Jak, Dean and Danny were out of the second wag quickly, and the bespectacled youth led the way through the crowd of wild-eyed fighters to where the crash had occurred.
Correll was looming over Ayesha through the dust and smoke. She was sure that he would cut her down where she stood, especially as she was the daughter of Baron Al Jourgensen, his sworn foe. In the heat of those eyes, all bargains would be forgotten.
And yet he looked at her with eyes that suddenly cleared from their fires of fury, and just for a second registered an infinite tenderness.
“Poor child,” he murmured before brushing past her with a wild yell and heading for the front of the convoy, where Baron Al’s wag was just moving off.
“Ayesha!” Danny yelled, coming upon her out of the dust and grasping her. “You’re okay!”
“Just,” she replied, “and it won’t stay that way unless we find some way of getting away from this slaughterhouse.”
“This way,” Jak said, “find wag.”
“Yeah, good idea,” Dean agreed. “Where the hell is everyone?”
“I, my dear boy, have finally got here,” Doc said, coming up to them, “but of the others…”
Dean and Jak looked around them. It was almost impossible to see in the swirling dust and smoke of the battlefield what was going on. Ryan and Krysty had to be in among it, and from the sounds of blasterfire and close combat, it seemed that mere yards away the sec men from Charity had emerged from their wags to take up hand-to-hand combat with the Hellbenders. They were forced to, as the sudden static nature of the other vehicles had left them with no target large or visible enough to fire at from inside the safety of the wags.
Suddenly, Dean caught sight of Krysty’s Titian flame of hair moving freely in the breeze as the woman encountered a sec man from Charity. As she moved nearer, they could see that the sec man had mistaken her for one of the more docile women from the wag, and was trying to trap her with a view to carrying her off. He had a Glock handblaster and a skinning knife, which he used to thrust at her, driving her backward. What he failed to realize was that she was leading him on, goading him into more confident, harder thrusts with the knife, nearly puncturing her skin. And then his confidence got the better of him, and he made his big mistake. He grinned with a leer and thrust the knife to try to rip the shoulder of her coat, to expose her bare flesh. But Krysty stepped under the blow and struck at his vulnerable side, striking below the heart with the heel of her hand. As the jarring blow turned the triumphant leer to a look of astonished agony, she drew back her arm and delivered a straight-fingered blow to his throat that ruptured the tissue within. He began to choke, and as he sank to the ground she raised one leg and delivered a chilling blow with the silvered toe of her boot, striking him at the joint of the jaw, just below the temple. The trauma to the brain finished off whatever life the sec man still had within him.
“Nice to know you haven’t lost your touch,” the one-eyed warrior commented as he emerged from the dust and smoke, the Steyr in one hand and his panga in the other. “I don’t know who’s chilling who out there, and I don’t think they do, either. My bet is we should get the hell out and regroup on the outside of the rocks, try and see what the hell is actually happening in here.”
“We could take one of the wags at the rear,” Dean suggested. “They’ve all gone blood-chill crazy out here, and I figure we should just shoot whoever gets in the way— can’t trust any of them not to chill us.”
Ryan agreed. “Only problem is, how do we let J.B. and Mildred know what the hell is going on?”
“HOW THE HELL are we supposed to know what’s going on here?” the Armorer asked Jenny as the wag spun yet again in the increasingly dense mix of smoke and dust that rose on the arena.