James Axler – Shadowfall

The water was utterly delicious, flowing from somewhere high up in the distant Sierras, away to the far east. It was as cold as charity and as sweet as hope.

Ryan dipped his face below the surface, drinking deeply, feeling refreshed from just a few mouthfuls.

He lifted his head, the dark curly hair dripping spangles of water back into the stream, and looked straight into the swarthy muzzle and hooked tusks of a huge mutie pig.

The beast wasn’t quite as big as the boar that was called General, but it had to have weighed better than a thousand pounds of murderous hatred on the hoof. Its tiny deep-set eyes glowered at the man who had invaded its own drinking place, and its sharp hooves pawed at the bank of wet mud.

All that separated it from Ryan was less than five feet of deep, chilly stream.

Ryan didn’t make any hurried, frightened movements that might have induced the pig to launch itself at him. He raised himself a little way, bringing the blaster around to cover the beast, not sure quite what effect a 9 mm round would have on a creature that size.

The pig snorted, its breath reeking with rotting meat. Ryan realized that it wasn’t sure what sort of a threat he represented, and it kept lowering its head as though checking that the water was still there.

“Fuck off,” Ryan whispered.

To his amazement and relief, the mutie animal did just that. It shook its huge rutting head from side to side, then backed away a few steps, as if it might be readying itself to charge. Then it simply turned and trotted ponderously away into the white fog, disappearing in seconds.

Ryan realized that he’d been holding his breath for a long time and slowly released it in a white plume into the cold predawn air.

THE EDGE OF THE CAMP was less than two hundred yards farther on, nestling in the sheer-sided valley.

There were no guards out, but Ryan could see through the clearing mist that there were men and women moving around the makeshift huts and tents.

The fire had been built up to a roaring blaze, which was one of the reasons that the fog was markedly less thick around the brushwood settlement.

Jamie had described where he thought Dean would be held prisoner. It was on the far side of the encampment, in a ragged tent with a high lodgepole from which something that looked like a human scalp was fluttering.

Ryan made his way around the perimeter, using the plentiful cover. He stopped once as three men walked quickly by, talking excitedly about the way Straub had massacred ten of the ville’s sec men entirely on his own, and how they had all the horses from the raiding party.

At least that was what the snatch of conversation sounded like, though Ryan simply didn’t believe that one person could take out ten armed and alert sec men. Unless he’d been armed with a first-class light machine gun. And there’s been no sound of any shooting.

“Impossible,” he whispered to himself.

DAWN WASN’T FAR OFF, and Ryan knew that his task would be made that much more difficult by the way the shrouding fog was leaking away.

But he was safely at the rear of what he hoped was the right tent. He’d come close to the flapping canvas, straining to catch any sound from within that would give him a clue.

But it was as silent as a tomb.

Ryan had a sudden vision of what he’d find insidehis son’s corpse, naked and bloodless, hideously mutilated. It was so powerful an image that he had to kneel, fighting against the desire to throw up.

“Don’t believe you.”

The words were barely audible, but Ryan would have known the voice out of ten million others.

“Dean,” he breathed.

There was another voice there, harsh and croaky, sounding like an old woman’s. Ryan cautiously probed at the coarse material with the needle tip of his panga, boring open a tiny hole, pressing his eye to it.

A small, smoky fire and a tallow lamp gave just enough light for him to be able to see what was happening inside the tent.