[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

Its movement was too slow to give it even a half chance against Ryan's
electrifying reflexes.
The panga had a rough point, and Ryan thrust with it, feeling it find a path
between the ribs at the back on the left.
The scalie threw its head back, so that its slit eyes stared into the sun, its voice
giving a shriek of terror and shock. Ryan slid the panga out again, watching the
mutie take a handful of stumbling paces and then crash face first onto the ground.
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There was no time for hesitation.
He'd laid all four of his attackers in the warm sand. But there'd been eight others.
A quick look told Ryan that they'd divided equally, with four going for Jak and
the remaining four rushing Krysty.
The woman's blaster had put down three, two obviously chilled and one gut-shot
and struggling to get up. Almost without thinking Ryan put a shot through its
angular gatorlike skull.
Krysty had just kicked her last opponent smack in the loincloth, and it had fallen
to its knees in front of her, jaw gaping, spittle and bile dribbling from its
pendulous lip. She put a bullet between its eyes and turned to see how Jak was
coping.
The white-haired youth's huge Magnum had blown away three out of the four
scalies. One lay on the ground, virtually headless, half its left arm also missing.
The second had been shot through the chest, not normally a terminal wound for a
mutie. But the .357 round had angled sideways and exited beneath the right arm,
taking half the ribs and lungs with it, blasting the heart to ruptured rags of torn
tissue. The third one had been shot in the back of the head, removing anything
that resembled a face and spreading it in shards of crimsoned bone over a twenty-
yard radius.
The fourth scalie was standing a few paces in front of the albino teenager, making
threatening gestures with an old hiltless hunting knife bound to a length of wood
to make a crude spear. Jak was holding his blaster in both hands, struggling with
it.
"Problem?" Ryan shouted.
"Fucker's jammed!"
"I'll take him out," Krysty called. "Move out of the way, Jak."
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But it eventually penetrated through the clouded brain of the mutie that this wasn't
a good place to hang around, that eleven of his comrades wouldn't be eating
around their fire that night and that his own chances were slim. He spun on his
heel and began to run with a clumsy speed toward the nearest wall of red rock.
Krysty leveled her pistol, but Jak waved her away. "Mine," he said, dropping the
useless blaster in the dirt, plucking out one of his throwing knives. He gripped it
by the taped hilt and snapped it toward the fleeing mutie.
Ryan watched the spinning steel, the light dancing off it like a tossed diamond.
But the ground dipped suddenly and the running scalie stumbled and nearly fell.
The knife hummed past his shoulder, clattering harmlessly among some jagged
boulders ahead of him.
"Angry!" Jak yelled, his voice echoing from the valley ahead of them. His hand
snaked down for one of his other knives, but Ryan was there first. The mutie was
close to cover, and it was never a good idea to let an enemy escape if you could
help it.
The SIG-Sauer coughed once and the scalie went over in a tangle of arms and
legs, raising his own small cloud of dust, a cloud of dust that quickly evaporated,
leaving nothing.
"Twelve up and twelve down," Ryan said.
" Would've chilled second knife," Jak moaned, running lightly toward the rocks to
retrieve his blade, examining it carefully for any scratches or damage.
"Probably," Ryan agreed, reloading his blaster. "But if you'd been unlucky there
wouldn't have been a chance for any of us."
"Funny they were all scalies," Krysty commented, looking at the corpses.
"Funny? Didn't hear a lot of laughing."
"Peculiar, if you prefer that, you pedantic son of a bitch, Ryan." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]