Doc swallowed hard and stood his ground. He straightened his right arm, tensing the wrist, and sighted along the slender blade of the rapier like a matador facing the moment of truth. He centered the point between the creature’s shoulders, watching it carefully as it plodded toward him.
“Yes,” he breathed.
The Le Mat had taken a lethal toll, sapping the cougar’s energy, stealing away something of its heart for the kill. But it still made a try for Doc, rearing onto its hind legs, swinging its good paw at him, the unsheathed claws missing the old man by a whisper as he swayed back.
It dropped down again onto three legs, head lowered for a moment, giving Doc the single opportunity that he knew he would have to take.
The point entered precisely where he’d aimed it, and Doc leaned on the hilt with all his weight and strength, feeling it slide through muscle, nicking the spinal cord, passing on into the mutie animal’s lungs.
To the heart.
It dropped like a sack of meat, eyes glazing, voiding a string of slimy, stinking fecal matter as it died.
Sensing the death, Judas stopped his thrashing panic, suddenly standing quite still, looking over its sweat-smeared shoulder toward Doc, who had withdrawn the sword from the dead cougar, kneeling to clean it in the dry sand, a little way off from the corpse.
“Well, now, upon my soul, but that was what writers might call a rather rude awakening, might they not, Judas? I would fling myself upon your neck and weep copiously as we comforted each otherwere it not for the fact that I imagine you would snatch the opportunity to bite off my ear, you rascal, you.” He walked back to his sleeping bag, sitting down rather more suddenly than he’d intended when his legs ceased to function.
“Shock. Clinical shock. Interesting phenomenon. Should have a mug of hot sweet coffee, but I fear I don’t possess such a brew. Perhaps I’ll sit awhile and rest and recover. After that, Judas, come the dawn, and my hands have stopped their recalcitrant trembling, we shall once again be up and on our way. With a fine adventure under our belts.”
Then, somewhat to his surprise and shame, the closeness of his brush with a hideous death caught up with the old man, and he began to weep.
Chapter Thirteen
Abe went around a bend in the narrow, winding highway, carefully steering the team past a substantial pothole, knowing that the delicate wheels of the hearse wouldn’t stand up to any serious jolting.
Once he’d gotten them hitched, they hadn’t made bad progress. But the sun was already well up, glinting off the distant expanse of the sea, beyond the ruins of the ville. Abe had reined the horses in at the top of a steep hill, levering on the clumsy brake, appreciating for the first time just how vast Seattle had been. Then he realized the utter hopelessness of his lonely quest, the impossibility of trying to locate three men among the endless, barren wilderness of fallen stone and iron.
“Man who doesn’t try, doesn’t get,” he said aloud to himself, unconsciously parroting one of Trader’s base sayings. Abe released the brake, clicked his tongue and drove the hearse onward. He had seen that the road went down into one more dip, then breasted a shallow rise, close by what had seemed like the ruins of a predark water tower. From then on in it had looked all downhill.
THE ATTACKERS HAD MADE the mistake of sending in their surviving dogs before risking their own lives against the lethal trio of outlanders.
As the slavering, howling brutes hurled themselves into the gap between the broken door and the dusty stone, it was child’s play for Ryan to neatly butcher each and every one with his panga.
Trader stared at the pile of steaming carcasses. “Now they’ll come at us. Nothing for them to wait for.”
Ryan wiped the blood-slick blade and stuck it, point-first, in the dirt by his feet. “Might as well keep it handy,” he said. “Waste of time sheathing it.”
J.B. had taken off his glasses, giving them a final wipe and polish. He carefully adjusted his fedora, then rubbed at the stubble on his pale face. “Would’ve liked to have a decent shave before before we go.”