And the horde of tiny rodents edged closer again.
DOC WAS SNORING, and she could see in the moonlight that Jak, flat on his back, was also fast asleep. J.B. and Mildred had been whispering for some time, snuggled together, but they’d finally fallen quiet.
Only Krysty remained awake, lying in the corner of the ruined cabin just off Highway 9.
She kept remembering something that Ryan had said a few days earlier, how the thing he hated most was vermin. Rats and mice. Any kind of rodent.
But Krysty couldn’t understand why she kept on recalling that conversation, eventually deciding that it had to have something to do with Ryan’s current predicament.
Krysty prayed to Gaia and to the forces of the Earth Mother that she was wrong.
Despite all her skills, she still wasn’t able to embrace sleep, lying with emerald eyes open, staring out at the starry night, worrying about Ryan.
The only bright spot was that it had finally stopped raining, though water still thundered down the wide streambed behind their cabin.
RYAN COULD FAINTLY HEAR the roaring of the swollen stream that ran clear down the valley toward the north.
It crossed his mind that Krysty might also be listening to it.
He had been watching the seething army of vermin, turning his head to try to check that they weren’t coming at him from behind. Two or three hundred had edged closer, until they were within his reach.
His hand shot out like a striking rattler, grabbing a fistful. He plunged them below the scummy surface of the water around him, holding them there while he counted to twenty, figuring that would be long enough to flood their tiny lungs.
Ryan held tight, ignoring the biting, until the wriggling stopped. When he opened his hand a dozen or more little corpses bobbed into sight. One or two had struggled free and were climbing out of the water onto the ruins of the house.
“One for me, you little shits,” he said, breathing hard with the tension.
The icy floodwater was now over his waist, and he started to worry about snakes. But he pushed that particular thought to the back of his mind. There were three possible ways that he was going to die crushed if the beams slipped any more; drowned if the water continued to rise; eaten alive if the rodents finally massed and attacked him all at once.
The way things were going, his best guess was that one of the three would have happened by dawn.
AS SOON AS KRYSTY touched J.B.’s shoulder he started awake.
“What?”
“We should go.”
“Now?” He sat up, whispering so as not to disturb Mildred or Doc. Jak, in the corner of the ruined building, had also awakened, his senses razor honed.
“What is it?” he said. “Danger?”
Krysty shook her head. “Not here. But I have this triple-strong feeling that Ryan is in deep trouble.”
“Dawn in an hour or so,” the Armorer said. “We could wait until then.”
“Move faster in light,” Jak agreed.
“Could be too late then.” She gripped J.B. by the shoulder, hard enough to make him wince. “Now.”
RYAN HAD LOST COUNT of how many of the mutie vermin he’d crushed and drowned. All that he was really aware of was the undeniable fact that they kept on coming. And each time there were more of them and each time they were bolder.
Twice in the past half hour his own violent reaction to the rodents had caused the timbers around him to slip, tightening their embrace on his legs and left arm, squeezing and crushing his chest so that breathing became more and more difficult.
Though it hadn’t rained again for four hours or so, the level of water around him had continued to rise steadily until it was now across the top of his chest, scant inches from his face.
A raft of little furry corpses bobbed around him on top of the dull surface, and he waved them away with his free hand. Breathing was becoming much harder with the compression around his chest, and he had lost all sense of feeling below the waist from the icy flood.