It took an enormous effort of will for Ryan to shutter off the thought of what he’d eaten with such delight. It wasn’t a good moment to give in to the nausea and double over, vomiting. Not with the rat on the move.
Lightning flashed, a massive display, longer and brighter than any that had gone before, thunder making the centuries-old conifer at his back tremble to its ringed core.
The mutie rat was coming slowly toward him, head moving from side to side, the silver light reflected from the cold gold eyes. Its mouth was half-open, drooling a thick yellowish grue. Ryan noticed that the thing still held a severed limb in its strong jaws, a fleshless arm, bony fingers clacking as the head moved. And it was making an obscene high-pitched squealing sound as it advanced on the man.
Ryan steadied his right wrist with his left hand, aiming the blaster at where he thought the rodent was.
There was a strong wish to cut and run, to get away from the horror that he knew was creeping stealthily toward him.
It would be a doubly bad move to expose his vulnerable back to the monster and risk running pell-mell into some of its brothers or sisters.
He stood his ground, ignoring the clubbing wind and the driving rain, ignoring his own utter discomfort and the worries about his friends.
A staccato burst of short, stabbing lightning strikes burst over the clearing, accompanied by deafening thunder.
The light showed the rat was in midcharge, its movements twitching in the strobing flashes barely a dozen paces from him.
The blaster coughed three times, the explosions muffled by the baffle silencer, the glow of the triple discharges barely visible. Ryan felt the kick of the pistol run up his arm, clear to the shoulder, and saw the bullets strike home, blood flaring black in the lightning.
The first one ripped into the side of the rat’s questing muzzle, shredding wet fur and flesh, exiting immediately below the right eye, bursting it from its socket where it dangled in the dirt like a discarded ornament.
The second drilled into the throat as the rat lifted its head in agony from the impact of the first 9 mm round. The bullet dug deep, nicking the spinal column, before coming out at the base of the skull in a welter of blood and bone.
The third round was superfluous. The grossly mutated, rad-cancerous animal was already dying, its legs folding under it, the tail flailing like a demented buggy whip. It lurched as the final round hit it through the right shoulder, toppling it onto its side, dropping its interrupted meal. Sable blood oozed from the parted jaws, the scream of shock and agony muffled by its own arterial flow, which flooded its throat and lungs, choking it.
“Bastard,” Ryan said quietly, looking around to see if there were any other giant rats anywhere close by. But the clearing was completely deserted—just the wind, the rain, the lightning and the mortally wounded creature, barely twitching.
Ryan closed his eye for a moment, pressing the blaster to his cold forehead, taking several slow, deep breaths to try to control the sickness that washed over him.
But he kept seeing a vision of the jerky, sitting there on the plate, nestled in its bed of potatoes and vegetables, soaked in that rich, luscious gravy, and Mom’s smiling, sweating face, hovering over the plate.
The sickness was shockingly violent, bringing Ryan to his knees in the mud, a thread of bile hanging from his mouth, all the way into the sodden dirt. His stomach rebelled, bringing up every last, bitter morsel of the supper, the watery chunks frothing all around his combat boots.
“Oh, fireblast,” he groaned. “Never ever eat at any place called Mom’s again.”
He remembered now that it had been a part of one of the Trader’s sayings. “Never play cards with a man called Doc,” was another part of it. And there had been a third part, but it had slipped from his memory.
He knew that—
“Doc,” he said, suddenly remembering his original worry about the old man, his son and Jak. He spun on his heel, still holding the SIG-Sauer, and set off back toward their cabin.