“Move!” Ryan shouted to the others. “Move, now!”
J.B. burst out the exit first, his scattergun thundering at his hip, dragging the zombielike Doc behind him.
JAK COULD RUN like the wind.
Something in his genes had given him coiled steel springs for legs, with just the right balance of muscle to bone, just the right kind of muscle. As he ran, sucking air all the way down into his boot tops, bullets flew at his head like angry wasps and whacked the side of the tent, raising puffs of dust. He ignored them. The curve of the tent loomed before him; the curve was cover if he got far enough, fast enough.
From behind him came rocking, consecutive blasts of J.B.’s scattergun. For an instant, the blaster-fire aimed at him stopped. An instant was all he needed. He rounded the perimeter of the tent, out of the line of pursuing fire.
If there were more shooters along the berm in front of him—and from the way his scalp and neck were prickling, Jak felt sure that there were—they were keeping their heads and blasters down. He figured they were holding fire, waiting for the rest of the companions to blunder into the killzone.
As the rows of trailered cages came into view, the lion roared. Joy exploded in Jak’s chest??
Joy shared.
The lion knew he was coming.
Jak sprinted to close the gap between them. The great cat awaited him, pacing wildly back and forth in its cage. He holstered the Colt and used the hub of a wheel to scramble onto the trailer’s bed.
Freedom. The thought exploded in the albino’s mind like a frag gren. And then a wave of tremendous emotion swept through him—gratitude to the nth power.
He unbolted the cage door and pushed it wide open. The mutie mountain lion jumped out, landing softly on the dirt despite its tremendous weight. When Jak hopped down from the trailer, the cat gave him a swat with a huge, soft paw. The blow drove Jak hard to his knees. Then a hot, scratchy tongue slathered his face and neck.
There are others, close, Little Brother. They lie in wait.
Jak could almost sense their terrible confusion and panic. It had never occurred to the chillers hiding on top of the berm that upon reaching safety the first act of their adversaries’ pointman would be the release of a half-ton of man-eater. They didn’t know whether to open fire to protect their comrades concealed among the trailers from the lion, or to wait for the rest of the designated targets to appear, according to the plan. It was a problem they had no time to consider, let alone solve.
Jak felt the rage building in the great cat’s body, the rage and the raw power, unquenchable and bottomless. The carny master’s words of warning about the true nature of this super intelligent, super cunning predator beast flooded back to him. And through him to the mind of the lion. Don’t be afraid of me. I will never hurt you. Not afraid. Good. Now we hunt.
The lion ducked under the trailer that supported its cage, out of the line of sight of the berm shooters. It pulled itself forward with its front legs and claws, belly dragging on the ground. Jak followed on his knees, the Colt Python in his hand. On the far side of the trailer’s undercarriage, in the aisle between the first and second rows of cages, Jak could see legs. Seven sets of legs. Five belonged to men and two to women. Seven pairs of feet shifted anxiously. Jak ducked his face lower and got a glimpse of the semiauto handblasters the ambush crew held. High-capacity stick mags jutted from the blue-steel weapons’ receivers. Big-time firepower—210 rounds versus his six.
Me first, Little Brother.
The thought came to him in the same instant the lion moved.
Jak lost the cat in a cloud of dust as it sprang out from under the trailer. The albino thrust himself forward, the cocked .357 Magnum blaster in front, seeking targets.
Before he could do that, staccato blasterfire roared, as the roustabouts and snake charmers, caught standing practically shoulder to shoulder, tried to put bullets into a tornado of fang and claw moving way too fast to track. The beige blur, five feet tall at the shoulder, slipped between them, wound around them, brushing them electric with the tips of its soft fur and its black-tasseled tail. The ambushers’ volleys of wild shots banged into cages and trailers, and set the trapped sideshow muties screaming. Jak saw Baldoona the scalie throw himself into a corner and cover both his heads with his arms as slugs sparked off of and rattled the bars of his cage.