The man was trying to back away from his fate, but it was impossible to move safely with only one functioning hand and he was almost paralyzed with terror.
The watchers on the raft could see his mouth opening and closing as he begged for mercy from the red-eyed teenager.
But mercy wasn’t a word that featured large in the vocabulary of Jak Lauren.
“Rain on him boy,” J.B. said.
Jak feinted with his left hand, but the blade had switched to the right. It thrust out like a tongue of a snake, faster than anyone could see, burying itself in the socket of the man’s left eye, hilt deep. For a moment there was a splash of pink among the foam from the river.
The teenager pulled the knife free, watching as his opponent writhed for a few moments in his death agony, finally letting go of the ropes, slipping away into the hungry waters.
“Haul him in,” Ryan called.
The cliffs were becoming lower, the river widening, slowing its churning passage as they began to leave the gorge.
It was easy to pull the teenager in off the snarled, twisted cords and shattered wood, back to the relative safety of the damaged raft.
“Need to get to shore and do some repairs,” Ryan said, aware as the tension passed away that his injured leg was hurting him like fire.
FORTUNATELY THEY HAD plenty of spare ropes to make the raft secure again, using the mass of cordage hooked on from the ruined bridge. But it was a long process.
By the time they had finished and were ready to push off again, the sun was way past the middle of the day, just visible through ragged cloud, and they were all thoroughly tired.
“That last meat?” asked Jak, who had been sitting by the river’s edge, using a stone to renew the honed edge on his throwing knives.
“Yeah.” Ryan had finished reloading the automatic and the rifle. J.B. was still fieldstripping his own blasters, though he hadn’t fired either of them, making sure they were dry and clean and oiled.
“We look for food now?”
“Mebbe. Haven’t thought much about that.”
“Or wait until we stop?”
“Could do that also.”
“How far Shiloh?”
Ryan looked across the clearing at J.B. to answer Jak’s question.
“Not sure. That gorge wasn’t on any map. Must’ve been some big earth movements.”
“No bridges,” Mildred said, rubbing her hands together. “No towns. No cities. Not even a dirt-poor frontier pesthole to give us some clue where we’re all at.”
“My guess is not far from Savannah,” the Armorer said. “But that could be another forty or fifty miles. And Shiloh’s a little way past that.”
“Not far. Forty or fifty miles.” Mildred stood and looked at him, hands on hips. “Jesus, John! The river’s slowed right down again. Four or five miles an hour, I’d guess. So it could be way late this evening.”
The Armorer smiled, the watery sun reflecting off his glasses. “True enough, Millie. All we can do is launch her and see where we end up by evening.”
“Will that oar do duty as a replacement rudder?” Doc asked from the shade of a bushy eucalyptus. “I assume it will.”
Ryan had tested it, throwing his weight against the makeshift binding. “Should do fine.”
“Want me to take another look at your leg?” Mildred asked. “Took a pounding during that fight.”
Ryan shook his head, trying not to lean too heavily on his stick. “Caught it a couple times. But it feels like it’s getting better.”
Krysty narrowed her eyes. “When it comes to lying, lover, you’re strictly little league.”
He hobbled quickly to the raft, ignoring her, stooping to loosen the mooring line. “Less talk and more sailing, friends. Let’s do it.”
Chapter Eighteen
Savannah had been used as a military base for some of the top-secret, silo-based ICBMs that had dominated American military policy for much of the latter part of the previous century. It had brought wealth to the city, and extra prosperity to the merchants, builders, tavern owners and storekeepers.
It had also brought the wrath of the Russkies, raining molten fire from the heavens, wiping the town and the surrounding region to the northwest away into an arid wasteland of black glass and rolling sand. It was a dangerous hot-spot that, nearly a hundred years after skydark, still sent the rad counters off the orange section of the scale way across into the red.