It was a no-go.
Watching the mutie general exhort his army, Ryan felt a surge of blind fury. It occurred to him that he didn’t want to chill the bastard with a long-distance bullet, anyway. He wanted to kill him up close, hand to hand. He wanted to cut off his massive bald head and wash his hands in the blood that jetted from the neck stump, to drink from it like a mountain spring.
Ryan grit his teeth and shook off the hideous image. It wasn’t his, he told himself. It was alien, intrusive,
vile. He lowered the Steyr from his shoulder and crawled back to join the others.
“It can’t be done,” he told them. “The shot’s clear, but he’s moving around too much. I’ll never hit him at this distance. And when I miss, all those stickles down there are going to be chasing after us. They’ll run us down, too. You can count on that”
“You’ve got to chill the bastard,” Mildred hissed. “We may never get another chance.”
The look on her face said she was deadly serious.
“No, it’s too risky,” Ryan said. “And we can’t wait around here for a better opportunity. It’s going to be hard enough to get around them and then stay ahead of them all the way to the ville. We’ve got to go now, while they’re stopped. It’s our only chance.”
He could see that Mildred wanted to argue, but she didn’t say another word. They moved in silence behind the line of mutated trees, following the curve of the hillside past the legion of homicidal monsters.
FOUR HOURS LATER, when they were halfway to Willie ville, Ryan called for a much-needed rest break. He led them up a ramp and onto a still-standing overpass. From that vantage point they watched the highway behind them while they shared a few cold MREs-military ready eats-J.B. had picked up in the redoubt’s
armory.
After a few minutes Mildred moved beside Ryan and said, “That problem I mentioned back in the redoubt…”
“Uh-huh.”
“This seems as good a time as any to explain what I meant” She waved for the others to come closer, “Everyone better hear this. It’s important.”
Ryan screwed the cap back on his water bag. “Go ahead,” he said.
“Was there anything different about our last jump?” Mildred asked them all.
“You mean the bad dreams?” J.B. said.
“Partly.”
“The stickles using the mat-trans system?” Krysty said.
“Partly.”
“My dear Dr. Wyeth, is this some manner of guessing game?” Doc asked. “I do love a turn at charades.”
Mildred scowled at the old man. “Let me put it another way,” she said. “Whenever we make a jump, our destination is usually fixed by the network’s preset controls. Say we use a mat-trans chamber in Idaho. We assume it always takes us to Louisiana. Hie Louisiana chamber will always take us back to Idaho if we use the LD button. To jump somewhere else, we have to find another redoubt and another gateway, and then we can only go forward and back between two predetermined points. We have no control over where the gateways send us.”
“If that’s supposed to be news,” Ryan said, “it isn’t”
“Hear me out. I believe the system wasn’t meant to work that way. The designers were a lot of things, but
they weren’t stupid. Think about it. They wouldn’t make a mat-trans traveler in New York City jump to Brazil, then search the jungle for another redoubt, in order to go to Boston. There has to be a way to program the individual gateways for multiple destinations.”
“So what’s your point, Millie?” J.B. asked.
“So, my friend,” Mildred said, “the stickies have done just that. Don’t ask me how, but they have. How else could they end up in the same chamber with us? We know they came from a different starting point.”
“Couldn’t two gateways be autoprogrammed to transfer matter to the same destination?” Ryan suggested.
“In all the jumps we’ve made,” Mildred said, “we’ve hardly ever gone from a new gateway to a place we’ve been before.”
“She’s right,” J.B. agreed.
“You’re saying the stickies know something we don’t about mat-trans,” Ryan said.