The bearded son took out his brother. He put one arm around his neck, and, kissing him once on the cheek, thrust the knife in under his ribs so hard that he lifted the skinny boy clean off his feet. He held him as he died, then lowered him gently to the turf.
Ryan was aware that Krysty was silently crying.
“Don’t let them” Marie began, rising to her feet, her hair blowing in the wind like a funeral veil.
But her order was too late.
The mother waited for her doom, smiling as husband and son stabbed her simultaneously in the chest and back, the thud of the blows audible above the rumbling noise of the advancing chem storm.
The tall son dropped his bloodied knife and stood with arms spread, like Christ crucified, nodding to his weeping father to chill him.
The stubby blade sank home, the man giving the lethal twist to his wrist before withdrawing the dagger. His son fell to his knees, then slid forward on his face, like a wearied laborer taking to his welcome bed.
There was a moment of infinite stillness, the four bodies and the father frozen like flies trapped in amber.
Krysty touched Ryan urgently on the arm. “He’s going to” she began, but her “seeing” was too slow, overtaken by the event that she saw.
The wildwooder looked around him at the ring of staring faces, his eyes landing on Mandeville. “Dogs’ll lick your blood,” he said, and threw the crimson knife at the baron’s throat.
If he hadn’t seen it for himself, Ryan would never have believed it.
Michael stood up and leaned toward the rubicund figure at his side, reaching out with his left hand and grabbing the whirling dagger by its hilt, inches from the neck of the helpless Mandeville.
Simultaneously Guiteau squeezed off three rounds from his Armalite AR 190. Set for triple-burst, the bullets tore into the wildwooder’s chest at almost point-blank range, knocking him off his feet, to lie still in the blood-slick grass beside the rest of his dead family.
One of the high-velocity rounds went clean through the man’s body and ripped the right ear off a scullery girl on the far side of the butts.
There was a moment of chaotic confusion, with part of the crowd having no idea at all what had happened.
Several of the sec men spun to cover Michael, who was looming over their lord with a bloody knife in his hand. Others were staring wildly out into the woods, as if they were trying to locate the shooter who’d wounded the young woman.
Ryan had drawn his SIG-Sauer, ready to put a bullet into the first man who opened fire on the teenager.
“It’s all done. Finished.” Marie Mandeville’s pure, cold voice rang out across the gathering, like a warning bell in a cathedral tower, holding the moment.
“Easy,” Harry Guiteau said, lifting the blaster over his head, catching the eyes of the nervous sec men. “Outlander saved the life of the baron. Stray round caught the girl.”
Krysty wiped her eyes, shaking her head. “Double-bad scene, lover,” she whispered.
Ryan felt a few spots of light rain dash on his cheeks. He put his tongue out to lick the water, grimacing at its bitterness. “Acid,” he said. “Sooner we all get back inside the ville the better.”
The early years in Deathlands, after skydark, had been a time of neomythical horrors. The heavens were filled with all manner of rad-high nuke junk, curling around from the Star Wars conflict, dropping back to Earth with lethal and monotonous regularity. The whole globe and the skies around it had been hideously polluted by the holocaust, producing all manner of changes in the entire interdependent eco-structure.
One of the worst side effects had been acid rains not like the bleeding-heart green liberals of the late nineties meant acid rain.
This was rain that could, so the stories went, flay the flesh off a man caught in the open. Burn him down to whitened bones within minutes.
From his journeyings with the Trader, Ryan knew that mutations of the atmosphere were rarely so powerful nowadays, though there were still places, particularly near the Gulf, where murderous acid storms could blow up.