She moved her focus slightly, whispering a warning to J.B. on her right and Doc on her left. “Get ready. Any moment now.” She heard the words passed along the line by Dean and Krysty to the patient Navaho.
The front hatch clattered back, heard by everyone around, followed only a half second later by the main entrance to the wag, on the turret.
Mildred’s index finger curled around the narrow trigger, taking up the first pressure. She drew in a deep breath and held it. At the level of pistol shooting where she’d represented the old United States, in the Miami Olympics of 1996which were the last evereveryone knew that you spaced your shots to coincide with the momentary gaps between the beats of the heart.
This kind of shooting didn’t need that sort of hairbreadth accuracy. The range was less than fifty yards, and the targets were all close to six feet high.
A man was out of the front, sliding down and looking around. He held a rifle of some sort. The first person who emerged from the turret was also a man, followed by a short, naked person that Mildred guessed was male, though she couldn’t be sure.
“Three out,” she announced.
The last of them had stooped to peer under the wag, shouting something to the others. But the words were inaudible. Mildred guessed he was trying to warn them that it was a false alarm, but the first couple was already sprinting, heads back, arms pumping, toward a bosk of live oaks, about a hundred yards away, near the skyline.
Mildred drew a bead on the first of them, centering the sight on the pale shirt the man wore, conscious at the same moment that a woman with very long hair was just clambering out of the turret, right beside Ryan.
The one-eyed warrior kept count. One left from the turret and a pair from the front. That left one or two, depending on the count of Man Sees Behind Sun.
The odor of smoke and the stink of rancid sweat wafted up to him from the open hatch. Human bodies, packed together, smelted rank and feral.
Just as he heard the cold snap of the Steyr, and a muffled scream, the woman surged up from the hatch. There was just enough light for Ryan to see that she was completely naked, her back to him.
Mildred saw her target go down, arms thrown up in the air like some famous old black-and-white photo she remembered. From the Spanish Civil War?
As she shifted her aim, there was some sort of a scuffle on top of the wag. The short nude man was looking toward her, raising a blaster. Jak was up on his feet, steadying himself against the cannon, like an avenger from a comic book, his mouth open, hair blowing in the night wind. Steel flickered in his right hand and the short man dropped his rifle, hands going to clutch at the knife in his throat.
Mildred fired a second round from the concealed Steyr, the sound reaching Ryan as he readied himself to kill the woman. But some sixth sense must have told her that he was behind her, and she flailed back with her right arm, catching him across the wrist, sending the SIG-Sauer spinning into the blackness.
“Fireblast!”
Mildred saw her own clean kill through the scope sight. The bullet had hit the running man through the head, an inch behind his right ear, blowing away most of the left side of his face and emptying his skull of brains and blood.
Despite the neural control room being destroyed, the message didn’t seem to have reached the man’s legs, which carried on sprinting for safety. Arterial blood jetted from the gaping hole, black in the moonlight.
“Like a headless chicken,” J.B. whispered at Mildred’s elbow.
It was several seconds before the corpse dropped to the ground like a bundle of dirty rags.
Mildred turned the sight from left to right, seeing that the three men from the wag were all down and dead, but that Ryan seemed to be having trouble with the naked woman.
He’d been ready for a simple execution, and her silent frenzy had taken him by surprise. Her body glistened with sweat, and his nostrils were flooded with the rutting smell of recent sex. There was enough light for him to make out something of her featuresthick lips, spittle dribbling between them, a narrow nose and heavy, dark eyebrows.
Her mouth was wide open, and she was hissing in what might have been anger, hatred or terror.
She was braced, the lower part of her body still inside the turret, keeping herself in place on the ladder, clawing at Ryan with long, strong fingers. He was far less steady, perched on top of the wag, the metal slippery with dew, and her attack was difficult to repel.
One hand raked across his face, nearly snagging the patch off his missing eye. It was one of the dark night horrors for Ryan, that something sharp might gouge at the raw socket. He jerked back from her and managed a short clubbing right to the side of her jaw. But the punch wasn’t delivered with full force and had little effect. The woman spit in his face and hit at Ryan with the edge of her left hand, catching him a glancing blow on the side of the neck. An inch or two farther back and a little harder, and he’d have been rolling off into the dirt with his mind turned dark.
An elbow, aimed at his groin, narrowly missed its target as he half turned and took it on the thigh.
“Want help, Ryan?”
He was too busy to take a breath to answer Jak. It should have been easy. The muzzle pushed into the angle of the jaw, with the crackling of the cartilage, the jolt running up his arm as he squeezed the trigger and the woman’s body going slack and empty.
It was so simple, he could hardly believe that it hadn’t happened.
“Fuckin’ scum!” the woman roared.
Ryan brought his left hand around, smashing the forearm into her open mouth, wincing as her teeth opened up a gash just below the elbow.
“Again!” The voice out of the gloom belonged to Mildred.
But Ryan had a better idea. The blow had briefly stunned the woman and given him a moment to reach for the hilt of the big panga. He drew the eighteen-inch blade from the greased leather sheath, using it as a dagger rather than an ax. The one-eyed warrior stabbed it into the woman’s body, below her pendulous breasts, feeling the ease with which the needle point penetrated the flesh of her stomach, like a hot knife through a slab of butter. Blood gushed out, hot across his wrist and arm.
She sighed once, a sound that was almost sexual in its languor. Her head swayed back away from Ryan, and he could taste the bitterness of her bile, wrapped around her last evening meal of dailies, pork and onions.
With a great effort, the wounded woman managed to heave herself out of the turret, flopping forward, where Jak bent over and slit her throat open, from ear to ear. He pushed the twitching corpse into the damp earth below the wag.
“That it?” J.B. asked from the sudden stillness.
“Guess so.”
The small fire was almost out, the smoke blowing toward the east. Ryan rubbed at the scraped wound on his arm, deciding that it wasn’t worth binding up.
In the last minutes, the light from the eastern sky seemed to have grown much stronger. He could make out the figures of J.B., Krysty and the others, coming slowly from cover.
The young Navaho warrior, Man Sees Behind Sun, bounded toward the wag and vaulted lightly onto it. He slapped hands with Ryan, ignoring the congealing blood on the Anglo’s fingers. Jak had dropped down and was retrieving his throwing knife from the neck of the dead man.
“Lady gave you some trouble, partner,” J.B. called, unable to keep the grin out of his voice.
“You can do the business next time. She knocked my blaster out of my hand. Can you get it for me?”
“Sure.”
Man Sees Behind Sun was kneeling by the open hatch. “Smells of wickedness,” he said.
“Not what I’d have called it.” Ryan grinned. “Plenty of other things.”
“We could free this wag.”
It had crossed Ryan’s mind, but time was too much against them. “No. Too late.”
“I will look inside. There might be blasters or food we could eat.”
Ryan reached out and took the SIG-Sauer out of the Armorer’s hand, nodding at the expected warning about making sure he fieldstripped and cleaned it thoroughly, after it had been dropped in the dirt.
The Navaho leaned down and peered into the darkness inside the wag. “I will go in.”
“Tell him to watch out,” J.B. called. “Could be grens or anything in there.”