Suddenly Kauderer felt a sharp burning pain in his right leg. He looked down and saw a piece of metal embedded in the muscle of his thigh.
Shouting in pain, he dropped his blaster and tore open his pant leg to get a good look at his wound. A leaf-bladed knife protruded from his flesh.
Where in the rad-blasted Deathlands had it come from? Kauderer wondered. No one was in sight. Maybe he’d been caught flat-footed by the one-eyed outlander, sneaking up on him from a stand of trees, stabbing him in the leg and retreating again, as invisible as the wind.
The blood was running freely down his leg now, and he was beginning to feel weak.
Fillinger came up behind him and grabbed Kauderer’s shoulders to steady him. “What’s wrong?”
“Been stabbed.”
“Where?” Fillinger asked. “By who?”
“In the leg…by the outlander.”
“We better get you to the nursery. The healer there’s pretty good with wounds. She’ll fix you up.”
Fillinger summoned a few nearby sec men to take Kauderer away. Then he moved a couple of squads from the east side of the farm to the west.
They’d be sure to find the outlander now.
DEAN LAY CLOSE to the ground next to Jak about twenty yards from the fence surrounding the farm. “How can you be sure they’ll know that’s the sign?”
“Knife,” the albino teenager said. “Know leaf blade.”
“I still can’t believe you got the knife through the fence, and hit the sec man in the leg.”
Jak nodded. “Good throw.”
“But the gap in the fencing couldn’t have been more than six inches across.”
“Was enough.”
They remained behind long enough to see the sec man being taken away, then started back to the wag so they could make a report to J.B.
“MILDRED?” Krysty called out, entering the nursery.
The woman was nowhere to be seen.
Krysty went back out into the hall and noticed the door across the hallway was open. It was the door to the armory.
She approached the door cautiously, sensing something was amiss.
Then the door suddenly sprung open and Krysty found herself at the wrong end of a Czech-built ZKR .38-caliber target pistol aimed directly at her head by one Mildred Wyeth.
“Hello, friend!” Krysty said.
Without a word, Mildred pulled Krysty into the armory and loaded her up with the several boxes of ammunition. “Bring them into the nursery.”
“What about our weapons?” Krysty asked.
Mildred removed the tape covering the lock on the door, then closed and locked the door to the armory behind her. “I’ve already got all our blasters back.”
“Where are they?”
“Safe in the nursery, until we need them.”
Just then there was a commotion on the stairs. Two sec men were carrying another who was bleeding badly from a wound on his leg.
Krysty dumped the ammo boxes into an empty bassinet and covered them with a blanket.
“Bring him to the table over there,” Mildred instructed.
They carried the wounded man, now unconscious, and lifted him on the table. “He was stabbed by the one-eyed outlander,” the sec man on the right of the wounded man said. “You better be able to save him.”
Mildred ignored the threat and set to work, motioning for Krysty to stay in order to give her a hand.
When the sec man protested, she said, “She knows how to prepare field dressings and clean wounds. Your friend can live with her helping me, or take his chances with me working alone.”
The sec man reluctantly nodded, and took a step back.
Mildred cut away what was left of the man’s pant leg and gasped audibly at what she saw.
“That bad?” the sec man asked.
“No,” she answered. “He’ll be fine.”
The sec man left the nursery a moment to inform the other sec men milling about in the hall.
Krysty tied off the man’s leg with a tourniquet, and Mildred gently pulled out the leaf-bladed throwing knife. “Well,” she said, “either Ryan has done the impossible and finally learned how to throw one of these knives, or a certain teenage albino has just sent us his card.”
RYAN SHIVERED in the cold water of the tower. He’d been hidden for hours, listening to sec men come and go around him, most of them eager to chill him and collect the big jack being offered by the baron.