, blue and piercing as had been impressed on his memory. So piercing and hypnotic that it seemed that time had stood still for a second. There was no sign of recognition in those blue pools, but instead a warning.
A warning Jak heeded a fraction of a second too late. A yelling stickie leaped at him from just to the rear of his right shoulder, catching him enough off guard to prevent his using the mutie’s momentum to roll it harmlessly away from his body. The wild creature cannoned into him, knocking him off balance and making him stumble to his left, his feet skipping across the grassy earth in an attempt to keep balance while he twisted his upper body and tried desperately to get a hand beneath the stickie’s body to try to jab beneath the ribs and dislodge it from him so that he could get in a killing blow. He could feel the suckered fingers of one hand become entangled in his hair, pulling at it and reaching for his scalp to try to tear at the skin. His face was close to that of the stickie, its dark and characterless eyes glittering with hatred into his red orbs, its teeth bared in a triumphant snarl as its breath enveloped him in a noxious cloud that made him want to puke.
And then there was another smell in the air, a scent that was warmer, sweeter and more earthy. The smell of flaming red hair and glistening skin. A breath colored by nuts and berries.
“Hey, stupidworks…eat this, you fuck,” husked a voice, followed by a deafening explosion.
Jak saw the stickie’s head dissolve in close-up before his eyes…eyes that blinked as gray brain matter and red, hot blood showered over him. The woman had drawn a handblaster and had discharged it into the stickie’s ear. At such close range, the sound of the blaster almost parted Jak from his hearing, and the smell of cordite obscured the stench of flesh and blood violently torn asunder.
Jak staggered back a couple of paces, wiping the gore from his face with his sleeve so that he could see again, despite the remnants of the stickie’s head that dripped from the ends of his hair. He looked from the corpse of the chilled stickie, lying prone with nothing that could be recognized as a head, to the slim and beautiful warrior woman who stood in front of him, a Vortak precision pistol in her hand. As he had seen in his mat-trans dream, it was a perfect example of the art of Fred Craig, the designer whose predark handblasters J.B. sometimes spoke of in hushed tones. It had a unique look, but was obviously based on an update of the John Browning 1911 design that had set the tone for such blasters. The gas-buffered recoil system had allowed the woman to shoot at such close range and know that she could have maximum accuracy at a range where even the slightest recoil could have altered the trajectory of the shell and also taken out the albino.