As Moonboy corkscrewed far below, an awful dizziness hit him. He shut his eye; it was either that or throw up. But before he did, he glimpsed the black expanse of the aircraft’s belly above him, and his ankle trapped in some kind of clamp. It was all that kept him from falling to his death.
Then the plane dropped like a stone with him hanging there, helpless, every muscle in his body clenched.
Six feet above the center of Moonboy’s main street, the aircraft stopped and hovered. With a clack, the claw around his ankle snapped open, and Ryan fell unceremoniously to the dirt. The propwash lashed his back as the plane turned away and landed on the trailer.
When he sat up, black-armor-clad figures had him surrounded. He stared down the muzzles of their tri-barreled blasters, then looked from visor to visor, trying to make out the faces behind them. All Ryan saw was his own reflection.
One of the creatures in black gestured at him with its blaster. “Stand up,” it said.
The thing spoke English, but its voice was rad-blasted strange, metallic and disembodied.
As Ryan obeyed the command and rose to his feet, a door slid open in the side of the aircraft and the pilot exited, hopping down to the road and walking purposefully toward him. The cannie who’d stolen his longblaster was sitting by the ruined curb on the other side of the street. Beside him was a squat black cube on wheels. The skin of his face under the salt-and-pepper beard stubble looked sickly gray-green. Perhaps, Ryan thought, because his severed right hand was sticking up out of the top of the cube, as if it were waving goodbye. The cannie cradled the scorched stump of his right arm to his chest. The treasured Steyr SSG-70 stood leaning against a piece of corrugated steel, part of a collapsed porch roof.
“I’m not part of that cannie bastard’s crew,” Ryan said, hooking a thumb over his shoulder at the cannie as the pilot stepped up. “Came here to chill him myself. I have no grudge against any of you.”
Ryan didn’t expect instant amnesty. He was just trying to draw them out of their black shells, looking for an edge, something he could use. He got no response.
The pilot who faced him was the biggest of the lot. Bigger than Ryan, too. No telling how much of it was armor, of course. Irritated by the silence, determined to show no weakness, the one-eyed man went nose to visor with him.
“Can you hear me in there?” Ryan shouted at his own reflection. “Or are you a bunch of rad-blasted dimmies?”
“This one’s quite a specimen,” said a scratchy, metallic voice behind him. “Love the eye patch.”
“He came after the assault gyro with nothing but a great big knife,” the pilot said.
Ryan winced at their peals of laughter, laughter grated through stainless steel. It dawned on him that they all had some kind of amplification system for external communication. “I’m guessing you people aren’t from around these parts.” he said dryly.
The pilot pointed to the cannie. “Over there.”
As he was escorted across the street, Ryan checked out the stubby blasters they carried. He’d never seen their like before. Why three barrels? he asked himself. Unlike Doc’s LeMat, all the muzzles seemed to be the same diameter. So what was the point of having three of them if they all fired the same thing? It looked like the barrels were fed from the blocky-looking mag near the stock’s buttplate, so they weren’t a triad of single-shot breeches, same way a side-by-side shotgun was. He also noticed they had two triggers, instead of one.
Or instead of three.
Ryan wondered if he was going to live long enough to figure it out.
The cannie looked mighty worried as they approached. He shrank against the curb, cowering like a kicked dog.
“How did Reverend Gore check out?” the pilot asked.
“He’s a wash,” the one with the higher-pitched voice replied. “Standard tests show he’s infected with a Shadow variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob.”
“Ice Nine,” the pilot said grimly. He leaned over the huddled cannibal. “With the ugly shit you’ve got in your head,” he said, “we can’t even use you for fertilizer.”