He wasn’t the only casualty.
Apart from the dead sec men, and the helpless Micah, the rest of the attackers were scourged.
J.B. took a musket ball in the left upper arm, the heavy shot passing clean through without striking bone or shredding muscle. But it knocked him over in the treacherous mud, nearly dropping the Uzi. He braced himself for a moment against a stunted tamarisk, saving himself from sliding all the way down into the brushwooders’ camp.
Jak was the third casualty.
He’d been second fastest to react to the disaster, a thousandth of a second behind Ryan. The albino had seen instantly that their position was untenable, almost helpless. Their only chance was to blast away at the brushwooders and hope that it distracted them long enough to retreat up the hill to safety.
But one of the rounds from Ditchdown’s AK-74 hit the dirt just below him and to the left, striking an outcrop of granite and splintering the rocks. One of the razor-edged shards caught Jak across the side of the right calf, ripping out a sizable chunk of flesh. Like J.B., he was unlucky to catch a wound, but lucky that nothing radical was affected by the injury.
“Out!” Ryan screamed again, backing away, forcing himself to carry on against the burning pain in his back, snapping off random shots through the screen of bushes.
Bullets and arrows seemed to fill the air, making it a miracle that they didn’t all get to buy the farm. Their reactions had been so quick that the brushwooders were mostly firing too low, beneath then scrambling figures, dimly seen through cover.
Leaves fluttered to the ground, and the air was thick with the smell of cordite, overlaid with the tang of fresh sap from the scarred trees.
Krysty was first to the top, throwing herself flat and trying to pick off targets with her Smith amp; Wesson 640, though the .38, with its two-inch barrel, wasn’t a good weapon once you got much above twenty-yards range. But it helped to keep their attackers moving and dodging.
Trader came second, his eyes staring wide, his lips peeled back off his teeth in a smile of pure rage, blasting away with the Armalite at his hip.
Ryan was next, Bill Rainey at his heels, the dirt-covered sec man cursing in a long, fluent tirade against the brushwooders. J.B. had gone a little way to the right, and he appeared unexpectedly over the ridge, almost catching a bullet from Krysty as she swung around to face what she had thought was an enemy.
Jak was last to reach the temporary haven of dead ground, hobbling painfully, pausing to fire back with the big satin-finish Colt Python.
Arrows hissed toward them, thudding into the trunks of the tall pines. They could hear Straub below them, shouting orders, his voice rising above the incoherent babble of yelling.
The shooting stopped.
“Hold fire,” Ryan said. “What’s the injury count?”
“Lost all three of my men,” Rainey said. “Poor bastards didn’t have a chance.” His voice cracked with emotion, and there were unshed tears glistening in his eyes.
“Hit in leg,” Jak stated, his voice as flat and calm as ever, stooping to bind a piece of rag around the bleeding gash in his calf. “Nothing serious.”
“You know you got a shaft sticking out of your back, lover?”
Ryan grinned at Krysty. “I noticed. Leave it there until we can take some time on drawing it out.”
“Best get out triple quick,” the Armorer said, reloading the Uzi, holding it across his lap, blood dripping down from his arm onto the gun.
“Want that tied?” Jak asked.
“Later.”
Trader lay flat, watching the activity below him. “Bald fucker’s gettin’ them organized. Won’t take long for them to get around and behind us. Sooner we go the better.”
“What about Micah?” Rainey asked. “He was alive when they took him.”
“Won’t be for long,” Ryan replied. “Nothing to be done. Let’s get out of here, best we can.”
TO RYAN’S SURPRISE, there was no effort made by the brushwooders to pursue them into the forest, and they reached the tethered horses safely.
“How come they aren’t on our heels?” Trader threw his Armalite in the dirt, ignoring a reproachful glance from J.B.