Outlanders 21 - Devil in the Moon Page 2

  Mina was so entranced she didn't move until the basilisk sank its needle-pointed fangs into the calf of her left leg. Screaming, she rolled onto her back, kick­ing frantically at the black shape hanging on to her leg by tooth and claw. Its whiplike tail coiled around her ankle, and Hell glared out of the obsidian black eyes.

  The basilisk was barely six inches long, though the spread of its talon-tipped wings was more than two feet. Its body was covered by a layer of blue-black overlapping scales, its three-toed hind feet tipped with curving claws. The reptilian head appeared to be little more than a maw full of serrated, razor-keen teeth.

  Mina reached for the winged monster, and its fangs crunched into her right ankle, grinding at the bone. Her hands swatted out, closing around its neck. The basilisk opened its mouth to voice a thin scream. Mina yanked her torn leg free, then struck with a balled fist at the devil-beast. Bone snapped, and blood spewed from the creature's maw amid a few fangs, like slivers of ivory.

  The basilisk spread its wings and sprang into the air, the whiplike tail lashing and laying open Mina's left calf. She cried out, more in fury than fear or pain. She stumbled erect, turning to run again, then lurched to a clumsy halt. Her cry of anger became a wordless call of wonder.

  On the ground rested a shape that resembled a very squat, broad-based pyramid made of smooth, gleam­ing metal. It appeared to be only one foot in overall width, its height not exceeding ten inches. A waxy, glowing funnel of light fanned up from the metal apex of the pyramid. It looked like a diffused veil of backlit fog, with tiny shimmering stars dancing within it.

  As Mina stared, the light expanded into a gushing borealis several feet wide, spreading out over the crossroads. A thready pulse of vibration suddenly tickled her skin, and shadows crawled over the gully walls, moving in fitful jerks and leaps. A faint hint of a breeze brushed her face and ruffled her hair.

  Then a yellow nova brilliance erupted from the tip of the pyramid. Mina felt the shock wave slapping her breath painfully back into her lungs, tumbling her off her feet. Her eyes stung fiercely.

  Mina cleared her vision with a swipe of her hands. Through the blurred afterimage of the flare, she saw three dark, shadowy shapes shifting in the fan of light. The shadow shapes looked distorted, as if they ap­proached from a great distance, elongated and strangely silhouetted by a sun she couldn't see. The edges of the light seemed to peel back and fragment, and a trio of human figures in black stepped out of nowhere and stood in the crossroads. Behind them, the glowing funnel disappeared back into the small pyramid, as if it were liquid and had been sucked down into the tip.

  Shocked into paralysis by the sight, her limbs fro­zen, her mouth gaping wide, Mina lay in a half-prone position and stared unblinkingly at the three shadow people standing before her. From throat to fingertip to heel, they were clad in one-piece black leathery garments that fitted as tightly as doeskin gloves.

  Mina couldn't move, not even when one of the shadow people stepped forward, extending a gloved right hand in a gesture of greeting or help.

  Mina looked up at the woman, noting her tall, wil­lowy, athletic figure. A curly mane of red-gold hair spilled over her shoulders and draped her upper back, framing a smoothly sculpted face dusted lightly with freckles across her nose and cheeks. The color of pol­ished emeralds glittered in her big, feline-slanted eyes.

  "Hi," said the shadow woman, her lips curving in a smile. "My name is Brigid. I hope we didn't scare you."

  Chapter 2

  Brigid Baptiste maintained the friendly, nonthreaten-ing smile and kept her hand extended as a gesture of help and to show she was unarmed. The raggedly dressed, blood-streaked girl only gazed up at her through a tangled hayrick of dark hair. Her black eyes bulged with astonishment as if she had never seen either a smile or an open hand before.

  A cacophony of piercing, whistling shrieks wafted down from above, interwoven with the flapping of many wings. As if the sound were an electrical cur­rent, the dark-haired girl's expression of blank, gog­gle-eyed shock became one of soul-deep terror. She crawled like a crippled crab toward the nearest gully wall, leaving a crimson trail.

  Brigid snapped up her head, squinting momentarily against the glare of the midmorning sun. A swarm of black shapes crossed the blue expanse of sky, re­minding her of a flight of arrows arcing through the air. The winged creatures wheeled around, circled for an instant in perfect formation, then darted downward. The beating of a multitude of leathery bat wings sounded like a round of applause made by gloved hands.

  "Screamwings," she bit out, taking a hasty back-step, sidling between Kane and Grant. From a sheath at the small of her back, she drew a Sykes-Fairbairn combat stiletto with a six-inch, razor-keen blade.

  The two men flexed their right wrists, and with a faint whine of tiny electric motors, actuators popped their Sin Eaters from forearm holsters into their wait­ing hands. Stripped down to skeletal frames, the Sin Eaters were barely fourteen inches long. The extended magazines held twenty rounds of 9 mm ammo. There was no trigger guard, no fripperies, no wasted inch of design. The Sin Eaters looked exactly like what they were supposed to be—the most wickedly efficient blasters ever made.

  The index fingers of the two men hovered over the firing studs of the weapons as the screamwings dived and dipped and banked at such a blurring speed, Grant and Kane couldn't draw a bead on them. They had seen screamwings once before, in the ruins of New-york, and not before or since had they encountered creatures that were such stripped-down, bare-essential predators. Kane remembered Brigid theorizing that the screamwing was a species of raptor that had lost its feathers and regressed to its reptilian roots.

  A clot of the creatures described a wide circle around the three standing people, wings slapping, fang-filled mouths emitting little piping shrieks. Grant, Kane and Brigid tried to keep them framed within their fields of vision, but the blinding speed and maneuverability of the monsters made it nearly impossible. A screamwing suddenly broke formation and glided directly toward Brigid, drawn toward her red-gold hair. She slashed out with her knife, and its edge sheared through the creature's scaled torso, slic­ing it in two with a single upward stroke.

  Voicing a thin prolonged scream, it fell amid a thrash of wings and a spray of crimson. Drawn by the sound of pain and scent of blood, the circling screamwings banked sharply and fluttered directly to­ward the three people.

  The Sin Eaters roared deafeningly, the slugs racing upward. Brigid caught a glimpse of the girl clapping her hands over her ears in reaction to the booming reports. Shooting from the hip, Kane and Grant seemed to tear a ragged hole in the clot of scream-wings. Scarlet sprinkled down in a warm drizzle, and small bodies thudded to earth all around them. The monsters didn't flee. Instead of being frightened by the carnage done to their flock, they grew even more maddened. The dead and injured creatures were set upon by other members of the swarm.

  More and more screamwings lanced across the sky and joined the flock. Black wings beat and thundered in the narrow gorge as the creatures flew in a tight­ening circle around the three people, like a cyclone cloud with a hollow center. Claws struck out and lash­ing tails whipped at their eyes.

  A screamwing landed on Kane's chest, the curving hind claws trying to secure a grip in the black fabric. The talons didn't penetrate, but he felt the pressure nonetheless. He crushed the creature's skull with a swipe of his blaster's barrel and kicked it away from him. He and Grant continued firing short 3-round bursts. With each shot and dying scream, the outraged survivors shrieked all the louder. Some of them turned on one another to vent their frustrated rage, talons raking raw strips from scaled bodies.

  For the next minute, the black winged monsters rained down, fairly carpeting the gully floor with an ankle-deep layer of feebly snapping jaws and thrash­ing tails.

  Then, like a cloud of billowing black smoke, the surviving screamwings broke formation and veered away. They hovered a few seconds, shrieking in frus­tration, then soared into the sky, the flapping of t
hen-wings and keening cries fading. Grant, Brigid and Kane released their pent-up breath in profanity-seasoned exhalations. The men thumbed the magazine toggle release of their guns and ejected the empty clips. They inserted fresh ones in the swift, smooth motions that came of long practice.

  Kicking a small scaled body out of his way, Grant stepped toward the girl. She cringed against the gully wall, a high-pitched wail of fright starting up her throat.

  "Don't go any closer," Brigid said. "You're scar­ing her."

  Grant's face contorted in a frown, but he came to a halt. A down-sweeping mustache showed jet-black against the coffee-brown of his skin. Beneath it, his heavy-jawed face was set in a perpetual scowl. Brigid knew that the more Grant frowned, the more satisfied he felt with circumstances.

  The sprinkling of gray in his close-cropped black hair gave him a patrician air, like somebody's cur­mudgeonly but essentially good-hearted uncle. A very broad-shouldered and thick-chested man, Grant stood four inches over six feet and he realized to the girl cowering in the gully, he had to have seemed like a ferocious giant, a bit of Outland folklore come to life.

  "We just rescued her," he said, trying to soften his lion's growl of a voice to a soothing rumble. "She should be grateful, not scared."

  "Three people popping out of nowhere is a little more nerve-racking than screamwings," Kane com­mented. "At least she knew what to expect from screamwings."

  "I wonder where she's from?" said Brigid. "She's just a kid."

  Kane glanced warily to the sky before he gave the girl a swift visual inspection. She looked very short, smaller even than Domi, which made her very small indeed. She was thin, her dark hair a wild and unruly mass of curls. Her big eyes were black and very bright. She wore only a ragged, threadbare shift of faded red, and her bare arms and legs were scratched and streaked with blood. There was a small red letter N emblazoned on her forehead, the result he guessed of a painful application of a branding iron. He couldn't help but wince.

  Brigid noticed the reaction and repressed a smile. She had seen Kane stroll through a corpse-littered bat­tlefield with apparently no more concern than if he had been walking into the cafeteria at Cerberus re­doubt. But a girl-child bearing the scar of a branding iron made him flinch. She knew, however, that Kane either felt something or he didn't, and in contrast to Grant, his high-planed face always mirrored his emo­tions.

  An inch over six feet, every line of Kane's rangy, flat-muscled body was hard and stripped of excess flesh. His thick, dark hair was tousled, sun-touched highlights showing at the temples and nape. His left hand impatiently pushed through a curving comma that fell over his forehead. He kept his right hand, his gun hand, free.

  A faint scar showed like a white thread against the sun-bronzed skin of his left cheek. His piercing eyes were gray with enough blue in them so the color re­sembled the high sky at sunset. The alert, wary look in them never changed. But Brigid had seen his face transformed into something ugly and terrible by rage, and then changed to the epitome of warm humor when he laughed.

  It was difficult for Brigid to keep in mind that Grant and Kane had spent their entire adult lives as killers—superbly trained and conditioned Magis­trates, not only bearing the legal license to deal death, but the spiritual sanction, as well. Both men had been through the dehumanizing cruelty of Magistrate train-ing yet had somehow, almost miraculously, managed to retain their humanity. But vestiges of their Mag years still lurked close to the surface, particularly in threatening situations. In those instances, their de­structive ruthlessness could be frightening to anyone. Although she owed both men her life, she still occa­sionally feared them, so she wasn't surprised by the girl's reaction.

  Kneeling in front of her, Brigid said softly, "We mean you no harm."

  After waiting a moment and receiving only a wild and wide-eyed stare in response, Brigid added, "There's nothing to be afraid of."

  Kane snorted in derision. "Oh, yeah. Three people in black long Johns appear out of thin air and start blowing the shit out of a screamwing flock. It prob­ably happens every day in these parts."

  Brigid cast him an over-the-shoulder glance that glittered with irritation. "Sarcasm isn't going to help us find out where we are."

  "I thought we knew," Grant said gruffly. "Around Sedona, about 115 miles north of Phoenix, Arizona."

  "If we're going to chart the parallax points," Bri­gid replied dryly, ' 'we need to be a little more precise than that."

  A faint aspirated whisper issued from the girl's lips. "City…"

  Brigid returned her attention to the girl, watching as her mouth worked as she tried to form words. "City of…flaming bird?"

  Kane started to step closer, caught the flash of fear in the girl's eyes and stayed motionless. "What did she say?"

  "I think she's trying to ask us a question," replied Brigid.

  She smiled encouragingly. "What do you want to say?"

  The girl coughed. "Are you from the city of the flaming bird? The Phoenix?"

  Grant muttered, "At least she speaks English, not some Outland dialect."

  Kane nodded in agreement. It was always a chancy business communicating with outlanders, particularly in settlements that had been isolated since the nuke-caust of two centuries. He retained vividly unpleasant memories of the Outland settlement known as Boon-town and the debased form of French spoken by its inhabitants. In the Outlands, people were divided into small, regional clans, communications with other groups stifled, education impeded and rivalries bred. The internecine struggles in the Outlands were not only condoned by the baronies but encouraged.

  Outlanders, or anyone who chose to live outside ville society or had that fate chosen for them, were of a breed born into a raw, wild world, accustomed to living on the edge of death. Grim necessity had taught them the skills to survive, even thrive in the postnuke environ­ment. They may have been the great-great-great­grandchildren of civilized men and women, but they had no choice but to embrace lives of semibarbarism.

  The people who lived outside the direct influence of the villes, who worked the farms, toiled in the fields or simply roamed from place to place, were reviled and hated. No one worried about an outlander or even cared. They were the outcasts of the new feudalism, the cheap, expendable labor force, even the cannon fodder when circumstances warranted. In re­turn, they feared and hated anyone not of their clan. The girl's terror was fueled by generations of condi­tioning.

  "Are you asking if we come from Phoenix?" Bri-gid asked the girl.

  Eyes still wide, she bobbed her head.

  "No, we're not from there. We're from much far­ther away. Where are you from?''

  The girl made a vague gesture with one hand, to­ward the top of the gully.

  "That doesn't tell us much," Brigid replied with a smile. "But first things first…do you have a name?"

  She bobbed her head again but said nothing more. Brigid waited, then asked, "Will you tell it to me?"

  The girl's response was a thready whisper so faint Brigid had to lean forward to hear her. "My name is Mina."

  "Mina…that's a pretty name. Short for Wilhel-mina?"

  Mina's shoulders moved up and down in a shrug, indicating that she didn't know and the subject didn't hold much interest for her. Brigid stood and extended her hand.' 'You look like you could use some medical attention…maybe even some food and water."

  Tentatively, as if she half suspected Brigid's black-gloved fingers were really venomous serpents in dis­guise, Mina took her hand and allowed the red-haired woman to help her up. Brigid nodded toward the two men. "You already know my name…this is Kane and Grant."

  Mina's dark eyes shifted from Kane to Grant and back to Brigid again. "Did you come across the For­bidden Waste?" Her voice was stronger now, a little more sure but still quavering with an undercurrent of fear.

  "No," Kane answered. "Like Brigid said, we came from far away."

  Brigid glanced toward him. "Let me have the med­ical kit."

 
After a second or two of hesitation, Kane pushed his Sin Eater back into its forearm holster where a locking solenoid caught it with a purposeful click. The sensitive wrist actuators ignored all movements except the one that indicated the gun should be un-holstered. It was a completely automatic, almost un­conscious pattern practiced by both Grant and Kane.

  Reaching around behind him, Kane removed a small canvas case from the small of his back. Velcro tabs crackled as they were pulled away. He handed it to Brigid, who opened the flap and swiftly took out a variety of first-aid items. Mina stood stock-still, not even whimpering as she was treated for her injuries. After the blood was swabbed away, Brigid saw most of the girl's wounds were superficial, shallow abra­sions and scratches. She sprayed them with disinfec­tant from a small aerosol can.

  Kane silently admired the deft ease with which Bri­gid Baptiste tended to Mina. Reba DeFore, Cerberus redoubt's resident medic, had done a good job teach­ing her field medicine. But Brigid's bedside manner was superior to that of her mentor's, which, Kane reminded himself, wouldn't be too difficult. A swampie's bedside manner was probably more sym­pathetic than DeFore's.

  Only the teeth- and claw-inflicted lacerations on Mina's leg required bandaging, and that also came from a can. Brigid used another aerosol spray to apply a liquid bandage. A skinlike thin layer of film formed over the cuts along her leg. The substance contained nutrients and antibiotics, and would be absorbed by the body as the injuries healed.

  While she finished treating the girl, Grant and Kane watched the skies warily. They could still hear the whistling shrieks of the screamwing horde, but they were very distant and didn't increase in volume.

  Kane glanced down at the front of his one-piece garment where the screamwing had clung. The black fabric showed only a faint series of vertical lines where the winged monster's talons had scored.

  "Saved again by this stuff," he observed wryly. "One of the few things we owe Sindri."

  Grant grunted. "I still put more faith in our body armor. At least it's bulletproof."