“Sure, sorry. Course. Sorry.”
But Trader was already asleep again.
Chapter Eighteen
Ryan’s eye blinked open. Three heartbeats later he was gripping his 9 mm SIG-Sauer.
The ruined church was relatively silent. The only noise was the shuffling of the horses and the mule, their shifting shapes just visible in the moonlight that seeped through the doorway.
It had stopped raining in the last few minutes, as Ryan could still hear water trickling from the damaged gutters. The rest of Opium Wells seemed quiet.
But something had triggered his combat reflex.
Something out of the ordinary.
He lay still. The worst thing a person could do in a suspicious situation was to make a hasty, ill-planned move.
Very slowly Ryan looked around the building, counting bodies under blankets. Unless there was something they didn’t know, they were the pursuers and not the pursued. So everyone was taking a needed rest.
Krysty lay next to him, and Dean on the other side. The boy sleeping on his back, snoring softly and rhythmically in the darkness.
Then came J.B. and Mildred, very close together, with Doc last in line, beyond them. Jak was the easiest of the seven to spot, on Dean’s left, his hair blazing like a warning flare.
And the two starving young people they’d saved, Jerry Park and Gemma from Eagle’s Fork, in West Texas. They’d been sleeping wrapped in each other’s arms, over where a corner of the old altar still stood, jagged, close by the end of the nave.
Ryan narrowed his eye, straining to be sure.
“Fireblast,” he said, so quietly that he never even heard it himself.
The couple had moved.
Ryan’s first gut reaction was to wake everyone, search for them together.
But until he knew where Jerry and Gemma were, that could be close to suicide.
He faked sleep, sighing a little and rolling over onto one side, desperately scanning the place for some clue. But Ryan still couldn’t see either of them.
Which left two possibilities.
They were aware he’d awakened and were watching him from the blackness. Jerry had claimed he had no blaster, and the holster had been empty. But Ryan recalled that same holster had been well-worn. It wouldn’t have been that difficult, once they spotted the riders coming in, for them to have hidden weapons anywhere inside the church.
Or outside.
That was the second possibility.
Ryan waited, steadying his breathing, his finger still on the trigger of the SIG-Sauer.
The two choices really came down to only one.
The longer he stayed still beneath the blankets, the more vulnerable they all were. People didn’t sneak away together in the middle of the night unless they meant evil.
He crawled out of the bedroll, waiting for the flash of fire and the boom of the blaster.
Nothing happened.
Two voices spoke from either side of him.
“Trouble?” J.B. queried.
“Outside?” Jak asked.
Both questions were asked in the faintest whisper, both men pulled out of shallow sleep by Ryan’s movement.
If Jerry and Gemma had been in the building, they’d likely have been pressured into making some sort of play by now. But there was still nothing.
There was no need for any more talk between the three old friends.
Ryan went first, his blaster reaching out into the darkness ahead of him, pausing at the doorway. There was no sign of life outside.
J.B. was holding the scattergun at his hip, Jak just behind him, gripping the Colt Python.
Ryan crouched and peered out, keeping perfectly still, listening and looking. He heard a faint sound, like someone digging in soft sand, nearby, around to the left. He gestured in that direction, ghosting through the door in a fighter’s crouch. The Armorer and the albino teenager covered him from the shadows.
There had been a heavy dew and the ground was soft, making it possible for Ryan to move around the side of the church in total silence.
Now the sound was clearer, ahead of him, just around the corner where a part of the tumbled roof was still piled against the eastern flank of the building.
Ryan looked behind him and made a circling motion with his free hand, sending J.B. and Jak around the church in the opposite direction, ready to cover any attempt to run for it from the young couple.
They vanished into the blackness and he continued creeping forward, reaching the angle of the walls, looking around it.
The moonlight was thin and diluted, filtered through a bank of low clouds, but it still gave enough light for him to make out Gemma and Jerry.
They had their backs to him, the man kneeling by a pile of tumbled adobe and stone, burrowing away, throwing dirt between his legs like a hyperactive prairie dog. Gemma stood watching him.
Ryan could see the glint of dull metal in her hands, which looked like a .22.
He began to edge closer.
Jerry was talking quietly, panting with the effort of the digging.
“They’d chill us if they could.”
Ryan wasn’t too sure of the stress in the words. Had the young man said, “They’d chill us if they could.”
Either way, it didn’t make much difference.
“Got it.” Jerry pulled out something wrapped in oilcloth, which he uncovered. It was another hand-blaster, a .357.
Over the years, Ryan had seen some speckled lengths of old vids, played on hand-generated viewers. Some of themmost of themhad involved various ways of chilling. One of the things he’d often noticed and puzzled at was how people seemed to always shout warnings to their enemies that they were about to begin shooting at them.
Stupes.
He leveled the SIG-Sauer and drilled the woman between the shoulder blades. The light hadn’t been good enough for a safe head shot.
The 9 mm bullet, exited through the splintered remnants of Gemma’s sternum, slicing through her lungs and heart, killing her instantly.
Ryan fired a second time, aiming at the kneeling man. But the woman’s corpse staggered a few disconnected steps, arms flailing, and dropped the blaster. She fell into the line of fire, and his shot hit her under the left arm as she toppled, the full-metal jacket tumbling and distorting, ripping through the ribs and chest cavity, angling upward and bursting out through the top of her left shoulder.
For a starving man, Jerry Park was fast in his reflexes and faster on his feet.
He dived away, rolling behind the fallen debris from the church roof and wall, managing to snap a shot off in the general direction of his attacker. The bullet whined fifteen feet past Ryan’s face, making him throw himself flat.
The woman was dying noisily, thrashing around, moaning and weeping, pink frothing blood choking her as it erupted from her open mouth.
“Bastard!” the young man screamed, firing twice more, the shots going high and wide.
Ryan lay still and said nothing, knowing that J.B. and Jak would be closing in from the other side.
“Ryan!”
“Stay where you are, Krysty. Everyone keep inside. It’ll soon be over.”
Another shot whistled by, closer this time, aimed at the sound of his voice.
J.B. and Jak still hadn’t showed their hands. Ryan stared into the darkness where he expected to see them appear.
“Come out, son,” Ryan called. “Got no chance. Throw down the blaster and just walk away. Keep walking.”
“No food and water. And you butchered Gemma, you shithead bastard!”
“You were aiming to chill us, boy.”
“Wanted to steal some food and a couple of horses. That was all.”
There was the familiar note of self-pity that Ryan had heard in dozens of voices, the voices of men who knew they were soon going to die.
“Come out, Jerry.”
“You’ll chill me. Don’t trust you.”
Ryan half smiled. The young man was right. If he’d come out and thrown down his blaster, Ryan would have shot him down without a moment’s compunction.
It wasn’t a game.
For several long seconds, nobody spoke. The woman had died, lying sprawled near the small pit where the blasters had been concealed.
Ryan caught a glimpse of something white at the far angle of the church’s wall. Jak’s hair. That meant J.B. would be there, as well.
If they all opened fire, the young man would have no chance. But it meant wasting a lot of ammo. And ammo in Deathlands was more valuable than a handful of jack. Be like dropping a brick of gold to crush a rat.
“Give you a count of five, Jerry,” Ryan called. “Then it’s finished. One, two, three”
Though he must have realized his position was totally helpless, the skinny young man made a try for it. He came out firing, jinking to left and right, then sprinting straight toward where Ryan was lying in the dirt.
He stretched out the SIG-Sauer, holding his right wrist in his left hand for extra steadiness and accuracy. Jerry was around fifty feet away from him, his own blaster blazing.