Then the beast had snapped at him, slicing his ear off, fastening its incredibly powerful jaws in the side of his face and ripping away a chunk of flesh from his cheek. The man had only realized the severity of the wound when he raised trembling fingers and found they penetrated right through the torn skin and touched his blood-slick teeth, exposed to the air.
He’d pulled away, dropping to his knees in shock, pushing feebly at the mule, which had then bitten him badly in the shoulder, holding him helpless.
Now the kid had shot his cousin to death and was advancing toward him, holding the handblaster with a muzzle that looked bigger than a railroad tunnel.
“No,” he tried to say, but his mouth was filled with blood and he could hardly see through the crimson mist.
“Yeah, you bastard,” Dean said gently, shooting him three times at point-blank range through the middle of the chest, the 9 mm bullets destroying heart and lungs and chilling him instantly.
Judas felt the life fleeing from the target of his venomous spleen, and he opened his crimsoned teeth, dropping the limp, flopping corpse to the dirt. He snorted triumphantly at it, pawing with his front hooves.
“That’s it, Judas.” Dean was trembling with the violent tension, trying to reload his warm blaster, but finding that his fingers weren’t strong on obedience. “You done good, Judas. Real good.”
He moved in, with the vague feeling that he might reward the mule with a hug or a pat. But Judas gave a hissing, angry bray and snapped out at him, making him back off.
Dean grinned. “Hot pipe, you mean son of a fucking bitch, Judas.” He nodded. “Yeah, fucking mean.”
A MILE AND A HALF AWAY and two thousand feet deep, Dean’s father was staring into the face of death.
The tall, powerful woman had her Kalashnikov braced at her hip, drilling straight at him. The range was less than a dozen feet and he was off balance, the SIG-Sauer pointing toward the doorway on the wrong side of the tunnel.
Krysty was pinioned like a netted bird, the weight of the Coke machine trapping her to the stone floor, her dropped blaster a yard away from her groping fingers.
Ryan had lived most of his life with the central awareness that the hooded man with the scythe could be waiting right around the next bend in the trail. Trader always said that living was a one-shot operation.
But he had never thought it would be in such a bizarre way and in such a strange place.
“Adios,” said the woman, granite-faced, in a deep, grating voice.
The machine hadn’t been emptied in a hundred years, but half a dozen Cokes still remained locked in the mechanical depths. As it fell, the front panel came away and the red cans rolled onto the tunnel floor.
Krysty snatched at one and hurled it, clumsily, upward and behind her.
It was one of those bizarre moments when the whole structure of time becomes fractured and stretched.
Ryan watched the bright-colored can as it tumbled slowly into the air, toward the hulking figure of the woman with the AKM. He was beginning to turn with the SIG-Sauer, but it would take hours before he was ready to shoot.
For the first time since he’d seen her, the General’s lieutenant was showing some sign of expression. Her dark brown eyes were narrowing and the lips pulling back and up in a ghastly parody of a smile, a mask of gloating delight in her power and ability to cause pain and death on a helpless victim.
The Coke can hit her left hand, nipping fingers against the underside of the Kalashnikov. Not hard enough to break bone, but hard enough to make her yelp at the sudden sharp pain, jerking the rifle away from the injury, simultaneously squeezing the trigger.
The bullets missed Ryan’s left shoulder by a good yard, bouncing and whining away, kicking a fountain of sparks off the vaulted roof and walls of the passage.
Time resumed its normal speed.
The blunt snout of the SIG-Sauer centered on the woman’s body, and Ryan fired three times.
For a moment it seemed like flicking pebbles at a mountain of dough. The 9 mm rounds seemed to disappear into the black-clad bulk, as though the woman’s body had simply swallowed them up.
But the stream of lead from the Russkie rifle stopped, and the barrel of the Kalashnikov began to droop toward the floor of the tunnel.
“Again,” Krysty gasped, still pinned down helplessly by the machine.
The sadistic leer remained on the woman’s face, oddly frozen, so Ryan carefully put a fourth bullet through the middle of the half-open mouth.
She was so tall, looming over him, that the full-metal jacket angled upward, splintering teeth into dancing fragments of bone, tearing the soft palate apart, and driving on through the front part of the brain. The bullet was rolling and distorting, causing terminal damage before it exited through the top of her head, shattering a chunk of the skull.
Her feet, in combat boots, were still twitching, the broken nails of her fingers scratching at the dusty stone, when Ryan holstered the blaster and stooped to heave away the fallen vending machine.
“Thanks, lover,” he said, as he helped Krysty up, dusting her down.
She looked at the dead woman and the can of Coke that had saved both their lives.
“Like they used to say,” she said, smiling. “There’s nothing like the real thing.”
“FIND JAK,” Ryan said.
“Found you,” an eerie voice replied, floating from behind the door at the side of the tunnel.
“You did good, friend,” Krysty called. “Saved this one-eyed old fart from becoming coyote lunch.”
The albino appeared, holding his big blaster, his white hair like an extra light in the main passage.
“Got her,” he observed.
Ryan nodded. “Yeah. How many the rest you got? And how many left?”
“All and none,” Jak replied. “Just General someplace running and breathing.”
On an impulse, Krysty took a step forward and hugged the teenager, who stood still and endured the embrace, showing no trace of emotion.
“You did well, Jak,” she said. “Truly.”
“Chilled the pack but not leader.”
Ryan looked around him, hearing the roar of the war wag’s powerful engine coughing into life, not far behind them. “J.B., Doc and Mildred are on their way,” he said. “General could be anywhere by now.”
Jak looked at him intently. “You going,” he said flatly, accusingly.
Ryan rubbed his hand over his chin. “Look, these caves run for miles. Bastard might be anywhere. Might know another way out. It’s not worth”
“Not worth Christina’s and Jenny’s lives, Ryan? Anyway, no other chance out.”
“How do you know?”
“Heard talk ‘fore chilled them. Two ways. One there” he hiked his thumb behind him, “and Visitors’ Center. General hasn’t come this way. Reckon cutting back and out front.”
“Dean’s there,” Ryan said. “I got a serious fear that the General might’ve sent a scouting party around the front and caught him cold. ”
“Get the wag and drive around. Only take about quarter hour,” Krysty suggested. “And if Jak’s right, then we can cut the General off before he escapes into the hills.”
“Jak?” Ryan said.
“Yeah. But if doesn’t come out then, I stay. You go, fine. Meet back spread. But I stay until look in General’s face and chill him. Understand?”
Ryan nodded slowly. “Sure. Might even stay a spell with you here myself. Getting a real taste for those caverns. Here comes J.B.”
THE CLOUDS HAD VANISHED, and the sky was a light blue from east to west and north to south. J.B. had switched off the engine of the wag, and it was cooling and clicking softly to itself.
Dean had hailed them, eagerly waving both hands above his head, rattling off the story of his adventure and the part that the sullen mule had played in it. Ryan, in turn, gave the boy a capsule version of what had been happening since they parted a few hours earlier.
“I swear that I’d plant a kiss on Judas if I didn’t reckon he’d take off my face.” Mildred laughed.
“I cannot convey the delight felt in my nether regions at the thought that I will never again have to straddle that saw-backed equine from Hades.” Doc reached out with the tip of his sword stick and scratched Judas behind one ear. Amazingly the mule stood still for it, almost looking pleased with itself.
“All we need do now is wait for the General to put in an appearance,” J.B. said.
“Still think we should have put a watch on the scuttle door out of the warren.” Ryan looked at Jak. “Would’ve been safer.”
“No.” The young man’s eyes were flaming like ruby torches. “Got feeling. Like Krysty.”
“But if you’re wrong” Ryan glanced around. “Not all that long before dark. He can slip out past us. Be thirty miles away by the dawning. In any direction. We’re double close to the Grandee. General gets over that and he’s safe forever.”