Now.
He sidestepped the baying charge, hacking at the creature's shoulder as it brushed past him. The blade of the panga bit deep, and he felt the jar as it cracked into bone. Blood sprayed, steaming in the cold, patterning the snow around them. The wolf howled, a tearing, unearthly banshee wail that froze the blood. Then it whirled around, snapping at its own wound, and charged again.
This time Ryan stood his ground.
Meeting the rush head-on, he swung the foot and a half of blood-slick steel with all his power, as if he were trying to fell a great oak with a single blow.
The blade hit the leaping wolf's frothing muzzle and sliced through the flesh of the animal's upper jaw, snapping off oversized teeth and burying itself finally in the side of the creature's skull, just below its crazed eye. The weight of the wolf pulled the panga's hilt out of Ryan's hands, and rolling over in the snow, the beast kicked itself to its feet again, the steel dangling from its narrow head.
"Tough mother, huh?" Ryan said to himself, carefully freeing the pistol from his coat. The animal was panting, blood flowing freely over its grizzled pelt and soaking the earth around its forepaws. Despite the crippling wound, the wolf wasn't finished yet.
The P-226 9 mm blaster was in Ryan's right fist, its twenty-five and a half ounces of weight feeling as familiar to him as his own face in a mirror. The barrel was more than four inches long, and it held fifteen rounds of ammunition. One bullet in the right place would kick a man over on his back, leaving him looking blank-eyed at the sky.
It was enough even for the mutie wolf.
The animal lurched toward Ryan again, hackles up, snow hanging in the folds of muscle around its throat. The gun barked, the flat sound muffled by the storm. The bullet hit precisely where Ryan had aimed it, between the kill-mad eyes.
The wolf howled, the long drawn-out scream of pain and frustrated rage echoing and fading off the trees. The high-velocity round exited from the back of the beast's skull, a fine spray of brains and blood hanging in the air for a moment. A great splinter of bone, inches across, pulped into the snow. The body was knocked sideways, the legs kicking frantically. Ryan heard the mutie beast's claws scrape through the ice at the road gravel beneath.
"Where are you, Ryan?" It was Krysty, stumbling over the slippery ruts of ice, her Heckler & Koch pistol in her hand. Ryan saw her looming through the wraiths of wind-torn snow. She stopped when she saw the twitching corpse of the timber wolf. "By Gaia! That's a big bastard. You all right, lover? I just saw it come out of the shadows at you, but I couldn't be sure what it was."
The Kenworth had finally ground to a halt just around the next bend in the road, its exhaust vomiting smoke. To Ryan's educated hearing, it was obvious that the truck's engine was beginning to fail. There was a much rougher note than when they'd left the town, and he could actually catch the taste in the air of burning oil as the engine overheated. His guess was that they'd covered around fifty miles from Ginnsburg Falls, moving slowly along the treacherous highway. They'd been told that the range of the Kenworth was only around one hundred miles. If that was right, they'd soon have to consider returning and trying to get to the gateway through the town.
Or going on and risking being totally stranded in the desert of rocks and snow.
Once they were all safely in the cluttered, cramped cab of the rig, they discussed what they should do.
"There's a big fucking ridge ahead," Finnegan said. "Saw it 'fore this fucking snow came down. It's only 'bout five, six miles ahead. Sky seemed clearer north."
"This wag won't run much longer," J.B. commented, taking off his glasses and polishing them clean of the smears of snow. "I doubt we'd make it back to the ville."
Ryan nodded his agreement. "Could be best to go on, I guess."
Jak stared moodily out of one of the high side windows and picked his nose. "The trans message was this way? Came for that. Go on."
Krysty shook her head. "If we stop now, then we should make the gateway. Try somewhere else. Farther we go on, the farther we've got to come back. Mebbe on foot. It's a bleak land."
Doc Tanner coughed to clear his throat. "We blunder across the Deathlands, like children, lost in a maze, like the players of some celestial game where we know neither the object nor the rules."
"What's your point, Doc?" Ryan asked.
"The point, my dear and somewhat brutal Mr. Cawdor, is that we could have here a chance, rare as Vatican charity, to improve our tiny store of knowledge."
"The message, you mean?"
"Indeed, I do. I, for one, am set that we should continue across this darkling plain, blighted by the long-dead ignorant armies."
"But we don't know where we're heading," J.B. said. "Got no radios with us."
"Ah, Mr. Dix," the old man said, grinning. "That is where you are wrong. Show the nice gentleman the pretty toy you found on the floor of this rumbling behemoth, dear child."
Lori smiled at him and reached inside her gray fur coat, pulling out a small black plastic box with a dial and several buttons.
Finn glanced sideways at it. "Fucking ace, lady. Nice little radio-trans. Where didja find it, Lori?"
"Under the seat when I get in."
"Got in," Doc Tanner corrected gently.
"It work?" Jak asked.
"Sure does, son," the old man replied. "You found that recorded message on the dial last time, Finn, did you not?"
"Yeah."
"Can you do it on this?"
"Sure. Strength of the signal should tell us if'n we're heading in the right fucking direction. Someone else can drive this crumbling shit heap a spell."
J.B. took over, muttering to himself in a bad-tempered monotone at the way the steering was becoming loose. Finn changed seats and took the little radio from the girl, peering at it in the light from the east of the valley.
"I think it was..." he began.
There was a faint crackling of static and hissing. Ryan had read in an old book, from before the Apocalypse, that in the golden age it was possible to spin the dial on a radio-trans and pick up hundreds of different stations, all broadcasting at once. Now you were very lucky to pick up even a single station.
"Mebbe we've gone wrong," Krysty suggested.
"Mebbe we..."
The voice was deafeningly loud, booming out in the cab of the Kenworth, repeating the same message they'd heard before.
"Stay tuned to this frequency. North of Ginnsburg Falls where the old Highway 62 reaches the trail to Crater Lake. Go there and wait. You will be contacted."
There was a brief pause and then the loop-tape message began again.
"Anyone receiving this message who requires any assistance in any matter of science or the study of past technical developments will be aided. Bring all your information and follow this signal where you will be given help. Stay tuned to this frequency. North of..."
Finn switched the machine off.
"How far?" Jak said, breaking the sudden silence in the cab.
J.B. was still wrestling with the steering of the ailing Kenworth, taking some time to answer. "Can't be more than a few miles. That signal's nearly on top of us, isn't it, Finn?"
"Guess so. Little fucking toy like this trans here... Can't have a range more'n five, mebbe ten miles tops."
"Straight ahead, up those hills?" Ryan asked, rubbing at the windshield with his glove, trying to see out through the swirls of light snow.
The Armorer nodded. "If this bitching wag can make it that far."
His concern was well placed.
About eight miles farther along the old blacktop, just as the bright sun of late afternoon was breaking through, the engine coughed and then seized up with a grinding, metallic sound that had a dreadful finality about it.