Genesis Echo (Deathlands 25) by James Axler

“How about” the woman began, but Ryan gestured for her to shut up.

“No time.” He turned and ran past the dead cub, into the relative stillness of the cave. The light was very poor, but he could see enough to realize that he’d made the right decision. There wasn’t enough room for all three of them to fight the grizzly with any chance of all making it.

At the back he could see a wall of blank rock, water seeping across it, shining in the pale glow from outside. There was a pile of crushed bones in one corner. The urine stench of the animals was overlaid by rotting meat and offal.

Ryan crouched, drawing the SIG-Sauer and laying it on the damp stone, bringing the Steyr to his shoulder, finger settling lightly on the trigger.

Outside, he was conscious only of a wall of unbroken white, which made him realize that there was a fundamental weakness in his plan. From where he was crouching, he couldn’t judge the arrival of the giant grizzly, wouldn’t be able to distract it and lure it past the guns of the others.

He scooped up the SIG-Sauer in his left hand and darted to the entrance of the cave, peering into the windswept waste. He was just aware of Trader, on his left side, flattened against the rock, Armalite at his shoulder. But the snow was too thick for him to see the woman scientist.

For a moment Ryan couldn’t see the grizzly, though he knew it had to be within spitting distance of him.

Then it was there, so huge that it blotted out what light remained. The wind dropped for a moment, and Ryan found himself staring into the bear’s small eyes, mesmerized by the blood-clotted muzzle, the great curved teeth that were still gripping the neck, head and shoulders of sec man Brunner. Below the chest there was only strings of muscle and ragged tendons, the flapping of part of the wretched man’s lungs and the white of splintered ribs.

Ryan, off balance, snapped a single shot at the creature, left-handed, hearing from the angry roar that the 9 mm round from the handblaster had found its mark somewhere in the flesh of the mutie beast. The bear’s breath belched out, steaming as it opened its jaws, dropping the poor raggled remains of the dead man. For a moment the grizzly started to rise onto its back legs, then changed its mind as its attention was caught by the figure of the man, crouched just inside its own den.

Ryan backed away making sure the animal was following him. His feet slipped on a patch of frozen urine, and he nearly went over on his back, but he managed to fight for balance.

“Come on, you bastard!” he yelled, leveling the SIG-Sauer and putting a second bullet into the mutie bear’s chest.

The noise of its roar filled the cave, reverberating off the walls, coursing through Ryan’s body.

As it began its charge, Ryan opened fire with the Steyr, shooting from the hip, as well as pumping lead from the handblaster. He actually heard the solid thwacking sound of the bullets striking solid muscle and bone.

He also heard the noise of the Armalite and the lighter pecking of the woman’s .22.

It was all over in four or five seconds, but the climax of the hunt seemed to last forever.

The charging animal staggered as a burst from the Armalite struck home in its belly, but its vast size and momentum seemed to have made it invulnerable.

The arched roof of the cave was thirty or forty feet high. When, at last, the grizzly reared up on its hind tegs, it looked to Ryan as though its head were scraping the raw stone. The front paws flailed at the air, the bellowing ceaseless.

Ryan dropped the SIG-Sauer and instantly leveled the rifle, aiming below the creature’s jaw, knowing from the angle that the 7.62 mm full-metal-jacket round should penetrate upward into the brain pan.

As he sighted, a nanosecond before squeezing the trigger, he saw an odd thing. A bullet from one of the others had to have hit the animal from the side and traveled through the upper bones of the skull, bursting the grizzly’s left eye as it exited.