Chapter Three
if any of the stupes had owned a blaster, then Ryan’s group would have taken some chillings. Even a couple of long-barreled Kentucky muskets would have picked them off like hogs on ice. Even bows and arrows, or straight spears would have been lethal at such close range, against helpless targets. Hanging on the slimy logs of the bob-bing raft for their very lives, none of the six could even hold a blaster, let alone hope to hit anyone with one.
The muties hadn’t come prepared, and the only weap-ons they had were the stones from the narrow expanse of the beach.
At less than twenty paces, the jagged missiles were po-tentially lethal, but the rocking of the raft that prevented Ryan and his friends from wiping away the muties also made them difficult targets. Krysty caught a painful blow on the left elbow, and Doc was cut on the forehead, but most of the stones bounced harmlessly off the raft.
A whirling current made the cumbersome vessel pitch and spin, then it broke free and began to move faster down the Mohawk, away from the murder ous muties. As the raft steadied, J.B. stood up with his mini-Uzi, bal-ancing himself against Ryan.
“Want me to take some of the bastards out?” he asked. “Be easy.”
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“No. Leave ’em,” Ryan replied, peering behind them into the darkness. “Best take care when we come back to the gateway.”
“That’s too damned right,” Krysty agreed, rubbing at her damaged elbow.
The river gradually became wider, the raft floating sluggishly in its center. As it widened it also became calmer, with no hint of rapids. The banks were each a hundred paces away, leaving them safe from attack. The night wore on, and most of them managed to snatch a few hours’ sleep, though Ryan took the precaution of keep-ing one of them awake and on watch.
“Keep careful-keep alive,” had been one of the Trader’s rules of living.
Just before dawn they passed another of the squalid little riverside communities. From a distance it was hard to see, but Krysty, with her sharp eyesight, was certain that it wasn’t a nest of muties. Just double-poor folk dredging up an existence on the razor edge of poverty.
An arrow was fired from a screen of dull green pine trees, but it fell woefully short of the raft. On a narrow headland, daubed pink by the florid orange sunrise, the six were watched by a pack of hunting dogs, with slaver-ing jaws and a crust of yellow froth around their long in-cisors.
Gradually the sky lightened. Around eight in the morning one of the limitless thousands of chunks of space debris, dating from the ill-founded Star Wars defense system, finally reentered the atmosphere of the Earth. It burned up in a dazzling display of green-and-red pyro-technics, breaking up and melting as it ripped through the clouds in a fearsome explosion.
Doc Tanner took off his beloved stovepipe hat and wiped sweat from his forehead with his handkerchief,
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which was decorated with a swallow’s-eye design. His eyes dimmed as he rubbed absently at the dent in the crown of the hat. “There will always be that sort of memory. Mil-lenia will come and go and still that damnable filth will boil in the spatial maelstrom, falling now and again to remind us of the futility of it all. Oh, if only…” The sentence, unfinished, trailed behind him like a maiden’s hand in the rolling water.
“Look,” Lori said, shading her eyes with one hand and pointing ahead of them with the other. “Road across wa-ter.”
“It’s called bridge,” Jak told her, balancing easily against the pitching of the raft. The vessel seemed even lower in the river now, the clear waves seeping over the front of the logs.
It was a place where the river narrowed, the banks closing in on either side, rising steeply to wooded bluffs. The bridge seemed to be made out of cables or ropes, strung like some dizzy spiderweb, dangling low in its cen-ter, barely thirty feet above the level of the surging Mo-hawk.
“And we got us company,” J.B. said, unslinging the mini-Uzi from his shoulder.