His breathing became steady and slow. “I am strong and I have no fear. I am strong and I have no fear. I am strong and I have no fear.” It was one of the mantras that Krysty had taught him many months ago, as a way of reducing stress and bringing back calmness and peace to the core of his being.
He stopped a moment, straining his hearing, imagining he’d heard a faint rustling sound. Feet. Far away in the heart of the building? Or something different?
“I am strong and I have no fear.”
Closer.
Something brushed against his ankle and he jumped, spooked by the almost silent approach of whatever it was.
“Krysty?” he whispered.
Another touch, on the back of his right thigh. He had the feeling that something was scenting him.
Ryan gripped his stick more firmly, trying to judge where the creature wasor if there was more than one.
The attack was so sudden, taking him by surprise, that he yelled out. Something had jumped into his lap and bitten him on the inside of his left wrist. It felt about the size and weight of a small mongrel dog, and Ryan snatched desperately at it with his right hand.
Blindness hadn’t slowed that part of his reflexes, and he caught the thing. Scrawny and hairy, struggling like crazy, squeaking at him, its long tail lashing against his body.
Long tail?
“Fireblast!” he shrieked. “Krysty! Help me, I’m being attacked by”
“Rats!” she shouted from some way off, her voice distorted by the distance, the walls and the broken doors and windows. “Stand up and swing the branch, Ryan. For your life! Now! There’s dozens of the mutie bastards!”
He was up in a nanosecond, throwing the rat from him, hearing the dull thump as its body smashed into a wall. He flailed around with the long stick as the pack of vermin surged at him, feeling more helpless and hopeless than ever before.
Chapter Eighteen
He was bitten a half-dozen times in the first couple of seconds of the one-sided fight. Two of the rats were climbing up his body with a sickening nimbleness, light-footed as demons as they scampered toward his face and throat.
Ryan used the stick like a medieval quarterstaff, two-handed, swinging it in a tight whirring circle, catching several of his attackers, hearing the dry snap of brittle bones splintering. The squeaking had grown to a shrieking, and the animals were pressing around his legs, trying to bring him to the floor by weight of numbers.
His first impression had been right. The rats were huge, bigger than cats, gigantic creatures spawned in some postnuke inferno, fattened on the creatures that lived in and around the bayous. One tried to fasten its grip on his hand, and he shook it off, shuddering at the realization that the thing had a double row of murderous teeth. If he fell
There was the sound of a shot, repeated twice more, the familiar waspish snapping of Krysty’s Smith amp; Wesson 640. It wasn’t a great blaster for any target much over forty feet away, but ideal as a stopper at closer quarters.
For a moment Ryan felt the rats hesitate.
Krysty fired twice more and the rodents retreated, leaving Ryan a clear space for a few moments. One of the mutie animals clung to the end of the staff and Ryan swung it to the floor with all his strength, crushing the creature to death.
“Let’s go, lover!”
For a moment he was totally disoriented. Had it not been for Krysty seizing his arm, he could easily have blundered deeper into the rats’ haunt or run out into the sluggish deeps of the swamp.
“This way.”
His hands still held tight to the whittled stick, feeling on the one end the broken slivers where the rats had gnawed at the hard wood.
“Close call,” he panted. “They after us?”
Ryan guessed they’d run about forty yards from the building, out onto the almost-submerged causeway that led eventually back to the ville of Bramton.
That much he knew.
Krysty slowed and twisted slightly as she looked behind her. “Nothing. The shots from the blaster did the trick, though you were more than holding your own with that chewed-up bit of stick you got there.”
“Wasn’t chewed up when I started, lover.”
Now they stopped, recovering their breath.
Ryan considered telling Krysty to reload, knowing that she’d fired five from five. But her rescue of him had unsettled the balance of their relationship and he kept his mouth closed.
“Real pisser having to depend on someone else like that,” he said finally.
“If I hadn’t been there, then you’d probably have made it clear yourself,” she replied. “You were holding them off all right, weren’t you?”
“I guess so. But” he let the words drift off into the silent afternoon, knowing without a shred of doubt that another minute or so among the mutie rats would have seen him down and done for, suffering a hideous passing.
“Anyway, we have to get back to the ville, ready to go and meet the Family.”
Ryan nodded. “Sure.”
He was holding Krysty by the hand when the water to their right erupted in an explosion of noise and violence, and something vast rushed up the shallow bank and snatched her away from him with awesome force.
Ryan heard the single scream and the sound of the hammer of the Smith amp; Wesson blaster falling on a spent cartridge. There was a hoglike grunt, then a tremendous splash to his left, the scream drowning instantly.
And Krysty was gone, torn away from him by what he knew instinctively had to be a monstrous alligator.
She was gone, and he stood there blind.
Chapter Nineteen
Ryan found that he’d drawn the powerful SIG-Sauer, holding it cocked and ready in his right hand. He’d automatically dropped the staff and drawn the blaster, without thinking for a moment what a futile gesture that was.
There was some kind of massive disturbance in the water, sounding about a dozen yards out from him, a noise that could only mean Krysty was fighting for her life against the saurian that had taken her. The fight would only have one ending as the great reptile rolled her under the frothing mud and rolled again and again, possibly tearing off an arm at the shoulder, or severing her trunk at the waist.
Ryan stood there in total darkness, knuckles white on the butt of the useless handblaster.
“I’m coming, lover!” he shouted at the top of his voice, hearing flatness and desolation all about him, aware of his isolation.
He bolstered the blaster and drew the eighteen-inch steel panga, feeling the familiar weight and balance, which gave him a momentary sense of comfort.
He held his breath, closed his eye and hurled himself away to the left, half diving, half falling in a noisy belly flop into the blood-warm soup of the lagoon.
Some of it went up his nose and some into his half-open mouth, making him cough and splutter, while desperately trying to hang on to his sense of direction, working out that the noise was coming from ahead and a little to his right.
“No, Ryan, don’t!” Krysty’s voice was shrill with mortal terror, ringing out across the swamp, rising above the piggish grunting and snuffling of the gator.
“I’m coming, lover.” Ryan’s head was thrown back, his neck straining, the sinews in his throat as taut as bowstrings. He kicked hard with both legs, unable to feel any bottom under his boots, trying to steer himself toward Krysty’s voice. –
But it was uncommonly difficult.
“Keep away!” Krysty screamed. “You can’t do”
The words were drowned in an eruption of bubbling and thrashing water.
The blade held tight in his right hand, Ryan slipped into a fluid sidestroke that moved him more easily across the treacherous swamp.
The noise had sounded close, less than twenty feet. He should have reached the place by now.
He gasped, swallowing a couple of mouthfuls of the brackish mud, feeling something brush against his leg, something vast and immeasurably powerful.
Just for a moment Ryan had a mental picture of the great white shark that he’d once encountered. The dead black eyes had stared incuriously at him, as though they were weighing his immortal soul.
He kicked sideways, toward the movement, feeling the turbulent currents left behind by the monster’s passing. Both of Ryan’s hands were outstretched, and it was the left that made the first contact with the gator.
The thick scales scraped past him, giving him a clue of the creature’s size and the direction it was taking. A short, muscular leg kicked out at Ryan as if the saurian sensed his presence close by.
Now that he’d finally made contact, all of Ryan’s fears left him. The blindness no longer mattered. In the filthy, impenetrable deeps of the swamp, it was to be a battle decided only by touch, not by sight.