When they stepped out of the cloud, Leeloo knew at once they weren’t carny folk. They were hunters. The man in the lead carried a scoped longblaster on a shoulder sling. He was tall, with dark hair falling to his broad shoulders. A black patch concealed his left eye socket. As he came closer, she noticed the color of the other eye.
It made her think of a cloudless morning sky.
Infinite blue.
Infinite cold.
Chapter Two
Ryan Cawdor shifted the sling, transferring the weight of his scoped Steyr SSG-70 sniper rifle from his right shoulder to his left. Six dusty companions followed single file behind him, heading for the crude gate cut into the twelve-foot-high berm wall. For the last third of a mile, they had been breathing and eating the drifting grit thrown up by the wag caravan. For the last third of a mile, they had been listening to the predark marching music, its sprightly cheerfulness like a dull dagger jammed in their guts, then twisted. For the last third of a mile, it had taken every bit of Ryan’s self control not to break into a dead run. Just as it now took all of his inner reserve not to sprint up the face of the perimeter barrier, drop belly down on the summit with the 7.62 mm longblaster and start bowling over the carny folk.
Suicide wasn’t part of the plan.
The plan was to make damn sure what they all suspected was true, and then to act in stealth, lowering the odds from eight to one against before showing their hand. The mechanics of the operation had been hatched over four days of one of the hardest forced marches Ryan and the others had ever endured. They had approached Bullard ville from the west, cross country, over seemingly endless rolling hills and scrub forest, breaking their own trail, sleeping only a few hours each night. They had pushed themselves mercilessly because they didn’t want to risk arriving too late and uncovering another horror.
For the thousandth time, the image of the hand came into Ryan’s mind. A grisly, ruined, black hand jutting from the earth in the middle of long patch of churned-up ground. The flesh had been torn away by teeth or beak, or both. Three fingers were missing down to the knuckles. Right off, he knew it was a woman or a child’s hand because it was so small and slender. Somehow, whoever it was had survived long enough to claw up through the smothering clods of earth. It had to have taken a superhuman effort.
They had discovered why after they had carefully scraped back the top layer of soil.
Cradled in the young woman’s other arm was a dead infant.
Her strength had come from desperation.
The companions peeled back more dirt, exposing other bodies. Many, many bodies piled on top of one another. Both sexes, old, young, strong, weak. As soon as Ryan saw the tangle of limbs and torsos, he sent his twelve-year-old son, Dean, away from the pit to recce the rest of the ville. The boy left gratefully, but he would have remained to prove to his father and the companions that he was made of the same rock-hard stuff that they were. Ryan had no doubt about the boy’s stuff; as far as he was concerned, Dean had nothing to prove.
There were close-range blaster wounds on a few of the corpses, but most were unmarked by obvious acts of violence. They never did find the bottom of the mass grave. The stench of death rained like hammer blows against the sides of their heads, and they staggered from the trench, bent over, retching.
“Bastards chilled the whole ville,” Krysty Wroth gasped as Ryan put a strong, gentle hand on her shoulder. The titian-haired, long-legged young woman was his lover and soul mate. They had seen many hard things during their wanderings over the hellscape, but rarely had they seen such wanton wholesale slaughter as this.
“Not all, mebbe,” said Jak Lauren, pointing at the cluster of shabby dwellings. It was a false hope. And from the expression in the albino’s ruby red eyes, he knew it. But Jak, like everyone else, wanted to be away from the pit and its rotting horrors. A thorough search showed the nameless little ville had been looted of everything of value, just like the dead folk buried in the ditch. The huts and lean-tos had been stripped, the underground storage pits emptied. All that remained was the trash in the ville’s midden too heavy to be blown away by the howling wind.