by James Axler
His companions were likely safe by now. They knew how to find cover. With the added advantage of a guide who knew the country, they should have either found a spot where the pursuers would have a hard time finding them, or holed up somewhere they could defend.
Still, Ryan was reluctant to quit his sniping and follow. This seemed to be a young army. He still hadn’t seen more than twenty guys. But he’d chilled a couple at least, and wounded several more. That was high casualties for even the stoniest of coldhearts to absorb. It would normally make them go to ground and wait for him to go away, if not just turn tail and run.
Maybe this Handsome guy had a stern sense of discipline. But even if it involved getting boiled slow in a pot, deferred punishment seldom trumped having bullets crack close by your ears. Especially while your buddy moaned and howled and clutched at a belly full of guts turned to bloody pulp.
They had to break, and soon. It was just a matter of keeping up the pressure, bouncing between spots and taking quick shots until they just plain had enough. Which Ryan continued to do as he held the internal debate with himself.
Oh, and not get shot. There was that. If nothing else, the hypothetical supersharpshooter didn’t seem to have made the trip today. They were all pretty crap shots.
I just don’t want this many of them on the trail of Krysty and the others, he thought, as he popped up over the top of the outcrop and snapped off a quick blast. This time he saw blood fly from the leg of a kneeling shooter, who squalled, grabbed himself and fell.
Ryan slid all the way to the bottom again. He crouched behind the rock, catching his breath. And suddenly there were bullets cracking all around him.
He sucked into a tight crouch as sharp shards of lava rock stung his face and hands. Ricochets screamed. He felt something tug the left shoulder of his shirt.
The firestorm paused. Ryan looked up to see a couple of shooters silhouetted atop the far side of the valley. Another man stood a few feet away. He and one of the others were aiming longblasters in Ryan’s direction. The third man, up on the ridge, was half-turned, frantically signaling someone behind him with his right hand.
Now Ryan knew why the coldheart squad was so hard-core in the face of casualties: there were more of the bastards.
He swung the Scout to his shoulder, acquired his target, then fired at the man slightly down the slope as the muzzle of the coldheart’s longblaster sprouted yellow fire.
He felt a sting on his left cheek as the shot cracked by. The coldheart dropped as his left shin was plucked right out from under him. He tumbled down the ridge, losing his bolt-action longblaster as he did so.
Ryan threw himself into a desperate rear somersault away from the outcrop that had sheltered him from the first wave of enemies. He was deep in trouble, and he didn’t need anyone to tell him. Even as the two still on their feet on the far slope blasted rock splinters from the space he’d just occupied, he could hear the triumphant cries of the first wave as they surged forward.
He’d gone and gotten himself flanked. It was about as tight a crack as a person would fit in. The odds were long against him getting himself out.
If he tried bolting to cover, or straight up the hill, he was asking for a bullet in the back, which would leave his companions at the mercy of their foes. He wouldn’t do that.
All he could do now was to sell his ass dearly and discourage pursuit.
He fired again before he came out of his roll, the blaster bucking in his hands like a live thing. Once again he hoped to throw off the coldhearts’ aim long enough for him to take down at least one more.
The shot flew wide, as expected. As he came up to a kneeling position and raised the longblaster to his shoulder, he saw something that hit him like a round in the gut.
There were more men silhouetted against the far ridge. They weren’t shooting at him yet, but soon would be.
And even if they all missed, it was only a matter of minutes before the first group closed in to blast him like a rabid dog.
Suddenly the head of a man trying to sight in on Ryan with an M-16 jerked back. He fell on his back flopping, grabbing the attention of his cohorts.
Ryan shot the remaining member of the first trio through the chest.
One of the men on the far ridgeline toppled backward out of sight. The remaining newcomers looked at one another and rabbited back down the far valley wall.
“Ryan!”
The shout came from the slope above him. The voice was momentarily unfamiliar.
“To your west! They’re crossing the side valley!”
He recognized the voice now: Ricky Morales. He suddenly realized why he hadn’t heard the shots that took out the two coldhearts.
He flung himself back to his first perch near the base of the outcrop where the two mutant monkey bodies still lay in pathetic huddles. Four of the original enemy unit were indeed scrambling down the far bank of the side cut and crossing the dry streambed at the bottom.
Ryan shot the nearest man in the face. He was only twenty yards or so away, so his head burst like an overripe cantaloupe hit with a sledgehammer.
As he toppled, the man right behind him triggered an AK blast from the hip. Even as Ryan brought his longblaster back online that man was cut down by another shot from Ricky Morales.
Another man sliding down the bank fired to reverse course, but took Ricky’s next blast in the hip. He went down screaming.
The survivors sprinted back toward the rest of their patrol, who themselves were pulling back out of sight the way they came.
“This way!”
Ryan looked up the slope to see Ricky grinning at him from a bush.
“¡Andale, señor!” the kid called.
Without a second thought, Ryan raced up the slope toward him.
They started moving fast through the brush up the hill. The kid made more crunching and rustling noise than Jak would have, or even than Ryan did. But Ryan didn’t think it’d make much difference. No enemy was near enough to hear them. At least, not one in shape to do much about it.
The scrub wasn’t cover, but it was pretty fair concealment. The only way an enemy would be likely to hit them was to blanket the area with fire.
But the group that had run into them headfirst had shown no taste for any more of Ryan and his companions. It was always possible they would rally and come right back, if they fetched up against some kind of leader with the balls and presence to kick their asses back into action. But odds were this was an independent patrol. And even if somebody did get them turned around in short order, it was triple-sure they wouldn’t be pursuing his friends any too eagerly.
“Where’re the others?” he asked Ricky.
“Safe,” Ricky said. “Up about half a kilometer, hidden. I, uh, came back on my own.”
“Thanks,” Ryan said. “One thing, though.”
“What?” The kid sounded scared at being judged by his new comrades’ formidable leader.
“That last little demo impressed me a shitload more than shooting some mutant monkeys.”
Chapter Eighteen
From somewhere out in the night, someone coughed. It sounded like a plaguer trying to hack his lungs up, but magnified four or five times.
Ryan looked around sharply from the bonfire where he squatted. The crude grass huts of a small ville stood in a ragged circle around him, his companions and their hosts.
“What was that?” he asked.
“Tigre,” the ville boss replied. You couldn’t call him a baron. Not without laughing, anyway. He was a little middle-aged guy with pipestem arms and legs and a potbelly hanging over a greasy loincloth. And his domain was about sixty people living in fifteen or twenty huts in a clearing in the heavy woods.
“You mean, some kind of mutant tiger?” Mildred asked. She was gnawing the roast rodent on a stick someone had handed her.
“Oh, no,” the ville boss said in Spanish, grinning. “Just a tiger. They roam these woods.”
Mildred looked around in alarm when
Ricky translated.
“What?” Jak demanded. “Feel better if mutie tiger?”
“Well...no,” Mildred admitted, relaxing slightly. “Now that you mention it. It just gave me a turn. I suppose they—their ancestors—must’ve escaped from zoos after the war. If they made it through the skydark somehow, the climate would suit them pretty well.”
“We should be safe here,” the ville’s senior woman said. Ryan wasn’t sure whether she was the headman’s wife or sister. He wouldn’t even assume she couldn’t be both. She was taller and sturdier than he was, built like a cinderblock, in fact, as well as visibly younger. But not that much different to look at. “They won’t come near the fire.”
“Even chupacabras don’t like fire,” the boss said with a cackle.
“Shit,” Mildred said. “Not chupacabras.”
The ville woman shrugged. “We don’t get them much down here these days,” she said. “Not like when I was a little girl. They mostly stick higher up in the mountains.”
The boss tittered. “After we taught them a sharp lesson,” he said. “It was during a year the rains didn’t come they started getting bold.”
Ryan took a healthy swallow of the local palm wine they’d given him in half a coconut. Coconut shells seemed to serve these people for all vessels, mugs and bowls alike.
Mildred tried a sip, but the stuff made her stomach roll over on its back and beg. For mercy. It was sour, vile, and slimy. She suspected that like a lot of quaint third-world bush types, the locals helped the fermenting process along by chewing the components and spitting them into the pot.
But her companions were slugging it down without batting an eye. Just as they’d devoured the stew of boiled rice, mashed bananas and some kind of stringy meat they’d been served earlier. She suspected the meat was monkey, which was never going to be her favorite, but it was better than, say, rat.
Mildred didn’t know if the monkeys the villagers had stewed up had spikes or not. She didn’t ask. She was hungry after their third day on the trail. She noticed that Jak didn’t ask, either, despite his distaste for “tainted” flesh. That gave her a chuckle.
The other villagers squatted around them in a big-eyed, respectful circle, allowing the elder pair places of honor with the guests by the fire. Either the common tribesfolk had eaten earlier, or would later. Only the chief, the woman and the visitors were served food and drink.
Lucky us, Mildred thought, holding her breath and knocking back another swallow of the wine. It coated her tongue in nasty sickness. Her gag reflex fought it all the way down.
“That was the year the rainy season didn’t come till late,” the woman agreed. “The drought was worse in the mountains. Usually the mountains get more rain higher up. Not that year. We had a lot of animals coming by the ville. They gave us a lot of trouble. Some ate our crops. Some ate us. Especially the monsters, obviously. The mountains teem with them.”
“The chupacabras are worst, though,” the man said, as she nodded agreement. “They organize, see. Like monkeys. Mebbe smarter.” He shrugged and took a drink of wine.
The ville elders continued their assessment of the chupacabras’ tactics. Normally the goatsuckers hunted by stealth—and alone. But that year, driven from their mountain realms en masse by drought, they ran—and attacked—in packs of twenty or more.
“First they started taking people who were out alone after dark,” the woman said. “That’s always dangerous. We try not to do it. But you know how people are, no? A month or two goes by without a monster attack, we get careless. Lazy. Then a tigre or a gato armado or the scorpion dogs or spike monkeys grab some poor person walking back from the fields alone, or some drunk farmer stumbling outside his hut to piss in the middle of the night.
“Then they started invading homes by night. The chupacabras often raid huts, so it didn’t seem so bad at first. No worse than any other time. We just had to be on our guard more.
“But even after we caught and killed one trying to snatch a baby from a crib, the night invasions didn’t stop. Then packs started attacking small groups going out after dark. Then even people working the fields or hunting in the daytime.”
The man shook his head. “It was a terrible time. We and the other villes of the valley lost many people, as well as dogs and other valuable livestock. It got so nobody dared venture out in groups of less than five or six, armed with spears, clubs and cane knives.
“Next the monsters started attacking whole villes, in force, at night. They all but wiped out one ville half a day’s walk upstream. They stopped being afraid of fire. They’d attack people gathered around fires.”
“They don’t like having flaming torches stuck in their ugly faces any better than anyone else,” the woman said in satisfaction.
“So when they got that bold—”
“That desperate,” the woman said.
The man nodded. “Then we had to get cagey ourselves.”
“What did you do?” J.B. asked.
He had been knocking back the horrible palm wine as if it were actually good.
“We set up a trap,” the headman said. “We stood watch around the ville with torches and weapons in hand, night-long vigils for one whole week. Sometimes we saw eyes shining back from the bush, which we’d cleared back to forty or fifty yards to make it harder to sneak up on us. Sometimes the eyes were big and widely spaced—tigres or armor cats. They gave us trouble, too, but nowhere near the goatsuckers. They might be cunning but they’re more like animals, you know?
“But most of all, we saw the nasty slanty glows of chupacabras’ eyes. We could feel their hunger and their hate. We pissed them off, keeping watch like that. They had no chance against us. They were smart enough to know it.”
“So after a week of no attacks—” the woman took up the narrative as the man stopped to wet his whistle “—we had a big party to celebrate. We danced and sang and got drunk and went off into our huts to screw and sleep off the wine.”
Ryan got an especially wolfish grin on his harshly handsome features. “You set them up.”
Their round, dark faces split into grins. “Of course!” the woman said. “They were smart, these monsters. Smart enough to see their opportunity. Smart enough to see we had gotten overconfident. They waited until mebbe an hour before dawn—”
“When folk are always most vulnerable,” J.B. said. He could see where this was going.
“Sí,” the headman said. “Then they hit us from all directions. There must have been a hundred of the muties. Usually they attack silently. Not that night. They were chirping and screeching to one another in their eerie voices as they came. They were enraged, and they were famished. And they were going to slake their hunger for vengeance as well as for the meat on our bones.”
“And of course we had been drinking water,” the woman said, “and only pretending to drink ourselves triple-stupe. We lay awake waiting. We planned to sleep in shifts, to stay as fresh as possible, but no one could sleep. And we kept waiting until they started ripping open the huts.”
The huts here were more substantial than most of the ones built closer to the coast, where hurricanes could get an unobstructed shot at them. They actually had walls of sorts, although these seemed more like mats woven of sticks and grasses than anything more solid.
“We laid into them with everything we had. We even had friends and cousins from other villes hiding with us. Plus refugees from isolated huts and villes they’d attacked, survivors.
“And so it was we, not they, who took our vengeance. Ah, but that was a lovely bloodletting! We stabbed and beat and hacked them. We were wild things ourselves. We knew no fatigue, any more than mercy. We knocked them down and then ran after the ones who could still flee, while the children and the old ones beat the wounded muties to death with rocks and sticks. We chased them through the brush, across the fields, into the woods.
“They were too surprised and terrified by the hot reception we gave them to try to turn back and ambush us. And o
nly the fastest—or mebbe the first to flee—got away.”
“We counted a hundred and thirty bodies the next morning,” the woman said. “We stuck twenty or thirty on sharpened stakes around the ville to rot, far enough out not to give us the black shits or other sickness. The rest we piled up in the middle of the ville, right where we sit now, and burned. Oh, how nasty it smelled! Yet wonderful, too.”
“After that,” the man said, “it was over ten years before any chupacabras were seen in our valley at all. Even the other monsters seemed to get the message. We had little trouble from any of them—even the scorpion dogs who fear nothing—until the rains returned to the mountains and they all went back to their heights.”
J.B. stood up and spanked dust off the back of his trousers. “Now, that’s the kind of bedtime story I like,” he said. “But if it’s all the same to you good people, I reckon it’s time we hit the hay. We’ve got miles to walk in the morning.”
Ryan nodded agreement. “Thanks for the hospitality,” he said. “And the story. I’m a sucker for happy endings, myself.”
“If we could only trouble you for a place to sleep, please,” Krysty said, sidling up to her man and slipping an arm around his narrow waist.
“Of course!” the headman beamed. He gestured grandly at the hut directly behind them. It was easily the biggest in the ville, about twenty feet in diameter and a couple of feet taller than the rest. “You can have our hut for the night. We insist!”
“Thank you kindly,” Ryan said. He had his arm around Krysty’s shoulder.
“There is one favor we ask in return,” the woman said. “We are a small ville, as you see. The other villes nearby are small, as well, and most of the people who live in them are our cousins.”
“And we don’t get many travelers through here,” the man said. He had a glitter to his eye, Mildred noticed. She had no idea where this was heading.
“So it’s hard to get new blood,” the woman explained. “But we need to. Otherwise we start getting kids with too many fingers and too few eyes, you know? As bad as muties, interbreeding.”
