“ANYTHING?”
Ryan shook his head, scanning their backtrail along the climb while they took a breather. “Brushwooders are coming up behind us, but they’re losing ground.”
“How many?”
“Thirty, mebbe.”
Kneeling beside him, J.B. lifted his fedora and brushed an arm along his forehead. He grimaced at the sweat stains on his coat sleeve. “We keep moving like this, sweating this hard, we’re due for a bad case of hypothermia.”
Ryan nodded. Through the binoculars he could occasionally see the line of brushwooders winding around the turns. Sniping would get a few of them, but then they’d have his position, too, which might make it bad all the way around.
He pushed himself to his feet. “Let’s go.”
The cloud cover had wiped away the moon, dimmed the light they had to move by. If it wasn’t for the reflective quality of the snow, they wouldn’t have been able to see in the dark at all. Their progress had slowed considerably.
“The ones who don’t fall and kill themselves on the climb, or we don’t shoot if they come up on us, the storm may take,” Ryan declared.
The wind had picked up, and it had turned colder.
“Their man isn’t a leader,” J.B. said. “He gets enough of them chilled tonight, they’ll turn on him. They must be good and afraid of him to come this far.”
Ryan kept a hand in contact with the stone wall at his side as he pressed forward. The snow flurries increased, burning cold into his face except where the scar tissue had robbed him of sensation. Though he couldn’t feel his face so much anymore between the old injuries and the fanged cold, he couldn’t keep his teeth from chattering like a desert rattler in full threat.
Without warning, his boot skidded out from under him. The edge of the abyss to his left yawned open suddenly. Wrapping around him like a demanding lover, the wind sucked at him, trying to pull him from the wall.
“Fireblast!” he swore, getting his balance back enough to fall against the wall behind him.
J.B. reached for him.
“Got it,” Ryan said. The hunger and the cold had hollowed him out enough that he knew he was running on adrenaline. He pushed himself up, feeling the dark anger moving around inside him. Dying quiet, frozen to death on some mountain, had never been in the cards for him the way he had it figured. When he caught the last train West, it’d be with a blaster in his fist and his blood mixing with that of an enemy.
“We can rest,” the Armorer said.
“We can rest when we’re dead. Something here.” Ryan scraped at the ground with his boot. Thin black liquid covered the stone in odd-shaped clots. As they tore under his boot, some of them tamed red.
“Blood,” J.B. commented.
Ryan nodded. “Somebody’s.” His eye lit on the awkward shape at the bottom of the sheer rise in front of him. The wall ahead bore one of Jak’s signs, letting him know to keep going straight.
The shadow turned out to be a dead beast that had been blown apart by bullets. The eyes had dimmed, but there was no mistaking the deadly way the tail was barbed. One of Jak’s leaf-bladed knives was thrust between the creature’s eyes.
“You ever seen anything like this?” Ryan asked.
“No.”
“Trader always said a man could live out his whole life in Deathlands just looking at what there is to see and never see it all. As soon as a man passed on, mutie genes tickled by all the radioactivity breezing across the Deathlands would make up something new.”
“And more than likely it’d be something hungry,” J.B. finished.
Ryan pulled the throwing knife from the dead mutie beast. “Guess Jak left this as a message.”
J.B. grinned. “It isn’t hard to understand. You see any of these, kill them quick.”
Ryan slung the creature out over the abyss and let go. He never heard it hit bottom. He cleaned the knife with the snow and put it in his gear. “Step careful around the blood. I’ll help you up first.” He put the Steyr against the wall and made a stirrup of his hands.