“Okay, let’s move,” he said, waving the others up the road after him.
They jogged in a single file along the steeply angled track, which wound back and forth through the clustered trunks. There was dust underfoot, and there was stifling heat, but there were no signs of life other than the trees. Here and there, shafts of light speared through breaks in the canopy of branches, spotlighting the blue-gray, bone-dry litter of fallen needles and limbs.
As he trotted up the road, despite the suffocating heat, a chill passed down Ryan’s spine, and he felt a sudden tension at the back of his head, as if the skin had drawn drum tight. It was the same feeling he had experienced when they uncovered the death pit in the nameless ville.
In the grim, eerie forest, he sensed the presence of the dead. Multitudes of the dead, swarming around him.
With an effort he shook off the sensation. He had more than enough flesh-and-blood trouble on his plate without worrying about legions of ghosts. J.B. ran behind him, straining to pull along the roped Doc. After Doc came Dean and Leeloo, then Mildred and Krysty. Jak brought up the rear. Ryan dropped back to jog alongside the Armorer.
“Got to quickly find us a place to chop down these bastards,” Ryan said in a low voice to J.B.
“Anyplace along here will do,” he replied as they rounded a right-hand bend that led to a long, dark, uphill straightaway. “Split up on either side of the road. Sandwich ’em.”
Ryan held up his hand, signaling for the column to stop. “This looks like a good spot for an ambush,” he told them. “We let ’em get to the straight part, then cross fire them from behind. If we work fast, we can keep them from getting to cover in the trees.”
“They’ll be tracking us, for sure,” J.B. said. He pointed at the jumbled footprints in the soft dirt of the road.
“By the time they figure out we’ve doubled back on them,” Ryan said, “they’ll be caught in the kill-zone.”
He then split up the companions, sending Dean, Leeloo, Mildred and Krysty to the left side of the road. He led Jak, J.B., and Doc to the right, into the stand of trees on the inside of the bend.
He didn’t have to tell any of them to make their shots count.
Underfoot, the dry twigs and branches snapped and crackled. Puffs of talc-fine dust rose like smoke into the shafts of light.
From the other side of the road came a tiny squeak of a smothered sneeze.
Leeloo, Ryan thought as he watched Jak and J.B. slide belly down in the litter beside the dark trunks. The Armorer made Doc lie down beside him, then followed Jak’s example and pulled some of the crumbling forest litter over them both, creating a double wide hide.
Before burrowing into the deadfall himself, Ryan carefully placed the Steyr longblaster behind a tree. The range was going to be too close to use it, and the bolt action was way too slow for the shootout he envisioned. The idea was to keep the chillers from reaching cover, and that meant cyclic rate. He dropped the SIG’s magazine into his palm, making sure it was topped off. Then he set out a second and a third full mag in front of him, hoping to hell he wouldn’t have to reach for them.
Chapter Twenty-Six
As he trotted up the road, the Magnificent Crecca carried his .223-caliber assault rifle by its plastic pistol grip, with his trigger finger braced outside the trigger guard, just behind the thick curve of the 30-round magazine. The rifle’s fire selector switch was on full auto. The carny master was ready to whip-saw with hot lead anything that moved among the seemingly endless ranks of tree trunks.
Nothing moved on either side of him, nor on the road ahead.
Not yet, anyway.
Even after his eyes had become adjusted to the darkness of the forest, the road before him was dim. Fifty feet ahead, it blended in with the dismal shadows. There were a few bright patches where sunlight penetrated the branches, but they actually made things worse. They made the surrounding shade seem even darker, more impenetrable.