As they walked the last few yards, they disturbed more of the disgusting predators, sending them flapping heavily away from their fresh feast.
The corpses lay everywhere, scattered like discarded toys, arms and legs tangled in heaps. The two old women were at the edge of the trees, naked, legs spread obscenely wide.
“Two younger women brought water not here,” Jak said. “Taken them.”
“All the slavers?” Doc cleared his throat, speaking in a hushed whisper. “Was it all of them, friend Lauren?”
Jak had been looking at the trampled tracks in the moist clay below the dam. “No, Doc. Three or four. Scouts. Could still be close. Some these wounds still bleeding.”
“I see that.”
It was a pathetic sight. One or two of the older boys had been gunned down, but most of the rest looked as if they’d been herded together, then had their throats slit like helpless cattle. There were seventeen dead children, all told.
Doc lowered his head. “I was not angry since I came to France until this instant,” he muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing, Jak, nothing. The impotent rambling of a helpless and useless old man.”
The albino stopped suddenly, head on one side, like a bird. “Listen.”
Doc dabbed the tears from his gnarled cheeks and screwed up his eyes as though it might help him to listen better.
The albino had drawn his big satin-finish Colt Python. “Close,” he breathed, pointing with the six-inch barrel into the undergrowth to their right.
He began to move, as light as a hunting panther, Doc following him, trying to keep quiet, though his knee joints creaked like rusted hinges.
Even Doc could see that they were following a trail of broken bushes and flattened grass. There was a length of bright dyed material hanging on a snapped twig that he recognized as having been worn by one of the food-bearing women.
Jak held up a hand, stopping with one foot raised, setting it gently to the ground. He beckoned Doc nearer, putting his mouth close to the old man’s ear.
“Very close. See big tree, reddish trunk? Yeah? Behind that. We’re goin’ to take them, Doc. You ready?”
Doc nodded, face set like granite at the prospect of instant revenge for the mindless, brutish massacre.
They both hesitated as they heard an unmistakable sound from ahead of them, a short, agonized cry, followed by the pattering of what could only be blood, then the drowning, gargling noise of a death rattle. And a burst of harsh laughter.
Without a moment’s thought, Doc pushed by the teenager, striding around the tree, blaster ready.
There were four slavers, four swarthy white men, with long, greasy hair, all wearing shirts and pants of stained once-white cotton. Two of them were busily pulling up their pants as Doc raged into sight. There was a dead woman from the village lying huddled and naked in the fetal position, her throat opened from ear to ear, blood streaking her thighs.
There was another naked young woman, blood pumping slowly from the severed artery at the side of her neck. Her feet were kicking as though they were tangled in blankets, and her arms were out straight, the fingers clawing at the damp mud, digging long furrows in her dying spasm.
” Qu ?” one of the men said curiously, his murderous little rat’s brain taking time to work out that the appearance of the silver-haired old man holding a cannon of a blaster could be a danger to them.
Doc squeezed the trigger on the Le Mat.
The scattergun charge starred out across the fifteen feet or so that separated him from the group of slavers.
It hit the nearest slaver in the stomach, almost cutting him in two. He staggered backward as his entrails slopped out of the gaping hole in his stomach, tumbling in yellowish coils about his bare feet.
The man tried to scream but it was way too late, and he went soundlessly down into the dark.
Jak’s chosen weapons were his beloved throwing knives, honed and balanced to perfection. But this was a time for the .357 Python.
The slim teenager leveled the big handblaster and fired twice, shooting past Doc.