Jak laughed out loud, attracting the venomous stare of the metal-eyed freak. “Stare all want,” he said to the Magus.
He turned to Wolfram. “What did the sec men find out in woods? Not dead Ryan. So, what?”
Wolfram shifted a little uncomfortably, sitting sideways, as if he were struggling to restrain a fart. “They came across the corpses of three stickies beneath a tree. Two had been hacked to death with some sort of cleaver. The third of them had his face stripped from his raw skull with a flechette round from a Smith amp; Wesson scattergun.”
“John’s blaster!” Mildred exclaimed.
“Indeed. Cawdor and Dix had fled the scene long before my men got there.”
“They see any sign of live stickies?” Krysty asked.
Wolfram nodded. “They were lucky not to be trapped themselves. It seemed that Cawdor and Dix had a lead, from their trail, of around forty-five minutes. But my sec people hid as they saw a group of nearly twenty stickies, hot in pursuit. They thought that it was likely that the muties would catch up with them around dawn.” He paused. “Oh, they returned with all speed. But one said he thought that he heard an explosion, just as they got back to the camp here. Wondered if it might have been a mine. About the right time for the stickies to have caught up with the boys.”
He glanced at his ornate gold chron. “By now they should all have met up.”
WOLFRAM’S SCOUTS WERE good at their job, and their information had proved accurate.
Ryan became aware an hour or so before dawn that they were being pursued. It had started with the all-too-familiar feeling at the back of his neck.
“Hold on,” he said.
“What? Feel something?” J.B. looked behind them, taking his time, glancing all around. The moon was virtually gone, and the shadows under the forest were almost impenetrably deep. “Can’t see a thing.”
“Nor me. But I’m sure there’s something trailing us. Closing in.”
“Trail ends ahead. We could wait up and check.”
Ryan looked where the Armorer pointed. “Good one, bro. Hide around the corner and look back.” He rubbed his chin. “Might be an animal of some kind.”
J.B. stared behind them again. “And then again, Ryan, it might not.”
“STICKIES!”
“Fireblast!” Ryan shaded his eyes, trying to make out numbers in the pallid light of the early dawning. “Big gang.”
“Close on twenty,” J.B. agreed. “Enough to scatter into the woods and give us a hard time if we screw up an ambush on them. They look strung-out, as well. Not a nice compact unit we could pour some chilling into.”
“Best steps are long ones,” Ryan said. “Go hard for a half hour or so and build up a lead. Then try and find a place to hole up, in the trees and brush. Hope they miss us.”
The bend in the trail hid them from the pursuers, about six hundred yards behind them, moving steadily, snouts down, like hunting dogs.
The track snake-backed only fifty yards ahead, and as they reached it, Ryan skidded to a halt, diving into the shadows on the left, followed instantly by J.B.
On the next straight stretch, less than a quarter mile in front of them, was another large gang of stickies.
Coming their way.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“Have to hide,” Ryan said. “No choice. They’d see us any way we run.”
“Be on top of us, from both directions, in less than two minutes.” J.B. had the 9 mm Uzi unslung, ready in his hand, while Ryan had his index finger on the trigger of the Steyr SSG-70. There was already enough daylight for him not to need the Starlight nightscope, but the rifle wasn’t much of a weapon for the close-range ambush of a numerically superior force.
His mind was racing. On every side was the featureless forest that had been surrounding them ever since they’d been dropped off the Golden Eagle. Apart from the narrow trails that occasionally meandered off to one side or the other, the forest was unbroken and largely impenetrable.
With the light increasing every moment, it would be far more difficult to simply lie still in the shadows and hope that the stickies went by. There was a longstanding body of strong rumor that the muties were able to scent out human prey with their snuffling noses.