"When do we leave?" Krysty asked as she and Ryan watched the gray-clad figure of Jim disappear into the darkness.
"False dawn, that's when. We'll put some more distance between us and Strasser!"
The girl moved to stand closer to Ryan, her hand reaching out into the gloom and resting for a brief moment on his right arm. "What do you think we'll find up there?"
"Fog. That's the only thing that's sure. Only thing they all talk of is the fog." He stared out through the trees, listening to the faint but insistent sound of fast-running water. "My guess is the fog hides somethin' from the old times. Somethin' they wanted kept hid, so they set this fog like a dog to guard it. Whoever 'they' are, they're long burned. Or chilled. But their dog's still there. I seen what it can do. I saw Kurt. He was like a man that's been through a mincer and then set on fire."
"Can we make it?"
"War wag holds plenty of gas. Food's fine. Touch short on men. And women."
"The Trader?"
"Soon. I just wish J.B. was here. And Sam and Hun and Koll. All good people to have at your back."
The wind was rising again. Off to the east Ryan saw something flare high in the sky, a vivid purple, crimson at its edges. One more piece of nuclear junk sliding back into the earth's atmosphere, burning up on reentry.
"Listen," said Krysty.
"What?"
She shook her head, her hair still luminous even in the blackness. "Quiet, Ryan. I can... Someone's coming."
The gun was in his hand, faster than a thought, his finger tense on the slim trigger. Good though his own senses were, Ryan had been around long enough to know that a lot of people had better.
"Where? How many? Creepy-crawling?"
"Southerly. Several. No. Moving fast and noisy. I guess five or six."
"How far off?"
"Difficult in this wind. Among trees. Maybe a klick or two."
That was close. Too close.
"Go warn the others. Now!" There was a bite to his words like the cut of a whiplash, and Krysty turned and vanished from his side.
Ryan headed toward the south. His life depended on the girl being correct. Half a dozen unknowns moving fast toward them. Odds were it was Strasser and an elite of his sec men, pushing quickly after them, hoping to wipe away their escape.
A hard rain began to fall on Ryan, slanting through the upper branches of the immense stand of lodgepole pines all around him. It sluiced through, turning the ground beneath his boots into a quagmire of mud and leaf mold. He knew now that his greatest hazard was running straight into the attackers. If there was to be any surprise, he wanted it on his side.
Holding the LAPA at the ready, he dropped to his knees behind a fallen tree, steadying his breathing, wiping rain from his forehead. If he'd grabbed one of the laser rifles with the night-sights he'd have been in better shape.
He knelt and waited. The Trader said that a man who cried over spilled milk got blinded by his tears.
By now Krysty would be back at the camp. The fire would have been stamped out and most of the party would be inside War Wag One, manning the entrances and gun-ports. There would be four outside, covering each compass point, watching for the attackers, ready to give him covering fire. If he made it back.
Fifty-five gifts of instant leaden mortality for the group of hostiles coming toward him with three extra sticks inside his coat, ready to slot in.
If they were muties with dark sight, he would be in the greatest danger. Then it wouldn't matter much if they were armed with flintlock muskets; he'd still be in a load of trouble. That thought made him tuck the weighted white silk scarf out of sight under the coat. He hunched and waited.
The lightning hit a tree less than a hundred paces away from him. He flinched, closing his eye against the instant blindness. The brutal thunder enveloped him, numbing his senses. He licked his lips, tasting the harsh, metallic flavor of ozone. If the attackers had been close enough, they could have taken him like a light-dazed rabbit.
"Scorch it to hell!" he cursed. Rubbing furiously at his right eye, seeing only a crimson mist, he blinked again and again. His head was lowered against the driving rain as he desperately fought to clear his vision.
He peered cautiously around the bole of the tumbled tree.
And saw them.
"Six. Seven," he muttered. All wearing the black waterproof slickers favored by the sec men from Mocsin. Hooded. High black boots. Oddly, not one of them was carrying a weapon at the ready, though he could make out rifles slung across the shoulders of some of them. It looked as if two of them were wounded, leaning on the arms of others.
They seemed more like refugees than a raiding party.
Either way, Ryan was going to wipe them from the face of this place of nukeshit and soul death called Earth. He set the LAPA on automatic and readied himself, bracing for the kick of the gun. At a range now of less than forty paces, he could take them all out in one savage raking burst of fire.
More thunder and lightning issued from a swirling sky that now glowed red in the west. Ryan waited, picking the moment when all of the enemy would be out in the open at once.
At thirty paces the sec men stopped and the leading figure turned around, pointing toward where Ryan waited. He tensed, even though he knew they couldn't possibly make him out in that weather and light. The pointman turned back, throwing off the shiny black hood. Another slash of silver lightning showed Ryan the face. And the hair.
Green hair.
"Hunaker! Hun, over here!"
The woman stared through the rain, mouth sagging with surprise. "Ryan? Ryan, you old bastard! Ryan!"
She ran toward him, then stopped and stared at him, and to their mutual embarrassment, she began to weep.
Chapter Twelve
Dawn was about an hour away.
The rain had stopped and the electrical storm had passed, grumbling its way to the south of them, leaving a quiet night. All the new arrivals had been fed and found bunks in the war wag.
Only J. B. Dix remained awake, talking to Ryan, telling him what had finally gone down in Mocsin. Around them, in the slumbering forest, the sentries still patrolled. They would all be on the move by first light.
J.B.'s report was characteristically terse.
"Convoy blew, knocked us all to hell and back. Sam an' Hun was laid out colder than a ten-year winter. I got my shoulder bruised some. Figured it was broke, but it's not. Girls came around and we got out. Koll found the old man, Doc. Gotten scrambled brains, Ryan. I don't know about him at all." J.B. stopped and shook his head, the glowing embers of the dying fire glinting off the steel-rimmed glasses. In the half light, his face looked more sallow and pinched than ever.
"Where d'you pick up Charlie and the guy they was huntin'? Kurt? He looks near dead, Kurt."
"Him and the Trader both. I looked in on him. Can't be more than days now, Ryan."
"Yeah."
"Fishmouth Charlie and Kurt was on the edge of Mocsin. She was near carrying him. We stopped with them to draw breath. Kurt was mumbling about when he was a blaster with McCandless up in the Darks. Claimed he knew the way to find the fogs. Said there was a big, big secret up there. A Redoubt, he called it. Figured we'd bring him. We liberated these clothes from some of Strasser's killers. There's been a small fight. Few bodies around."
Ryan guessed from J.B.'s taciturn description that it had probably been a desperate battle, but there was no point in pressing J.B. for that kind of detail. It was the results that mattered to the weapons master, not how they were obtained.
"I figured you'd gone this way," Dix continued. "Strasser's bound to come after us. He went ape-crazy. Saw him twice but I couldn't get a clear shot at him. I think our bombs fired the whole town. A rising wind did the rest. I looked back and Mocsin was most gone."