Bloodfire

“Until proved otherwise,” Doc pronounced, “the enemy of my enemy is still my goddamn enemy.”

Thumbing back the hammer on her .38 ZKR target pistol, Mildred briefly gave the old man a puzzled look, then returned to the matter at hand. This wasn’t the time and place to find out where that paranoid quote had come from.

Just then the horse attacked by the underground mutie fell to its knees and started to shake. Ryan never took his eye off the stranger, but since it was his horse Doc rushed over to see what was the problem. As he got close, the scholar could see that the needles of the mutie were still sunk deep into the throat of the horse, red blood flowing from the severed end of the tendril. By the Three Kennedys, he thought, the piece of the dead mutie was acting like a tap and draining all of the blood from the horse!

Whipping out his eating knife, Doc tried to figure out where to begin trying to remove the needles in the horse’s throat when the animal gently lowered its head to the sandy ground as if it were going to sleep, then simply stopped breathing. Almost immediately, the blood ceased to flow on to the salty ground.

Standing helpless near the dead beast, Doc blinked moist eyes at the sight for a moment, then drew in a sharp breath and turned away.

“I am impressed. Drinkers are very hard to kill,” the stranger spoke unexpectedly, his words dry and raspy as if spoken through a long tunnel. “If I had known your iron weapons worked, I would not have revealed myself.”

“So it could drag us all down for dinner?” Ryan growled in a voice like granite. “It lived underground, and so do you. This seems pretty straightforward to me. So what was the deal? It hauls us down and you share in the food?”

The being tilted his head. “You walk the surface,” he said. “Does that make you friends of the rattler and the stickie?”

“Fair enough,” Ryan said, easing his stance but not turning away the blaster. “So who are you?”

As if in reply, a thrilling whistle came from the stranger, and the sand behind him shifted as more of the beings rose into view from below ground. Even as the companions aimed their collection of blasters at the newcomers, dozens more of the wrapped people came from the sand, then even more on both sides. Turning about slowly, Ryan and the others saw they were now surrounded by an army of the beings, every one of them armed with a needle tipped metal spear or sicklelike longknifes. The ebony blades were worn from constant use, the handles stained with dried blood.

The figures stood at average height, sporting two legs, two arms and head, but each was so heavily wrapped in strips of loose cloth it was impossible to tell if they were men or women, even if they were norms or muties.

“I am Alar,” the first stranger said, “the leader of the Core.”

Even through the thick wrappings, Ryan could hear the capital letter being used. The Core, eh? That could mean anything. But there was something oddly familiar about how the being held the short spears in his bandaged hands, and Ryan grunted softly as he recognized the military postures from the guards at the Anthill. These were the descendants of army troops, copying the port arms and such of drilling troops. Only they were armed with spears instead of longblasters. The Core as in U.S. Marine Corps, or a nuclear core? Could be either way, and there was no way of telling.

“I’m Ryan,” he said gruffly, then introduced the rest of the companions.

Alar bowed to each, the rest of the Core copying the gesture. At the end, the masked people put away their weapons, and the companions hesitantly did the same. Since they were outnumbered by a fifty-to-one ratio, it seemed prudent to stay on smooth terms with these… people?

“Here you go,” Dean said, walking up with the spear from the Drinker and offering it to the Core leader.

Nodding his head, Alar took the weapon and stabbed it twice into the ground to clean the tip of the sticky pink blood.

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