James Axler – Stoneface

Flinging the body away, Ryan slapped another screamwing from its perch on the man’s head, at the same time swatting at the third. It took flight, hissing in anger and fear, its tail lashing from side to side like a miniature whip.

Ryan got his hands under the man’s arms, lifted and heaved him up over his shoulder. Fortunately the man didn’t weigh much. In fact, he was downright scrawny.

Securing a grip on a blood-slick wrist, Ryan ran back toward the wag, which had progressed only another fifty feet down the road. He loped across the shoulder of the road, ducking as several winged shapes swooped in front of him. The man draped over his shoulder suddenly stiffened and shrieked out a curse as one of the screamwings landed on him. He struggled and howled, “Bastard mutie’s eatin’ my balls!”

There was nothing Ryan could do but try to quicken his pace. Even Mildred, an Olympic-class shootist, would be hard-pressed to plug a target as small as the screamwing perched between the man’s legs without the cure being worse than the disease.

Krysty and Mildred slid the door open just as Ryan reached it. He wasn’t gentle about laying down his burdenhe bent over and hurled the man into the wag. The back of his head struck the metal with a sharp bang, and the screamwing, pressed beneath the body, crushed against the floorplates, squealed and clawed its way out between denim-clad thighs.

Ryan leapt into the wag, and Krysty slammed the door shut behind him, the edge clipping his boot heel. At the same time, the screamwing took flight within the confined space of the wag, generating shrieking chaos.

No one dared to trigger a blaster, but there was plenty of flailing about with gun barrels. Jak had to duck to avoid being brained by Doc’s Le Mat. Ryan managed to whip the blanket from his shoulders and fling it over the frantically fluttering creature. The weight dragged the screamwing down to the floorplates. Jak used the heels of his boots and the heavy butt of his .357 Colt Python to hammer out its life.

Finally the lump beneath the blanket no longer stirred. Doc wadded up the cloth, rolling the remains of the screamwing into a tight ball, and Krysty opened the door just wide enough for him to throw it out.

Mildred had scooted over to the examine the screamwings’ victim. He was groaning, his eyes closed, face streaked with blood. She peeled back an eyelid and said, “Out of it. Pain, shock or that impact to the head. Maybe a combination of all three.”

She reached over to tug out the first-aid kit stowed beneath the front passenger seat.

“Can we start the engine now?” J.B. asked. “This incline bottoms out in less than a mile.”

Though there were no nearby sounds of the screamwings, Ryan said, “Let’s just keep rolling until we stop. No sense in tempting them back to us.”

Though the rear cargo compartment of the Hotspur could accommodate eight people, it wasn’t the best place for a field hospital. Mildred had the wounded man stretched out on the deck, and she kept bumping everyone as she attended to him.

Ryan watched her methodically clean her patient’s wounds, swab away the blood and check his vital signs. For the hundredth time, he thanked the twist of fate that had planted her within his little group.

Mildred Wyeth was a medical doctor, a former specialist in cryogenic sciences. Though she was in her mid-thirties, she was, chronologically, well over a century old. Mildred had entered a hospital in late 2000 for minor surgery, but a freak reaction to the anesthetic had necessitated her body being placed in cryonic stasis until a treatment could be found.

It never was. The world was blown apart before she was revived, and she slept, like a fly trapped in amber, for a hundred years. Ryan had found her in a shielded underground cell, her life-support system still functioning. He had brought her back to life, into a world she had never dreamed existed. The cryogenic process and suspension of life seemed to have reversed the ill effects of the anesthetic.