I can’t talk to them the way I can talk to you, Little Brother. That’s the problem. I can’t explain to anyone else what I am. I can only use this physical form to dominate. A weak form of communication, at best.
The lion smiled. But things could be worse, I suppose. If I were a daisy, I couldn’t communicate at all.
A baleful moan from the trailers behind them made Jak pivot, weapon up and ready. He looked at the roustie cowering on the nasty floor of Baldoona’s cage. The man was alone in the enclosure; the sideshow mutie was nowhere to be seen.
What happened to scalie? the albino thought as he stepped closer.
Then he saw the door standing slightly ajar and the spawl of a bullet impact—a bright splash of lead where the cage’s locking bolt had been.
Chapter Seventeen
Ryan raced out of the tent after the Armorer and Doc. As J.B. sidestepped, squaring his shoulders to the target, scattering flechettes across the top of the berm, Ryan ran past him, turning left around the candy-striped tent’s perimeter, taking the point.
The sounds of concentrated small-weapons fire rolled over him in waves. As he rounded the curve of the big top, clouds of black-powder gun smoke interspersed with sickly yellow muzzle-flashes obscured his view of the ville. Bullets whined across the compound, ricocheting and kicking up dirt.
Ryan could make out three carny wags parked in the ancient road that ran between the first of the rows of raised, awning covered plant beds and the building that had once housed Burger Stravaganza. The wags were predark RVs, Winnebagos refitted for the hazards of Deathlands. Rousties fired from behind the steel-armored wheel wells and from around the massive I-beams that were replacement bumpers, front and rear. The carny chillers were absorbing fire from a small group of ville folk strung out along and shooting from the low cover of the plant beds. The ville folks had their backs turned to the tent, and to the companions.
Even though he was running full tilt, Ryan could see dead and wounded rousties on the ground around the wags. The loot they’d been carrying when they were hit lay in the dirt beside them. Caught with both hands in the Bullard ville cookie jar. The ville had dead, as well, some of them shot to pieces.
Other rousties, blocked from most of the sec force’s fire by the wags, were still moving booty from the jumble of cabins and shacks built alongside the prenukecaust fast-food restaurant, and hurriedly loading it into the rear of the Winnebagos.
At first glance it was hard to say which side was winning the war. One thing was for sure, though— the looters were concentrating all their attention on the ville people, and vice versa.
There was no safety for the companions along the tent perimeter; the stakes that held up the guy wires were the only cover, and they were useless. If the ville sec men caught them trying to sneak past in plain view, it was going to be instant chilling. Ryan broke away from the tent wall, leading the others across the stretch of open ground to the far side of the first row of raised plant beds. They bellied down behind the protective berm.
Two rows over, through the lower branches of overgrown tomato plants, Ryan could see a small portion of the ville sec crew systematically popping away at the looters with handblasters. From the care they were taking with their shot placement, and the number of bodies already strewed around the wags, they were no doubt the most skilled marksmen in Bullard.
Ryan and the others ducked as a wave of return fire from the rousties behind the wags trimmed clumps of leaves and stems and exploded ripe tomatoes above their heads.
Crawling to the end of the bed, Ryan saw where the rest of the ville sec force was headed. With covering fire from their sharpshooting pals, they were carefully filtering through the rows of beds at the far end of the compound. From there, they were crossing the ville’s main street and the leaders of the pack were already circling the other fast-food buildings to outflank the looters and attack them from behind.