It was hilt-deep, but he still tried to drive it in those extra fractions of an inch.
General skidded to a shuddering halt, front legs braced, nearly throwing Ryan over its head. It gave a strange, groaning cry, like an old man stricken with a heart attack. Ryan felt its gigantic body start to shake and quiver, as if it were suffering an ague.
He drew out the panga and drove it in again, pushing the hilt with both hands, feeling the steel nick on bone.
Like a brain-shot horse in an abattoir yard, General slumped suddenly onto his knees, snout gouging a furrow in the packed leaf mold. Then he rolled onto his side, legs kicking helplessly, enabling Ryan to step quite safely off, withdrawing the steel.
Feeling that he was being watched, Ryan spun, seeing at least a dozen of the mutie pigs staring at him from the edge of the woods, only a few yards away.
“Time to move,” he said, sheathing the panga and drawing the SIG-Sauer. He reached for the self-light that he’d dropped on the ground.
Ryan realized that the pigs weren’t looking at him. Their attention was fixed on their dying leader. General wasn’t going gently into the good night. His hooves were scratching in the dirt, fighting for purchase, and he kept lifting his head, eyes red-rimmed, seeking the creature that had slain him. The monstrous bulk was convulsing, actually driving it along like a vast pink slug, toward Ryan. Bright blood trickled from the muzzle and streamed from the open, panting jaws.
The self-light blazed into life, its yellow flame hardly visible. Ryan thrust it into the pile of tiny twigs that he’d prepared, gathering the dried branches that the boar had scattered.
There was a wisp of smoke, then the scarlet glow of a fire that gathered momentum fast under the light breeze.
The herd of pigs had already grown in numbers to thirty, a few of them showing signs of restlessness at the scent of the flames.
Moments later, the fire was burning fiercely, tongues of red and yellow racing across the carpet of dead needles, igniting the chaparral and mesquite with explosions of flame.
Ryan straightened, checking that the course of the fire was right, along the canyon, toward the pigs. Some had already turned away and were starting to move restlessly down through the close-set pines trees at something between a fast walk and a lumbering trot.
It was burning more quickly than he’d anticipated, making it time to give Dean the gunshot signal to start his own bonfire before the entire herd of pigs gave way to panic and fled out of the box canyon.
General was snarling and grunting, more blood tumbling in gobbets from its open jaws. The boar could see that the fire was going to surround him and burn him alive.
Ryan saw that as well.
“All right,” he said, aiming the SIG-Sauer just behind the mutie boar’s left ear and squeezing the trigger. The crack of the heavy handblaster echoed from the granite walls. The pig’s skull jerked and a tremor ran through its body.
A moment later it was quite still, the flames already licking at its mountainous carcass, singeing the bristles.
And Ryan was off and running.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Krysty had been resting on the double bed in the room that she’d been sharing with Ryan. She suddenly got up and walked to the window that faced west, peering through the slats in the shutters. Doc had been sitting with her, the friends talking about when the brushwooders might put in an appearance. And when Ryan would return to them.
“What is wrong, my dear lady? Are you having one of your feelings?”
She nodded, pushing back an errant curl of her bright red sentient hair. “Something like that.”
“How does it work? Do you see it or hear it? I find such an ability quite fascinating.”
“Like hearing the sound of a bell, very far off. Sometimes the bell’s bright and silver. Sometimes it’s more like the tolling at a funeral. I don’t mean that I can really hear a bell. Just that it’s the nearest I can explain it.”