He stopped, shook himself and buttoned up, standing still for a few moments, trying to clear his mind and think about the task that faced them. Their plan to reach the place and recce it around noon tomorrow with a view to a nighttime attack seemed feasible. But it wasn’t yet much of a plan.
He opened his eye again, ready to rejoin J.B., snug in the live oak.
And saw the pallid, raggedy figure.
No, two of them.
Three.
They had the unmistakable, shambling demeanor of stickies, shoulders hunched, scrawny necks thrust out inquisitively, their heads thrown back, sniffing the night air, seeking their prey, closing in on the tree where J.B. was sleeping.
The moonlight was bright enough for Ryan to make out the brutish faces, with rudimentary noses like hogs, gaping, dribbling jaws, skin seamed with running sores, and the circles of voracious suckers that lined their hands and fingers, opening and closing, showing the tiny, razored teeth.
All three of the half-naked muties were holding crude daggers, with wooden hilts bound to rusting blades with knotted lengths of baling wire.
Ryan’s first inclination was to draw the heavy automatic and blast the three creatures back to their own private hell. It would only take a handful of seconds at a range where he couldn’t miss. Even with the silencer, the sound of the shots would carry through the silent woods, attracting the attention of any other muties within a quarter mile. And there was also a better-than-average chance that one of the stickies would scream out as he went down.
It was possible they were a single, small hunting party, but from everything he knew, it was likely the place was teeming with the runaway slaves.
Ryan slipped from cover, taking a few moments to look all around him, checking for the flicker of movement beneath the trees, watching beyond the pool for lean, solitary figures standing and waiting.
But it looked as if there were just the three.
They’d located J.B. Standing in a cluster, heads close together, they were whispering. Their backs were turned to Ryan.
The speed of their movement took him by surprise. Two of them cupped hands and hefted the third up the tree, allowing him to reach the first of the holds. Stickies were naturally clumsy, and Ryan had expected the climb to give them trouble.
Now the leader would be within reach of J.B. in a handful of seconds, his comrades already struggling to follow him up the gnarled trunk.
Ryan broke into a run, boots sliding silently through the packed pine needles and leaf mold. He drew the panga from its soft leather sheath as he ran, gripping the taped hilt tightly, starting to swing the heavy eighteen-inch blade, ready for the first lethal blow.
At the last moment the third of the stickies started to turn around, his feral senses catching some murmur of the attack. He was lowest on the tree, only a couple of feet off the ground.
The panga cut into the side of his neck, powered with all of Ryan’s furious strength. The honed edge hacked clear through scabby skin, flesh, artery and muscle and the slight jar of the spine, through and out the other side. Blood jetted yards into the air, spinning black droplets in the harsh silver light of the moon.
There was a barely audible grunt from the dead creature as its sucking fingers relaxed their hold and it dropped at Ryan’s feet. The misshapen head landed a frozen fraction of a second earlier, thudding heavily in the dirt and rolling a few steps toward the edge of the pool.
But by the time the skull thumped to the earth, Ryan was readying his second cut, twisting his wrists to present the blade on the backswing, cutting up between the spread thighs of the second, desperately scrambling stickie.
All hopes of silence vanished as the mutie threw back its head and screamed through broken teeth, loud and shrill, like a power saw slicing through granite. It was a raw sound of terror and agony, overlaid with the black knowledge of death.
The panga had thrust home deep under the stickie’s genitals, severing them, ramming deep into the lower intestines, where a wrench of Ryan’s wrist hacked the guts into threads of bloodied tissue.
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