The animals that scampered from the long grass looked like wild boars, but they were less than ten inches in height, with tiny curling tusks and button-bright little eyes, their hooves twinkling across the dry earth.
“Shoot them!” Mashashige called, waving his long sword above his head.
There was a crackle of fire, and the ground erupted into fountains of dust and torn turf, all around the herd of tiny wild pigs. Several were hit, blown apart by the powerful ammunition of the sec men.
Ryan had unslung his Steyr again, but he held his fire, unwilling to take part in a massacre. None of the outlanders shot at the miniature boars.
The standard of marksmanship of the Japanese was amazingly poor, considering the ever-shortening range! and the large number of little animals. There were still about a dozen of them alive, squeaking excitedly, dodging and weaving through the hail of lead. The nearest of them was closing fast, less than thirty yards from Ryan.
“Take part in sport, gaijin !” Yashimoto yelled, his face flushed, a thread of spittle dribbling from his distorted mouth.
“Unsporting,” Doc grunted.
There was another round of shooting, but the creatures were now so close that the bullets were more of a threat to the huntsmen. The nearest of them was crying out like a baby, a long weal from a bullet graze seeping blood through its delicate golden fur.
It headed straight for Ryan.
Yashimoto swung the rifle around, dangerously close to the one-eyed man, who responded calmly by leveling the SIG-Sauer at the head of the samurai.
“No careless mistakes,” Ryan grated, and Yashimoto looked away, dropping the muzzle of the blaster.
The terrified little boar reached Ryan and rubbed itself against his leg, cowering and trembling. He stooped and patted it, his fingers brushing the wickedly curved tusks.
It wasn’t that much of a surprise to find that they were made of pliable plastic, stapled to the sides of the wretched animal’s skull.
The odd business of the sound of bolts and the lurking sec men all made sense now.
“They were trapped,” Ryan said, straightening and looking at Mashashige. “Poor little bastards that you caught or bred and tried to make them look dangerous. About as dangerous as a field mouse! Then your men let them go so you could blast them to hell and back and call it sport!”
“We have no natural animals here,” the shogun said. “It was best we can do.”
“Well, it was a long way shy of being good enough,” Ryan said, kneeling to pat the little animal. Several of the surviving mutie creatures had flocked to the foreigners, rubbing against their legs, making a strange, contented purring noise.
“If you move out of way, we can finish the hunting,” Hideyoshi said.
Mildred had her hand on the butt of the ZKR 551, her gaze narrowed with anger. “First man touches the trigger of his blaster gets a .38 smack through the middle of his forehead,” she warned, her voice as cold as pack-ice.
“They are born to die,” the shogun said, shaking his head in bewilderment. “Their lives are not worth a grain of dust. Better they die as they are meant to.”
“Like I said, first man harms one of them gets to be lying on his back looking at the sky.”
As she spoke, Mildred gazed around, realizing that the bright sun had vanished, as though a black cloud had passed over its face.
Ryan also looked up, followed by all of the others, at the unnatural darkness that had come sweeping in over the hunting park.
“Fireblast!” he whispered.
It was like watching a giant’s fist, clenched and angry, sweeping its way across the summery sky. The sun had vanished, and an unnatural stillness had fallen over the land. Not a breath of wind touched the feathery top branches of the trees.
Yet the cloud was swooping fast toward them, seeming to possess a seething, malignant life of its own.
The little piglets cowered and whimpered, bellies against the dirt.
“The plague of death,” Mashashige whispered, his face ashen. “Plague of death.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“What?” Jak said. “Not storm?”
It was J.B. among the outlanders who spotted first what the cloud was.
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