But the poor woman was wild-eyed with fear. If anything, her cries got louder.
Grub took hold of her face, squeezing her jaws shut, and gave her a hard shove that sent her stumbling backward onto the mattress. As she scrambled to take cover beneath it, he pulled on his torn desert camouflage BDUs and raggedy jungle boots.
“Good thinking,” he said to the human-sized lump under the middle of the pallet. ‘ ‘They sure as shit won’t find you there.”
Realizing the slut was in no position to complain, Grub picked up the Roadmaster hubcap on his way out the door.
Chapter Two
The sun’s sweltering heat made the empty eyesocket beneath Ryan Cawdor’s black patch itch. He shut his one good eye and listened. Hard.
Crouched in the shade of the stand of scraggy, mutant willow trees, the tall, powerfully built man blocked out the sawing hum of insects, the steady plip-plop-plip of his own sweat dripping into the sand and the footfalls of his companions approaching around the bend in the river channel. Though Ryan strained to pick up sounds of pursuit, he could hear nothing.
Out of sight and earshot, faceless, nameless hunters dogged Ryan and his friends across the floodplain of the dried-up river. More than a mile wide, its thousands of narrow willow islands were separated by winding sandy lanes, which, during the wet season, were interlaced stream braids.
It was an evil place, a maze of nearly identical paths bordered by skinny trees ten feet tall, their lower branches creeping along the ground like vines.
The area was full of patches of quicksand, rad-blasted, suffocating heat and dark-scummed puddles of poisoned watera place made to order for ambush, by both four-legged and two-legged predators. And Ryan and his companions were moving through this no-man’s-land at a snail’s pacewhen they were moving at all.
The sound of a baby fussing cut through the throbbing insect song. Someone made soft shushing noises as the scrape of boot soles on sand grew louder.
Ryan opened his eye and, leaning on the stock of his Steyr SSG-70 sniper rifle, looked over at J. B. Dix, who knelt in a patch of shade on the other side of the wash, his fedora tipped back on his head. Rivulets of perspiration poured around the wire frames of J.B.’s glasses and down the sides of his face. He held his Smith amp; Wesson M-4000 shotgun balanced between pistol grip and pump slide, index finger braced against the outside of the trigger guard, poised and ready for anything.
The two men had traveled Deathlands together for many years. Both had been in the service of the legendary Trader, J.B. as his Armorer, Ryan as his second in command. In the Trader’s employ and in the years after, they had survived more pitched battles than either could begin to count. Long ago, words between them had become unnecessary.
J.B. looked back toward the source of the mewling cries and shook his head.
For what had to have been the dozenth time in their two-hour trek, the two men had had to stop and wait for the main file to catch up to them. Another full minute passed before a tall, skinny man dressed in a dusty frock coat and tall boots rounded the bend in the stream. He carried an ebony walking stick with a silver lion’s head for a handle. The cane concealed a steel serpent’s tongue a wicked, double-edged short sword.
Though he appeared to be in his midsixties, Ryan knew that chronologically Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner was closer to 250 years old. He had been born in the small village of South Strafford, Vermont, in the year 1868. One hundred and thirty years later, the first successful experiment in time trawling, code-named Operation Chronos, had plucked him without his consent from his wife and children, from a simpler, if not kinder and gentler world, and had deposited him in a fop-secret government laboratory. Because of the physiological and psychological shock brought on by the experience, the Oxford doctor of philosophy had proved a less than ideal test subject. His truculence had caused the Operation Chronos researchers considerable frustration and aggravation. In the year 2000, just before skydark, the scientists decided “Doc” was more trouble than he was worth and sent him forward in time to Deathlands.