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  At the same moment, he heard Doc's voice, harsh with excitement, from the room directly above the main en­trance.

  "A man with a long gun is moving slowly in a crouched position in a narrow draw, eastward."

  The warning drew J.B., snake-silent, to Ryan's elbow. "Could be a trick. Bring us out while the others start blasting."

  "Doesn't feel like that to me. You?"

  The Armorer shook his head. "Nope. Go after him? You and me?"

  "And Jak. Get him. Others watch the sides. Leave the rifles behind for them."

  In less than twenty seconds the three men were outside, picking their way through the drifted banks of snow, the heels of their boots crunching through the thin layer of ice that crusted everything.

  "East," Ryan said, leading.

  He glanced once behind them and saw that Krysty was at the second-floor front, framed by the broken casement, arm pointing directly to where she could still see the escap­ing figure of their assailant. The bright morning sun danced off the vivid flames of her hair, making her an unmissable target if there were any more murderously inclined locals around.

  "Back trail?" Jak asked.

  Ryan nodded. "Sure. Gotta be over…yeah, down here."

  The sniper's nest was unmistakable: a patch of tram­pled, muddied snow; a gnawed knuckle of what looked like a mutton bone; the spaced indentations of the elbows on the ridge, overlooking the front doors; the shape of the body, legs spread-eagled. A couple of steps away was a small area of yellow, smearing the white, where the man had taken a leak.

  Jak stopped, tossing his fine white hair from his eyes. He picked at something on the ground and held it up to show them. A blur of gray stained his long pale finger.

  "Black powder," he said. "Fucker's got shaky hands."

  "Let's go," Ryan said.

  "Easy as tracking a war wag down a main street at high noon," J.B. whispered, lips peeling off his neat, even teeth, in his hunter's wolfish grin.

  Though their prey was obviously trying to move cau­tiously and fast, the trail couldn't have been more ob­vious. From the blurring of the footmarks, it looked as if the man were dragging a bag of some sort behind him.

  It took only six or seven minutes to close in on him.

  The man was stooped, scurrying along the narrow ditch with his musket slung across his shoulders. He was pulling a pile of furs, and he never once looked back.

  Jak gripped the butt of his pocket cannon, gesturing to­ward the hunched figure ahead.

  Ryan shook a warning finger. In a winter wasteland like this, food wasn't going to be easy to come by. If they could take the man alive, they might be able to somehow find out where the nearest ville lay. From the clumsy, halting gait of the man, it looked as if he was old, or maybe a crippled mutie. Either way, the three of them should be able to take him.

  They'd only been out of the shelter of the house for a few minutes, but Ryan could already feel the biting wind numbing the skin tight across his cheeks, making his eye water. Without better clothing, a man would soon lie down and sleep in such an iron cold.

  The three friends could only go in single file on the cramped path. If the man turned suddenly and had a good handblaster, he could probably get an ace on the line at them. Ryan had his own pistol, the SIG-Sauer P-226, drawn and ready, finger on the trigger.

  They were only thirty yards behind, close enough to hear the fur-shrouded man grunting and mumbling to himself with the effort of heaving along his bundle. Then he paused and straightened. Ryan was half a heartbeat from chilling him with a bullet through the back of the skull, but the man hawked and spit a green ball of phlegm to the side of the trail.

  Twenty yards.

  Fifteen.

  And the man turned.

  Without a moment's hesitation, Ryan shot at him. But the old man was already falling to the snow, dropping his bundle, hands reaching for the sky. Only Ryan's honed re­flexes saved the stunted little figure from a 9 mm bullet through the throat. Seeing, even as he fired, that the man was surrendering, Ryan was able to switch his aim higher, the shot singing harmlessly into the blue sky.

  "Fireblast!" he said. "Close."

  Jak and J.B. had fanned out on either side as best they could, fighting for a footing in the deeper snow.

  The figure in front of them was lying facedown, fists clenched, feet kicking up a storm of powdered white, all the time maintaining a muffled series of inaudible and incom­prehensible moans. Ryan cautiously stepped in closer, kicking the bundle of pelts out of the way. Jak took the far side, keeping the old man covered, while J.B. stayed back a few paces, watching carefully.

  "That Russian?" the boy asked, head on one side, lis­tening to what sounded like a croaking string of gibberish.

  "Could be. Can't recall having heard much Russian spoken. Only time was…" His mind leaped back to an­other frozen wasteland and conjured a short, stocky man with a pockmarked face and a long, drooping mustache, bald head under a fur cap that carried a single circle of sil­ver. If he tried, the name would come back, as well. The Russkie had introduced himself.

  "Was when?" Jak asked, interrupting his train of thought.

  The name slipped away. "Zim," something or other. The name would slide again into his memory when he didn't need it. There wasn't much chance of ever meeting the man again. The Kamchatka Peninsula was around four thou­sand miles away.

  "What's he saying?" J.B. said, moving a single step closer, the barrel of his Steyr blaster never deviating from the cringing man's spine.

  "Sounds like 'pomegat,' or some such," Ryan replied. "We could use the freezie here to do us some translating."

  "Looks like shitting himself," was Jak's comment.

  The old man was gradually quietening, risking a glance up from the snow at his captors when he realized that they weren't going to send him off to buy the farm.

  The fur hood had slipped down over his forehead, so that his glittering blue eyes barely peeped beneath the fringe. Snow caked most of his face, like a clown, the lips red, the scarlet cobra of his tongue flicking nervously out. He fixed on Ryan and began to crawl very slowly toward him.

  "Neschastni sluchai."

  None of this had the least bit of meaning to any of the three men.

  "Wish he'd get up," J.B. said. "Looks like he's rad-blasted scared."

  "Should be. Trying to chill Rick like that. Guess it could have been a mistake. Saw movement and just let it go."

  Ryan, standing with legs slightly apart, looked down and saw in the trampled snow and earth a tiny bunch of yellow and white flowers, delicate as a baby's breath.

  The old man had wriggled closer.

  His hand touched against Ryan's ankle, stroking the damp material of the combat pants. The words had ceased and there was just the whistling of heavy breathing. Ryan stared, still not letting his concentration waver.

  Now the face of the old man was between his feet, on top of the little cluster of flowers, hiding them. Both hands gripped his ankles, and Ryan could feel pressure against his foot. He moved a half step sideways to see what was hap­pening. The Russian was placidly licking his boots, the long tongue wiping at the snow and clotted mud.

  "No!" Ryan shouted, pulling away, stumbling clear.

  "Sure wants to live," J.B. observed.

  The old man crawled after Ryan, flat on his belly, left hand reaching out imploringly, the right hand busily bur­rowing somewhere beneath all the layers of fur. The effort of wriggling through the snow pushed the hood com­pletely off the old man's head, revealing his face.

  Revealing the old woman's face.

  "Fireblast! He's… It's a woman."

  Despite the deep, dirt-crusted furrows, and the strag­gling downy mustache, it was unmistakably a woman's face, staring beseechingly up at Ryan.

  "Doesn't make no difference," J.B. said calmly. "Get her up and find out about a ville and food. If she won't tell us, then we chill her. It doesn't make no difference."

  Ryan stood back, gesturing
with the barrel of his pistol for the woman to get to her feet. Hesitatingly, slowly, she obeyed him, eyes locked on his face. Her left hand trem­blingly brushed snow from her lined face.

  She looked totally pathetic, abject and defeated. She shuffled her ragged boots and edged a little closer to Ryan, who half turned to J.B. to help him question their pris­oner.

  His eye caught Jak.

  The face of the albino was a distorted mask, lips pulled back, sharp teeth grating. The teenager's red eyes were wide, staring past Ryan. His white hair was caught in the cold wind, floating around the angular head like mist be­neath a high waterfall. The Magnum dropped from the boy's fist, landing silently in the soft snow.

  "What?" Ryan began, shaken by the boy's horrific expression. Jak reached behind his neck and withdrew a bone-hilted, leaf-bladed throwing-knife. His wrist whipped the feathered steel toward Ryan's throat.

  "Don't move!" Jak yelped.

  Then Ryan knew. Despite the warning, he started to turn toward the Russian woman, knowing he would be too late, too slow, a last curse bursting to his lips.

  He heard the whirring of the knife as it missed his ca­rotid artery by a couple of inches, heard the unforgettable thunk of steel finding its mark in flesh and bone.

  Their prisoner had drawn an old walnut-hafted straight razor from somewhere under the furs and layers of rags, and she was slicing it through the frosty morning air to­ward the back of his neck.

  Jak's aim was true.

  Ryan had seen the ruby-eyed boy at his daily practice with his hidden knives, and marveled at his almost blas­phemous accuracy. He'd seen him put three blades into a space the size of a man's hand at twenty paces, all three knives seemingly spinning in the air at once.

  He realized, as he began to turn to defend himself, that his own bulk had shielded the old woman, leaving Jak the smallest of targets—a part of her face and one eye.

  One eye.

  The left, he realized with a momentary pang of sympa­thetic revulsion.

  As she staggered, the white hilt bobbled like the body of some obscene insect that had attacked her, launching itself with a venomous accuracy into the gleaming orb of her left eye. There was little blood, but the force of the throw had driven the sharp point deep through cornea, iris and lens, clear into the central retinal artery, piercing the brain.

  Her mouth opened and closed like a stranded fish, her hands waving, becoming claws. She was crying, a piteous, feeble sound.

  "Done." J.B. holstered his own blaster and turned away, no longer interested in the old woman, knowing that she was down and dying.

  Ryan also turned away, ignoring the moaning, kicking thing that thrashed around in the trampled snow and dirt. There were more important things to worry about now.

  "Get knife," Jak said, stooping and plucking the blade from the Russian woman's eyeball, sliding it out with a sickening, sucking sound. He wiped it clean on the wad­ded fur cloak she was wearing. "Could use warm clothes," he added.

  "Let's find where she came from. Could be furs, and could be drink and food." Ryan climbed a few paces out of the narrow draw and looked in the direction that the old woman had been heading. Very faint, like a smudge of gray against the blue, he could make out smoke "That way."

  Chapter Eight

  THEY DREW NEARER, following the meandering draw as it widened. They could see clearly the tracks of the old wom­an's boots, marking her outward journey. The large house was now far out of sight behind them, partly concealed by a dip in the land and by the trees that grew in random, scattered clumps.

  Jak stopped dead and sniffed at the air, catching the taint from the smear of gray smoke that the breeze carried in to­ward them. "Cooking meat."

  "Sounds good." Ryan nodded. His own sense of smell wasn't subtle enough to distinguish the scent of roasting meat at a distance of half a mile.

  They crossed the rippled remnants of an old blacktop, its surface molded like corrugated paper by the shock waves of the massive nukings that had touched every country of the world, back in 2001.

  "Glad to see our folks hit some good licks," Ryan said, rubbing at the highway with the toe of his combat boot, seeing the way the snow lay evenly in the shallow hollows.

  J.B. was blowing on his hands, trying to warm them. "Yeah. Doc told me all about the Totality Concept, the thing he was on the edge of. Sounded real simple. They hit you and you hit them back." His breath feathered out around him as he spoke. "Worked even if they got in a sneak attack. It'd trigger your buried nukes, launch them at the Russkies, even after…"

  "After our side was all chilled," Ryan finished for him.

  Now Ryan could taste meat cooking over a smoky open fire.

  The smell brought a beading of saliva to his lips, and he wondered what price they might have to pay for food. In a barren, wild place like this, he knew that the price could well be blood.

  "THERE. BEYOND BUSHES." Jak was lying flat on his belly, wriggling through a grove of stunted larches until he was close enough to be able to spy on the small hut.

  Ryan and the Armorer joined him. The sky was cloud­ing over, and the air tasted like cold iron. It was a feeling that Ryan associated with the threat of snow, remembered from his time in the Darks and up in what had once been Alaska.

  "Anyone?"

  Jak shook his head at the question. "No." There was a tumbledown shed behind the hut and a pen with a broken gate where animals might once have been kept. The place was silent and looked deserted, but the trail of the old woman led to the front door. And if there was meat roast­ing, someone must be there to watch over it.

  Ryan whistled quietly through his teeth. The cold was biting at the small cavity that had appeared in one of his back molars.

  "What's wrong?" J.B. asked.

  "Nothing. Just that… You and me both seen lots of old books and vids about Russia and the dangers of the Com­mies. Now we're here. Unless there's some real weird mis­take, we're here. In the middle of Russia!"

  THEY FOLLOWED the usual plan of attack. Ryan and J.B. crept cautiously, keeping low, around either side of the clearing, settling into their positions. There was still no sign of life.

  A tattered nightshirt in faded pink danced on a line at the rear of the building. Ryan, from his side, could make out what looked like a path that wound away toward the northeast, vanishing over a rise in the land.

  As they moved, each of the three companions had been counting on a slow, rhythmic beat, something that they'd synchronized before parting. They agreed to begin closing in when their individual count reached one hundred and twenty.

  Blaster firmly in his hand, Ryan finished his count and broke cover. There appeared to be two windows in the hovel, on opposite sides. The rear of the cabin had only a ramshackle door that hung crookedly off a single leather hinge. There was a narrow gap at the top where a man could be sighting at him along the barrel of a rifle.

  He glimpsed J.B. making his own move, darting in at an angle, crouched, pistol probing in front of him, glasses re­flecting what little sunlight remained.

  Out at the front, white hair streaming behind him like a crazed bridal veil, Jak would be now be flattened against the wall by the door, his own cannon filling his hand.

  "Time to move," Ryan whispered, taking a slow, care­ful look all around him and seeing nobody. At that mo­ment it struck him that he hadn't seen a single living creature since leaving the mansion. Not a bird nor an ani­mal—nothing but the ragged old woman who had led them here.

  He braced himself as he moved away from the tar-painted wooden wall and kicked in at the flimsy door, rip­ping it off its single hinge. Almost simultaneously he heard a crash as the albino boy burst through the front.

  The hut was less than twelve feet square, and nobody was in there.

  He faced Jak, eyeball to eyeball, across the stinking squalor of the cabin. They were joined a brace of heart­beats later by J.B.

  "Nobody?." the Armorer asked, immediately answering his own question. "No. No
body."

  "Got to be someone close by," Ryan said, pointing at the open hearth where a haunch of meat, vaguely resembling venison, was cooking on a spit. The outside of the meat was already blackened and scorched in a couple of places.

  On the corner of the fire was a trivet that held a filthy and chipped enamel pot containing a mix of bubbling veg­etables. Ryan licked his lips at the delicious odor that filled the hut.

  "One bed."

  "Big enough for two," Ryan amended.

  "Two plates on table," Jak agreed. "Two spoons. Two mugs."

  "One corpse," J.B. added.

  THE RECCE TOOK only a couple of minutes.

  Jak remained by the front door, watching for anyone coming along the same trail that had brought them to the hut. Ryan went one way and J.B. the other, checking the shed and the outhouse. The latter was empty. The former was packed with bales of furs, some of them already sewn into crude coats, cloaks and hats. The shed also contained a large smoked ham and some dried fish. A well at the rear of the property provided sweet water, achingly cold.

  "Gotta be someone else around," Ryan said.

  "Wind's shifted dry, loose snow. Covered any tracks out the rear." J.B. sighed. "Reckon we should eat what we can, then load up food, furs and water and head back to the others."

  "Good sense. I'll watch. You two eat what you can get down. I'll eat, and you can guard and start pulling some furs together."

  "Iron-runnered sledge behind the crapper," J.B. sug­gested.

  "Easy for three of us. Carry more that way."

  Ryan wished that Krysty had been with them. Apart from her strength and support, the mutie side of her ge­netic makeup would have been invaluable. She could "see." Not the way a doomie could make out the grim elements of the future, but she could often feel if there was an immi­nent threat of danger, even confirm that a place was de­serted. It would be helpful to know the location of the person who used the second spoon and plate.

  "Don't like it," Ryan muttered, rubbing the back of his hand across his stubbled chin. He looked around the room. "Hairs at the nape of my neck are prickling. It's close. Man or woman. It's real close."