Loosening his collar, J.B. squatted by the fire, savoring the warmth. “I double-checked our location on my minisextant. It’s slightly more than a hundred miles to Front Royal, north by northwest.”
“Right through the heart of some bad mutie territory,” Ryan noted, holding the cup in both hands to absorb its heat better. He took another sip. “We’ll never make it on foot.”
“So this little ville is our best bet,” Mildred said, grimacing as her foot painfully throbbed. She had slammed her ankle in the fall and received a bone bruise along with the sprain. Neither was life threatening, just painful.
“Our only bet,” Ryan corrected, looking over the others. They weren’t sick yet with the wet coughs, or starving, either. But their food was low, and hunting had been very poor in this area. The backpacks held some self-heats and jerked meat that hadn’t gone bad yet, maybe enough chow for a week. Shelter and food were top priorities. Both could be gotten at Front Royal, if his home ville was still standing.
Strange rumors had been plaguing them for months about trouble at the Virginia ville, but Ryan had discounted the news. His nephew, Nathan Freeman Cawdor, was a more than competent baron and could handle any problems that came his way. But in Utah, then California, clear across the continent, they had again heard tales of people fleeing the ville from the tyranny of a savage baron. Even simple stories got garbled over the long distance, but the third time Ryan heard the same tale, it was clear that something was horribly wrong in Virginia.
Mildred and Dean hadn’t been with them the last time they had gone this way. Just as well. He had faced many coldhearts and mad killers before, but his own brother Harvey was near the top of that shit list.
“If we can’t trade for a wag, why can’t we just walk? We could make a litter and drag Mildred along behind us,” Dean suggested, drawing in the dirt with a stick. “She wouldn’t slow us much.”
“We would never make it to Front Royal,” his father stated. “Autumn is here and in the hills the temperature drops to killing levels at night. Plus there are snow leopards and ratters, muties who live under icy ground. Bastard things attack only when you are standing right smack on top of them.”
“Frag them,” Jak snarled, a knife dropping from his sleeve and into his hand in a reflex action. He flipped the blade once, catching it by the handle and sliding it away again.
“Leopards, in this part of the world?” Mildred asked, arching an eyebrow. “You sure about that?”
“Don’t know if they are, but that’s what they’re called.” Ryan threw the dregs of his drink onto the fire, dampening the dying flames. “Come on, let’s get going before night falls and they close the gates until dawn. Another night out here and we won’t have to worry about muties.”
Throwing dirt on the campfire, the companions gathered their belongings and savored the tapped heat of the fire pit until the evening wind started to leech it away again. Climbing free, Ryan and the others checked their weapons and started deeper into the woods until they were a good quarter mile from their camp before angling down the hillside toward the road.
Behind them, something only vaguely shaped like a human stirred in the trees, then was gone.
Chapter Two
Zigzagging down the snowy side of the hill, the companions reached the road and spread out in a standard two-on-two defense pattern. The paved surface was badly cracked and full of holes, but still a lot easier to traverse than the rough ground. A rusty sign on a badly dented metal pole warned that no CB or cellular phones should be used for the next ten miles.
Taking a curve in the cracked road, Dean eagerly pointed as the irregular top of the shale hill became visible above the trees.
“We’re close, so be ready for trouble,” J.B. warned, unwrapping the tape from the handle of a grenade. “Just ’cause the sec men may greet us with a grin doesn’t mean they won’t kill us anyway.”