The triple-stupe bastard still hadn’t figured it out.
Giggly Jane playfully poked at his protruding white potbelly with the sharpened point of the willow stick.
“Oh, we’re gonna chill you, all right,” Gore said. He moved closer with his knife held waist-high and poised to strike. ”But first we’re gonna gut you, from goobers to windpipe. After you bleed out, we’re gonna quarter-saw your pasty carcass and pack it along with us.”
Grub’s eyes bulged in horror.
Gore grinned at him. “What, you never heard of ‘trail mix’?”
Chapter Seven
Krysty matched, stride for stride, her black-haired lover’s brutal pace. The path they were taking, at the base of the towering bedrock ridge, was an obstacle course of boulder outcrops in shades of dusty brown and ocher. Some of the rocks were big enough to hide a crouching man; most were mere ankle breakers. No screen of trees shielded them from the sun, and it would be hours, yet, before it sank into the west. The only things growing in the thin desert soil were scattered, stunted bushes and widely spaced clumps of needle grass.
To her left, sweeping all the way to the southern horizon, was a vast depression in the earth. Though she could see for tens of miles into the bowl scoured out by three thermonuclear warheads, Krysty couldn’t see the far side of it. This was in part because of the sun’s blinding glare off the thermoglass, which looked to her like a frozen, storm-tossed sea, but mostly because the blast crater’s diameter was so enormous. At irregular intervals, individual pillars of smoke rose in the dead air, spiraling into the blue sky for thousands of feet. More than a century after the nuclear holocaust, Slakecity still burned. Isolated fires raged beneath the thermoglass skin, fueled by Gaia knew what, plumes of smoke steadily uncoiling from fractures and deep fissures in the surface.
Mildred had told her what this place had looked like before skydark. It was hard for Krysty to imagine a Great Salt Lake stretching off to the west, or a large city framed by a backdrop of hills. Mildred said there had been a huge temple with a gold statue atop it that could be seen for miles around. All that had once beenimmense lake, bracketing hills, glorious templewas gone, vaporized by the fury of man-made suns.
An unseen rock scraped against her ankle, then clattered noisily away. Krysty’s attention snapped back to the ground and its hazards. Because of the accumulated stresses of an already long and dangerous day, because of the distance she had already walked, because of the unrelenting sun and heat, it was getting more and more difficult for her to maintain a triple-red level of alert.
Ryan turned his head at the sound the rock made. Seeing that she was okay, he half smiled and turned back without slowing.
Krysty knew he wasn’t pushing himself and everyone else to exhaustion just because an angel-faced, seven-year-old girl had asked him to avenge her father’s murder. Ryan was far too much of a pragmatist, and far too good a leader, to fall for something like that.
Sure, he had a personal score to settle with the cannie who had stolen his Steyr SSG-70. In Deathlands, a person’s main blaster was like a strong right hand; it was the key to survival. It was something that was never willingly surrendered, and always retrieved, if possible.
And there was no forgetting the wounds suffered by his friends during the cannie attack. Krysty’s own shoulder and neck throbbed agonizingly in time with her footfalls, a reminder of how close she had come to death. But payback, with interest, for that had already had been dished out in the form of the seventeen enemy they had left chilled in the willow thicket.
A need for more retribution wasn’t the demon driving Ryan across the high plains. The one-eyed man wasn’t consumed with anger; he was steely calm. He had heard of Moonboy’s reputation as a “pure norm” ville, a place where Jak and Krysty were at risk of being summarily murdered, and yet he was resolved, as were Krysty and the rest of the companions, to take the risk and do what had to be done in order to hunt down and exterminate the remaining cannies.