The sound of the dogs was already beginning to close in on them with frightening speed.
“Water fuck “em,” Jak said, looking to their left where there was a narrow stream meandering gently between low, muddied banks.
“Not these bastards. Mutie bred. Take the scent out of the air as well as the ground.”
“When hounds are on a trail, you can distract them with blood. Any blood’ll turn them,” J.B. suggested.
Ryan nodded, gripping the hilt of his knife. “Yeah. That’s my thinking.”
The Oxbow Loop was a wilderness of tall trees and stunted bushes with patches of deep swamp and tangling willows. There were a few clearings where the sun lanced through with a startling brightness that made you blink at it-and acres of leprous earth where only spear grass grew. Streams divided and subdivided the land. No birds ever seemed to fly above the Oxbow Loop, and no crea-tures scurried there. Even as a child, Ryan had known it as an eerie place, tainted with death. Renegades had been driven there to die for several generations, and there were handed-down tales of runaway slaves being hunted to their lonely and fearful deaths in the Oxbow Loop dur-ing the Civil War.
272
Ryan led the others at a fast pace, moving to where he’d once had a hiding place, a den where he would come when the bullying of Harvey became too much to bear. No-body ever found it. Nobody ever tracked him into the wilderness by the Sorrow. He knew that the wind and the rain would have torn down his woven brushwood secret, but the place was good for a stand.
The dogs would split up into smaller hunting units, and the terrain would make it impossible for them to main-tain close contact. The biggest and strongest animals would be in the lead, the rest strung out behind them.
Not far from the gas store, where a smaller stream looped in a near-circle, was a steep bank with several stately live oaks nearby, places a man with a knife could turn and dodge and protect his back against a charging dog.
They were nearly there. The howling was very close, so close that they could distinguish the echoing sound of in-dividual animals. One, in particular, was racing ahead, seeming less than a hundred paces from them.
Jak looked at Ryan. “Can hear horse. Sec man?”
“Could be. Wanna go for him?”
The albino boy, face streaked with gray mud, hair plaited with dirt, nodded. “Get blaster. Be help. You take dogs.”
Ryan patted him on the shoulder, watching the lad as he vanished into the undergrowth, wriggling through invisi-ble gaps. Raised in the bayous of Louisiana, this was like home to Jak.
“I’ll take the first one. J.B., you gut the second. Krysty, pick up what’s left. Make it quick and ugly. Put ’em down and put ’em out.”
273
They stood in a loose semicircle, backs against the earth bank, tall trees on either side to give some measure of protection on their flanks.
“Fireblast!” Ryan exclaimed as the pack leader burst over a rotting stump of a decayed walnut tree.
The fragmented sunlight dappled the animal’s sleek coat like scattered gold. The crossbreed frothed at the muzzle, teeth bared. Its eyes glowed like embers and it howled as it sighted its prey, far louder than the baying sound as it had tracked them down.
“Mine,” Ryan said, taking a half step forward. He didn’t have time to say more.
The dog was enormous, its sides streaked with innu-merable old scars. Its muzzle was long and narrow, the jaws wide. The top of its lean head came higher than a man’s waist, and its weight must have been close to 120 pounds.
Dogs like that were trained to go either for the throat or for the genitals. Ryan had seen sec dogs bred to take an intruder’s arm and hold him. Not the Cawdor pack. They were trained only to hunt and to kill.
It went for his groin.
Ryan half turned, protecting his testicles from the foaming teeth. He used the dagger almost like a hammer, ramming it with all his power at the side of the animal’s muscular neck.