Even as he started shooting, a small part of Ryan’s concentration had slipped to that ornament, wondering at the sharp tug of memory that was triggered by it, trying to recall where he’d seen it before.
But the chilling swamped all other thoughts.
The muddies started to howl as the occupants of the wag tumbled into the rain all around them, pouring death from a variety of blasters.
The diminutive bodies were torn apart under the concentrated hail of lead, spinning and tumbling, sliding along in the river of liquid dirt.
With Ryan, Jak and J.B. on one side of the 4×4, and the others on the far side, the only danger was getting caught in the cross fire.
“Hold it!” Ryan yelled, seeing that the surviving muties had broken and run for it, all clawing their way over the steep slope and vanishing down into the stygian darkness, leaving only their dead and a few of their dying.
“Anyone hurt?” Krysty shouted.
“Little fucks never got to us,” Jak called, standing up, his white face streaked with mud, hair plastered to the sides of his narrow skull, eyes glowing a fiery red in the lightning.
“Glad we got to them,” Ryan said, quickly reloading his blaster.
Krysty and J.B. quickly terminated the squealing survivors, with single shots to the nape, bringing a silence to the heart of the storm.
“We chase them?” Jak asked, reloading.
Ryan shook his head, sending a spray of rain from his matted hair. “No. Best thing is to try and get moving again.” He stared up at the sky, blinking against the flaring lightning. “Pull her forward away from the edge, J.B., and we can get on. Take it slow and careful. Think it might be easing.”
He went to drag some of the stocky corpses away from the highway, pulling a face at the horrific expressions on the distorted heads. The others had finished reloading and lent a hand, clearing a path from the front of the vehicle while J.B. wired it back into life again.
The wag had edged clean, and J.B. leaned out of the cracked window. “Ready when you are, friends.”
Krysty opened the middle door and slid in, wincing at the amount of mud she was smearing on the plush upholstery. Mildred joined J.B. in the front, and Jak and Doc sat in the back of the vehicle.
Ryan hesitated a moment, worrying that something was nagging at his memory, something that he’d noticed in the beginning of the brief fight and then forgotten.
“No,” he said to himself. Whatever it was, it was gone. So it probably hadn’t been important. He opened the passenger’s door and joined Krysty in the middle section of the wag.
“Ready?” J.B. asked, taking off his fedora and putting it on the seat at his side.
“Sure.”
They began to inch forward. The rain had eased, and the thunder and lightning had become more sporadic. Ryan looked out through the unbroken glass, squinting at the pile of muddies’ corpses, seeing something glinting brightly among the bodies in a purple-pink flash of chem lightning.
“Hold it.” He opened the door and jumped quickly into the mud. He splashed through and stooped over one of the dead muties, lifting the silver ornament and chain from around its stubby, bristly neck.
J.B. had put on the brake, stopping the 4×4, and now everyone piled out again, gathering around Ryan, peering at the disk that he held in his hand.
“It seems to me that I have seen that pretty bauble at another place and in another time,” Doc said.
“Me, too.” Mildred looked carefully at the engraved disk. “I know what it is!”
Ryan nodded before she even said the name. “I knew I recognized it. It belongs to Straub.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Straub was one of the most evil and dangerous men that Ryan had ever met, in a world that held far more than its share of dangerous and evil men and women.
He could visualize Straub without any trouble, recalling every detail of dress and appearance. He was about fifty years old, slender, a touch over six feet tall. His head was shaved clean, and he wore a large opal in his right ear and had a gold tooth at the front of his mouth. A beautiful necklace of raw turquoise hung around his throat.