"Look," Lori said, shading her eyes with one hand and pointing ahead of them with the other. "Road across water."
"It's called bridge," Jak told her, balancing easily against the pitching of the raft. The vessel seemed even lower in the river now, the clear waves seeping over the front of the logs.
It was a place where the river narrowed, the banks closing in on either side, rising steeply to wooded bluffs. The bridge seemed to be made out of cables or ropes, strung like some dizzy spiderweb, dangling low in its center, barely thirty feet above the level of the surging Mohawk.
"And we got us company," J.B. said, unslinging the mini-Uzi from his shoulder.
They could see small, dark figures silhouetted against the light violet of the sky, scurrying toward the middle of the bridge, swinging hand over hand like tiny malevolent insects. Unlike the muties from farther upstream, these wore long cowled robes that concealed their faces and most of their bodies.
"They got no blasters," Jak said.
"Some got stones. And those two on the left have hunting bows," Krysty exclaimed, pointing with the muzzle of her P7A-13 handgun.
The raft was swooping fast toward the bridge, pitching and rolling. Ryan squinted ahead, clutching his G-12 caseless, trying to estimate how severe the threat was. Getting involved in a firefight in these circumstances was highly hazardous. The enemy, if proved hostile, held all of the jack. To try to blow them off their vantage point would be difficult at best, and extremely costly in ammo at worst. Even an ace shot like Ryan Cawdor couldn't guarantee wreaking much havoc from the unsteady platform of the waterlogged and rotating raft.
"Hold fire!" he yelled, hoping everyone could hear him above the pounding of the white-topped waves surrounding them.
"Be hard to chill 'em," Jak shouted from the front of the raft, where he crouched with his beloved Magnum, the spray washing over him.
"Doc! You an' Lori take that steering oar and try to keep the bastard steady. Keep her going forward and hold her from circling."
The girl and the old man staggered to the stern, Doc slipping and coming within an inch of toppling into the swollen waters. But they clawed a hold on the misshapen branch that trailed in the river, throwing their combined weight against it, gradually controlling the swinging of the clumsy craft. It was some improvement, but the chances of pulling off any accurate shooting were still dozens to one.
There were about thirty people on the fragile bridge, making it pitch and dip even lower.
Oddly none of them was showing any obvious signs of aggression toward Ryan and his group, no waving of fists or throwing of stones. The couple with bows simply held them, unstrung, in their hands.
J.B. glanced toward Ryan, the unspoken question clear on his face. He reached up and wiped spots of water off his wire-rimmed glasses, shaking his head in puzzlement.
"Why don't they?.."
Ryan readied himself. "Mebbe they aren't against us."
Doc heard him above the sound of the river. "Wrong, my dear Ryan. Anyone who is not for us, must be against us."
They were less than two hundred yards from the bridge.
One hundred yards.
"They're going't'let us through," Jak yelped, staring up at the hooded strangers.
"Mebbe," Ryan muttered. It was true what Doc had shouted. In the ravaged world of Deathlands you had few friends. And a mess of enemies.
Twenty yards.
A fish leaped in the air off to the left, bursting in rainbow spray, taking everyone's eyes for a crucial moment.
"We making..." began Lori, eyes wide with the tension of the second.
Dangling monkeylike from the center span of twisted cords, one of the silent watchers reached out as the raft floated directly beneath him — or her — and opened a hand, allowing something to drop. The object landed with a metallic thud on the logs, hitting the mast and wedging itself between two of the knotted creepers.
It was oval in shape, about the size of a man's fist. The top was dull, steel glinting through a number of gouged scratches. There were scarlet and blue bands painted around it.
"Implo-gren!" J.B. shouted in a thin, cracking voice, shaken into dropping his normal laconic mask at the sight of the bomb.
It had been a similar implosion grenade that had broken through the creeping fog when Ryan had entered the first mat-trans gateway. Using some very basic experimental anti-grav material, the hand bombs created a sudden and extremely violent vacuum so that everything around the edge of the detonation was sucked into it. The displacement was more ferocious than with a conventional explosion. Very few of the implo-grens had been made, and it flashed through Ryan's mind, even at that moment of maximum danger, to wonder how these isolated villagers had gotten hold of one.
The other thought that flooded into his brain was to try to recall what kind of fuses the grens had. Twelve seconds? Ten?
Five?
Doc and Lori were helpless, hanging onto the steering oar at the stern. J.B. was nearest, but the bulk of the mast obstructed him. Jak was the one with the fastest reflexes, but he was kneeling at the front of the raft, gun drawn, looking up at the monklike figures who hung on the bridge above them.
Krysty Wroth began to move. Despite having part-mutie sight and hearing, her reflexes were no faster than any normal person's.
Which left it in Ryan Cawdor's court.
As he started to dive for the implo-gren, he remembered about the fuse.
They were generally eight seconds.
Chapter Four
The metal was cold, slippery with the waters of the Mohawk.
Ryan's fingers closed on the gren, and he hefted it from the sodden logs, cocking his arm to throw it over the side of the raft. The rope bridge above them replaced a four-lane highway bridge that had crumbled in the first minutes of the nuking of 2001. Even now, a century later, some of the original stone and girders still lay in the river, just below the surface. At that moment the laden craft struck some relic of the ruined bridge, jarring into it with a sickening crunch.
The raft swung into a sullen half circle, throwing Ryan completely off guard. He stumbled, fighting for balance. He tried to dump the grenade over the side, but his fingers had locked over it as he fell. At the last moment he struggled to roll on his shoulder, but the slick cold wood betrayed his footing and he tumbled sideways. His shoulder thumped against the stump of the mast, and he half rolled on top of Krysty, who snatched at his coat to check him from falling over the side into the Mohawk. The implo-gren slipped from his hand, clattering under both their bodies.
The crowd on the spiderwork bridge gave a ragged cheer, waving their fists at the clumsy craft beneath them.
Ryan groped for the fallen grenade, feeling the raft hit again, with a jagged, splintering sound, holding it in the same place. Even as he touched the icy metal, his brain screamed to him that he was way too slow, that the eight seconds were up and gone. The metal would disintegrate and he would be sucked into the hissing vacuum and destroyed, along with everyone on the doomed raft.
He dropped the gren twice more, until he was finally able to grip it securely, sitting up and holding it in his right hand. Ryan was almost unable to believe their good fortune. Above him the cheers turned to screeching anger.
"It's a fucking malfunk!" Jak yelled. "Lemme chill the monsters."