Under different circumstances, Ryan would have most certainly gone the other way. If he and his friends hadn’t been hobbled by the farmers and their kids, their best option for survival would have been to light out for Perdition, to rely on foot speed and firepower as they had so many times before.
But they didn’t have that luxury this day.
A running firefight was out of the question with the burden of Uda and the little girls. They really only had one choice if they wanted to livethey had to quickly close ranks with the rear guard, then, with their force maximized, stand and fight.
No more gunshots split the air, the only sounds the tramp of their boots as they ran down the riverbed.
The lack of follow-up shotgun blasts didn’t bode well for Benjy. Though there were other possible explanations for his firing just the once, given the situationand his inexperiencenone of the alternatives was very likely. Cannies didn’t know the meaning of the word “mercy”; inhuman cruelties were part and parcel of their feasting.
If the dirt farmer was rad-blasted lucky, Ryan thought, he had already taken the last train west.
As was their custom, the companions didn’t waste breath speculating about the man’s fate; they proceeded in grim silence. Uda had to have figured it out for herself because she put forth an extra effort and, baby and all, somehow managed to keep up.
For Ryan and the others the only question that remained was, what had happened to Jak?
Chapter Four
Jak closed in on the scuffling, grunting animal sounds filtering up the arroyo. Those sounds told him Benjy was already beyond help. With his .357 Magnum Colt Python leading the way, Jak circled downwind. When he was one stream channel away from the ruckus, he crawled through a stand of willows and, keeping to the shadows, peered out through the screen of low branches.
A dozen cannies huddled in the middle of the stream bed, bending over and grabbing at something limp that lay in the sand. Arms pumping, the cannies were fighting like wild beasts over the last gobbets of flesh on Benjy’s skeleton.
One look at their weaponry told Jak he’d been right about then- lack of firepower. They had a few black-powder handblasters, a couple of homemade crossbows built out of auto leaf springs, but it was mostly knives and clubs. And it was with the knives that they were scraping away at what little was left of the dirt farmer.
All the noise didn’t seem to worry the cannies one bit. Maybe they didn’t figure their other potential victims would come back for a straggler. Or perhaps they were counting on the refugees to run like hell for Perdition? Any rate, Jak thought, they figured it was plenty safe enough to take the time to make a meal out of poor Benjy.
They were dead wrong.
Knowing that help was fast on the way, and not wanting any of the coldhearts to escape, Jak jumped from cover with the big handgun in a rock-solid two-handed grip. His abrupt entrance went barely noticed.
Only three of the cannies bothered to glance up from their feast, fresh blood smeared over their faces and hands. Perhaps their comrades had been made sluggish by the big meal they were finishing, or they were just too pig-greedy to pay attention. One of the three made a grab for the Colt Third Dragoon strapped to his hip, the cannie’s wet fingers slipping on the pistol grip; Before he got the .44’s barrel clear of leather, the .357 barked and bucked in Jak’s hands. The Magnum slug sailed through the flesh eater’s open mouth. His head snapped back, gory chin pointing skyward, and in the same instant, the rear of his skull exploded, spraying pink mist over his stunned fellows.
They didn’t stay stunned for long. A crossbow bolt harmlessly swooshed past Jak’s right ear. The teenager shifted his aim point and fired again. The cannibal archer sat hard in the sand, clutching at a small, dark hole along the midline of his chest, three inches below his Adam’s apple. Exiting his back, the soft-nosed Magnum slug had taken with it big chunks of his airway and spinal column. The through-and-through had sufficient force to bowl over another cannie, hitting him square in the head as he tried to rise from over Benjy’s corpse. There was no wet plume of flying brains this time, as there wasn’t enough velocity left in the slug to make an exit wound. Trapped inside the cannie’s skull, the flattened, razor-edged bullet ricocheted off the inside of that bony vault, zigzagging back and forth, cutting great swaths through his gray matter, and he dropped as if all his strings had been cut.