The club hit the turf, inches from his skull.
There wasn’t time to stand and try to draw either the panga or the SIG-Sauer. Any attempt would have opened him up to a terminal blow from the native.
If you couldn’t get safe away, then try to get in close. Trader’s advice for intimate combat situations was always valid, and Ryan followed it instinctively.
Even though he was still hovering on the right side of consciousness, he powered himself up from hands and knees and ducked inside the third swing of the club, taking a glancing blow into the ribs that made him gasp.
He grappled with the man, his fingers slipping on the oiled skin, immediately aware that his opponent was nearly as tall as he was, and felt, at first contact, at least as strong.
The native grunted something, dropping his useless club, trying to knee Ryan in the groin. A half turn parried it with his thigh, but there was a jar of pain.
Ryan tried to grab at his enemy’s genitals, but the man was quicker, moving sideways and drawing him off-balance, his own hands reaching up for a stranglehold.
To negate that attack, Ryan pressed himself closer, pushing his face against the native’s neck, sliding upward and managing to get his arms around the barrel chest. Both men were soaked in sweat, panting hard with the desperate effort of trying to kill without being killed.
Ryan could hardly breathe through his damaged throat, was unable to cry out. He tried to bite the man’s muscular neck, but the heavy coating of grease defeated him.
The bitten nails on his adversary’s stubby fingers were digging into his own neck, clamping off what remained of his breath. The man dipped, trying to lift Ryan off his feet, but the Anglo’s slightly greater height defeated him.
The necklace of claws and teeth was digging into Ryan’s cheek, and he could feel blood trickling down his face.
It occurred to him, like a shock of Sierra melt-water, that this nameless native from a stinking little village in the middle of nowhere was going to chill him.
They struggled face-to-face, Ryan not daring to relax his grip on the man’s body.
The moonlight was stark enough to show the flat features in sharpest detail, the patterned tattoo across the forehead and the streaks of black paint smeared over each cheek, and the eyes. The dark slits showed no emotion, no hatred or anger, and stared incuriously back at Ryan.
Acting on a primitive, atavistic impulse, Ryan opened his mouth, pressed his lips against the bony cavern of the socket and sucked as hard as be could.
For a moment he thought that there couldn’t possibly be enough suction.
But there was.
He felt the eye move, quivering with uncertain life, and the grip on his throat relaxed for a moment.
Ryan sucked harder, pushing his face in closer, the muscles in his neck and shoulders like cords, his jaw aching with the unbelievable pressure.
Once more he felt the slippery orb move, feeling moisture flood between his lips, the eye sliding from the socket like a boiled egg, entering his mouth.
The hands fell away from Ryan’s throat, and he drew in a shuddering gasp of air, pushing the native away and spitting out the eye, where it dangled on the native’s cheek.
The man opened his mouth and began to scream in mind-blanking horror at what had been done to him. His vision was shot. One eye showed the moonlit fence and the powerful figure of the Anglo, the other a swinging, confused picture of the grass and his own staggering feet.
Ryan gave a sickened groan, spitting to try to clear the bitter taste from his mouth. But while he took a couple of stumbling steps away, he reached for the cold butt of the 9 mm blaster, leveled it and squeezed the trigger.
The old baffle silencer had been through some hard times, and it didn’t do much to muffle the sharp crack of the explosion. Ryan felt the jolt run up his arm, past the elbow to the shoulder, the muzzle of the SIG-Sauer jerking upward.
But the bullet had already done its job, hitting the screaming native through the center of the chest, blowing his lungs apart, exiting and taking the splintered shards of four spinal vertebrae with it.