The wolves were among the worst.
Something moved in the bushes to his right, and he leveled the G-12, finger tightening on the trigger. The gun was set on triple-burst, ready to cough out three rounds in a fraction of a second. His eye caught a slithery, gleaming animal, larger than an otter, scurrying across the damp boulders, making for the foaming edge of the Mo-hawk. It paused and stared directly at him, seemingly fearless. Its eyes were deep-set, glittering like bright em-eralds, and its jaw hung open in a snarl of manic ferocity. Ryan held the rifle steady, ready to smear the creature into rags of bone and blood. But it turned its head contemp-tuously away and slipped silently into the water.
Only in the second it disappeared from sight did Ryan notice that the animal had six legs, tipped with claws like ivory daggers.
“If we could find a boat of some type, we could sail down to where the Mohawk meets the Hudson, just above Troy, and thence we could navigate clear to New York it-self,” Doc said, joining Ryan on the shore of the river.
“If we could find a copter and get some gas for it, we could fly to Front Royal and never get our damned feet wet,” Ryan retorted.
They followed the water, heading south, picking their way along indistinct paths. Around noon Ryan called a halt for them to take a drink from the widening river and
24
to open up a self-heat each. During the afternoon there was a rain shower that persisted, becoming a steady, dull drizzle that quickly soaked them all to the skin.
“Take us a year to reach Newyork if’n we don’t find us some transport,” J.B. said, looking up through the ceaseless rain to the west, where the sky was darkening. “Be night in an hour.”
“Wait!”
They all stopped to look at Krysty, who stood with an expression of concentration on her face. Her saturated hair clung to her shoulders like a fiery, frightened ani-mal.
“What? “Ryan asked.
“By Gaia, it’s smoke! I can smell woodsmoke.”
Ryan held his head up, ignoring the teeming rain that dripped over his face and ran behind the black patch that covered his ruined left eye. He sniffed at the air.
“Yeah, I can smell it, too. Wet weather keeps it low down. Can’t be more’n a mile off.”
“I will be liking getting warm,” Lori said, wiping a strand of sodden yellow hair from her face.
“Not just warm,” Jak said. “Fire means people. And in a place like this, people means boats.”
“People also means guards and mebbe some chilling to be done. So, step cautious.” Ryan led them on again, ever watchful.
it was a ragtag community of double-poor muties. Mud huts, covered in rough branches, had been built around a hewn clearing at the edge of the Mohawk. A large fire of green wood smoldered in the middle of the huts, and a rusty iron caldron was suspended over it. From the smell that bubbled up from the pot, it was some kind of fish stew.
25
The villagers were all small, not one of them topping five feet. Most were heavily muscled and had shaggy hair that hung over low foreheads. Their jaws jutted out, and they seemed to communicate in a language that consisted mainly of grunts.
They wore jerkins and breeches of a sackcloth, dyed dark green and russet yellow. It was difficult to tell the sexes apart. While Ryan and the others watched from the shadows at the edge of the forest, one of them came to pass water only a few yards from them. Krysty, with her sensitive nose, could easily catch the rancid stench of sweat and grease from the mutie’s body. The sickle moon that swooped over the hills behind them also revealed to the watching six that the mutie was grotesquely sexually endowed.
J.B. caught Ryan’s hand, pointing urgently beyond the farthest of the tumbledown houses. Hauled up above the level of the river was a crude raft. It was from hewn logs, bound with creepers and was about eight feet square. A stump of mast at its center and a steering oak, hacked from a single long branch, were the only signs that it might be maneuverable.