THE FOG GAVE THEM COVER over the first dangerous yards, and J.B. put the Uzi on full-auto, blasting out a stream of murderous 9 mm rounds that chopped into the heart of the throng of muties. Their little bodies danced and thrashed, tumbling into one another, the powerful blaster cutting off hands and legs. Ryan, Mildred and Doc were at J.B.’s side, picking their targets with more care, the Le Mat erupting in a cloud of black-powder smoke, with its 18-gauge shotgun round blowing a hole in the muddies ranks.
The dwarfish muties fled their village, vanishing and splashing into the pools and the fog behind the settlement.
Ryan set the perimeter along the rear of the last row of huts, with Doc on his left and J.B. and Mildred on the right. Behind him, he glanced over his shoulder to make sure that Jak and Krysty had gotten through unharmed. They were kneeling by the row of torture stakes, working at severing the rawhide cords that tied the prisoner.
The numbers raced on the wrist chron. “Two minutes and ten seconds,” he called.
A spear came from the mist, its flaked stone point digging into the dirt a yard or so from Ryan. He fired a couple of aimless shots into the gloom, but heard nothing.
“Got him, lover,” Krysty yelled. “Unconscious. But it’s Straub. Leaving with him now.”
“One minute thirty-five,” Ryan shouted. “Everyone still all right?”
The three friends confirmed that none of them had been harmed.
“Forty seconds. Looks like they’re gathering out there. I can see them by that fallen mangrove.”
Ryan didn’t want to have to fight a running rearguard action all the way back to the highway, carrying an unconscious Straub, the vengeful muddies gathering at their heels.
More spears were thrown, one of them so close to Mildred that she had to parry it with her left arm. Somewhere in the rolling fog, a number of drums had started beating.
“I fear that they are gathering courage to attack us,” Doc said. “Either that or they are summoning King Kong from his mountain fastness.”
If it hadn’t been for the rain soaking the crude huts, Ryan would have tried to start a diversionary fire.
On the spur of the moment he changed his plan. “Wait for them,” he said. “If they want to summon up their nerve and try and charge us, then we let them. We got the firepower to hold them off at least one more time without blowing all the ammo. Beat them back, and they’ll think a long time before they try us again. That’s when we pull out and support Krysty and Jak back to the wag.”
The drumming was growing louder, closer, the noise only slightly muffled by the thickening fog, and they could now hear a rhythmic chanting as the muddies worked themselves up to attack the outlanders.
Ryan glanced once more at the wrist chron, seeing Krysty and Jak already had a lead of nearly five minutes. Two miles across poor terrain would take a good half hour. Probably half as long as that again if they had to help Straub.
“Coming,” J.B. said, setting the Uzi back onto single shot, aiming and firing carefully at the line of stocky figures that was creeping from the wall of mist.
Despite the poor light and the numbers of the muties, Ryan never felt that they were in serious danger. The blasters kept the muddies out of viable range for spears and knives, and the bodies dropped with a relentless regularity. There was time to pick a target and aim and fire, and even Doc, not the greatest marksman, was able to make good use of the revolver rounds of the Le Mat.
“This is plain and simple murder,” the old man complained. “Why do they not retire and save themselves from further slaughter at our hands?”
“Because they got brains the size of peanuts,” J.B. replied, slapping in another mag.
“They’re folding,” Mildred said. “Stop firing.”
Ryan ignored her taking over his role by issuing such a command. She was right, and there was no point in making any kind of issue of it. The gunfire ceased and the swamps became quieter, with only weeping and cries from some of the wounded muddies lying twisting in the watery mud.