“Get in deep, back to back. Mebbe they’ll miss us. If not, then we fight.”
J.B. straightened his fedora. “If I had a better plan, then I’d tell you. Let’s do it.”
But there was another development that neither man had reckoned on.
As they darted off the side of the track, Ryan’s boots slipped in loose earth near the broken end of a fallen ponderosa pine, sending him flat on his face, hands outstretched, dropping the hunting rifle in front of him.
He lay there for a moment, shaken by the heavy fall, fingers brushing a bunch of thin, stiff twigs that protruded from the leaf moldthin, stiff, metallic twigs.
“Fuck” he breathed.
“You all right?” J.B. whispered, standing a yard away from him, taking a half step toward him to help him to his feet.
“Don’t move, John,” Ryan croaked.
“What?” He was more surprised at being called by his given name than anything.
“Mines. Got my hand on one.”
“Where?” He stooped, his eyes narrowed behind the lenses, peering at Ryan’s spread fingers and the tiny antennas that protruded between them. “Dark night!”
“Dirt’s been dug over. Must be all around us. There’s several trails going off here. Why they picked it to seed the mines. One wrong move”
In the silence they could now hear the approaching stickies, chattering in their reedy, hoarse voices. In a few seconds they’d be around both corners, virtually on top of them.
J.B. acted fast, drawing his own long-bladed knife, cutting quickly beneath the antipersonnel mine that lay under Ryan’s hand. “Keep your fingers still!” he hissed under his breath, loosening the earth, revealing the dark gray, circular metal shape. It was about eight inches across, with the delicate contact on the top, packed with hi-ex and lethal frags.
The stickies were closer.
As soon as the Armorer had it free, Ryan jumped to his feet, snatching the Uzi from the dirt, while J.B. picked up the mine in both hands, holding it out in front of him, like a mother with a newborn babe.
“What shall I ?” he whispered.
“Throw it on the track,” Ryan urged. “Quick.”
It was a clumsy, heavy thing to dispose of easily. Ryan watched his companion as he swung it awkwardly around, like an amateur discus thrower, releasing it in a shallow arc toward the sharp bend in the path.
“Down!” Ryan yelled, diving for cover behind the nearest large pine.
As he hurled himself down, he glimpsed the first of the gang of stickies out of the corner of his eye, walking along the narrow track from the north.
They stopped as the metal disk landed among them, frozen in midstride.
Then the explosion concealed them.
It was flatter and more muffled than Ryan had expected, absorbed by the bodies of the muties and by the surrounding bank of trees. But it was still a frighteningly substantial noise, filled with smoke and the whistling ricochets of the jagged shards of the hot, splintered shrapnel, which hissed through the high branches above him.
Ryan didn’t have time to cover his ears against the concussive effects of the land mine, so he closed his eye and opened his mouth to try to minimize the results.
The blast picked him up and rolled him over twice, covering him with loose dirt and leaves. He was vaguely aware of a sickening cracking sound as one of the large overhanging branches snapped through the middle and fell to earth, missing him by a couple of feet.
He knew that J.B. had been just behind him, but for the first few seconds he was so disorientated that he couldn’t work out where his friend had landed.
After the sucking explosion, there was a heartbeat of uncanny stillness, like the motionless center at the frozen heart of a hurricane.
Then the screaming began.
And there was a strange burst of rain that pattered all around the immediate blast area, spotting on Ryan’s clothes, hands and face, a soft, warm, sticky, crimson rain.
Ryan was partly deafened by the explosion, everything still sounding muffled and faraway. Even the piercing screams from the hideously torn and mutilated stickies seemed as if they were trickling in from another dimension. At his side Ryan was aware of J.B. struggling to his knees, glasses hanging crookedly from his blood-patched face, his hat lying in the dirt near his feet.