"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.
In among the endless rows of conifers, Ryan ran and dodged, never once looking back. The trees were so close together that his shoulders brushed on both sides as he twisted and turned. On either flank, just a little behind, he was aware of Krysty and J.B., following his headlong dash.
Ryan had reacted so quickly that not a single shot was fired from the men in the jeep. By the time the Russians clambered down from the vehicle and ran to the place where the trio had vanished, there was no sign of them.
The woods were lonely, dark and deep.
"We got miles to go," Ryan said, crouching against the bole of a dead spruce tree.
"Back to the house?" Krysty panted, throwing off her furs, wiping sweat from her forehead.
"No choice. If the freezie'd been with us we could have bluffed our way. I heard one warning shout from the guys in the jeep. Once you stop, you're dead. Mebbe they'll think we don't hear too good. Or we're scared by the way they appeared."
J.B. was trying to clean his glasses on a kerchief from one of his capacious pockets. "Yeah. We have to go back. Be stupid to get holed up like that. Now we know they got sec men out. See the badge?"
Ryan shook his head. "No."
"Like you described those troops up in the snows. The Russkies. Single silver circle. No doubt about it."
"If they're regular soldiers then they could have radio communications. Call up reinforcements. Sooner we get away from here the better. That door to the gateway's well hidden, but not good enough if we finished up trapped in there. Few pounds of ex-plas'll bring the place on our necks."
"Back to the trail?" J.B. queried. "Figure it's the only way. We try and circle around and we're in trouble deep."
"They could be waiting," Krysty said, replacing her pistol in its belt holster.
"This wood's so thick that we could get close enough to chill 'em from cover," J.B. suggested. "Long gun like those Kalashnikovs... great in the open. Useless in here. Can't see more than six feet in any direction. Knife's more use."
"Time's wasting," Ryan said. "Longer we wait, the more they got to cut us off. Let's go."
The approach of evening brought a return to the colder weather. But it was not nearly as lethally chill as it had been the previous day. The temperature slithered down toward freezing, but the mixture of mud and thawing snow remained semiliquid. It was difficult and treacherous to walk through.
There was no sign of the jeep along the track, though a set of double wheel marks showed it had driven as far along as the miserable little ville, and then returned in the general direction of Moscow.
Ryan led the way around the hamlet, taking care to keep out of sight, guessing that the sec men could have given some sort of warning about strangers in the area.
The dog's corpse had been dragged away from the killground.
"Going to be a struggle to get to the house before full dark," J.B. warned. "Still a good few miles to go."
"No point trying to hole up. It's the best place we got," Ryan replied.
They heard the wolves when they were within the last mile, far off, almost at the edge of hearing. The howl was a susurrating ghost of a sound, rising and falling, like the keening of a mother for her dead child. Across a distant valley, the noise echoed back from unseen hills, making it difficult to judge where the pack was running. Ryan put the direction some way behind them and to the south. But the noise was coming closer. Louder.
In the century since doomsday, many wild creatures had come back from the brink of extinction: cougars and rattlers, grizzlies and wolves. During the tired embers of the 1990s the creatures had been illegally poached and hunted into the remote high country and the desert fastnesses.