“Venison,” Ryan said. “Now that sounds like the best ace on the line since we left the Keys.”
“Think those muties are around here?” Michael still looked pale from the horrors behind them.
Ryan shook his head. “Doubt it. If we return to the gateway in the next day or so we’d best walk triple-red. Out here, who knows what there is? So, we’ll go take a look. Unless anyone fancies a third jump? No? You all agree?” Nobody said anything. He laughed. “Well, you don’t disagree. Let’s go.”
THE WALK DOWN the sloping bluff was pleasant, with none of the danger that they’d so often experienced with redoubts set in the high country. The land below was visibly rich in game, and the woods were honeycombed with narrow trails. Birds sang in the high branches while narrow streams bubbled clean and pure over quartz-veined pebbles.
They all refreshed themselves, despite Mildred’s warning that there might easily be some sort of unpleasant organism lurking in the water.
“You won’t know its burrowed into your guts until you get unstoppable shits,” she said. “And by then it’s way too late to do anything.”
But she also flopped belly-down, along with the others, and drank deeply from her cupped hands.
“If there was a ville off to the west,” Ryan said, wiping his mouth with the back of his right hand, “then it could be that this is all part of some baron’s domain.”
J.B. sat with his back against a slender beech, polishing his glasses. His fedora lay in his lap, and he was smiling, his face turned to the sky.
“Tell you the truth, Ryan, couldn’t give a flying fuck about any baron. Warm sunshine and clean water.” He reached out to Mildred, who was dozing at his side, and touched her cheek. “Less she’s right about the bugs. There’s a good breeze.”
It was an idyllic moment.
Ryan sat and sharpened his panga on the sole of his boot, watching as his eleven-year-old son lay flat on the overhanging bank of the stream, fingers dabbling in the shadowed water, trying to gudgeon a trout for them. But the speckled fish was too alert for him and slithered away between the boy’s hands.
“Nice try, son.”
“Nearly had him, Dad.”
“I saw.”
Michael was doing some of his stretching exercises, balancing first on one leg, then on the other, hands probing out with a supreme delicacy, as if he were a blind man seeking to touch a single invisible feather.
“This is good, Ryan,” he said. “Used to be like this up at Nil-Vanity. Specially in the greening and in the quiet days of the early fall.”
“Look,” whispered Krysty, who’d been washing the scent of death and corruption from her brilliantly crimson hair. “Just on the other side of the stream.”
It was a pair of roe deer, a doe, hesitant, but oddly unafraid of the proximity to the group of humans, and her little fawn, nuzzling at her flanks with its velvet nose.
“Looks like Bambi,” Mildred said. “They’re really cute, aren’t they?”
Ryan drew the SIG-Sauer. The range was a little long for the automatic, but it had the advantage over the Steyr rifle of the built-in baffle silencer. The thought that they might be making a kill on the hunting land of a local baron made Ryan even more cautious than usual.
“Must you?” Doc asked, answering his own question. “Needs must when hunger drives, I suppose.”
The silencer was beginning to lose its efficiency, as they mostly did, but it still muffled the explosion as Ryan squeezed the trigger.
The fawn went down in a heap, as if it had been struck by a thunderbolt, its skinny legs kicking and scrabbling, the blood marking its pale brown coat just behind the shoulder. Its mother looked around as though she couldn’t believe that death should leap so suddenly from a clear sky.
“Take her out as well,” J.B. suggested.
“No. Enough meat on the baby. More tender. We already seen spoor to know the woods are teeming with food. No need to jerk it, then have to carry it around with us. Just pick up what we want, when we want it.”