“Keep going,” Ryan said. “Once we get over there, pull off and shut down for a minute. See if anyone’s around.”
The planks and struts rattled and shook, but held firm as they inched over the foaming water. Abe steered in toward a wider place and heaved on the brake. He switched off the engine, and they all sat in the sudden, deafening stillness.
“Why not call out to them, Ryan?” Trader asked. “Night like this, it’ll carry miles.”
“Could carry to the wrong people,” he replied. “They’ll have heard us, if they’re near.”
“Long as that bastard rad sickness don’t have them in its bloody claws,” Sukie whispered to Doc, loud enough for them all to hear.
The sound of the desert night gradually crept back around them. A hunting owl swept low overhead, making Doc start, and they all heard the nerve-shivering cry of a hunting pack of wolves, somewhere much higher up in the surrounding bowl of the mountains.
“Ten minutes,” J.B. said, checking his wrist chron, angling it toward the moonlight to see the figures more clearly. “If they’re around here, they should be about ready to show themselves to us by now.”
“I would venture to suggest that they aren’t able to make out who it is driving this truck,” Doc stated. “Our dear friends might suspect that we are malefactors, pursuing them with a villainous intent.”
Ryan considered the possibility. “Jak Lauren’s got great night vision, with those ruby eyes of his. But, you could be right, Doc. I’ll step down and walk a few yards clear, so they can see me if they’re watching from hiding. Everyone up on full red alert.”
He dropped cautiously from the rear of the wag, boots crunching among the small pebbles. The blaster was cocked in his hand, and he knew that the other men were covering him with their own array of weapons.
Ryan walked a little way up the trail toward a sharp bend to the left. He was straining to see or hear the first sight or sound of any danger, but the roar of the river behind him was drowning out most sounds. And nothing was moving.
Someone was there.
Ryan felt it before he saw anything. The short hairs prickled at his nape as his index finger took up the tension on the trigger of the P-226.
A cluster of fallen boulders, rust red in sunlight, black as marble in the moonlight, stood off to the right of the trail, and Ryan moved quickly to their shelter.
Behind him he heard a flicker of sound as the others reacted in turn to his own instinctive reaction.
Hidden behind the great pile of rocks, Ryan waited, his eye raking the dark pool of shadow that lay spilled everywhere around him.
But the voice was behind.
“Getting old when watch wrong way.”
Ryan didn’t move at all. “Hi, Jak.”
“Would have had knife between third and fourth spine bones, Ryan.”
“I believe you, kid.”
The youth laughed quietly at the old insult. “See J.B. in the rig. Catch moon off glasses. Doc blundering like buffalo in wallow. Loudest quiet mover I know. Who else?”
“Trader and Abe are in the back. And Doc found himself a woman up in the hills.”
Jak stepped silently from hiding, appearing less than twenty feet away from where Ryan was crouching. “Good for Doc.” His mane of white hair was tied back under a dark-colored bandanna for night movement.
“Where are the others? They all safe?”
“Sure. No sign of rad sickness. Mildred figures all right.”
Ryan hoped privately that the woman was correct. Perhaps the worst bane of Deathlands was the varied forms of radiation sickness and the infinite range of genetic disorders that they propagated.
“We just got back to the house. Hour or so ago.”
“What’s going on, Ryan?” The loud bellowed query came from Trader.
“Everything’s king-ace,” he replied. “Coming back down with Jak.”
“Saw note?” the teenager asked.
“Yeah.”
“Warren dead?”
There was a momentary hesitation that Ryan couldn’t avoid and knew that Jak would have picked up on, and interpreted correctly. “Yeah. Both dead.”
“Best that way. Fire house?” He answered his own question before Ryan could reply. “Would have seen flames. Thought of it. You think of it, Ryan?”
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