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  “Dean’s fine, lover,” Krysty said softly, recognizing the expression. “Safe with Sharona.” Reaching out a hand, she squeezed the man’s arm. It was like touching cordwood, but then the strength of the man was incredible.

  Nodding in silent reply, Ryan swept the horizon with the Navy ’scope, and saw the ruins of a predark city to the east and a major seaport of some kind across a bay, the harbor jammed full of rusting Navy ships, aircraft carriers laying on top of battleships, destroyers, submarines and frigates. It was a hodgepodge of Navy vessels, now merely windblown trash gathered like autumn leaves by the thermonuclear winds of skydark.

  Spotting a vein of sulfur in the nearby rocks, Mildred jumped down from the wag to hurry over and started scooping the dust into an empty plastic jar she carried for just such a purpose. Sprinkled into an open wound, sulfur helped fight infection, and mixed with honey it made a wonderful poultice for a wide variety of ills. Without a hospital pharmacy to draw vital supplies from, the predark physician was quickly becoming adept at finding the basic ingredients of her trade under rocks or scraped off machinery.

  “No sign of any villes,” Ryan said, collapsing the telescope. “But a lot of ruins to the north and west.”

  “Mebbe chisel marks natural,” Jak suggested, his voice betraying the fact that he didn’t really believe the idea. “Seen gator tracks in mud damn near close to writing.”

  “No, my young friend, those were most definitely made by human hands,” Doc countered, the gentle breeze from the jungle blowing back his long silvery hair. “Or, at least by some creature intelligent enough to use tools.”

  “Hunters are that smart,” Mildred said, climbing back into the battered LARC. “But then, most bioweps are.” Biowep, slang for biological weapons. Genetically designed, living weapons that were the bane of the Deathlands. Most redoubt droids were a century old, weak on power, malfunctioning and rusty. But the living, breathing, bioweps just bred new generations every year, each smarter and more deadly than their nightmarish progenitors.

  “All right, let’s see where the frag we are,” J.B. said, pulling a minisextant from under his damp shirt.

  But just then, there came the crack of a blaster and a window in the pilothouse shattered, spraying Krysty with glistening shards. A lock of her living hair fluttered away, severed at the roots, and the woman screamed in pain, tumbling limply to the floor. Instantly the rest of the companions turned and triggered their assorted weapons, the barrage echoing off the rocky walls of the cliff.

  Two men stood in the mouth of a cave fifty feet above the plateau. They reared backward, blood spraying from riddled chests as they dropped from sight. Both had been wearing matching dark blue uniforms, vaguely resembling predark police, and the companions instantly tagged them as ville sec men.

  “We’re coming for you, Carlton!” somebody shouted loudly from a higher plateau.

  Carlton? Looking up, Ryan looked directly into the face of a barrel-chested giant, a gold ring glistening in his left ear. Then they shot in unison. Ryan felt something hot graze his cheek, and the giant staggered, red blood appearing on his left shoulder. Fireblast, the big man was lightning quick with a handblaster! Faster than anybody Ryan had ever faced before.

  Firing the Steyr again and again, Ryan stepped in front of Krysty to provide cover. He had seen this sort of wound happen before and knew that Krysty would be unable to protect herself for several minutes from the incalculable pain. Her hair was as alive as his fingers, and having them cut off would have stopped even him for a brief span. The human mind could only take so much pain before it retreated within itself for protection.

  “Dastardly blackguards!” Doc bellowed, discharging both the LeMat and the Webley, the double explosions catching a short man in the face and blowing out the back of his head.

  The rest of the sec men scattered for cover, then started firing back with a wide variety of black-powder weapons.

  Shouting a war cry, Jak racked the cliff with a long burst from his M-16, the 5.56 mm rounds zinging off the rocks and kicking up a small storm of chips and dust. A section of the cliff broke away, and a sec man screamed as he fell all the way down to land on the cold lava flow, the hundreds of sharp spires piercing his body. Horribly alive, he twitched once, blood gushing in every direction, then mercifully went still.

  Taking a position behind the gunwale, Mildred started snapping off shots from the ZKR, while J.B. rattled off a full clip from the Uzi. Another sec man went falling to his doom.

  But now more sec men and women appeared, along with an Asian-looking woman with fluttering black hair. Expertly cradling an MP-5 submachine gun, she sent down a deadly halo of hot lead, the 9 mm rounds ricocheting off the hull of the LARC, smashing another window and blowing a tire.

  Then the startled sec men on the cliff paused in their attack to stare as the mil tire stopped deflating and swelled back to normal size.

  “Magic!” a sec man cried, turning to run away.

  “No, they’re fragging whitecoats!” the giant man roared, aiming the M-203. “Chill them all!”

  The huge maw of the gren launcher belched black smoke and something slammed into the grass only a foot from the LARC to explode with amazing force. Shrapnel filled the air, ricocheting off the boulders and cliff. Doc gasped as he was hit in the face, blood pumping from his cheek, and Jak snorted as his hair jerked from the passage of a rock chip.

  “Here!” J.B. shouted, thrusting the Uzi toward Mildred. She took the rapidfire and sent a burst skyward as the man swung around the S&W M-4000 scattergun. Which made no sense as the range was far too great for him to do anything more than merely annoy their attackers.

  “Dodge this, Carlton!” the Asian woman snarled, jerking her hands apart and then casting a small square object down the cliff.

  Who the frag was Carlton? Swinging up the alley-sweeper, J.B. sent off three belching roars and the falling gren detonated high in the air, harmlessly spreading out a corona of flame and smoke.

  As the snarling giant sent down a maelstrom of rounds from the stuttering M-16, another sec man stepped into view holding a glass bottle with a burning rag tied around the neck.

  Switching targets, Mildred concentrated on the new danger, the 9 mm rounds shattering the glass bottle and dousing the sec man with the fiery contents of the Molotov cocktail. Covered with flames, the man just stood there, galvanized motionless and shrieking insanely.

  Unexpectedly, the Asian woman shot the dying man in the head, tears appearing on her cheeks.

  Using the momentary distraction, Ryan got behind the wheel of the LARC and started the engines. Without any kind of a roof, the bastard wag offered them about as much protection as a painted bull’s-eye. It was time to leave. Throwing the wag into gear, Ryan started rolling for the field of boulders, zigzagging along the way to try to throw off the enemy snipers.

  That only made the sec men on the cliff shoot faster, but his tactic worked and the incoming lead hammered the ground around the Navy transport, but never reached the companions crouching behind the gunwale.

  “Cheap bastard should have given his troops more brass to practice shooting,” J.B. snorted contemptuously, thumbing fresh cartridges into the scattergun. “Blasters are useless if you can’t hit the fragging target!”

  “Practice makes perfect,” Mildred replied, reloading her blaster with nimble fingers.

  Advancing to the extreme edge of the cliff, the giant man brandished a clenched fist at the retreating companions and loudly bellowed something in a foreign language.

  That caught Doc and Mildred completely by surprise, and they openly stared at the dwindling figure until the LARC moved behind a boulder and blocked their sight.

  “Madam, did you also hear that, or have I gone mad?” Doc whispered, the two blasters dropping in his hands. The words were slurred slightly, red blood still flowing from the gash in his cheek.

  “Damn straight, I did,” Mildred said, thumbing the safety on the Uzi and slinging it over a should
er. “He cursed us in Latin!”

  “Incredible, just incredible,” Doc said, slowly standing to try to see the receding figure. There immediately came the report of a longblaster, and the man ducked back down again. A split second later, something zinged off a boulder.

  “What say?” Jak asked, dropping the empty clip from the M-16 and starting to thumb in some spare rounds from his pocket.

  “Revenge is a dish best served cold,” Mildred said softly, an inadvertent chill running down her spine. A lot of coldhearts, cannies and slavers had shouted death threats at the companions over the years, but that simple Latin phrase made her feel incredibly uneasy. It was the sort of thing you shouted when revenge on the enemy was guaranteed.

  “Indeed, madam, knowledge is power, and in these blighted days, anybody who speaks even a smidgen of Latin should be considered a most dangerous adversary,” Doc said, swaying to the motion of the rattling LARC. The ground was starting to angle a little, and the Navy transport was beginning to increase in speed.

  “Although his pronunciation was absolutely horrific,” Doc added as an afterthought.

  “And your grammar is any better?” Mildred retorted, pulling a sanitary pad from her med kit and ripping open the plastic packet to press the sterile material against the man’s bloody cheek.

  He winced from the contact. “My Latin is perfect!”

  “Aybe-ma our-ya pig Latin,” she countered, using duct tape to hold the crude bandage in place.

  Unable to speak at the moment, Doc merely glared at the woman with marked disdain.

  “He also called us by the name of Carlton,” J.B. added. “So he must think that we’re mercies, working for the man. Whoever the frag he is!”

  Crashing through a dried thicket, the LARC bounded out of the field of boulders to crash into a dry riverbed. Or rather, what had once been a river. The bed was now a smooth strip of hard lava that flowed between the earthen banks like a long black highway.

  “Make good time!” Jak said, pleased, then frowned. “No, get off! Lava road mebbe collapse under weight wag!”

  “Working on it!” Ryan snarled in reply, frantically downshifting. The transmission seemed to have taken some damage in the brief fight, or more likely, from their bone-jarring ride down the lava field.

  Following a curve in the riverbed, Ryan inhaled sharply as the ground suddenly dropped away on either side. The speeding LARC was now driving over a lava bridge, a dark river rushing underneath. The mud lake had to have overflowed its banks and dissolved the ground below the riverbed, converting the lava road into a makeshift bridge.

  Maintaining an even speed, Ryan tried to do nothing that would disturb the delicate construct, then the wag hit a small dip in the lava and bounced. As it landed, Ryan heard the terrible sound of a cracking stone, and the bridge broke apart, sending the LARC straight down into the river.

  However, the fall was only twenty feet or so, and the wag hit the river in a thick splash, some of the warm mud washing over the gunwales. Then the Navy transport buoyantly bobbed back up and was suddenly moving sideways down the swift currents.

  “Forget this boat!” Jak laughed in relief as the LARC straightened and began to proceed along the river prow first.

  Fumbling with the controls, Ryan switched the transmission from land to sea, and the mud behind the craft began to churn as the rear propeller spun into action. Their speed increased dramatically, so experimenting with some of the switches, Ryan got the transmission into reverse and the LARC began to slow to a more reasonable pace.

  “This must be what the giant meant,” Doc said, pressing a hand to his cheek, trying not to smile. “He thought we were in an ordinary war wag, and would sink like a rock once we reached the lava bridge… Is something wrong with the main engine?”

  “Not that I can see,” Ryan replied, checking the controls. Everything that worked was in the green.

  Then he heard it. The sound was low at first, only a distant rumble, but it steadily increased until reaching deafening levels, and the LARC unexpectedly surged ahead, moving faster than ever.

  Quickly, Ryan threw the wag into full reverse and stomped on the gas. The big Detroit diesel roared with power, and the craft slowed, but only for a few seconds. The dirty river was still accelerating, the banks beginning to flash by in a blur.

  Now a churning mist was visible ahead of the craft, and they could hear the unmistakable thunder of a waterfall.

  “Head for shore!” J.B. bellowed, tucking his glasses into a shirt pocket and buttoning it closed.

  “The bastard current is too strong!” Ryan shouted back, the tendons standing out on his arms as he tried to force the craft toward land.

  Hugging her med kit tight, Mildred started to order them to cast out the anchor, then remembered they had already tossed it away to save weight. What had saved them underground, now doomed them on the river. Even the lifejackets were gone.

  A spray of muddy droplets pelted the companions with stinging force, and any attempt at conversation stopped as the sound of the waterfall became even louder, the noise filling their world.

  Dashing forward, Jak lashed a rope around the waist of the unconscious Krysty, then tied the other end around himself.

  As the wag flashed into the dirty mist, Ryan couldn’t see anything behind the partially melted prow. Then he felt a rush in his guts as the LARC sailed over the edge and began to fall. Releasing the useless wheel, Ryan scrambled out of the pilothouse and dived over the side, heading after Jak and Krysty. Just for a fleeting second, the plummeting man thought he saw a wide expanse of shimmering blue water very far away, then he was engulfed in chaos, noise and mud.

  Chapter Eight

  Erupting into a ragged cough, Krysty came awake fighting for air. She felt awful, every inch battered and bruised, as if she had been beaten by an overseer’s whip.

  As the cough came under control, there seemed to be something on her face, and she tried to brush it away, only to discover that it was sand. Still hacking, the woman weakly raised her head to see that she was lying upon a white sandy beach. It was night, and a full moon was bathing the world in a silvery light that made the still bodies lying nearby seem grotesque mockeries of her friends.

  Struggling to get up, Krysty brushed the sand off her face, her animated hair flexing and moving to do the same. Dimly, she could recall the fight with the people on the cliff and the terrible pain of having her hair cut. Krysty shivered at the memory, then forced away the thought, concentrating on where she was at the moment.

  It had been afternoon when they exited the lava tube, so clearly she had been out for a long time, and from the new location it was clear that the companions had gotten shipwrecked. Glancing around, Krysty saw the possible source. There was a huge black waterfall on the other side of the bay, the top and bottom lost in swirling clouds of mist. The fall was considerable, and the woman couldn’t account for her survival until finding the knotted rope around her waist. Following it to other end, she found a sprawled Jak, the albino teen looking like he had drowned twice and then gone back to do it again.

  Kneeling, she checked to make sure that he was breathing, then borrowed a knife and slashed the rope. Her longblaster was gone, but the S&W Model 640 was still in its holster, albeit with tufts of seaweed sticking out from under the flap.

  Extracting the blaster, Krysty cleaned away the stringy plants, then removed the brass rounds to dry-fire the blaster a few times to make sure it was still in working condition. Satisfied, she reloaded the weapon.

  Dragging Jak out of the shallows to a dry stretch of beach, Krysty started along the sandy coast, locating several of the other companions only a few yards away. The tide had to have washed them on shore like so much driftwood. Everybody was battered and bruised, J.B. with a clearly broken nose, and Mildred with her arm bent at an unnatural angle. Gingerly probing the swollen shoulder, Krysty sighed in relief that the joint was merely dislocated, and debated ramming it back into place. But on second thought, she d
ecide to let the physician get some obviously needed sleep. Repairs could be done later. The salty breeze coming in from the sea was warm, and it felt wonderful to the woman. At least there would be no need of a fire this night.

  His silvery hair shining like a mirror in the moonlight, Doc was slumped over a large mound of something that proved to be a snapping turtle, the creature thankfully aced. The animal was huge, over a yard wide, the hard shell covered with the scars of countless battles. The Webley was jammed into its mouth, the lethal jaws deeply embedded into the cushioned grip.

  Lying on the beach nearby was Doc’s ebony walking stick, but the sword it contained was thrust completely through the throat of the mutie turtle, the Spanish words etched into the steel blade almost visible from the smears of dried blood. The deadly LeMat was still holstered at his side, the black-powder charges staining the white sand where they had dribbled out of the blaster. Clearly, the man had been in a battle for his life with the aquatic monster and come out victorious.

  “Well done, Theo.” Krysty smiled, double-checking to make sure the snapping turtle was aced. The leathery hide was cold, but it was normally that temperature, so she withdrew the sword and slit open the throat of the animal, almost removing the head entirely.

  Leaving Doc where he was, Krysty continued her recce of the beach, pausing at the sight of the LARC laying on its side, partially submerged just off the beach. The gentle waves were cresting onto the badly dented hull, and she thought there was something wrong with the craft, when she realized the redoubtable LARC was bent, the Navy transport resembling the boomerang of a barb. With a shrug, Krysty wrote off the craft as useless. Even if the diesel engine still worked, which was highly unlikely, there was no way they could steer it now. Unless they planned to only travel in circles.