The skike possessed an uncanny skill for dodging while in the water, changing course a half-dozen times in an eye blink, rolling its membrane to feint in still other directions.
All three rounds missed the creature. Then Krysty’s weapon boomed, too, throwing up geysers of water around the skike. Taking a double-handed grip on his weapon and wading into the cold water, Ryan fired in a steady roll, working a pattern around the skike that allowed for forward movement, as well as to either side. The water was the creature’s element.
He’d almost run his clip dry when he scored his first hit. Ears ringing from the concussions of his weapon, he saw the plume of blood jet up from the creature’s left side. The membrane curled in on itself slightly, trying to cover the hole near the bottom. The skike kept moving, pulling to the right and starting to go under.
Ryan fired his last two rounds. The slide blew back into the locked and empty position at the same time he spotted the sudden cloud of blood churn the water and erase the skike from view. He replaced the clip, storing the empty in his pocket.
He waited, tense. Krysty had a hand over Bernsen’s mouth, and the man was only able to make small, plaintive noises. She prodded the back of his skull with the barrel of her weapon to freeze him.
“You got it,” Hoyle said breathlessly.
Ryan glared the man into silence. A moment later the skike’s dead and mutilated body surfaced in a diamond of bloody flesh. It floated upside down, blue-gray belly turned up against the ceiling of the cavern. Ryan waited a little longer, until he was sure nothing else was coming after them.
“HOW FAR ARE YOU GOING to go looking for the boy?” Hoyle asked.
Ryan had the lead, and Krysty covered his back. Neither of the two men had been allowed weapons. “As far as it takes,” he answered.
“Him holding on to that raft like he was, he could be anywhere. Hell, if he drowned, he might not be stopped yet.”
Ryan knew that was true. Linked to the raft, Jak had been at its full mercy. “I’ll take that chance.”
“Leaving your friends back there wasn’t any too smart, either, if you ask me.”
“Didn’t ask.”
“Those skikes will be all stirred up from the floods, swimming around all hot up from being in rut. They won’t hesitate about attacking those people back there.”
Ryan kept moving, ducking under an overhang of crooked, lichen-covered rock that jutted from the cavern wall. The cavern was continuing to widen slightly, allowing more light in from cracks across the ceiling. The river appeared to be moving slower, but still at a steady clip.
“They haven’t been attacked,” he said.
“How do you know?”
“J.B. would have blasted anything that tried,” Ryan replied. “Would have heard that.”
“What do you intend to do with us?” Bernsen asked.
“Depends,” Ryan answered. Along the sides of the river, trees and branches and other detritus had hung up in the scattered shallows, seining still more refuse from the current.
“‘Depends’?” Bernsen echoed. “What kind of answer is that? My God, that’s no answer at all.”
“It’s the only one I’ve got for you,” Ryan said. “You and your friend here know this river, and I can use knowledge like that.”
Ahead and to the right, a scarecrow figure in jeans and a green flannel shirt lay draped over a broken red-and-white-striped sawhorse that had seen its last good days years ago. Ryan approached it long enough to make sure the albino teenager wasn’t covered over by the corpse.
He grabbed the corpse by the hair and lifted it. The woman was days-old dead, her throat cut straight across. Other cuts marred her face, showing she’d died hard and her killer hadn’t been successful on the first try. Or had carried a grudge.
Jak was nowhere around.
Ryan dropped the woman’s head back into the water, disturbing the small minnows that had been feeding on the soft parts of her face. In another few hours she wouldn’t be recognizable at all. He walked back out of the water and kept on going.