“Good job you called out the warning, Mildred,” J.B. said, putting an arm around her shoulders. “Otherwise I’d have blasted the snake and the girl would’ve been crushed.”
“The young lady in question finds that the agony is somewhat abated. And she is feeling a little better.” Doc was leading Rain Flower toward them. She was shaking, and blood seeped from under the nails of her right hand. Despite the darkness of her skin, it was all too easy to make out the number of purple bruises rising on arms, legs and body.
Mildred went to her, smiling, hands spread. “You all right, child?” she asked.
“Hurts all of me.” But she brushed past Mildred as though she weren’t there, making her way to where Jak was standing, kneeling and touching her forehead to the trampled grass. “Only god would be filled with heart blood.” She hesitated, struggling for the word she wanted. “Courage.”
“Shit,” the teenager muttered. “Oh, shit!”
THIS TIME AROUND Rain Flower wasn’t that worried about the ghosts of the long-dead Americans that were supposed to haunt the base. She followed close behind Jak, actually setting her own bare feet into the marks left by his combat boots. Her eyes never left him.
The cataclysmic battle with the giant mutie python seemed to have scared away most of the wildlife from the area, with the exception of the beautiful butterflies that proliferated everywhere in the jungle. Many of them had already caught the smell of death from the snake and were fluttering eagerly about it, covering the bleeding wounds to its eyes and head in a shroud of living, iridescent color.
There was a second ruined helicopter lying at the edge of the trees, its rotors all smashed. “Bell Kiowa,” J.B. said. “Light observation machine.”
“Virtually all of the buildings of the predark base were totally wrecked, many showing signs of mortar fire or the effects of hi-ex.”
“Wasting time here,” Jak said.
“Then perhaps we could return to the village,” Doc suggested. “My throat is in a similar condition to a sand snake’s ass. Pardon my French, ladies.”
Ryan had been looking around, worried at the silence in the green hell beyond the limits of the complex. But the noises of the forest were creeping back, reassuring him that there was no immediately threatening enemy.
“There’s the big building over at the far side. We’ll give that the once-over and then leave it be.”
J.B. was delighted to have found the rotted remnants of a Russkie pistol, a 9 mm Makarov lying under a pile of glass from a shattered window.
“Proves there was a firefight,” he said.
The biggest of the buildingswell over a hundred and fifty feet in length and more than half that in widthwas also in the best condition. It had a roof, and all four walls were still standing, though virtually every window had been smashed.
The double sec doors hung from a single hinge, and as Ryan pushed at them, they fell down with a deafening clatter, sending an armadillo scuttling from its shelter just inside the main entrance hall.
Dean leveled his blaster at it, just controlling himself in time. “Thought it was one of the ghosts,” he said, grinning nervously at his father.
The bullet scars on the walls were even more noticeable here, prompting Ryan to wonder whether this might have been a last-stand situation for the American defenders of the base. It was hardly likely that frontline, top-grade troops would have been stuck out here in the jungle, and an attack by ace-on-the-line Ruskies had to have come as a lethal shock.
Rain Flower was deeply unhappy in the big building. “Home of ghosts,” she moaned, teeth chattering, eyes darting nervously all around her. “No man walk here.”
It looked as if the animal predators shared her unease. Or, more likely, the sec doors had been enough of a barrier to keep them out, because there were still several corpses in the last part of the complex.
“American and Ruskies,” J.B. pronounced, kneeling beside one dried bundle of sticks and grinning teeth in rags of uniform. The corpses lay here and there, most still clutching rusted blasters.