It was only a matter of time, but Ryan wanted him down and out. He crawled on hands and knees toward him, gasping at the pain from his thigh, the SIG-Sauer held out toward the dying man like a crucifix toward a vampire.
“Cut head off, you shitter outlander!” the attacker grunted, waving his dagger.
“No,” Ryan said, shooting him carefully through the center of the chest, seeing a chunk of flesh burst from the exit wound between the shoulders, flecked with the white splinters of ribs and spine.
The turbulence was growing worse, and only the dragging wreckage of the ruined bridge was helping to hold the raft on course in the main current, stopping it from swinging completely around, out of control.
There was a loud crack as the main steering oar snapped in two, leaving J.B. holding a useless stump of wood barely four feet in length.
“Where’s Jak?” Ryan yelled, trying to make his way toward the stern, kicking one of the flailing corpses out of his way, clinging onto the pitching, sodden timbers.
“In among the cordage,” Mildred replied, pointing with the barrel of her own blaster. “One of the bastards is caught in there with him.”
Ryan saw Jak’s flaring white hair, like a beacon among the frothing dark green water. He was hanging on to the mass of tangled ropes and planks that had been the bridge, waving with his free hand to show that he was alive and well.
“Gets quieter ahead,” Krysty shouted, her mouth close to Ryan’s ear. “Should survive.”
But Ryan had also seen the man that Mildred had spotted, only a few feet behind the teenager, working his way toward Jak with a rusty cutlass gripped in his rotting teeth.
The raft was shuddering, and Ryan noticed that several of the main bindings had come apart, loosening the timbers so that they moved against one another, rubbing and chafing. If they didn’t get into calm water soon, Ryan guessed that the whole thing was about to fall apart.
“Jak hasn’t seen the other bastard,” J.B. shouted, still holding the stump of the oar.
Though Jak was a couple of yards nearer than the enemy, they were almost in line with each other, making a shot far too risky to attempt.
The Armorer managed to balance for a moment and pitched the remains of the oar over the stern, aiming at Jak’s attacker.
But the hunk of wood overshot by a dozen feet.
Krysty was gesturing to the albino, pointing behind him, giving the traditional signal for danger.
At last Jak realized, shaking hair from his eyes, glancing over his shoulder. The attacker was now close enough to him to take the sword from his teeth, clinging to the knotted wreckage with his left hand, trying a violent slash at the teenager, missing him by scant inches.
The others could only watch helplessly as the deathly struggle began less than twenty feet away, yet it might as well have been on the dark side of the moon.
The man was stout, in his forties, with thinning hair and a red complexion. In among the dashing spray, Ryan noticed that the enemy’s ears were on backward.
Jak had drawn another of his knives, using it to peck at his attacker, but it seemed like a child using a toy blade against a grown man with his powerful cutlass.
“Gaia, help him,” Krysty muttered, barely audible above the roar of the Tennessee through the steep gorge.
But Jak didn’t need any help when it came to hand-to-hand fighting.
The other man was slow and clumsy, terrified of losing his grip on the tangled wreckage of the fallen bridge, aware of the corpses of several of his colleagues that were being dashed on the rocks around him or sucked under in whirlpools.
Jak was constantly on the move, always hanging on by one hand, once vanishing below the surface of the river, emerging directly beneath his opponent, cutting up at him, severing the tendons in the man’s right wrist. The old sword vanished into the water, leaving him one-handed and weaponless.
“Now,” Ryan said, holstering the SIG-Sauer, seeing that it was all done.