Ryan simply wanted to make his excuses and leave the clearing. He was unconsciously trying to breathe fast and shallow through his mouth to minimize the risk of breathing in some foul taint of corruption.
“Got jack, mister?” the woman asked, holding out a clawed right hand, showing that most of the nails were missing. “Help us out, it would.”
Ryan shook his head. “Jack I got’s the jack I keep,” he replied. He was aware of the canteens, swinging heavy on his shoulder. It would be easy enough to fill them up again on the way back. “You got a container, I’ll give you good water.” He unslung them and opened one so that the fresh gurgling sound filled the clearing.
The reaction was startling and scary, similar to his first demon-king appearance in the firelight.
The woman threw back her head and screamed, the sinews in her scrawny throat as taut as bowstrings, eyes rolled back in the sockets so that only the bloodshot whites showed.
The man dropped to his haunches, suddenly bringing to mind Ryan’s fancy of shape-changing, wolflike muties. His head settled in his shoulders, and for a moment he resembled a crouching predator, eyes gleaming yellow under the mane of hair. He was snarling deep in his throat, and flecks of reddened foam dripped from his peeled-back lips.
“Fireblast!” Ryan backed off a couple of paces, index finger on the trigger of the SIG-Sauer.
“Water chills!” The man’s voice cracked, sliding up the scale until it became a lupine howl of mindless rage and fear. “You chill us!”
Then the round slipped into the chamber, and Ryan guessed what he’d encountered.
“Rabies,” he said. “You both got rabies. Wiped out your whole community. Now you’re the last.”
“Blood saves,” the woman whispered, eyeing him hungrily, sliding toward him. The knife was back in her hand.
Ryan fired two shots, the 9 mm rounds booming out, the sounds muffled by the surrounding trees.
The first one took the female through the upper part of the right cheek as she turned her head away from the threat of the blaster. It bowled her over on her back, legs kicking, fingers scrabbling while blood poured from the massive exit wound at the back of her angular skull.
The second round caught the man in midleap. He had powered himself up in a vaunting spring toward Ryan’s throat, knife in his outstretched hand, open jaws showing the foam-smeared fangs, curved and yellow.
Ryan shot him in the chest, going for the safe option, despite the close range and good light.
By one of the freaks of combat, the full-metal-jacket round went clean through and out the back without striking anything vital, missing heart, lungs, ribs, spine and scapula, barely slowing the leap.
Ryan was taken by surprise, unable to get off a third shot before the howling creature was on top of him. There was just time to use the snub barrel of the SIG-Sauer to deflect the knife from his throat, then he was down in the dirt, rolling and wrestling with the rabid man.
He was incredibly strong, fueled by the ravening sickness that was sliding fire through his veins. Ryan got a grip on the right wrist, which held the knife, dropping the now useless blaster, managing to keep his thighs pressed together to stop the intruding knee. He jabbed a couple of short, chopping, savage punches into the man’s lower abdomen, but they hardly checked the ferocious attack.
The man tried to bite his face, and Ryan barely pulled away in time, knowing that if blood was drawn by the infected creature, then the odds were that he, too, would be contaminated and confront the same brutish passing.
There was a vital pressure point beneath the breastbone that Jak had taught Ryan, and the one-eyed man went for it, feeling his fingers beginning to slip in the sweat on his enemy’s wrist. It was only a matter of moments before the knife hand was free again. The stink of death from the gaping jaws was overwhelming, and Ryan kept his own face turned away, fingers groping, feeling for the point, hard under the upper ribs, aware of the jerk of shock and pain from the man on top of him as he finally located it and pressed with all his strength.