Ryan was next in line. "What is it, lover? Trouble ahead?"
She shook her head. "Two things. Heard them both, round about the same time. One of them is a kind of drumming."
"Drumming?" Mildred asked. "You mean the war brought some kind of weird natives along with the jungle?"
Krysty didn't smile. "Don't know, but it's definitely some kind of rhythmic drums. Could be three miles or more ahead. Over the ridge that we're heading for."
"You said two things," Ryan pressed. "What's the other one?" He noticed that her hair was suddenly curling in closer against her neck and shoulders, a sure sign that she "felt" some kind of trouble threatening them.
"Don't know. Mixed-up sort of signal, like some animal, or lots of animals. But it's overlaid with a lot of fear."
"How do you receive that kind of signal?" Mildred asked interestedly. "Do you see it in some way?"
Krysty looked at her, blinking as though she didn't recognize her. "Oh, sorry. Miles away. How do I feel threats? Don't know. Mebbe if I knew I couldn't do it. Mother Sonja taught it to me back in my home ville of Harmony. No. No, taughtisn't the right word. She showed me how to use something that was already within me. Can't tell you more than that, Mildred. Sorry."
"Orange alert," Ryan said. "Move a little slower. I'll take point, Krysty." He saw the argument surfacing angrily in her eyes and defused it quickly. "It's my turn, lover. That's all."
He took the panga and began to slice through the undergrowth, leading them slowly toward higher ground.
Fifteen minutes later they became aware of movements in the jungle around them. First it was small animals, swinging high and invisible in the top branches, chattering and squealing excitedly as they went. Then it was bigger creatures, lumbering along narrow, twisting paths, parallel to the track that Ryan had found.
Birds, many of them just brightly colored blurs, hummed between the low branches, squawking madly as they flew south. An animal resembling a panther, but lower to the ground and with light gold stripes across its flanks, came straight at Ryan. He drew a bead on it with the blaster, holding his fire until the last moment. The creature cut aside, breaking through a scented bush. Its eyes had been blankly staring and its muzzle laced with white foam.
"Could it be a blaze?" Doc suggested. "I have seen this sort of terror down in the southwest, many years ago. Every living thing for fifty miles was racing for its very life."
"Wind's blowing toward us," Jak said. "Can't smell smoke."
J.B. took off his hat and smelled the air. "Yeah. No fire. Something else, though. Mebbe worse."
Ryan looked around them. There was an enormous tree about two hundred yards dead ahead, with multiple trunks that twined around one another. The leaves were dark olive green, shiny in the late-afternoon sun.
"Make for that," he ordered, pointing. "Give us some shelter and a fire defense from whatever it is that's coming this way."
At that moment he distinctly felt the earth tremble beneath his feet as if some massive underground monster surged deep below him.
"Fireblast! What the..."
The others felt it, though less strongly. Mildred jumped sideways and clutched at Doc's arm. Ryan noticed that the old man didn't make any attempt to remove it.
"This is a dreadful place, this Deathlands!" she gasped. "Maybe you ought to have left me frozen back there."
For several minutes the jungle had been filled with pounding, racing life. But the tropical vegetation was so thick that it wasn't possible to do more than glimpse what was happening.
A large brindled wolf, dangling a mewing cub from its jaws, appeared on the path, stopping as it saw the six humans blocking its escape. It snarled through bloodied teeth.
"Chill it," J.B. warned.
"No," Krysty said. "Let it pass. It's already terrified. Why chill it?"
They all edged back into the bushes and luxuriant shrubs, opening up the track. After a moment's hesitation the wolf moved toward them and padded quickly along, glancing over its shoulder as though it sensed something rushing behind it.
"A frightful fiend doth close behind him tread," Doc said quietly as the animal vanished.
"Listen," Krysty warned, standing stock-still, the silvered Heckler & Koch pistol gripped in her right hand.
"What?" J.B. probed.
"Can't hear a sound, lover," Ryan said.
"That's the point, isn't it, Krysty?" Mildred asked. "It's totally silent. So what put the fear of the Almighty into those creatures? What comes on silent feet?"
"Get to the tree," Ryan commanded, feeling a prickle at his nape.
The light wind had dropped, and the sweltering heat had returned. They seemed to stand at the center of a dome of overpowering stillness.
They'd closed half the distance between themselves and what Ryan could now see was a ponderous mangrove tree when he glimpsed something in front of them, across an area of more open ground that was dotted with light yellow flowering bushes.
His first thought was that a dam had burst somewhere up the slope ahead of them. It looked as if a stream of water, shimmering and gleaming, had forked around the massive trunk of the tree.
But his second thought was the right one.
"Ants! Mutie ants!" he yelled, glancing around for the safest escape route.
Behind them lay the jungle and any number of fleeing, terrified creatures. The flanks were cut off by impenetrable walls of jungle. Which left one possibility.
"Come on!" he shouted, springing toward the unknowable insect army.
Chapter Sixteen
The stream of ants was only the advance guard, which numbered in tens of thousands, rather than in tens of millions, but still enough to make the race for the shelter of the mangrove one of the most desperate of Ryan Cawdor's life.
Each ant was more than a foot long, with a carapace of fiery copper. The mandibles were huge, disproportionate even to the insect's grotesquely mutated size. Longer than a man's finger, they clicked together in a deafening warning as the ants picked up the approach of the six companions. Those at the front reared up on hind legs, their heads turning from side to side.
As Ryan led the charge, the very front row retreated a few yards, then regrouped in a solid phalanx of glittering death.
To hesitate was to die.
For the first dozen steps, Ryan tried to dodge the ants, but they were packed too closely for him to find any clear ground between them. The crunching of delicate skeletons beneath boot heels almost drowned out the clicking. Ryan kept moving, powering himself toward the tree, which was now only twenty yards distant. He didn't dare turn to see if the others were making it. A stumble would put a person on the last train to the coast.
He could now see something of the main body of the killer army beyond the mangrove. Not an inch of ground was free of the iridescent horde that swept toward him.
Weighing up the chances as he ran, Ryan had already spotted several low branches within easy reach. He became aware of Jak sprinting past, white hair streaming behind him like a snowy banner. The boy made the tree a torn fragment of time ahead of Ryan, diving for a branch and swinging himself onto it with a prehensile agility.
When Ryan was perched four feet from the carpet of ants, he was finally able to look around for the others. He saw Krysty running like someone dancing on hot coals, trying to pick her way between the mutie insects. J.B. was level with her, running flat-footed, deliberately crushing as many ants as he could.
Mildred and Tanner shared last spot in the desperate race.
"Go!" Jak yelled.
Ryan reached a hand down to Krysty and heaved her up beside him. J.B. made it on a lower branch to the left of the mangrove, standing up and looking down at the tide of insects, hand trembling over the butt of his pistol as though he wanted to spray lead into the limitless swell of the ants. But he recognized the utter futility of the thought.