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  Ryan put his arms around her waist, steadying himself and preventing her from moving so fast that she risked losing him. The Trader's joke about it being a dirty job came back to him at that moment.

  Two factors kept Ryan from giving himself up to the delight of their coupling. One was his straining to hear the sound of the two-wheel wags coming along the dirt road toward the ruined ranch, and the other was his awareness that the grandfather of all storms was raging in toward them.

  He'd taken the precaution of wheeling his Norton into an angle between the walls of the main building, where it would get some protection, but Sharona's chopped hog was out in the open, not far from the river.

  "Oh, yeah! Come on, you son of a bitching bastard, Ryan! Gimme it all, all, all!" Her head was thrown back, the cords in her throat standing out as if she were being throttled. Her mouth gaped open in an expression of near idiocy, and spittle was stringing from her full lips.

  Knowing he wasn't going to get there, Ryan concentrated on sustaining his erection to avoid disappointing the gasping woman. Outside, over her heaving shoulders, he could see that sunlight had disappeared, and the day had become dusk. Sand swirled around, and the door began to swing back and forth in the howling wind.

  Ryan had expected Sharona to scream her climax, but she simply collapsed on him with a long-drawn sigh of pure delight.

  She was kissing him on the lips, the face, his good eye, his neck, his forehead, tiny nibbling kisses that kept him roused.

  "Oh, dearest, that was wonderful. Again. We gotta do it again. We got time."

  "No, Sharona."

  "Yes. Don't worry about the sec-men. They won't get here. Please, lover. Anything you want. I'll be so good for you."

  "No. The storm."

  "You can be baron of Towse, Ryan. With me to help you."

  The noise of the hurricane was so piercing that Ryan wasn't sure he'd heard her properly, even though her lips were against his ear. She had started to move again, little risings and fallings, making him stir with arousal.

  "What d'you say?" he shouted.

  "You and me, Ryan. You're man enough to take him out."

  "Take him? The baron?"

  "Chill him, lover."

  She was moving more, one hand stroking his face, sliding her index finger into the corner of his mouth. But Ryan shifted away from her touch.

  "No. You want me to chill Alias Carson for you? That it?"

  Dust was billowing around the small, square building, and the wind was deafening.

  "Yes. Chill him. I'll arrange it. No risk. He doesn't even have a blaster. Do it, lover, and you'll have me for always and all the power and all the jack. All of it."

  Ryan closed his good eye, blinded by the dust. When he opened it again, moments later, he stared straight into the muzzle of McMurtry's blaster.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  "THIS IS BUSINESS, Ryan," McMurtry shouted, shaking his head sadly.

  "Yeah," Smitty agreed from behind him, also holding an automatic pistol. "We heard what you said, and we seen what you done. What you're still doing by the look of it."

  Ryan with Sharona Carson sitting astride him, knew that this was as close to death as he'd come for a long, long while. Either the sec-men chilled them both now, or they got taken back to Towse. The latter might give him some sort of a chance.

  "Do it now, Mac? Or take 'em back for the baron? Which?"

  McMurtry sniffed. "Fucking dust gets… I don't much like the idea of having to watch this one-eyed son of a bitch all the way back to the ville. Guess it looks like now."

  That was the same decision that Ryan would have taken if their respective positions had been reversed. Now was generally best.

  And safest.

  The hut was about ten feet square. The mattress where he sat, back against the wall, took up about a third of the space. The door was still swinging back and forth, slamming against the latch. A ferocious wind screamed outside, sending spiraling fountains of red dust into the crowded room.

  Sharona, her back to the intruders, hadn't said a word, seeming paralyzed with shock. She slumped forward, her left hand at her face. The right was on the blind side, clutching, oddly, at her ankle, just inside the soft top of the suede boot.

  Peering through the fog of sand, Ryan tried to make out what kind of blasters the two sec-men were carrying, but his eye was prickling and tears filled it. All he could see was that they were both hefting standard .38s. At a range of six feet, it didn't much matter.

  "Ready?" McMurtry asked.

  Sharona turned around at last, staring up at the sec-man. "Any use offering you jack?"

  "Jack'd buy us good graves with real pretty coffins. Brass handles and all. Won't buy us life if the baron got to hear about what you said and done."

  "If Ryan chills him, then you'd be safe."

  Her right hand was reaching for Ryan's fingers, as though she sought the comfort of a human touch in the final seconds of life.

  "Nobody can chill Baron Alias Carson," Smitty bellowed. "Man lives for ever and ever."

  "Amen to that," McMurtry said.

  "Please. You can both have me if you let me go. Just chill Ryan."

  The sec-men laughed. The eerie shriek of the storm was all around them, and Ryan couldn't actually hear the noise of the laughter. But he saw Smitty's layers of belly rippling with his amusement.

  "You'll fuck with us, Sharona?"

  "Yes. Any way you like."

  Now her hand was locked into Ryan's hand, and he could feel what she was holding.

  McMurtry shook his head. "You don't have nothing other sluts don't have. Not 'nough to buy the farm for. No. This is it."

  She passed Ryan a knife, short, with a very heavy blade, shaped like a broad leaf. The slender hilt felt like carved bone to Ryan's fingers.

  McMurtry was partly hidden by Sharona, but Smitty was a little to the left, his grinning face and raggy beard hanging over the barrel of the blaster.

  Hampered by the woman, and with an unfamiliar blade, Ryan knew that he had to go for the ace-on-the-line throw. That meant the throat.

  He powered himself into explosive action.

  Bracing his legs and pushing Sharona directly at McMurtry, he simultaneously flicked the small knife toward Smitty's neck, not waiting to see how successful the throw was.

  The combat logic was very simple.

  If the knife missed, then the fat man would shoot him. If he waited to see whether he'd hit the target, then McMurtry would recover and shoot him.

  Sharona sprawled on her back, legs wide apart, arms clawing toward McMurtry, who staggered a couple of paces, banging his shoulder against the swinging door. The blaster went off, almost mute in the inferno of noise from the appalling chem-storm that raged outside. Chips of adobe flew from the wall by Ryan's shoulder, peppering him with the sharp splinters.

  A tiny fraction of Ryan's fighting brain was conscious of how vulnerable he was, with his pants down and sand stinging the exposed flesh.

  Hobbled, he barely reached the sec-man, his hands snatching at McMurtry's groin. He locked his fingers into the softness and tore at it with all his strength. There was a mewing squeak, and the sec-man tore himself free, stumbling and falling halfway through the door. Ryan chopped with the edge of his right hand at McMurtry's unprotected groin, feeling the jar as he pulped the genitals against the ridge of the pubic bone.

  The man's knees came up in an involuntary reaction, and his whole body went into a shocked muscular spasm. Ryan knew that the sec-man wouldn't be taking any interest in things for a while, and he turned his attention to Smitty.

  The fat man was kneeling against the far wall, sand smearing his sweating face. The ivory hilt of the throwing knife was stuck in the side of his fleshy neck, blood leaking fast. The pistol had fallen from his fingers, and he was fumbling for it with his left hand, while the right hand touched the hilt of the knife cautiously, as though he feared he would hasten his own passing if he was clumsy.

&nbs
p; Sharona lay where McMurtry had kicked her, doubled over, eyes shut tight.

  Ryan snatched a moment to hoist his own pants, clicking the buckle closed. Then he stepped across to Smitty. The sec-man squinted up at him through glazing eyes. His lips moved, but Ryan couldn't hear a sound from the dying man. He stooped and picked up the blaster, throwing it into the corner of the hut.

  Smitty was rocking slowly back and forth, head moving from side to side. Eventually the knife would take his life, but Ryan wasn't about to stand there waiting.

  He bunched his right fist and struck a single, lethal blow to the side of the sec-man's neck, just below and behind the right ear. Smitty slumped on his face, legs twitching, fingers scrabbling in the piled sand.

  Sharona had recovered enough to drag the semiconscious figure of McMurtry inside the hut, gesturing to Ryan to close the flapping door and shut out the hurricane.

  As he threw all of his weight against the heavy oak door, Ryan glimpsed a scene from hell. The trees of the river were folded double, all of their leaves stripped by the demonic gale. Visibility fluctuated between forty yards and zero. With a great effort, Ryan braced his shoulder against the door and forced it shut, slamming the bolt. A tiny barred window of thick glass, set near the ceiling, provided murky light, enough for him to see Sharona bending over the moaning figure of McMurtry.

  The noise outside was still deafening, but inside the adobe walls there was a reasonable level of sound.

  "What're you doing?" he shouted.

  "Making sure, lover," she replied, straightening up.

  She'd drawn the ivory-hiked throwing knife from the neck of the corpse and placed the point inside McMurtry's left ear where he lay in the dirt. The white bone handle was smeared with Smitty's blood. It stood there, like a marine creature probing at the interior of a shell, moving slightly in time with the breathing of the barely conscious sec-man.

  "Now what?"

  Sharona turned to him, her eyes staring white with shock, her lips folded back off the perfect teeth in a vicious snarl.

  "This," she called.

  Lifting her right foot and positioning it carefully over McMurtry's head, she stamped down with all of her weight, the sole of the boot driving the sharp steel deep into the sec-man's skull. The impact was so great that Ryan heard the hollow sound of bone bouncing off the stone floor of the hut.

  There was hardly any blood from the mortal wound, just a little, very dark, seeping out around the sculpted ivory hilt.

  "Now we put 'em out," she yelled.

  Ryan immediately saw the cunning of her plan.

  Someone, sometime, might want to take a look at the corpses of the two sec-men, and if they found knife wounds then it might prove difficult for Ryan and the woman to explain. But out in the scouring gale…

  "Pull that blade," he said.

  "I put it in. You take it out," she argued, wiping her hands in the sand to clean off the flecks of blood.

  Ryan wasn't in the arguing mood.

  He reached inside with finger and thumb and was just able to grip the slippery haft, drawing it smoothly out and wiping it on the dead man's T-shirt. He handed it to Sharona, who tucked it snugly back inside her right boot.

  "Lucky you had that," he said.

  She pointed to the two dead men with her foot. "They were unlucky. We were better."

  It was easier to talk about dumping the bodies outside the protection of the hut than it was to actually do it.

  The chem-storm was so unrelentingly savage that it whisked away the senses. Once the door was opened again, both Ryan and Sharona were blinded and deafened. The sand lashed at their skin, making it impossible for them to see what they were doing. Communication was out of the question.

  Finally Ryan pushed the woman down on the mattress while he stooped and lifted Smitty under the arms. He heaved him a few paces out the front of the ruined ranch, dropped him and went back to fetch McMurtry's corpse.

  He battled back into the hut, surrounded by constant thunder and purple lightning. The air reverberated and buffeted him, filling his nostrils with the bitter stench of ozone.

  Ryan jammed the door shut, fighting for breath. Sharona sat hunched on the stained mattress.

  "Now we wait," he said.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  AS FAR AS RYAN could calculate, the eye of the chem-storm passed over them around five o'clock in the afternoon. That was when they were both conscious of a sharp, painful change in atmospheric pressure. Sharona cried out, clapping her hands over her ears. Ryan did the same, swallowing hard to try to minimize the sudden discomfort.

  The noise dropped for a quarter of an hour, then resumed again with a banshee wail. It persisted for several more hours, bombarding the sturdy little building. Long after dark, the noise began to ease. The thunder drifted slowly away, and they could no longer see continuous purple lightning through the one tiny window.

  "Is it over?" she asked, breaking the long, long silence between them.

  Ryan considered his answer. "The storm, you mean? Yeah, that's over?"

  "How about what I said?"

  "That's over, too. Fact is, it never got itself started."

  "And us?"

  "Us?"

  "You and me, lover?"

  "Over."

  Ryan opened the door and glanced out. The sky was shrouded in unbroken cloud, hiding the moon completely, making it impossible to see what had happened to their hogs or to the corpses of the sec-men.

  He closed the door again and went back to the mattress, curling up beside the baron's wife and falling immediately asleep once more.

  When Ryan next came smoothly from sleep, he saw the first pallid lightening of the dawn sky through the window above him. He had slept fully dressed and he swung himself upright, stretching the kinks from his muscles.

  The movement woke Sharona. "Time to get up?" she asked.

  "Storm's done."

  "Sweet Lord! I feel like I've been rad-blasted up and down and in and out. My mouth tastes like a rabid cougar pissed in it."

  The door was blocked by a drift of blown sand. Ryan levered it open enough for them to get out and look around.

  It was a thoroughly beautiful morning, with the air clean and fresh, the peaks of the Sangre de Cristo looking close enough to touch.

  The sun smiled serenely from a flawlessly blue sky. At a first glance around them, nothing seemed to have changed.

  The contours of the land were the same. Ryan could see that the river was still running, though its waters now looked swollen and muddied. The devastated house and hut were much as they'd been before, though the adobe walls looked as if they'd been scoured clean by a team of sandblasting workers. The trees had gone—not totally, but only splintered trunks remained. Every leaf and twig, and virtually all of the large branches had been stripped away.

  "Look at 'em," said Sharona Carson, standing at his elbow.

  Ryan looked.

  At first glance it was difficult to even recognize the corpses as human bodies. Sand was piled around and over them, almost providing ready-built graves.

  Ryan walked toward them, his boot heels crunching through the scattered, glittering sand. He stooped and brushed away at the corpses, checking that the marks of their violent deaths had been removed by the chem-storm.

  "Nothing to worry about," he said quietly.

  He straightened and brushed his hands free of the orange dust.

  The clothing of the sec-men had gone, except for a few ragged threads that had been partly protected by the weight of the bodies. Their skins had been flayed away, often taking the flesh with it. In several places— at shoulder, knee, elbow—the polished whiteness of exposed bone.

  McMurtry's face was unrecognizable. His eyes had been torn out, as had his lips and the soft tissues around his throat and mouth. His jaw gaped, and his teeth bore an unnatural gleam of scoured ivory. Smitty's beard had protected a little of the flesh around the jaw, but the rest of the face was disfigured in the same way a
s the other sec-man.

  "Tell it like it was. Smitty's hog overheated. Mac stayed with him. We went on and got to cover. They didn't make it." The woman's voice was calm and totally lacked expression. She stared at the bodies, avoiding any sort of eye contact with Ryan.

  "Sure," he agreed. Sharona was quite right. Best lies were the simple ones. You got caught out when you tried to be clever and elaborate. Tell it like it happened.

  More or less.

  The two-wheel wags of Sharona and the sec-men had been destroyed by the insane power of the chem-storm. Not a flake of paint remained on any of the machines. When Ryan tried the starter on the Harley trike, there was just the faintest grating sound. McMurtry's hog and Smitty's Suzuki were totally, terminally mech-dead.

  "Where's your…oh, I remember. You put it inside there, didn't you?"

  He nodded and walked through the empty doorway. His Norton was relatively unscathed.

  Sharona followed him in. "You're one of the most careful men I ever met, Ryan Cawdor. You wouldn't want to reconsider…"

  He didn't even bother to turn round, throwing the words over his shoulder. "I said it was over, lady. Over."

  Before starting off toward Towse ville, they snatched a hasty meal from the emergency rations in the hut and shared the remaining drinking water from the metal canteen. Ryan opened a couple of the cans, none of which bore any labels.

  "Corned meat in this one," he said, "and I guess this is some kinda squash. You got a preference, or can we eat half each?"

  "I don't care."

  "How about if I eat it all, if you really don't care?"

  "Fuck you… lover," she spit, snatching the tin of meat from him.

  In the end Ryan decided that it would be wise to drag the stripped corpses into the hut and push the door shut on them. The wind and sand had almost tanned what flesh remained, and they were light and easy to move.

  "Keep them away from the wolves and the coyotes," he said.

  "Wouldn't hurt them. Not now."

  He stared at the woman. "You get your mouth working before you get your brain engaged, lady. Suppose your husband wants to see the bodies. Suppose he doesn't believe our story. Those scoured bodies are like…like silent witnesses. Leave them out and they disappear, and our story gets to grow a few more holes in it. That what you want?"