J.B. flexed his shoulders. "Agreed. Let's move on around."
It was J.B. who killed the dog. They were three-quarters of the way around, picking their way cautiously between the patches of cover, checking that nobody from the ville was coming their way. They'd just negotiated a part of the woods that had been particularly unpleasant. From the copious evidence all around it was obvious that the wretched ville had no sanitation arrangements. Everyone simply came out and did what they had to among the trees.
Krysty began to giggle quietly to herself as they picked their way carefully onward.
"What's the joke, lover?" Ryan asked.
"Carl Lanning, the smith's son from Harmony. You know?"
"Yeah. What about him?"
"He always said I'd end up in the shit. He finally got it right."
All three of them laughed, laughter that was snapped off clean when the dog appeared from the far side of a small clearing.
It wasn't a particularly large animal, no more than two feet tall at the shoulder and probably weighing less than a hundred pounds. But it wasn't carrying much fat. Waves of muscle rippled over the squat shoulders and it stood foursquare, lips folding back off savage teeth. A thin trickle of yellow foam clung to its underslung jaw. In the sudden silence they could hear a faint snarl, rumbling deep in its belly. The sunken eyes were rimmed red.
"Gaia!"
Ryan took in a slow, whistling breath, leveling his SIG-Sauer P-226, finger taut on the feather-light trigger. He held his fire. If the dog barked they could have the whole ville teeming about their ears within seconds. If he shot the animal, even with the baffle silencer, there was a good chance of someone hearing the muted report of the blaster. Same result.
There was always the hope that the cur might simply take it into its head to turn and run, allowing them to move on unhindered.
That hope died the moment he saw the head go back and heard the first beginning of the howl of warning.
J.B. never hesitated.
He drew the Tekna knife left-handed and threw it underarm at the dog. The needle-sharp blade spun across the clearing, glinting in the sun. The point buried itself in the creature's throat, beneath the ruff of its muscular jowls. The yelp died, stillborn, and the dog staggered a few steps sideways, collapsing with a feeble, bubbling attempt at a bark. Blood oozed from its open jaws, tinting the froth, and its powerful legs kicked and scrabbled at the carpet of snow.
J.B. walked across and stooped to retrieve the heavy knife, jerking his hand away as the dying animal made a determined attempt to take a few of his fingers with it into the long stillness.
"Bastard," he muttered with no anger, waiting a half minute until the mongrel's eyes filmed over and it lay dead. Then he withdrew the Tekna and wiped it in the ground before resheathing it.
Ryan had figured that the bodies of the three horsemen might have been found by now. What he didn't know was the extent to which rural Russia was subject to sec patrols. Generally in Deathlands sec men were visible in any numbers only near a large ville run by a powerful baron.
They'd only been in the country for a few hours and they'd already managed to kill five Russians. And a dog, Ryan added. There wasn't going to be any way they could throw themselves on the mercy of their unwitting hosts and took for anything better than a hemp collar and a short dance on the air.
The path had become a trail and now widened to the width of a two-lane blacktop. Most of the snow had already melted from its surface, the potholed pavement showing through. The river ran alongside it on the left, pounding over huge tumbled boulders, its noise now deafeningly loud. On the right side of the road the forest had thickened and darkened, massive pines gathering close together with barely room for a man to squeeze between the trunks.
"Don't like this!" J.B. shouted, looking behind them. "Can't see a quick way out if we get ourselves caught here."
Ryan nodded and stopped. He looked at the metallic gray of the icy water and knew that nobody could hope to survive in among the rocks for more than a handful of seconds. "Have to be the forest!" he bellowed back.
There wasn't too much of the day remaining. Clouds were bunching over the low hills ahead of them, where the trail disappeared. Ryan was thinking about when they should stop to find a hiding place for the night.
Because of the noise of the rushing river, none of them heard the clattering engine of the jeep until it roared around the corner right in front of them. It was filled with five armed sec men.
Chapter Thirteen
Major-Commissar Zimyanin flicked through the report, one of dozens that landed on his desk every morning of every working day. He glanced through it, stopping as his eye caught the familiar name.
"Peredelkino," he muttered, running the flat of his hand over the polished dome of his skull.
Only the day before there'd been something about a hamlet out that way, in the southwest sector of the grid.
"Peredelkino." There'd been three men missing. According to this report, they hadn't been located yet. But there was a mysterious corpse of a very tall mutie. "Stuck in a doorway," mused the officer. It sounded sufficiently bizarre to be interesting.
But what was even more interesting was the account of the motorized sec patrol that had been driving out on the river road and had come across three strangers.
"The missing horsemen?" he asked aloud. He immediately answered himself. "No." They'd all been male. One of these had been a woman. The descriptions had been amazingly sketchy. "Wearing furs. Who doesn't at this time of year? Shortish man. Glasses. Tallish woman. Maybe with red hair. And a tall man with only one eye. All of them could have been deaf muties?"
He pushed the report from one side of his desk to the other, recalling another phrase from his English book. Deaf muties. "Could you possibly repeat that? I regret that I am a little hard of hearing."
Still, the three seemed to have escaped, so that was the end of that.
The descriptions didn't ring any bells at all for Zimyanin. Shortish man. Redhead. Man with one eye. Nothing uncommon. In the country of brutality, the one-eyed man was common.
"Black dust!" J.B. exclaimed as the jeep came skidding around the bend, braking hard only forty yards in front of them.
Ryan had once spent some time in a stinking prison close by the Lantic. So close that the rising tide each day flooded the cell to within a couple of feet of the ceiling. An old man was dying there; indeed he finally slipped away in Ryan's arms. Before his death he passed on to the young one-eyed man his sole piece of wisdom. One on which he had not acted himself.
"When you get took prisoner... you gotta know you get more chance of breakin' away in the first five minutes than you'll get in the next five years."
Ryan had always remembered that.
And there wasn't a mess of choices.
The patrol had rifles, looking at a distance mostly like Kalashnikov AK-47s. It was highly unlikely that three handguns could chill the five uniformed sec men without taking losses.
The track stretched behind them, fairly straight, for over a hundred yards. Plenty of time for the rifles to put them down in the melting slush.
And the river was death.
"Trees! Now!" Ryan yelled.
The sec men weren't used to that kind of speed. Illegal drinkers, mutie hunters, an occasional small band of ragged guerrillas. That was the limit of their experience.
The three fur-wrapped peasants moved far too fast for them to react. By the time any of them had their blasters unslung, the track was deserted. One of the sec men was a secret Christian and he surreptitiously crossed himself, suspecting that they might have encountered a trio of forest ghouls. His mother had warned him of such creatures. They had long tongues that rotated like steel drills and insinuated themselves into every orifice of the human body, draining all your precious fluids.