Seeing that Ryan and J.B. had stopped, Doc slid a massive black-powder revolver from the front of his frock coat. The gold engraved LeMat was a relic of the decade of Tanner’s birth. Arguably the Civil War’s most potent side arm, the LeMat fired nine .44-caliber balls through a six-and-one-half-inch top barrel. A second, shorter barrel beneath the first had a much bigger bore, chambered for a single scatter-gun round. The “blue whistler” barrel was currently packed with a mixture of glass and iron fragments. Capable of inflicting devastating damage in close-quarters combat, this particular payload gave new meaning to the phrase “face lift.” Doc hand-signaled those walking behind him to slow down and be careful.
Krysty Wroth appeared around the bend, her glorious mane of prehensile red hair cascading around her shoulders, the centers of her cheeks rosy from the riverbed’s raging heat. She had tied the arms of her long, shaggy, black fur coat around her waist. In one hand she held a .38-caliber Smith amp; Wesson model 640 revolver; the other hand shielded a girl child of about seven who stood timidly behind her long legs. The girl wore a faded and tattered dress, and her blond hair was hacked off in a bowl shape just below the ears.
Krysty’s emerald-green eyes sought out and locked on to Ryan’s face. As with J.B., there was a connection between them, a different sort of connection to be sure, but one that also didn’t require words. Though Ryan felt something akin to tenderness at the sight of his woman so fiercely protecting the child, his face gave nothing away. Wrong time. Wrong place. Reading her lover’s expression, Krysty lowered the blaster, but didn’t reholster it as she advanced.
A second or two later, Dr. Mildred Wyeth stepped into view. The stocky black woman was also a time traveler of sorts. Cryogenically frozen after a life-threatening reaction to anesthetic on December 28, 2000, the medical doctor had been reanimated by Ryan and his companions after a century of near-death sleep. Her hair in beaded plaits, Mildred wore baggy, desert camou BDU pants, and her gray, sleeveless T-shirt was soaked through with sweat, front and back. On her right hip, arms locked around her neck, legs gripping her waist, rode another girl child. This one was frail and about six years old. Mildred carried her Czech-built ZKR 551 handblaster with its muzzle pointed skyward. She was a deadly accurate markswoman. Lifetimes ago, when such things still had meaning, she had won a silver medal in the last ever Olympic games.
Right behind Mildred was the source of all the racket an infant in the arms of a young mother. The woman wore a shapeless dress made of sewn-together scraps of colored cloth. A broad-brimmed, crudely woven straw hat shielded both mother and child from the sun.
Abruptly, the insect song stopped, and the baby momentarily ceased its fussing.
In the sudden, oppressive silence Ryan could hear the rasp of his own breathing. He didn’t have to explain to his companions what was wrong. Sweaty hands tightened on pistol grips as they searched the tree lines for the slightest flicker of movement. Something was closing in on them from all sides, homing in on the baby’s cries.
The woman called Uda moved the weight of her infant to her other arm. “Why are we stopping again?” she asked Ryan.
Not wanting to panic the young mother and the older children, and therefore compound their predicament, Ryan told her only part of the truth. “We’re going too slow,” he said. “We’ve got to pick up the pace. We’ll wait here a couple of minutes and let Jak and your man, Benjy, catch up. Then we’ll shift the loads around. The men will carry the girls from here on. And after that, there’ll be no more stops. Everybody double-times it until we’re out of this hellpit.” The woman nodded. All she wanted was to get her family to someplace safe, and as quickly as possible. Ryan looked away from her worried but hopeful face. He knew the chances were she wasn’t going to make it. Maybe none of them would make it. He looked over at his son, Dean, nearly twelve years old and almost the mirror image of himself, and understood her concern.