As Straub had rightly said, “If the fucks aren’t with us, then that has to mean that they’re against us. Nobody argue with that?”
Nobody had argued.
Schickel’s mouth was open when, out of the corner of his eye, he caught the tiny red flash of fire from among the bushes to his left.
Before his mind had even begun to attempt the problem of what could have caused the crimson spark, Schickel was hit in the face with unimaginable power.
The pellets had spread out sufficiently to strike the war chief between throat and forehead. His left ear vanished, as did his left eye, pulped by the lead. His left cheek opened up under the impact, and his teeth in both upper and lower jaw were shattered, the jagged splinters of bone driven through by the slugs to rip apart the right cheek, bursting it outward like an exploding melon.
Doc couldn’t resist a whoop of delight before concentrating on the fiddling task of shifting the hammer of the massive Le Mat so that it would strike on nine rounds of .44-caliber ammunition.
The attackers were thrown into total confusion by the murderous attack from the blackness. Schickel was down, dying, felled like a stricken oak tree, before they even heard the thunderous boom from the blaster. None of them saw the muzzle-flash, but the billowing cloud of powder smoke among the trees was impossible to miss.
As well as being soaked in arterial blood and peppered with shards of bone, three or four of the men had also been bit by stray pellets from the 18-gauge, one of which had ripped through the big drum.
Schickel was still rolling in the dirt, the fountain of blood already slowed to a trickle as the heart ceased pumping, when panic started.
Straub had reacted quickest among the milling, yelling crowd, turning toward where Doc was crouching, gesturing with the shears. “In there. One of them has escaped us. Take him before the others awaken!”
Ryan heard the words with an unnatural clarity, as if each syllable had been hewn from a mountain of glass.
The moon was strong enough to penetrate the thin fabric of the tent, showing him the silhouettes of a number of people moving around outside. In that first waking moment he had no way of knowing whether they were friend or foe, though all of his combat instincts told him they were hostile.
He fired three quick rounds, aiming high, the bullets ripping up into the night sky, the noise of the shots deafeningly loud inside the tent.
“Outside!” he shouted, hoping that the rest of the group, in the other tent, were all awake and alert. A small part of his mind wondered what Doc was doing out in the trees, firing the Le Mat and causing chaos.
As he dived out, Ryan was immediately aware that there was some serious shit going down.
There was a dozen or more men, most of them with either knives or blasters drawn. Straub stared straight at him, with what looked like a big pair of scissors glittering in his right hand, an automatic pistol in his left. And there was a dying man, half his head blown away, thrashing bloodily in the dirt like a gaffed salmon. There was no sign at all of Doc, whose Le Mat had to have done the chilling.
It was immediately obvious that Ryan didn’t have to worry about whether he hit friends or enemies out there.
There were only enemies.
Chapter Eighteen
The greatest threat to Ryan and his companions came from their own blasters.
Just as Ryan came out from his tent, Jak slithered from the other shelter. Within less than five seconds they were all out in the open night, with blasters ready.
The planned attack on them had turned into a hopeless bloody shambles. The shocking death of Schickel had thrown everyone into utter confusion, wondering where the next death would strike. Despite all of Straub’s efforts to regain discipline, nobody wanted to stay around.
Ryan put down two more of the brushwood men, picking kill shots in the good light of the sailing moon. Jak’s excellent night vision came to his aid, enabling him to take out another two with the booming .357 Magnum.