He hobbled toward the jetty, gritting his teeth against the tiredness and pain, shooting a yelping woman through the face as she appeared around the corner of another of the huts, waving a long-handled ax at him.
“Five left,” he reminded himself.
One of the boats was being repaired, its ribs stripped bare. Ryan fired three more of his precious 9 mm rounds through the bottom of the second boat, smashing holes bigger than a man’s fist, seeing water bubbling in.
Now there were shots coming his way, one of them peeling off a long splinter from the jetty, inches from where he knelt. They were mainly muskets, from the sound, though there was also a more modern hunting rifle in among them.
The bloodied panga was still in his left hand, and Ryan swung it at the painter of the third of the boats, hacking clear through it in a single blow. The strong current of the river immediately began to tug the boat away from the jetty, bringing the bow toward the northern bank so fast that Ryan was taken by surprise and barely managed to throw himself clumsily aboard, jarring his shoulder and cracking the side of his head against one of the thwarts.
He fired one of his last two rounds into the darkness, where he could just see men rushing between the huts, toward the landing stage.
The boat was moving faster now, and Ryan flattened himself in the couple of inches of stinking water that swilled around the bottom boards. He could hear spasmodic shooting, and several balls thudded into the stout wooden sides of the boat. But he was floating faster now, away from the shore.
Eventually the shooting stopped, and the boat drifted on south and west.
Ryan slept.
Chapter Eight
The first pale light of the false dawn, fingering from the east, awakened him.
Ryan blinked and sat up, moaning at his stiffness. His head ached and his legs felt as though he’d run fifty miles across plowed fields with hot irons drilled through the muscles. As he moved his arm, he winced at a painful swelling in his shoulder, which he vaguely remembered had come as he’d sprawled desperately into the drifting boat.
He felt for the SIG-Sauer, drawing it from the holster, mentally reproaching himself for leaving it with only a single round left under the hammer. “Good job J.B. isn’t here to see me getting so rad-blasted careless,” he said to himself, carefully replacing the fourteen spent bullets.
When he reached down to the other hip for the panga, it wasn’t there, and for a moment he figured he had to have left it out on the jetty. Then he found that the blade, with dark brown smears on it, was lying underneath him in the bottom of the boat. He quickly wiped it clean and resheathed it.
Only then did Ryan sit up on the seat and take note of his surroundings.
The river was even wider, its color changed, dirtier, carrying a lot of brownish mud. The land on either side was flatter, with a scattering of trees. Ryan spotted a couple of farmers, one walking behind an ox-drawn plow, the other working at laying a hedge on the flank of a large field.
Farther to the north he could see a trim farmhouse, with smoke curling from the chimney and a neat orchard to its side.
But it was what lay ahead of the boat that drew Ryan’s attention.
Less than a quarter mile downstream were the beginnings of a large ville that he guessed had to be Twin Forks, where the Big White ran into the Sippi, forming one of the largest river meetings in the whole of Deathlands.
Ryan was sure that Trader had called there with the war wags several times over the years he’d ridden with him. But he could remember surprisingly little of the place. It was centered on the trade that came from the big river. The docks ran north to south, ready to cater to the endless stream of freighters and carriers. There had been a countless number of saloons and gaudies, as you’d expect for a busy ville like Twin Forks, making itself open and available, like a warm-hearted whore, to all of the travelers and merchants.