“Brilliant, love!” J.B. exclaimed, slapping Mildred on the arm. “Brilliant shot. The best.”
“Worst, John. I was aiming at the point of the arrow and hit the damned bow. Still.”
Below them, the frozen tableau had suddenly thawed.
Doc was fumbling for his Le Mat, yelling incoherent oaths at the bemused Japanese warrior, who threw away his shattered bow and stood staring in disbelief at the furious old man who was threatening to shoot him.
Ryan brought the Steyr to his shoulder again, but a dip in the land meant that Doc’s greater height lay between him and a clear shot at the lone enemy.
“Move it, Doc!” he bellowed.
But Doc was deaf to anything, his blood racing as he finally managed to draw the big Le Mat and thumb back on the spur hammer above the scattergun round.
The armored figure half drew his sword, then seemed to realize he had no chance at all.
As quickly as he’d appeared from the undergrowth, the man vanished in a swirl of leaves, the quiver of long arrows snagging for a moment on a low branch.
Doc fired the gold-engraved Le Mat, disappearing in a great cloud of powder smoke, ripping a chunk out of the bushes. Ryan thought that he heard a sharp cry of pain, but he couldn’t be absolutely certain.
“Gone,” Jak said.
“Did I hit him?” Doc called, trying to shift the hammer to the revolver barrel, with its nine.44s.
“Mebbe,” Ryan replied. “Come on back to the house, Doc, and we’ll get moving. Leave this quiet suburb of Forest Heights. Come on.”
“By the Three Kennedys! My heartfelt thanks to you, Dr. Wyeth, for some damnably pretty pistolry. If I ever set these glims on another of these Oriental demons, then I’ll. Had I not just relieved myself, I fear that I might easily have soiled my best linen.”
He bolstered the Le Mat and stooped to pick up the spent arrow. He snapped it across his knee, then gripping the two broken pieces and breaking them again, hurled the four sections of the samurai’s arrow into the bushes.
“Know the feeling, Doc,” Ryan said.
Chapter Ten
As they walked slowly through the bright morning, along deserted streets of houses, which became more ravaged the nearer they came to the lip of the gigantic crater, the main topic of conversation was the encounter with the pair of Japanese samurai warriors.
“Think that last one escaped, Dad?”
“Could be. But I thought I heard a yell when Doc shot after him.”
“I thought I heard it, too,” Krysty agreed.
“Where the dark night do they come from?” J.B. asked, puzzled. “I figure we’ve been just about all over Deathlands, and I never saw nor heard a word of them.”
“Until in the last few weeks.” Ryan kicked the gnawed body of a rat out of his path.
Doc had been quiet, walking along, absently tapping his cane. Now he stopped and faced Ryan.
“That wasn’t some young fool pretending to be a samurai, Ryan. I was as close to him as I am to you, and I would swear on the grave of my beloved Emily that he was the real article.” He hesitated. “Her grave. I have never thought where she might lie. When I was first a prisoner I tried to discover something of her later life. Where she might have been interred, but they watched me. Now all records have gone. Did she marry again, I wonder? A part of me hopes she stayed a widow, true to my memory. But my disappearance.she would never know why I was taken or where I went. I would not truly have wanted my Emily to pull in single harness for all that remained of her life.” He drew out his swallow’s-eye kerchief and blew his nose. “I wandered, dear friends. I am so sorry. I was saying I believed the samurai was genuine.”
“But there haven’t been men like that for two hundred years or more, Doc,” J.B. said.
“True, John Barrymore. True. First came the Totality Concept. A secret range of subdivided projects designed to insure the safety and power of the United States against all aggressors. A part of that was Overproject Whisper, which included the section known as Cerberus. Matter transfer was their main aim. But there was also Operation Chronos. The whitecoat murderers who time-trawled me here from my happy home.”