James Axler – Shadowfall

Now a scabbie was on top of him, its mouth opening in a screeching yell of hatred and triumph as it leapt at the defenseless man.

But Ryan Cawdor was never without a defense.

His reflexes took over. There was no time at all to try to draw any of his armory of weapons, with the scabbie already in the air, jumping at him, a broad-bladed notched knife clutched in its right hand.

Ryan stooped a little, reaching with his left hand for the mutie’s right wrist. He locked his fingers and stooped further, pulling the helpless mutie onto his shoulders, then straightening at the perfect moment, heaving the scabbie high in the air, off to the left of the trail.

The battle cry of rage and hatred changed in midair to a scream of shock and despair, seeing his own inexorable doom rising up toward him.

He crashed down on his right arm, the blade of the knife snapping on impact. But the thin layer of crystallized salts wasn’t thick enough to take his weight and he plunged through it, vanishing in an eruption of stone splinters and boiling, hissing water.

Ryan didn’t have time to look to see what happened to the mutie, but the agonized yell and the frantic thrashing told its own terrible story.

A second scabbie attacked Ryan, lunging at him with a long-shafted spear, its point tied in place with thin strips of rawhide. There was a moment when they were face-to-face, and Ryan recognized the ghastly deformities that characterized the breed of mutie.

Every inch of exposed skin seemed to be a single festering sore. Flaps of whitened skin were peeling off across the forehead, dangling over the deep-set eyes. The mouth was lipless and toothless, surrounded by a nest of dried craters and fresh, yellow boils. One ear was missing, the other hanging loosely from the side of the skull, tethered by a strip of gangrenous gristle.

The hands holding the long spear were covered in a scaly golden rash of spots, spreading up the forearms, high above the elbows.

What hair there was on the head was limp and colorless, pasted flat by the steam in the air around them.

Ryan batted the clumsy weapon aside with his left hand, jabbing a vicious punch into the scabbie’s solar plexus. The air whooshed out of the mutie’s lungs and he started to double up, dropping the spear. He stumbled past Ryan, who chopped down a vicious rabbit punch on the back of his neck with the hardened edge of his right hand as he went by.

The mutie went off the opposite side of the trail to his colleague, tumbling headfirst into the deep, golden mud. He was swallowed completely, without even a scream, his feet sliding below the bubbling, boiling surface.

Ryan was aware of yelling behind him, then the tearing sound of the Uzi, fired on full-auto.

Two more scabbies charged him, undeterred by the awful fate of their two comrades. One of them suddenly stopped, staggered a couple of paces, then fell on his disfigured face. Ryan saw the taped hilt of one of Jak’s throwing knives protruding from his throat.

In close combat, there was sometimes the temptation to go for the handblaster. But, as Ryan had learned over the years, that wasn’t always the best option to take. You might get the chance only for a single shot, and if it didn’t put your man down, then a blaster was a useless weapon for hand-to-hand.

He drew the eighteen-inch panga from its sheath in a single smooth, rehearsed action, feeling its familiar weight and balance.

Cutting from left to right, backhanded, he stopped the nearer of the scabbies, who was armed with a short-hafted ax. The mutie moved back from the intended blow, ducking and trying to slice at Ryan’s legs.

But the one-eyed man had been expecting it, swaying away like a dancer, pivoting to his right and using the panga like a long dagger. He stabbed directly at the scabbie’s neck, but the man was quick, hunching his shoulder, so that he only took a shallow flesh wound at the top of the left arm.

He whirled, his ragged clothes fluttering about his scrawny body, feinting toward Ryan’s face, then changing the direction of the blow to his hand and wrist.