“Don’t chill it,” Ryan snapped over his shoulder. “The fucker’s mine. Mine!”
Breath hissing from its snapping jaws, the mutie shuf-fled forward, its good hand clawing at Ryan. Once caught
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in that embrace, it would be too late for any of the others to save him.
Ryan ducked and slashed at the thing’s legs, barely nicking it below the knee. But his thrust checked the monster’s advance, giving another moment of breathing space.
“Shoot it, Ryan,” Doc Tanner called in a reedy, trem-bling voice.
But Ryan’s temper had been touched, a temper that he had fought to control most of his adult life.
“Come on you fucking lizard! Come on, you rad-mutated bastard. Come and eat this blade.” He beck-oned to it with his left hand, watching for some sign of reaction, but the fishlike eyes remained blank and incu-rious. Even the amputation of one of its hands didn’t seem to have disturbed the mutie very much.
The fog was growing thicker.
The mutie slid closer, hand weaving, the elongated fin-gers opening and closing. Ryan flicked the heavy panga from hand to hand, feinting with the left and then the right. He was growing tired of the standoff.
“Fuck this,” he snarled, picking his moment to at-tack.
He fended off the snapping fingers and dealt a short, savage blow that hit the mutie across the side of the head. The broad blade of the panga gouged a chunk of bone from the upper jaw and snapped off a dozen teeth. Blood seeped from the wound, and the creature staggered back, arms flailing for balance. Ryan moved carefully after it, swinging the panga in a roundhouse blow that severed the end of the snuffling jaws, leaving oozing flesh and torn teeth.
“It’s going!” Lori whooped.
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“One more,” Ryan grated. He tried a last cut at it, but he was short and the blade hissed harmlessly a couple of inches away from the mutie’s throat.
The creature seemed to fall off the front of the raft in slow motion, arms waving for balance. Its ruined jaw hung open, and a pale red slime trickled out. The eyes fixed Ryan Cawdor with a basilisk stare.
To his amazement, the creature spoke, even as it was in the act of falling. In a clear, calm voice it said, “Into the long dark.”
It didn’t make much of a splash as it went into the Hudson, the body vanishing under the water. Though they kept a careful watch for many minutes, none of them saw the mutie reappear.
The raft flowed slowly southward in the direction of the Atlantic Ocean.
Chapter Eleven
around midnight the fog cleared away, like a curtain drawn at the opening of a play, revealing the sharp moonlit vista on both banks.
The raft floated on, like some stately royal barge, with Jak Lauren able to keep it easily on course with the steer-ing oar.
On the New Jersey shore they saw no signs of life among the waterlogged wharves and jetties of the old docks. It was obvious that the water level had risen since the old days, with less being taken out for power and in-dustry. Now the surface lapped over the rotting concrete of the walls.
The skyline of Manhattan changed as they moved ever so slowly toward the tip of the island and upper New York harbor.
Now, at last, there was evidence that the lower parts of some of the scrapers had survived even the megadeath nuking of 2001. Doc strained his sight and his memory to try to identify some of the towering hulks that dotted the weed-wrapped wilderness of the city. But there were no landmarks, nothing to judge by. Two monoliths, each at least a hundred feet high, jostled each other close to the southern spur of the vanished metropolis.
“The Trade Center. Has to be. I flew into New York myself, and I would deduce the year must have been just before the second millenium. We circled over Manhat-
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tan, just above low cloud. I saw the flat roofs of those great towers jutting above the bank of stratus, and there were tiny people walking on them. I swear that it was one of the most bizarre hallucinations that I have ever suf-fered from.”