Cannies, on the other hand, left next to nothing of their victims’ bodies or worldly goods behind. They were usually completely norm, both in their outward appearance and in their lust for the things that norms valued, like blasters and gold. Cannies routinely stripped everything from their victims, taking away all but the bloody rags of their clothes. To put it simply, they killed, they ate, they robbed. Though not necessarily in that order. As Jak rounded the point of a willow island, he found what he’d been searching for. Even Benjy couldn’t have missed it. The sand of the stream channel before him was so churned up by footprints it looked as if it had been plowed. He knelt and examined the riverbed. The freshly turned surface had already started to dry out, but the bottoms of the jumbled, overlaid tracks were still dark with moisture. From this he guessed the cannies were no more than three or four minutes ahead of him. A scan of the footprints gave him a rough head count. On this side of the river alone, there were maybe twenty of them, which was a much larger than usual band. And from the length of some of the strides, they were moving at a dead run.
Jak sniffed at the air. The faint, coppery scent of blood told him these particular cannies had chilled someone, and not long ago. Gore-splattered from the murder, they weren’t satisfied. They wanted more.
The other refugees from Brigham ville had been bushwhacked long before they’d gotten this far. As he straightened, Jak realized why the flesh eaters were waiting to attack. Though there were lots of them, they had to be seriously undergunned. They hadn’t jumped Ryan and the others because of the quality of the companions’ blasters. They weren’t eager to face all that concentrated firepower.
Jak also knew that three things had kept the cannies from abandoning the hunt altogether the three children.
And especially the baby.
Cannies loved baby.
Horrible images flooded Jak’s mindflashback images of his own infant girl after she’d been smashed to death against the side of his homestead barn in New Mexico, of his wife, Christina, brutally raped and murdered on the floor of their homestead cabin. Though he and Ryan and the others had hunted down and chilled the marauders who had butchered his family, it wasn’t enough. Revenge could never balance out what had been taken from him. Beneath the deep layers of scar tissue on the teenager’s soul, there was a place that would remain forever wounded, bleeding.
Tragedies like Jak’s weren’t unusual in Deathlandsthey were, instead, the hard-and-fast rule. He had learned early on that the hellscape had an insatiable appetite for the innocent, the good and the helpless. To do something about it was to fight against fate, to battle one on one with the nuke wind or the chem rain sooner or later you were bound to lose. Even Jak, a born warrior, a true child of Deathlands, couldn’t protect his own loved ones from its savagery. Though he couldn’t put his feelings into words, perhaps more than any of the other companions, he wanted to see the young family make it to the safety of Perdition ville.
He crossed the lane of tracks and moved low and quick through the bordering line of willows. One stream channel over, running full out, he began to parallel the cannies’ course. He figured the flesh eaters were trying to reach a place that would give them the greatest possible advantage for their attack maybe a particularly narrow and steep-sided channel with heavily treed islands on either side, a spot where they could use close quarters and their superior numbers to overrun and overwhelm the companions.
The teen had sprinted about seventy-five yards when behind him and off to the left, Benjy’s single-shot 12-gauge boomed sharply. He skidded to a stop as the gunshot echoes rolled over the floodplain. After the echoes faded away, there was silence.
Reload! he thought. Reload!
It was as close to prayer as Jak Lauren got.
The silence stretched on.
And on.
THE SOUND of the lone shotgun blast set Ryan into motion. The one-eyed man didn’t have to wave for the others to follow. Weapons at the ready, they fell into a loose skirmish line behind him as he raced back down the stream channel, retreating toward the source of the gunshot.