James Axler – Deathlands

The blasting powder triggered the igniter mix of barium and magnesium. There was a brilliant flash of light from the first bomb, brighter than the noon sun, followed by another and another, as each mine in the row went off.

Ryan waited.

The dazzling display completed the spooking of the horses. Without exception they kicked and reared, crying out like gelded men, high and thin. Virtually all of the riders were unseated, including Bivar, though many struggled to hang on to the reins of their terrified mounts.

But the bombs were only halfway done.

The igniter mixture finally caught the main charge of aluminum and ironthe thermite mixture.

It began to burn at more than five hundred degrees centigrade, hot enough to set fire to the earth itself.

The line of fires, bubbling like the heart of Hell, completed the rout of the slavers.

The horses ran, blind with fear, knocking into walls, one or two dragging their riders with them, leaving them scattered around the village like broken marionettes, bloody, bruised and fractured.

A fresh volley of bullets, arrows and tiny poisoned darts flooded in against the dozen or so survivors, taking out half of them.

Most were on their knees, holding up their hands in surrender, wreathed in the blinding smoke from the thermite bombs. Itzcoatl shouted above the bedlam, ordering a cease-fire.

Ryan holstered his SIG-Sauer and began to pick his way through the dead and dying men and animals, eventually deciding to walk back along the rear of the huts, close to the perimeter fence.

Where he was attacked by Rodrigo Bivar.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Bivar lunged out of the beaded back door of one of the smaller huts, holding his Smith amp; Wesson 66 in his right hand. He was limping heavily from his wound, clothes blackened with thermite smoke, crimson spotting his shirt and face, matting his long black hair. His eyes were so wide and blood veined that it looked as if they were about to burst from their sockets, and his mouth sagged open.

“Bastard!” he croaked, firing twice at Ryan.

The range was less than fifteen feet, but the slaver was off-balance, in the last stages of desperate exhaustion. Both bullets missed.

Ryan was in the act of drawing his own handblaster when the slaver chief threw his empty Combat Magnum at him, two pounds of blued steel.

Ironically his aim was much better with the empty blaster than with the full one, and it struck Ryan just below the elbow on the right arm.

The pain was so sharp that Ryan’s first guess was that one of the bones was broken, and his fingers opened in a neural spasm, dropping his blaster at his feet.

Bivar was quick, faster than a man on the ragged edge of defeat had any right to be.

Even before Ryan’s SIG-Sauer hit the dirt, he was closing in, holding a black-hilted switchblade in his right hand, lunging toward the one-eyed man’s belly.

Ryan backed away, reaching clumsily with his left hand for the taped hilt of the panga, drawing it just in time to parry a second attack.

“You kill my men, you fuck bastard,” the swarthy man panted, his lips peeled back off his teeth in a lupine grin. “I get over fence and way into trees. And leave you with your guts spilled!”

Ryan didn’t waste time, energy or concentration on responding. One of the truest things Trader ever said was that if you came to talk, then you talked. But if you came to fight, then you got on with it.

The slim-bladed knife danced out again, as fast as a desert rattler, and Ryan was just able to parry it with the clumsier eighteen-inch blade of the heavy cleaver. He had trained himself to shoot and fight left-handed, but he was only too aware of his limitations.

He was conscious of the background noise of the firefight subsiding around the front of the huts, but his universe had narrowed to a couple of yards of worn grass and the silver point of Bivar’s knife.

The slaver was breathing hard, his breath stinking of wild onions, fogging the air between them. But his eyes were like a cornered shithouse rat, fiery and crazed.