A staccato crackle of gunfire froze him. It was from a single blaster, inside the ville’s perimeter. There was still at least one survivor. He crossed the courtyard, homing in on the source of the sound.
When he tried the front door of the shabby hut, it wouldn’t open, even to a full-force kick. It was heavily barred from the inside. Without a thought he climbed the hut’s front wall, as quick as a lizard, scampering up onto the thatched roof. He peered down through the ragged hole that had been torn in the thatch. The room
below him was lit by rows of guttering candles, illuminating several corpses around a long table.
Ryan dropped twenty-five feet, landing softly on the killing floor.
Three adults and four children lay facedown in the middle of their evening meal. He sniffed at one of the crude wooden bowls, recognizing boiled mashed roots, boiled mashed beans, boiled prickly leaves. It was a gray-green, tasteless last supper. The rough-hewn table was puddled with the blood of the seven diners. From the eye sockets up, the tops of their skulls had been ripped off, the contents plundered, splattered and smeared over the clay-colored interior walls. Their arms and legs were cracked and twisted into impossible positions, their necks grotesquely bent.
The sweet stench of gore suffused the warm, moist air, and made it even harder for Ryan to breathe. A surge of internal heat, more powerful than anything he had yet felt, slammed him. And he had the sudden urge to throw himself into the pool of blood spreading across the tamped earth floor, the urge to roll and wallow in it. At some deeply submerged level of mind, Ryan recognized the alien nature of the thought and recoiled. Though he tried, he couldn’t stop himself from kneeling and touching the spilled blood. Nor could he stop himself from feeling disappointment when he realized it had already gone cold.
He examined the floor. Multiple bloody footprints led away from the red pool. And then he caught a faint whiff of a familiar, fishy odor: kin on the hunt
His strange new body’s response was automatic. Once more the strangely pleasurable mewling sound erupted from his throat. As it did, a horrendous, sustained burst of gunfire rang out, this time so close it seemed to shake the hut’s walls. Ryan leaped over the blood and through the yawning doorway beyond. It opened onto a cramped, dark room where rude straw pallets were spread out on the ground. At one end of the room a door to the outside stood ajar. He peered cautiously around the jamb. The doorway looked onto a small lane that separated the ragged line of huts. Lit by the nearby burning rooftops, the dirt track lay heaped with still-thrashing white bodies: his kin tangled up in yards of their own spilled bowels.
Only one creature remained standing in the narrow lane.
The enemy.
A tall, rangy and powerfully built man bent over a fresh corpse, trying to pry the first six inches of a long-bladed knife from the center of its bony chest. With his back to Ryan, the black-haired foe braced the sole of his boot on the dead face while he savagely levered the knife handle back and forth.
The sight sent a wave of righteous hatred and rage coursing through Ryan’s blood. Under the hate and the rage-and more terrible than either-he felt a surge of pure delight, delight in what he knew to be his own vastly superior physical strength, delight in the destruction he was about to visit upon the unwary man.
In a single, catlike bound, he crossed the space
between the doorway and his target. He launched himself with his arms outstretched, and when he slammed onto the enemy’s back, he caught hold and drove him forward, but not down as he had planned. With a combination of balance and strength, the man managed to keep his feet despite the sudden impact. Ryan’s arms whipped in a blur, hands tearing at the broad shoulders. Cloth gave way, presenting him with bare, warm skin. Ryan snatched hold and pulled as hard as he could. The skin stretched and stretched until it could stretch no more, and then it began to rip loose from the dense layers of muscle underneath.