Cincinnati Run

Chapter Thirteen

What was the blasted critter doing?

Taking a snooze?

Hickok stood as immobile as a statue, scarcely daring to breathe, feeling the weight of the creature on the top of his head, his neck muscles twitching.

How long had he stood there?

A minute?

Two?

He was tempted to give a yell, to let his pards know he was in trouble, but the slightest motion might agitate the thing perched on his noggin, might provoke it to bite him. Being bitten wasn’t a big deal. Being bitten by a potentially poisonous spiker was. And Hickok believed the critter was a spider.

A mutant spider.

From the pressure on his hair, he knew that eight appendages were gripping the sides of his head, and spiders sported eight legs. Plus there was the matter of the cobwebs all over the place. By his reckoning, a spider was the only candidate. From the size of the thing, it must be a mutant. But if so, where did the midget monster come from? Cincinnati had not sustained a nuclear hit during the Big Blast, so the radiation levels shouldn’t have climbed very high, definitely not high enough to permanently pollute the environment. Genetic deviations, as Plato liked to call the varmints, were usually the result of radiation or some other toxin disrupting the inheritance factors in the genes. If radiation didn’t produce the creature on his head, what the dickens did? As far as he knew, no chemical weapons were used in the vicinity of Cincinnati.

Wait a minute.

He was forgetting something.

The fallout.

Think, you dunderhead! he chided himself. What did he know about fallout? What had the Elders taught him? Whenever a nuclear doohickey detonated at ground level, the explosion sucked all kinds of dust and debris up into the atmosphere. The winds would then scatter the radioactive particles all over the landscape. The important distinction to make was between a ground blast and an air burst. Air bursts hardly produced any fallout, and the Soviets had wisely employed primarily air bursts during World War Three. Exclusively blanketing America with ground-level strikes would have been a drastic case of overkill and defeated the Soviet Union’s purpose. The Russians wanted to conquer America, not reduce it to a smoldering cinder.

Hickok felt the spider shift its weight.

If he recollected correctly, the Russians had generally reserved ground strikes for military targets, and there had been any number of primary military targets to the west of Ohio. There had also been two prime military sites north of Cincinnati.

But what were they?

Think!

He remembered a course taught by one of the Elders concerning the known Hot Spots in the country, those areas where there had been ground blasts. They also covered known and suspected air-burst targets.

Columbus, Ohio, was one of the cities believed devastated by an air burst because of the proximity of Rickenbacker Air Force Base. Oddly, Dayton, Ohio, near which Wright Patterson Air force Base was located, was not hit. So the closest confirmed target to Cincinnati, namely Columbus, sustained an air burst, and the prevailing high-altitude winds would have carried the minimal amount of radioactive particles to the east, not to the southwest toward Cincinnati.

Which brought him back to square one.

What accounted for the danged spider?

Hickok was becoming impatient. He didn’t want Blade and Geronimo to get too far ahead. Surely they had noticed his absence by now! He expected them to show up at any moment.

Gunfire suddenly punctuated the blackness, arising from the direction of Delhi Road.

Blade and Geronimo were in trouble!

Hickok hesitated for less than a second. He couldn’t stand idly by and do nothing while his friends were fighting for their lives. He might be bitten if he so much as moved a muscle, but that was the risk he would have to take. His hands were at his sides, and he tensed his fingers and his shoulder muscles in preparation for making his play.

There was a slim hope.

If he could smash the spider before the arachnid bit him, he’d be home free. Everyone claimed he was one of the fastest men with a shooting iron who ever lived. Here was his chance to prove his speed with his hands.

Then again, the creature might not even be a spider and might not be poisonous, in which case he was standing there like an idiot running in mental circles and worrying over nothing. He gritted his teeth, clenched his fists, and went into action.

Hickok whipped his fists up and around, his arms arcing at the thing with all the swiftness of a striking rattlesnake, yet as quick as he was, he wasn’t quick enough. His fists were midway to his head when he felt an intense stinging sensation an inch or so above his hairline. The mutant started to rise, using its legs to push itself erect. Hickok brought his fists down with all the force in his sinews, smashing whatever-it-was to a pulp, plastering his hair with its flattened, gory form. His loathing compelled him to pound the creature again and again, until he was certain it was dead, until his head ached. He relaxed and leaned against the right-hand wall, expelling a long breath.

He’d done it!

But the critter had nailed him.

He straightened and took a stride forward. A liquid substance trickled past his ears and onto his neck. Feeling nauseous, he hurried, eager to catch up to Blade and Geronimo. The stinging on his scalp was spreading rapidly and growing worse.

Blast!

Hickok reached up and used his fingers as scoops, wiping his hands back and forth, trying to remove the mashed, pasty residue from his blond hair. His hands became sticky, and he detected the scent of a putrid odor.

The shooting outside seemed to have ceased.

He abruptly felt extremely hot, as if his body temperature had elevated five degrees, and his head was now burning terribly. His eyes were having difficulty focusing.

Was that a ribbon of light up ahead?

Blade had mentioned seeing a light.

The thought of Blade and Geronimo pushed him onward. The dummies needed him. He couldn’t fail them now when the chips were down.

Ooooh, his aching noggin!

Hickok noticed a strange tingling in his limbs, and his movements were becoming sluggish. He shook his head, striving to concentrate on reaching the light, but his body was refusing to cooperate. A peculiar lethargy engulfed him and he halted, weaving, flushed and disoriented.

What a pitiful way to buy the farm.

Bumped off by a measly spider.

The gunman mustered his flagging strength and tottered toward the light, and for a few seconds he believed he would make it. Then his knees buckled and he sagged to the dusty floor, doubling over, his whole body on fire, and his consciousness plunged into the flames of oblivion.