“I don’t have anything better. Let her go.”
On full-auto, twenty rounds of 9 mm ammo spit out of the Uzi machine pistol in a couple of heartbeats, with a noise like tearing silk.
Stinking ichor sprayed from the mangled bodies of the creatures as the bullets ripped into them, killing or wounding thirty or forty where they had been climbing over one another in their eagerness to reach the trapped man.
“Now!” J.B. shouted, slinging the empty blaster over his shoulder.
But Ryan didn’t need the warning yell. The metal support was sliding gently sideways, and he jumped clear of it, landing foursquare in the corridor of dead and dying insects that J.B. had provided.
The scaly carapaces cracked and crunched under his combat boots, and he slipped and slithered, fighting for balance, knowing that to fall was to die.
Horribly.
It was a close-run thing.
The burst of fire from the Uzi had opened up enough of a passage through the shocked and disjointed insects to enable Ryan to sprint through. Several of the creatures struck at him, but he was moving too fast, using the long panga like an ax to clear a wider path, lashing out at any of the giant mutie centipedes that threatened him.
Once they saw he was going to make it, the other friends turned and started moving fast toward the top of the track, avoiding a few more of the insects that were wriggling from their sun-blind burrows.
One of the larger centipedes reared up in front of him, its head at the height of Ryan’s chest, and he swung the panga at it without breaking stride, slicing through the armored body.
There was a strange noise from all around him, like the high-pitched mewing of drowning kittens, and the air was filled with the alien metallic stink.
Suddenly he was free of them, following the others helter-skelter down the slope. Ryan glanced a couple of times over his shoulder, but the mutie insects didn’t try to pursue them.
They all arrived together down by the water, panting and exhausted. Doc’s nosebleed had gotten worse, and Mildred had also been sick.
“All in good shape,” Ryan said, grinning.
“Apart from your pants,” Krysty observed. “Those little fuckers did a good job on them.”
Ryan hadn’t been aware in the headlong dash of just how close some of the clamping jaws had come to him. But when he sat on a rounded boulder by the brackish lake, he saw that the lower parts of his pants were cut and slashed in several places, as though a straight razor had been used on them.
“THERE’S THE SMOKE I saw,” Ryan pointed with the SIG-Sauer toward the pallid column of gray that was twining into the overcast sky. It was the middle of the day, but the clouds had returned. Now it was warm and humid, with the threat of possible thunder in the air.
“Where there’s smoke there’s food,” J.B. said.
“And where there’s food, there’s trouble,” Ryan added. “Always the way.”
Chapter Ten
They crossed over a ridge, leaving the poisoned water behind them, finding themselves in a cleaner and fresher part of the country.
There were sweeping banks of scented flowers, the blossoms drooping heavily toward the lush grass, and they forded three fast-running streams of good, sparkling water. All six of them drank deeply.
They could see the tall plume of smoke more clearly and could even catch the smell of it when the wind shifted a little. It carried the flavor of cooking meat, which made all of them salivate with hunger.
“Hope they’re friendly to outlanders,” Krysty said.
“Won’t matter that much if they’re not.” Ryan’s lean face was vulpine with the desire for something to eat and to put a lining on his groaning stomach.
They had seen tracks of deer at two of the crossings, and once a flock of doves circled noisily above them. Jak had drawn his Colt Python, holstering it at Ryan’s snapped command.
“If we want everyone to know there’s strangers in the woods, then we can yell out and tell them.”
IT WAS A SMALL COMMUNITY.
They approached it with the greatest caution, in an extended double-red skirmish line. The streams had melted into a larger river, which flowed over bubbling shallows, running deeper a little farther beyond the village, through high cliffs.