He worked the bolt action with a fluid ease, snapping off a second bullet into the same target area of the throat.
Then it was on top of him.
One paw knocked the Steyr spinning from his hands, nearly dislocating his thumb and forefinger. Ryan tried to dodge clear of the toppling giant, but there was simply nowhere to run.
It crashed down from its full height, smothering him, sending him backward, the rear of his head striking a rounded boulder with a sickening thud that plunged Ryan into instant blackness.
WHEN HE BLINKED his good eye open, the only thing that he knew was that he was still alive. There was no sense of passing time. Ryan could have been unconscious for five seconds or for five days.
He was lying inside the cave, his head propped against the corpse of the monstrous mutie grizzly. The air was filled with the foul stink of its passingblood, urine and fecal matteras well as the fading scent of discharged blasters.
Trader was kneeling at Ryan’s side, rubbing snow over his forehead, while Thea Gibson was sitting cross-legged a yard or so away, her Anschutz Kadett across her lap.
“You all right, bro?” Trader asked.
“Think so.” Ryan lifted a hand to touch the back of his head, wincing as his fingers encountered a large raw lump. When he squinted at his hand, be saw a smear of blood.
“That was simply the most terrifying experience of my entire life,” the scientist said. “I had no idea that such creatures still roamed the earth.”
Trader rested a foot on the body. “Well, I’ll tell you one truth, lady. This daughter of a bitch won’t be doing no more roaming.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“You two!”
The voice was so close that Mildred jumped and nearly rattled the barrel of the Czech revolver against the tiled corridor wall.
From where she was standing, it wasn’t possible to see down toward what had looked like a prison cell. But she heard the scrape of a chair being pushed back.
“What?”
“Wanted at reception area. Seems the hunts gone wrong. Two lots came back.”
“Who?”
“Buford and one of the Ellisons.”
“Which one?”
“Who knows, now one of them’s shaved his mustache. Now we just got identical scar-faced bastards.”
Mildred heard a bellow of laughter. She inched backward, glancing behind her. Only a part of her mind focused on the talking.
“Might be a search for the Gibson woman, Brunner and Cooke and some of the outlanders. Not sure of all of the details about who’s missing.”
There was a window with a long white blind that came right to the floor. Holding her breath, Mildred began to edge toward it.
“Go out in this shitting blizzard to look for that wrinkled dike and some outlanders! You gotta be greasin’ my wheels.”
“No. Order comes right from the top.”
A third voice spoke, which Mildred assumed to be the second of the card players. “Tell Crichton that you looked double hard and couldn’t find us.”
More laughter. “Yeah, he’d love that. Come on. Get the carrot out of your stew and follow me.”
The blind was made from thin sheets of plastic slats, made fragile by the passing of time. Mildred lifted one side and began to try to slip behind it. The glass of the window was close to her back, and she caught a glimpse of fading light and whirling flakes of fresh snow.
“All right, all right. We’re coming.”
In her hiding place, Mildred couldn’t catch what was said next, but it seemed to be a joking reference to whoever or whatever lay behind the bolted door.
“What could those sorry bastards do if they ever got loose, anyway?” one of the sec men asked.
“Not a lot.”
There was a crack in one of the slats, right at eye-level, and Mildred could see the short stretch of corridor, where she’d been hiding. She drew in a sharp breath as two figures appeared in her line of sight. One of the card players and the messenger sent to fetch them, she figured. They were joined almost immediately by the third sec man.
“Still snowing?”
“Was last time I looked.”