But even a blaster in the hands of an incompetent idiot was a threat. The sooner they moved out, the better.
“We go now, yeah?” he yelled as he scrambled to his feet.
“Head out!” Harvey returned.
The party scrambled to its feet, the circle of sec laying down fire that kept the Sunchildren at bay. They had pressed forward from the back, and those at the front were seeking to move back, away from the blasterfire. The result was that the muties had got themselves into a tangle of limbs and falling bodies on either side of a clear pathway. For, as Harvey had figured, the forward force of the gren explosion had parted them, driving them to one side of the point on the dirt road where the gren had landed.
In fact, this was the major obstacle that confronted the party on the way out. There was a large hole in the road where the gren had dug out a gouge of earth, and the pole carriers had to negotiate the treacherous sliding earth at the sides of the earthen indent.
Once past that, the resistance they encountered became almost negligible. As Harvey had told them, the confused and cretinous Sunchildren had preferred to stay in the light, only a few thrown blades and the odd stray shot following them, and causing no danger.
The incline out of the valley was wearing on those carrying the poles, and once they were in open country, with just a faint, angry buzz of sound from the ville of Samtvogel all to remind them it was there, the party swapped over. Ryan and Harvey took one pole, and the lead on the route back.
It was quiet, and they traveled in silence, all the companions wondering silently why it was so important to recover the chilled corpses. Harvey and his sec men kept an uneasy silence, unwilling to say anything in front of the strangers.
Doc was keeping pace with the front runners of Ryan and Harvey, cradling his LeMat and keeping an eye out for anything that moved across the arid plain. He seemed to be deep in thought, deeper than any of the others.
Finally, he turned to the one-eyed warrior.
“Ryan, my dear friend and leader, there is something I shall have to share with you,” he said insistently.
Ryan shot him a warning look, fixing him with his steely eye. Doc appeared to notice and take heed, for his tone changed noticeably.
“It is, ah, a personal matter, and perhaps now is not the time…but certainly I shall need to converse with you on something that is causing me much alarm.”
The old man moved away, with a backward glance at Harvey that made the sec man curious. Downey, keeping guard in a similar parallel position to Harvey as Doc was to Ryan, also noted the old man’s behavior, and made note to himself to keep an eye on the crazy old man—who perhaps wasn’t as crazy as he seemed.
THEY MADE easy progress through the edges of old Seattle, past the apartment building and through the forest, Harvey and his sec men leading them on a path that only a thorough working knowledge of the territory could reveal. They went farther into the forest than Ryan and his people had penetrated before their first encounter with the sec force.
Here, the many-colored flowering plants decreased in favor of the mutated and stunted trees, which grew from the mounds of rubble. The creeping vines were more prevalent, flowering white and sweet smelling, the flowers open even at night. The tilted buildings, standing firm yet looking precarious on mounds of moved earth, their structures yielding slowly to gravity. Varieties of vine crawled across the spaces between buildings, forming a ceiling of green, sentient plant life that kept that part of the forest in perpetual twilight.
“Not much farther.” Harvey spoke suddenly, his voice surprising in the silence engendered by their journey. It was a response to a question he had felt had been unspoken for some time. “You wouldn’t have found the entrance, even with the map,” he continued with a note of pride creeping into his voice. “We’re real careful to keep ourselves hidden. You never know what’s around…”