The cannies’ plan was to drive a double wedge through the middle of the island, to split the companions’ force, giving themselves an opportunity to snatch up the children. Mildred and Krysty covered each of the girls with their own bodies, Uda shielded the baby with hers. To get at their intended prey, the cannies were going to have kill them all. And before that happened, Ryan vowed, Uda and the girls would get mercy bullets in the brain.
At the farthest reaches of his sight, almost lost amid the confusion of leaves and branches, which were pierced by narrow shafts of sunlight, Ryan glimpsed moving shadows. No matter how careful the cannies tried to be, they couldn’t enter the tightly packed stand of trees without making noise. As they dropped to their bellies and snaked into the bush, branches creaked, leaves rustled. The one-eyed man waited, likewise on his stomach, with the sweat rolling down his face and dripping off his chin. It was hotter than rad-blazes in among the willow roots, and so dusty it half choked him to draw breath.
A twig snapped not six feet in front of him.
Then the backlit silhouette of a head and shoulders popped up. The cannie scout was close enough to spit on.
To Ryan’s left, Doc rose slightly, the LeMat’s hammer already cocked. It was a fire-at-will situation, and that was just what Doc did. The massive pistol boomed in his hand, sending forth a yard-long tongue of flame and a boiling cloud of white smoke. At such close range, the blast from the pistol’s shotgun barrel was nothing short of awesome. Its load of steel-and-glass splinters scoured the flesh and sinew from the cannie, forehead to chin, and emptied his eye sockets, the heat flash turning his hair into a halo of fire.
At the LeMat’s roar, the other cannies abandoned stealth, jumped up from the ground and threw themselves headlong into the fray. Knowing their main chance was to overwhelm their quarry, they crashed through the walls of branches from both sides of the island at once, screaming at the tops of their lungs and firing their weapons. Unlike the high-powered, cased-cartridge blasters Ryan and his friends carried, the cannies’ black-powder pistols couldn’t shoot through tree limbs to reach their targets. No matter how they angled their shots, the maze of intervening tree limbs deflected the flight of their crossbow bolts. To bring knives and clubs into play they had to get within arm’s reach.
Which was something the companions were determined to avoid.
Ryan put a 9 mm slug dead center into an onrushing form. When the cannie didn’t even slow, he followed up with two more quick shots. The body fell forward, arms outstretched, splintering the frail branches and crashing in a cloud of dust to the ground. Right on the first cannie’s heels was another. Dean, who lay about ten feet to the left, blazed away with his 9 mm Browning Hi-Power as the second cannie leaped over his fallen comrade and drove onward through the bush. Though he hit the man in the stomach and chest, the 9 mm slugs seemed to have no stopping power. Ryan took a careful aim and shot the man through the face, which not so neatly did the trick.
The body had barely slammed to earth when the cannie behind jumped it and threw himself forward. They were cutting a path to their prey, paved by their own corpses. Krysty’s blaster cracked twice more, then the hammer snapped softly on a spent primer. Ryan raised up and fired three Parabellum rounds into the oncoming cannie’s neck and head. The man dropped to his knees, then his face, falling away to reveal yet another charging figure behind him.
Dean chilled that one, as well as the one that came after, while Krysty hurriedly dumped the spent shells from her revolver, then fumbled with the speed loader.
Before she had the live rounds chambered, Ryan had shot two more cannies, then the SIG’s slide locked back. He was out of ammo, too. He thumbed the release button, dumping the empty mag into the dirt. Through the rising clouds of dust, more cannies charged, a seemingly endless wave of them. The path of bodies now ended no more than fifteen feet from where he, Dean and Krysty lay.
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