That fraction of a second was enough. The sound of Jak’s Python was enough to shake the recce party from the stunned inaction that the sight of the cat pack had caused.
“Nukeshit bastard—chill them now!” Lonnie yelled, beginning to fire with his H&K into the cat posse.
Mik and Tilly also opened up with their blasters—-Tilly was carrying an Uzi, and Mik had a H&K like Lonnie. Danny also carried an Uzi, but showed his ineptitude in yet another inopportune moment by jamming the Uzi as he began to fire. Cursing, he fiddled awkwardly with the blaster while Dean stepped back to cover him, concentrating on precision shooting with the Browning Hi-Power that would keep the pack well back from them, even though his blaster alone couldn’t put much of a hole in their numbers.
Doc, on the other hand, was more than able to do some serious damage. The older man stepped forward, his eyes glittering with anger as though the attack of the cats was in some way a personal affront. It would have been baffling to the others if they had noticed—if their attention had not been focused on the pack in front of them—but to Doc it truly was a personal matter.
In his head, Doc was no longer standing in the middle of the New Mexico desert after skydark, but was in the backyard of his home in Vermont, some two hundred years before. Young Jolyon was standing to one side of him, crying in pain and fear, his arm scratched hideously by a feral cat that had wandered from the nearby woods—the same creature that had been responsible for the death of Rachel and Jolyon’s pet cat Matilda a few days before— and had responded to the young boy’s desire to pet him with a vicious rake of the claw. That wild cat had been killed with a single shot from the Remington that Doc kept in the house for emergencies.
That cat; young Jolyon, whom he would never see again and who had probably died well over a century before and may never even have seen adulthood for all he knew; the danger posed by this motley crew…all of these things went through Doc’s mind as he stepped forward and fired the shot chamber of the LeMat into the posse of wildcats.
The shot from the percussion blaster spread through the pack, ripping into them and generating high-pitched and terrible yowls of pain as more of the animals were wounded or chilled. Yet the fact that they were confused, and now were either in a feeding frenzy or a panic over the danger, made them disperse from pack movements, and made them harder to fire upon, their actions harder to predict or second-guess.
Some of the cats had turned upon themselves, either beginning to sate their hunger on the chilled animals, or sensing injury, fear and near death in others who had been hit, turning on them as easy targets. Others had taken fright at the sudden explosions of the blasters and the molten death that had passed among them. Driven wild with hate, hunger and fear, they were moving erratically, running between the legs of the recce party but not attacking, while others were trying a concerted approach to their actions, their claws and teeth attempting to scratch and bite through the tough material of the clothing worn by all the party members.
“Shit, they’re feisty little fuckers!” Mik exclaimed, shaking one cat loose from his leg and then following through to kick another in the head as it tried to leap at him, the force of his combat boot dislocating the animal’s jaw so that it sagged uselessly as the creature hit the ground.
“Yeah—watch jaws, though,” Jak yelled back.
Dean, hearing this, took a closer look at the creature that approached him before taking a shot that cleaved the head of the creature. As it came toward him, while he took aim, he noted that the jaws of the cat were slightly enlarged in order to accommodate larger than usual fangs. And these fangs dripped with a viscous fluid that suggested they were designed for combat in some manner.
It was something Doc needed to hear and take heed of, but the older man was no longer in the New Mexico desert.