by James Axler
“If I had to guess,” the spokesman lisped, rubbing his clean-shaved chin, “I’d say you should look up north in the mountains.”
“That’s right!” A chorus of agreement fluttered up like a flock of gulls. “The mountains are definitely where you should look.”
“It only stands to reason,” the elderly woman said, nodding sagely. “Odd things are always going on in the mountains. Mountains are full of secret places.”
Ryan cocked an eyebrow at Krysty, who stood beside him. She quirked a grin and a slight one-shoulder shrug back. It made a certain sense in Ryan’s gut. They often did find hidden things in the mountains, redoubts in particular.
“But there could be a problem with that,” the tall spokesman said thoughtfully.
“And what might that be, my good man?” Doc asked.
The man’s tongue slipped out to lick his lips. “Why, that’s where most of the monsters live, of course.”
* * *
“SO, WHAT USE FANCY GUN, island boy?” Jak asked derisively.
“The DeLisle, you mean?” Ricky asked.
They were trudging into the foothills inland, per the advice of the folk in the nameless little rice-farming ville. They followed a narrow valley with frequent outcroppings of jagged black lava rock that climbed steeply from the alluvial plain. The walls were thickly furred in green brush. Birds called, quarreled and occasionally burst out in brightly colored flight.
“Yeah,” Jak said. “So, shoots quiet. So? Anyway, can shoot?”
Krysty hung near the two youths, who walked in front of the file, keeping an eye on the interaction between Jak and the newcomer. Ricky had, she knew, made a decent impression on Ryan during the meet with the farmers. He made introductions and then stood back, not trying to push himself forward and be the center of things, the way a kid his age might. His dad, she reckoned, had taught him well.
Of course, now it remained to see if he was too reticent. A person had to have some spice to keep upright in this world. Especially in a crew that led the sort of lives Ryan’s did.
Ricky turned his head to look at the white-haired youth. Krysty read the bafflement in his body language before she caught his uncomprehending frown. He hadn’t gotten used to Jak’s miserly ways with words yet.
But the way Jak’s ruby eyes were fixed on him brought the message home quick.
“I guess I can shoot some,” he said with a certain pride.
“Why not show us?” Ryan said, closing up to Krysty’s left from behind. “Up ahead there, where the granite juts out and the other valley flows into this one.”
“Those monkeys?” Mildred asked. She followed Ryan. Behind her walked Doc, smiling vaguely and humming to himself. J.B. brought up the rear, shotgun in hand and eyes well skinned for danger.
“Mutie monkeys,” Jak hissed, stopping short.
Halting, mainly so as not to walk into either of the two boys, Krysty peered up the path. They were headed pretty much north right now. She had to raise her left hand to shade her eyes from the sun. It was going to disappear behind the ridge to the west before two more hours passed, plunging the valley into early mountain twilight.
She’d noticed the monkey troop perching on the rugged gray boulders sticking out from the near side of the confluence of valleys. They were big ones, though not huge. Rhesus monkeys, she thought. Big enough, smart enough—mean enough—to threaten humans in a pack. There were perhaps twenty of them. Could be a problem, she acknowledged.
And looking closely through the glare, she saw Jak was right, as he usually was about the world of the senses. The creatures had what looked like yokes of spines bristling up from their shoulders and backs, reminiscent of porcupine quills. Even at this range, a good sixty or seventy yards, she could tell they were heavier than usual, and bleached white.
“Monkeys with bone spikes?” Mildred said. “You have got to be kidding me.”
“If those spikes are bone,” Doc said, “they cannot be firmly attached to the skeleton. Note how the beasts seemed to lower or erect them when interacting with one another.”
It was true, Krysty quickly saw. Though Doc’s blue eyes looked weak, they were still quite sharp, more befitting his actual age than his apparent one. And while he didn’t have Jak’s overwhelming intuition for the natural world—or at least the wild one, since so much of today’s world couldn’t be called remotely natural—he had an encyclopedic knowledge of it.
Usually Krysty felt far more in sympathy with Jak’s perspective. Sometimes she saw the use of Doc’s, though.
“Wonder if they can shoot those things,” J.B. said. “Like porky-pines do.”
“That’s just an old wives’ tale,” Mildred said promptly. “Porcupines can’t shoot their quills.”
Krysty looked back to see J.B. take off his glasses and polish them with a handkerchief. He showed her a bland smile. “You haven’t come up against the porcupines I have.”
Mildred blinked at him, then she scowled. “John,” she accused, “you’re making fun of me.”
The armorer put his specs back on and blinked at her through the round lenses, the very image of innocence.
“Why, Millie,” he said. “Would I do a thing like that?”
“Yes.”
“Normally I’d chase them off myself with this,” Ryan said, raising the Scout Tactical longblaster he carried. “But I’m interested to see what you and that Denial of yours can do.”
“DeLisle.” J.B. and Ricky corrected him in unison.
“Whatever,” Ryan said. “Show us, kid.”
Ricky took his time cinching up his left forearm in the carbine’s shooting sling. From his hesitant posture, Krysty guessed he was wondering whether to kneel or sit to get a more stable shooting platform. Then, straightening his back slightly, he brought the longblaster’s buttplate to his shoulder. It had adjustable iron sights, but the boy didn’t bother with them. One way or another it wasn’t a prohibitively difficult shot for a longblaster, even one as short as his. Although she wondered if the fact it shot a handblaster round made a difference.
Clearly—at least to her—Ricky guessed he was most likely to impress his audience if he took the shot standing up. Boys, she thought.
Then with a grin, she mentally amended that to men. They never grew out of it entirely. Not even Ryan, although he’d long since learned to rein in the urge to showboat. The one exception she could call to mind was J.B. He didn’t seem the show-off type. As fond as he was of Mildred—and the rest of them, of course—he was his most demanding audience. Nobody else would hold him to anywhere near the standards of skill he demanded of himself.
When Ricky fired the stubby carbine, it made a muted thump, like a fist hitting someone’s thigh. Krysty didn’t see how hard it kicked or how the boy handled it. She was focused on the mutant monkeys sitting and grooming one another downrange.
The biggest of them sat a bit above and apart from the rest, eyeing the landscape with stern grandeur. He was apparently somewhat myopic, since he gave no sign of spotting the humans yet. The wind blew down the valley, bringing the musky tang of the monkey tribe to Krysty’s nostrils, rather than human smell to him.
The troop leader’s body jerked as if a thought had struck him.
But it had been something a little harder than a thought, if perhaps not so fast. He pitched off his rock, to land on a flat granite ledge twelve feet below. The wind brought the plop a beat later. It was only a little quieter than the carbine had been.
The other monkeys sitting on the outcrop looked at one another, right through the space where the pack leader’s butt and shortish tail had been a breath before. They did an almost comical take of surprise before turning almost as one to stare down at the fallen alpha, lying on his face with his rump slightly elevated and clearly a chill.
Krysty heard the muties chitter to one another. One hopped down to sniff at the fallen leader.
The DeLisle thumped again. The inquisitive monkey flopped onto its far side. It beat th
e air with fists and feet for a moment, then went limp.
Krysty looked back to see that Ricky had the shrouded barrel of his piece back down online from the recoil. He was jacking the action to chamber a cartridge for the next shot.
“Okay,” Jak said a little glumly. “Not bad.”
Ricky shrugged and grinned shyly. “Thanks.”
“Not bad at all,” Ryan said.
Ricky looked at him, a little anxiously. “Is that, uh, enough?” he asked. “I don’t— I don’t want to shoot more than I have to.”
Even Krysty half expected Ryan to sneer at his softheartedness. Instead, he proved that you could never take the man for granted—and made her love him all over again.
“Only a mad thing chills more than he needs to,” he said. “And only a stupe wastes ammo.”
“Bastards’re still in our road, though, Ryan,” J.B. said.
Mildred laughed. “They don’t have any idea what happened to their friends,” she said. “Shit, they don’t even know we’re here yet.” Then she winced as a blaster shot cracked off nearby.
Krysty blinked as the side-blast from Ryan’s SIG-Sauer smacked the side of her face. He’d drawn his Steyr and fired a shot in the air.
As the echoes chased each other up and down the green-and-black valley walls, the monkeys turned to stare at the humans. With a swirl of tails they vanished, as if into the rocks.
“They parlez-vous blaster,” J.B. said in satisfaction.
“Most things do,” Ryan said, “that live.”
To Ricky, who was looking an obvious question at him, he said, “My nine ball’s easier to find than your .45. What’re we standing here for? Let’s move, people.”
He holstered the piece, grabbed the wrist of his longblaster stock and strode forward with long legs eating up the sloping trail. The two boys had to scamper to avoid him brushing them off the narrow path.
“Are those unsightly creatures edible, young man?” Doc asked.
“Huh? Yeah. Not bad. Mebbe a little gamier than, you know, normal monkey.”
“Muties!” Jak spit. “Not eat muties. Tainted.”
“That’s more for the rest of us, then,” J.B. said jovially. Coming up alongside Mildred he fetched her a comradely slap on the shoulder. “Isn’t that right, Millie?”
She blanched and swallowed hard. “Whatever you say, J.B.”
As they neared the juncture of the two valleys, Jak took off at an angle, up the slope to their right, vanishing briefly into the brush before reaching the top. He reappeared a moment later to wave an all clear before melting out of sight again.
As they came up on the dead monkeys, a chunk of dirt and dead grass flew up from right beside one of the little lifeless bodies.
A moment later the unmistakable crack of a big-bore longblaster reached Krysty’s ears.
Someone was shooting at them!
Chapter Seventeen
Ryan brought up his Steyr and snapped off a shot. If it hit near the party of heavily armed men who had just rounded a bluff a hundred yards up the valley’s far side, he didn’t see. Much as he hated to waste ammo, the other side had the edge on them right now. If he made even one of them hurry a shot, that was one thin sliver of survival his burning a round had bought them.
Fireblast, bad luck that I was looking the wrong way when they spotted us first, he thought. But that was as far as that went. Regret was useless.
Especially now, when only action, fast and hard, could save their hides.
“Up the other valley!” he shouted to his companions. “Fast!”
“What about you?” Krysty asked.
“I’ll hold them!” He got a flash sight picture through the sights and fired.
The coldheart went down, but Ryan wasn’t fooled. The man was spooked, not scared. He got the sense he had pulled a fraction to his left, probably stinging the enemy with a burst of black lava chips from the rocks beside him.
“Go!” he shouted again.
He sensed the others in rapid motion. He knew they didn’t like leaving him to face at least a dozen well-heeled enemies all on his lonesome.
But they did what he said, and it wasn’t as if he planned to sacrifice himself covering their escape.
Ryan ducked behind the outcrop the mutant monkeys had been sitting on as a flurry of bullets kicked up more dust from the trail. One of the dead monkeys rolled over as slugs slammed into it.
More bullets cracked off the hard granite and screamed as they tumbled away across the valley. Ryan found a sort of natural step that allow him to pop up, prop an elbow on jutting stone and brace for a quick shot. He snapped down the built-in folding bipod and went for it.
This time he used the long eye-relief scope, mounted well forward, among other things, to keep it from stamping a bloody circle around an unwary shooter’s eye. It wasn’t high-power, but was more than enough.
Especially now. He lined up the pointed bottom post on the chest of a man standing bolt upright firing an M-16 from the shoulder. Then he lowered his aim point to midgut. He didn’t owe this bastard an easy out, and he wanted the dude’s buddies to think deep, unhappy thoughts about what they were doing.
He squeezed off the shot. The lightweight polymer stock kicked him in the shoulder. The short muzzle rose sharply.
Before the longblaster settled back on its bipod he’d chambered a new round. Even as the weapon bucked up he’d had his eye out of the glass, looking for his next target. There were at least twenty coldhearts in sight now, most firing their blasters with no idea of what they were shooting at. Shots crackled down the valley to his left so hard and fast it sounded like a big bonfire built of green wood.
He didn’t bother glancing at his first target. He’d aimed so close to center of mass it’d take a serious miss not to hit flesh somewhere. The coldheart’s screams told him he’d planted the bullet in the man’s belly, where he wanted it.
He shot another enemy. As the Scout recoiled, Ryan saw the man jump and drop his rifle; he guessed he’d winged an arm.
The one-eyed man ducked. Taking two shots in a row from the same position was crowding it. These bastards had ammo to burn and were doing just that.
The rough rule of thumb Trader had taught him, long ago and far away, was that past 150 yards, even a lot of people shooting at you full-auto would hit you only by your own bad luck. Unless they were shooting an MG on some kind of mount, in which case you were already in dreck to your neck.
Unfortunately, inside about 100 yards, where these coldhearts were blasting from, the odds of one of them getting lucky went way up. Especially once they all got dialed into the general vicinity of where their target was.
Not all of them had autoblasters. Even if they were the Army of National Unity—and if they weren’t, El Guapo and his people had lots worse things to worry about than Ryan and his band of unwilling armed tourists—it was unlikely they could scrape together enough to arm everybody with automatic weapons. He could hear the louder, flatter barks of bigger-bore blasters as he scouted quickly for another sniping position. Single shots meant bolt-action blasters or even lever actions.
Most of the coldhearts with nonautomatic weapons didn’t aim any better than the ones rocking and rolling balls-out. Even if they could, it took more presence of mind than most random sec men had to mark their shots carefully when the hot sizzle of the chase was firing up their blood. Even when no one was shooting back.
But Ryan wasn’t about to take it for granted they didn’t have at least one good marksman. Or one with the self-control to line up his piece on the spot where Ryan had been shooting from, and wait to pick him off when he stuck his head up for another shot, like a Deathlands dirt farmer popping a prairie dog out of his bean field.
He didn’t see an appealing platform for a fast and steady shot, short of the mostly flat top of the outcrop. He scrambled up the slope beside it, then flung himself belly-first against the sun-hot stone. It cut into his skin through his shirt as he brought the bipod down on the
top. He could smell rank monkey shit and felt sliminess between him and the rock.
Even as he’d sprung into position, he’d kept his eye on the enemy, trusting his flash impression of his destination and his superb body control to bring him safely where he needed to be. They did, with a little scrabbling of his right boot when the first foothold rolled out of place from beneath. It was the sort of thing he could correct without looking, by feel, and did.
He was already lining up a shot on a coldheart with an armband who was furiously waving his men forward and shouting. That made him an ideal target.
Because the coldheart had his head stretched around on his neck, and the motion of his arm was rhythmic, his head was a more stable target than people’s heads usually were. Ryan lined up the post on his right temple and squeezed off.
This time he watched the dark spray puff out the far side of the man’s head as the weapon reared up. The coldheart dropped like an empty sack.
A couple of men raced forward along the trail leading down the valley’s far side. Some ran down into the valley itself, which was neither steep nor deep, with only a little splash of stream running through it. Those could eventually be trouble, but not for a while. The hill he’d seen Krysty and the others go up was taller and steeper than most around here.
Ryan dropped back almost to the trail, set up on the first rock he’d used as a brace, shot the lead of the two men running toward him. The guy sprawled face-first, his longblaster flying from his hands to bounce down toward the stream. He snapped a second shot at the guy’s partner, but missed. The second man had flung himself into the brush on the far side.
Even without the one leader type Ryan had chilled, somebody was starting to coordinate fire toward Ryan’s rock clump. It was still more enthusiastic than accurate. He could hear ricochets zinging in all directions as well as shots continuing to crack past in open air, missing the outcrop completely.
