“Tough mother, huh?” Ryan said to himself, carefully freeing the pistol from his coat. The animal was panting, blood flowing freely over its grizzled pelt and soaking the earth around its forepaws. Despite the crippling wound, the wolf wasn’t finished yet.
The P-226 9 mm blaster was in Ryan’s right fist, its twenty-five and a half ounces of weight feeling as familiar to him as his own face in a mirror. The barrel was more than four inches long, and it held fifteen rounds of ammunition. One bullet in the right place would kick a man over on his back, leaving him looking blank-eyed at the sky.
It was enough even for the mutie wolf.
The animal lurched toward Ryan again, hackles up, snow hanging in the folds of muscle around its throat. The gun barked, the flat sound muffled by the storm. The bullet hit precisely where Ryan had aimed it, between the kill-mad eyes.
The wolf howled, the long drawn-out scream of pain and frustrated rage echoing and fading off the trees. The high-velocity round exited from the back of the beast’s skull, a fine spray of brains and blood hanging in the air for a moment. A great splinter of bone, inches across, pulped into the snow. The body was knocked sideways, the legs kicking frantically. Ryan heard the mutie beast’s claws scrape through the ice at the road gravel beneath.
“Where are you, Ryan?”
It was Krysty, stumbling over the slippery ruts of ice, her Heckler amp; Koch pistol in her hand. Ryan saw her looming through the wraiths of wind-torn snow. She stopped when she saw the twitching corpse of the timber wolf. “By Gaia! That’s a big bastard. You all right, lover? I just saw it come out of the shadows at you, but I couldn’t be sure what it was.”
The Kenworth had finally ground to a halt just around the next bend in the road, its exhaust vomiting smoke. To Ryan’s educated hearing, it was obvious that the truck’s engine was beginning to fail. There was a much rougher note than when they’d left the town, and he could actually catch the taste in the air of burning oil as the engine overheated. His guess was that they’d covered around fifty miles from Ginnsburg Falls, moving slowly along the treacherous highway. They’d been told that the range of the Kenworth was only around one hundred miles. If that was right, they’d soon have to consider returning and trying to get to the gateway through the town.
Or going on and risking being totally stranded in the desert of rocks and snow.
ONCE THEY WERE ALL SAFELY in the cluttered, cramped cab of the rig, they discussed what they should do.
“There’s a big fucking ridge ahead,” Finnegan said. “Saw it ‘fore this fucking snow came down. It’s only ’bout five, six miles ahead. Sky seemed clearer north.”
“This wag won’t run much longer,” J.B. commented, taking off his glasses and polishing them clean of the smears of snow. “I doubt we’d make it back to the ville.”
Ryan nodded his agreement. “Could be best to go on, I guess.”
Jak stared moodily out of one of the high side windows and picked his nose. “The trans message was this way? Came for that. Go on.”
Krysty shook her head. “If we stop now, then we should make the gateway. Try somewhere else. Farther we go on, the farther we’ve got to come back. Mebbe on foot. It’s a bleak land.”
Doc Tanner coughed to clear his throat. “We blunder across the Deathlands, like children, lost in a maze, like the players of some celestial game where we know neither the object nor the rules.”
“What’s your point, Doc?” Ryan asked.
“The point, my dear and somewhat brutal Mr. Cawdor, is that we could have here a chance, rare as Vatican charity, to improve our tiny store of knowledge.”
“The message, you mean?”
“Indeed, I do. I, for one, am set that we should continue across this darkling plain, blighted by the long-dead ignorant armies.”
“But we don’t know where we’re heading,” J.B. said. “Got no radios with us.”
“Ah, Mr. Dix,” the old man said, grinning. “That is where you are wrong. Show the nice gentleman the pretty toy you found on the floor of this rumbling behemoth, dear child.”