“Back in the wag,” he ordered. “Close up the roof vent and drop the ob-slits. Don’t bolt them shut, but keep
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ready by them. Any of the blaster ports not covered by someone had best be locked.”
“THAT’S close enough, Jak. Hold her here, but keep her running.”
They were about a hundred paces away, and Ryan squinted through the narrow gap in the wired glass at what looked to be a battered truck. The tires were gone, burned to sticky black tar, and all the windows were broken. The piles of charred wood heaped at the bottom of the vehi-cle still smoked, sending gray coils skyward.
The metal of the wag was rusted deep orange, even around the wheel hubs, and it had settled into the earth.
“Been ambushed?” J.B. asked as the others crowded forward for a look at the wreck.
“Looks that way. Still a lot of smoke. Best wait a while before we go past it. Anyone could be waiting for us.”
They sat and watched, the smoke slowly clearing. There were no bodies visible, which could mean the attackers had taken them prisoner. Or it might mean the wreck held roasted corpses.
“Want me to move on?” Jak asked, sounding bored to the teeth with hanging around.
“Whoever did that can’t be far off. Don’t forget Krysty said she saw someone spy-watching us. So they know we’re here.”
There was something about the wrecked truck that somehow didn’t sit right with Ryan, something out of place that nagged away at the back of his mind. But he couldn’t quite grab hold of the doubt and examine it.
“Okay,” he said. “Slow and easy. Double-care, friends.”
Ryan saw the two figures first, torn and ragged, stum-bling on the broken surface of the road. Their clothes were
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strips of blackened material and hung off their bodies. Their faces were smudged with dirt, oil and smoke, hair flattened against their heads. Their hands were empty.
“Stop, Ryan?” Jak asked, tongue flicking to lick his dry lips.
“Everyone looking? See anyone?”
The answers rattled in like machine-gun fire. Nobody could see anything threatening from their ob-slits.
“Stop,” he said. “Keep double-red alert. Nobody move or open anything.”
It was impossible to tell the sex of either of the people who had staggered to a halt in the center of the highway. They were both of average height and lightly built. As far as Ryan could see, neither had any obvious mutie defect.
As the wag stopped, both of them held up a hand, palm outward. Suddenly the one on the left collapsed like a doll, lying sprawled in the dirt.
“Survivors from an ambush?” Krysty said. “You going t’help ’em, lover?”
“Pull alongside them,” Ryan ordered. “On my side.” He wound down the window a couple of inches. He real-ized that the person still standing was a woman. The other was a male.
“Help us, mister. Got ‘bushed by muties. Came out and blocked road. Set us alight ‘fore we could do anything.”
The eyes were deep cornflower blue, the voice hoarse and ragged. Beneath all the dirt and oil Ryan guessed she might have been a good-looking woman. Her body was lean and muscular. One firm breast protruded through a tear in her jerkin.
“Help, mister!” moaned the man on the ground, head half-turned to stare up at Ryan. “We’ll die if’n you don’t.”
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“How d’you get out?” Ryan asked, still conscious of some incongruity about the wrecked wag nibbling at his gut.
“Luck, mister,” the woman replied. “There was a dozen of us. Tried to fight the dead-eyes in th’open. Too many of ’em. Chilled most of us and took a coupla kids with ’em. Me an’ Jem runned in the brush. They let us go.”
It made sense.
Ryan had lived long enough in the Deathlands to know that the one predictable thing about muties was that they were utterly unpredictable. And he’d seen enough am-bushes to know the way death came grinning out of a clear sky. They could be telling the truth about what hap-pened.
“You got blasters?”
The woman held her arms wide, spreading her legs in a parody of the classic sec-search position. The rags were so tattered and thin that he could clearly see she was naked underneath them-naked except for a wide leather belt.