Doc turned to the one-eyed man. “If—when—we get out, then I fear I shall have something of import to discuss,” he said with a worried frown.
“Worry me later,” Ryan returned. “This is gonna be a bitch.”
It was about to get worse. The sound of a blaster discharging cut through the chanting and yells of the muties.
“I thought you said they didn’t have blasters!” J.B. yelled at Harvey.
Chapter Eight
It was Sunchild himself who had the blaster. Where he had found it was something none of them could ever know—the fact that he had no idea how to use it was undeniable.
The mutie leader appeared in the middle of the crowd, the scarlet of his blood blending with the colors on his robes, running together in a mess of red as it flowed from the wound in his shoulder. Whatever else, the mutie leader had immense reserves of strength and stamina. He waved the blaster in the air, yelling in a fury even more incoherent than the chanting he had previously led.
It was hard to see in the glare of the firelight, but it looked like a long-barreled blaster, possibly a .44 Colt Peacemaker. The Armorer strained his eyes to tell, wanting to know how many shots the mutie would have left. Especially as he had just discharged the second round.
None of the party had seen where the first shot was directed, but it was an even bet that it was as random as the second, which fired off at an oblique angle, stopped by the soft flesh of a mutie with only one arm, the other showing just a few fingers flapping at the shoulder.
Now the mutie had no arms, its only true limb blown off at the elbow by the heavy lead slug, ripping sinew, flesh and bone at such short range.
The companions and sec men encircled the poles, facing out. What had been difficult before was now shaping up to be a deadly proposition.
“You said they didn’t have blasters,” Ryan stated flatly. “Our entire attack was based on that…but they do.”
Harvey shook his head, momentarily thrown. “Never seen the bastards use them before. Didn’t even know that they had them,” he whispered.
“Seems certain they don’t know how to use them,” J.B. snapped, “so mebbe we’d better get going before they do.”
Harvey nodded. “We keep tight, lay down a covering fire, staggering shots to preserve ammo. But first I think we need to carve ourselves a little path.”
The uncertainty that had plagued his voice a few moments before was now gone as the sec man’s tactical brain clicked into gear, going through the permutations of what was possible in this situation.
From the leather bag at his belt he produced an old gren. He pulled the pin and lobbed the bomb overarm toward the road out of the ville. Ryan noticed that a few of the muties automatically followed the path of the gren as its dark shape arced in the light, their inbred idiocy responding to stimulus, even in the middle of a battle.
The sec men laid down a volley of fire, driving the muties back, while Harvey counted carefully, hissing the numbers between his teeth, until he screamed, “Now!”
He hit the ground hard. The sec men around him did likewise. The companions took only a split second between them to realize what Harvey had been counting, and followed.
The gren exploded, either on impact with the ground or else in the air directly above. It was hard to tell, as it landed somewhere to the rear of the pressing crowd of mutie Sunchildren. Shrapnel from the gren spread out in all directions, and the air was suddenly filled with shrill screams as those at the rear of the crowd were either hit by the white-hot metal or thrown forward by the concussion of the blast.
There was more confusion among the ville dwellers, and a few more shots were loosed. J.B.’s experienced ears picked up that it was more than one blaster…a Peacemaker, probably Sunchild’s, as he had suspected, and a Walther PPK, like the one carried by Blake. So there were at least two. The Armorer surmised that the blasters had been picked up from sec men claimed in raids by the Sunchildren in the past. It was obvious that they had no idea or experience of blasters, and probably only used them now because of the injury to their leader.