He worked harder, bending all his muscles into each thrusting stroke, feeling the boat shoot forward faster, a gurgling wave breaking under the bow. His ears caught a strange sound behind him a thin, hissing noise, like escaping steam. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the water parting and something chasing after him.
The instant the bow of the canoe slid into the pebbles and mud, he leaped from it. His blaster ready, he spun around to face what had been pursuing him. But the water was calm and still, with only the faintest suggestion of a ripple toward the deeper part of the swamp.
He was motionless for a moment, gathering his self-control about him like a protective cloak, checking his bearings. In the moonlight, he could barely make out the tracks of the albino through the mud. But he saw a rowboat a few yards farther along, toward the building. Examining it, he discovered some extraordinary marks in the mud. Someone had fallen, and fallen again, and dragged himself along by hand. There was one clear print, and Ryan stooped and placed his own hand in the seeping mark. The fingers were nearly four inches longer than his. “Fuck it,” he sighed. Tourment was going to be a difficult man to take if it came to close combat between them. The mud also showed the truth of the leg-supports. Great furrows vanished into the bushes where the land was less wet. Despite, or perhaps because of his enormous size, the baron wasn’t going to find it easy to move.
The fire was dying behind him as he set out to move inland. The temple was open, and it was obvious that nobody was hiding there. The island was apparently no more than a half mile in length, but he had no idea how wide it was. The undergrowth closed in around him.
He never heard the swampies.
One moment he was up and walking; the next he was rolling over on his hands and knees, the G-12 pulled from his grip, someone’s arm around his throat, another attacker hanging on his waist, kicking at his legs. There was the stench of gasoline and sweat as he grappled with the oily bodies.
Despite the shock of the sudden attack, Ryan was able to immediately retaliate. Heaving up, feeling the hold loosen on his waist, he snapped an elbow back as hard as he could, hearing a rib break, and a strangled gasp of pain. The arm was off his throat, and he was able to wriggle to his feet, drawing the panga, the best weapon for hand-to-hand combat.
There were three of them.
Two men and a woman. Muties, like the ones they’d seen on the day they arrived in Louisiana. All of them were around five feet tall, stumpy, squat and muscular. Dressed in torn pants and shirts, they had flapping sandals of hacked rubber on their feet. They stared at him blankly, the sockets of their eyes surrounded by odd scars. The woman held a small crossbow, and the men were armed with machetes shorter and narrower than Ryan’s own weapon.
They breathed noisily through open mouths, their arms hanging by their sides. Standing gazing at Ryan, they seemed to be waiting for him to make the first move. Suddenly the woman raised the bow, aiming it jerkily at Ryan’s belly.
The thought darted through his mind that this was a squalid and foolish way to die. Alone in the muddy darks, gut-shot with a wooden arrow. He tensed, ready for a desperate dive at her, his senses telling him it would be too late and too slow.
The bow twanged, and the shaft hissed through the air several yards over his head. Ryan stared as the woman staggered sideways, her nailless fingers plucking at the hilt of the slim dagger that sprouted from her neck like a bizarre pendant.
“Take the others, stupe!” hissed Jak Lauren, darting from the undergrowth, a knife in each hand.
The fountain of blood from the woman’s severed neck pattered around them; she fell to her knees, then rolled heavily on her back. Her legs spread, and Ryan noticed with revulsion that a small residual penis dangled from her naked belly.