There were fifteen or twenty minor cuts and bites on his right hand and arm, but nothing serious. Ryan knew that it wouldn’t be long before the diminutive rodents gathered themselves and made a concerted rush at him. Hundreds would cover his head and chest and swarm over his eye and mouth, suffocating and blinding him.
He watched them in the moonlight. Making a high cheeping sound like newborn chicks, they were moving restlessly all over the ruins of the house, occasionally coming down to feast on Elvira’s corpse.
There was enough illumination for Ryan to see the progress of their ravenous devouring. The dead woman’s skull gleamed white, with ragged patches of matted hair and threads of gristle dangling from it. Despite their tiny size, the rodents were voracious eaters, and he could hear the noise of an infinity of small teeth tearing at the cooling flesh.
Dawn was still a good half hour away.
Ryan sensed that the ultimate attack from the mutie rodents was about to begin, and he readied himself to go down fighting into the last darkness and take his final ride on the wall of death.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The first tremulous gleam of the false dawn lightened the sky with its promise of light to come. But the trail up toward the outlying houses in the small ville of Alma was still in darkness, rutted, muddy and treacherous.
Krysty had encouraged the others along in her wake, with poor old Doc struggling with the cold, the dark and the altitude, panting and wheezing at the rear.
“Got to get there,” she kept saying. “Come on, guys, we got to get there. Ryan needs us triple bad.”
“But we don’t know where he is,” J.B. said. “Could be up at Fairplay by now.”
She shook her tightly bunched hair. “No. Closer than that. Much closer.”
“Suppose cold hearts still around?” asked Jak, who had kept up effortlessly with Krysty, over the steepest part of the old highway.
“Can’t feel them,” she replied, breathing hard. “No smell of fresh fires. No lights. I’m certain that they’re well ahead of us up the mountain someplace. Probably in Harmony itself. That’s my feeling.”
“Feelings!” Doc snorted. “Feeling appealing while the dealing is reeling. Peeling apples and pealing bells. Congealing like the faint aroma of performing seals. If we don’t stop soon then my feeling is that blood will begin to gush from my mouth, nose, ears and eyes. I am certain sure that I can feel a nosebleed just waiting to begin.”
Krysty stopped and swung on him. “Doc, there’s plenty of times I find you real cute. This isn’t one of them. Ryan’s life is on the line and we need to get there. Faster we go, the better the chance. Even our fastest might be too fuckin’ slow. Right?”
Doc nodded, the moon glinting off his silvery hair. “Right,” he repeated. “I am properly chastened. Let us proceed and I shall strain every nerve and fiber to get there with you.”
RYAN HAD MANAGED to beat back yet another attack.
But now he had blood streaming down his cheeks and over his good eye from a score of bites from the mutie rodents. As he thrashed about, fighting them off with his right arm alone, there had been a sonorous crunching sound and he had felt himself starting to slip down, water splashing in his face.
The furry mice had retreated, leaving another forty or fifty of them crushed or drowned.
But Ryan had reached the end of the line.
When they came again he would have to let go of the room joist that he clung to with all his failing strength. Then the shifting, sliding rubble of the building would quickly tug him below the surface.
Of the optional ways of dying, he was now certain that it was going to be drowning.
“Better than being rat food,” he muttered.
“BANDITS CLEARED this place,” the Armorer said as they paused to look across what remained of Alma. “Must’ve been the endless rain put out all the fires and saved some of the houses off the main street.”
“Soon be dawn,” Mildred added, huddling her shoulders against a cool wind that was blowing up the valley from the north, behind them.