Two of the hollowpoints slammed into the creature, ripping it apart. It collapsed to the ground, a bloody mass of meat.
The teenager put his knives away, then shook the empty casings from the Python and reloaded.
“Jak!” Krysty called.
“Here.” The albino walked to the dead creature and picked it up by the barbed tail. He crossed to the edge of the cliff face he’d climbed.
Krysty, Mildred and Doc gazed up at him, worried looks on their cold-pinched faces.
“Dear lad,” Doc said, “we thought you’d fallen to your demise.”
Jak shook his head. “I fall, I’d scream. Let you know not safe.”
“Of course you would. How foolish of me to think otherwise. Forgive the awkward ruminations of a man aged by experience.”
“Sure.” Jak shrugged. More weapons were being used down the mountainside. He saw the bright sparks leaping among the trees.
“What was the blasterfire?” Krysty asked, her attention divided between Jak and the action behind them.
The albino lifted the dead mutie beast, then dropped it onto the ledge among them. “This. See one, better chill quick. Otherwise, chill you.”
“How’d you get up there?” Mildred asked.
Jak knelt and pointed, wanting to go back for his coat. But it would be better to wait, in case there was another of the gliding creatures. The next person up could cover his back.
“Step there,” Jak said. “Careful. Skin knees, if go too sudden like. Then step there.” He pointed again. “Get up this far, help pull you up.”
Krysty went first, managing the climb with difficulty. “Did you find the pass?”
Jak shook his head. “Not yet. Mebbe out there. Not look everywhere yet. Shooting started, I got back here.”
Krysty stood beside him, her pistol in her fist. Her attention shifted back to the forested lands farther down.
“Shooting good sign,” Jak said as he reached for Mildred’s hand. “Ryan and J.B. dead, nobody to shoot at.”
Chapter Four
Ryan squeezed the Steyr’s trigger before he had the rifle quite to his shoulder. When it fired, the recoil made the Steyr jump in his hands.
The bullet caught the brushwooder full in the chest and knocked him back. The man’s blaster discharged into the ground more than a yard from Ryan, tearing up a fist-sized clod of snow-frosted earth. Already dying, with blood spitting up over his lips, the brushwooder stubbornly tried to bring his weapon to bear again.
Ryan shouldered the Steyr and aimed at the man’s head. Before he could squeeze off another round, the familiar boom of J.B.’s Smith amp; Wesson M-4000 shotgun filled the clearing beneath the tree.
A nasty hornet’s nest of the Remington flechettes belched out by the 12-gauge shotgun tore into the man’s face, shoulders and chest. The impact bared white breastbone and bounced him against the tree bole. The few flechettes that had missed the man embedded in the tree and stuck out like steel spurs.
“Close one,” the Armorer commented as he sought a new target.
“Been closer,” Ryan answered. He pushed the dead man from the tree and used the trunk for cover.
J.B. stood fast and worked his way through the shotgun’s magazine, spitting out death. The swarms of flechettes chopped into the brushwooders and stripped them of their sudden courage. “You about ready to get out of here?”
“I’m done.” Lifting the Steyr, Ryan quickly picked off two men who were within his range. “You take the lead, and I’ll close the back door.”
Renewed gunfire broke out behind them. Turning, his back to a boulder almost as big as a wag, Ryan glanced at the trees and brush where they’d left the dead brushwooders. The advancing brushwooders had gone to ground under his fire and were shooting at the corpses. Bullets hitting the dead brushwooders caused jerky movements, drawing even more intense fire.
“Hold your goddamn fire!” someone yelled. “Those people are dead!”
“That’ll slow them for a minute. Let’s get out of here,” Ryan said.
The Armorer took point, moving in a broad semicircle that would bring them to the foot of the mountains.
Driving his legs hard against the muddy earth, Ryan hoped Krysty and the others had found the pass they’d been looking for. If the storm front kept moving in and trapped them in the mountains, it could mean their deaths.