Genesis Echo (Deathlands 25) by James Axler

He was so close to Ryan that he could feel the old man’s breath tickling the tiny hairs in his ears. “Stay still here, Doc. I’ll take a look.”

It hadn’t entirely been a false alarm.

As Ryan inched toward the pool, blaster ready, he could hear a faint sound above the tumbling of the fall. He flattened out and crawled the last few yards on his stomach, parting a fringe of long sedge grass, peered out and smiled. He turned back and rejoined the waiting Doc Tanner.

“You were right to wake me,” he said quietly. “Anything out of the ordinary has a capacity for turning into danger. But not this time.”

“What was it?”

“Water shrews, about as big as your little finger. Couple hundred of them, like a regular army. Probably come up here together for a drink every night about this time.”

JAK TOUCHED HIM on the shoulder. Despite the almost total blackness that met Ryan’s eye, it was easy to see the great flare of white hair that tumbled about the young man’s shoulders. “Time,” he said.

“Anything?”

“No.”

But there was a faint note of reservation. “What, Jak?”

“Thought heard dogs and man calling. Quarter hour back. Not repeated.”

“Wolves?”

“Not wolves. Dogs. Then quieted.”

Ryan stood, pulling on his coat. Despite the warmth and sunshine of the day, the temperature had dropped sharply and was now very close to freezing.

“Fine,” he said, watching Jak pick his way to his own place around the dull embers of the fire.

As he moved from the camp, Krysty stirred and lifted a hand. Ryan stopped and took it, squeezing it between both his. He stooped and kissed the woman on the forehead, feeling the tendrils of sentient hair stirring and brushing at his own stubbled cheeks.

“Take care, lover,” she breathed.

After a few minutes Ryan found that his night vision was slowly creeping back. It wasn’t as good as Jak’s, but a deal better than the average. The night was very dark, with the moon having finally given up the struggle and settled down for the rest of the night behind a wall of dense cloud.

As Ryan looked around him, he saw a chem storm in the distance, pink and purple streaks of lightning flickering across the sky like threads of fine silk in an antique shawl.

He’d read old crumbling books that showed men on guard in the night. They’d been marching around and around, like little clockwork sec men, making themselves an easy prey to any attacker. That wasn’t the way to do it, as Trader had taught him.

“Slow and easy. Stop a lot, look and listen. Go back every now and again in the opposite direction. Avoid any pattern. Most important is to stop and listen. Best way of picking someone up who’s trying to get in.”

The other thing was to work a different perimeter. No point letting any enemy see that you were always walking the same pattern over the ground.

On his third walk around the camp, Ryan decided to strike off deeper into the woods, following a game trail down past the pool, into a steep-sided, narrow valley. It was filled with a tangle of brush and fallen trees, but the path wound its way around the obstacles.

Despite the covering of dry wood, Ryan moved silently, ghosting through the darkness.

He spotted the sinuous progress of a tiny, thick-furred, weasel like creature, crossing the trail less than ten feet in front of him, yet totally unaware of the human predator that had invaded its hunting territory.

The wind had eased in the shelter of the ravine, and Ryan stopped and held his breath, straining to hear any sound that didn’t fit the mosaic of the night. He could just hear his own blood thudding in his ears, and he remembered that Mildred had told him that the great pistol shooters, back when she was on the Olympic team, timed their shots between heartbeats. Something that he found barely credible.

But he’d seen the astounding way that Mildred could shoot, so mebbe it was true.

Ryan waited, deciding that he’d gone far enough away from the camp, intending to climb back onto the ridge and walk around the pool, over the stream, when he heard a noise a little way farther down, where the path dipped sharply. The noise was like heavy breathing, or sighing, or moaning.