The dying man was carried away by the surging torrent, his broken arm waving crookedly as he whipped around a sharp corner and vanished.
Ryan stooped to retrieve the fallen blaster, glancing at the trap in the ceiling, seeing someone still stooped there. Without hesitation he pulled the trigger, firing a short burst. There was a cry of pain, and the mutie fell backward out of sight.
“Any more?” a voice shouted from behind him.
“Can’t fucking tell,” he shouted back. Wading toward Krysty, who was stooping under the low roof a few yards away, it struck him that she was in a peculiar, lopsided position.
“Took your time there, lover,” she called. “Getting too old for all this.”
“Didn’t know it took long. Shows how time hisses by when you’re having fun. You hurt your leg?”
“No. Had a mutie come after me, but I neck-chopped the little bastard. Knocked him under water. Then, ‘fore I knew it, I had the heel of my boot jammed tight on the back of his head. He’s still down there. Figure he’s ’bout had enough?”
“Let go and find out.”
Krysty moved away, and the sodden corpse of another mutie rose slowly to the surface, face up, eyes and mouth open. It began to drift in a circle before the girl pushed it, allowing the current to carry it off and follow the other chilled body.
Ryan took Krysty’s hand, holding her tight. “Done good,” he said, leaning and kissing her on the cheek. “You get hurt?”
“Some. He had one of them folding spears, like Whitey got. It caught me ‘cross the belly.”
“No serious damage lower down?”
“No. Not that I noticed. Bled a little. The son of a bitching fucker tried to rip my balls off. That made me real angry.”
Krysty stared up at the circle of yellow light. “Could be more of ’em up there?”
“I reckon they’ll have had it on their toes when the shooting started. I’ll lift you and you take the blaster,” he said, handing her the gray G-12 caseless.
“Water’s stopped rising.”
“Yeah. But if’n that passage goes above, we can find a way out and mebbe link up with the others outside. Save us waiting down here. Truth is, I don’t much care for this crawling on my stomach under five miles of mud and stone. I’m an out-in-the-open sort of person.”
“Me, too, lover.”
Ryan steadied himself against the wall of the tunnel, cupping his hands so that Krysty could step up, balance and stand on his shoulders. It would give her the height to look through the open mouth of the tunnel above and blast anything that moved.
If it didn’t blast her first.
Her boots were slippery, and she nearly fell. She grabbed his head to steady herself, her fingers tangling in his hair, which made him yelp.
“Watch it,” he moaned.
“Keep still. You’re rocking around like an aspen in a hurricane.”
Then she was up on his shoulders. Ryan braced himself, wincing in expectation of hearing the roar of a gun from some hidden enemy. But all was quiet. She half turned, the heels of her cowboy boots scraping his ears, which made him wriggle again, then she pushed upward, and her weight was off him. He looked up and saw her legs vanishing into the hole above, momentarily blocking the light.
“Anything?”
Her face reappeared, the long red rags of her hair dangling down, almost touching him. “Nothing. Come on up, lover.”
She reached down, giving him a wrist to grip. In one steady motion, he hauled himself up to the higher level. Slumped against the far wall of the tunnel, which was wider than the one below, was the corpse of the third mutie, its head more or less pulped off its shoulders by the burst of lead from the G-12.
“Time we got out of this bastard warren,” Ryan said, stooping and peering as far as he could into the dimness. The light at their elbow was a small clay lamp, with a wick floating in liquid fat.
“I can hear something,” Krysty whispered. “Way we came. Could be J.B. and the others.”
“Let’s go, then,” Ryan said, leading the way, finger ready on the trigger of the Hamp;K.