Red Equinox

Chapter Seven

"Close bastard door!" Jak yelled, his heavy satin-finish Magnum in his right hand.

"No, leave it!" Ryan countered. "Anyone out there could have an angle to put a bullet through someone going near." He looked sideways at the freezie, who lay flattened against the wall of the long hallway, his bamboo cane just out of reach. "Rick? You all right? You hit?"

"No. I'm terrific, Ryan. Great shape. Popper of amyl'd be down the white line." His voice changed suddenly, louder, more shrill. "Course I'm not all right, you dumb-ass bastard! I damned near turned my Jockeys brown."

"Sounds like he's okay, lover." Krysty grinned.

"I believe that the firearm sounded like something from my childhood," Doc called, crouching at the bottom of the stairs.

"How's that?" J.B. said.

"A musket. Black powder. A percussion cap from the flatness."

The armorer glanced around at Ryan and nodded, the light from the half-open doorway glinting off his eyeglasses. "He's right. Not a modern blaster. Some old Kentucky musket. Or whatever they call 'em over here."

Ryan had thought the sound of the gun, bursting at them from the snowy wilderness, had indicated a cap-and-ball kind of weapon. One round, the bullet ripping a long splinter of white wood from the leading edge of the door.

They lay in the dim light for about five minutes, but there was no further shooting. No voice, no sound of movement. Trader had taught Ryan that the worst thing you could do when you suddenly found yourself under blaster fire was to start rushing around carelessly.

"Chickens without heads," Trader had said, in that calm, measured way of his. "Think of a chicken skittering around a yard, blood gushing out the windpipe. Hold that in your mind, and it might — just might — stop you doing something real foolish one of these hot days."

Gesturing to the others to hold their positions, Ryan crawled toward the door, eased his good eye around it and peered out into the stark morning light.

The view was the same as it had been from the roof. Just a little more limited. Snow lay everywhere, piled deep against the trunks of some of the trees. There was no sign of life.

"Jak, cover the rear. Just look, don't shoot. J.B., take the east. Krysty, the west. Doc, go slow up the stairs and see what you can see from the second floor. Slow and easy."

"How about me, Ryan?" Rick asked.

"Sit still, stay quiet and keep a tight grip on your ass."

Ryan stayed where he was, watching the wilderness of tree-scattered white. If it had been a shot from an antique musket, the chances were that the attacker was within a hundred paces. He had come across a beautifully preserved Sharps .50-caliber buffalo rifle a year or so ago. In the right hands, the weapon was capable of putting a man on his back from half a mile away.

He waited for something to happen.

They had cover in the house, although an assault by anything over a dozen might be tough to hold off. One shot. A warning? Too close to Rick for that. It had been aimed to hit. To chill.

Ryan caught a flicker of movement a hundred paces away from the front of the house — an elbow, knee or a shoulder, a dark triangle that showed for a splinter of a second, like the fin of a cruising shark amid the snowy billows.

At the same moment, he heard Doc's voice, harsh with excitement, from the room directly above the main entrance.

"A man with a long gun is moving slowly in a crouched position in a narrow draw, eastward."

The warning drew J.B., snake-silent, to Ryan's elbow. "Could be a trick. Bring us out while the others start blasting."

"Doesn't feel like that to me. You?"

The Armorer shook his head. "Nope. Go after him? You and me?"

"And Jak. Get him. Others watch the sides. Leave the rifles behind for them."

In less than twenty seconds the three men were outside, picking their way through the drifted banks of snow, the heels of their boots crunching through the thin layer of ice that crusted everything.

"East," Ryan said, leading.

He glanced once behind them and saw that Krysty was at the second-floor front, framed by the broken casement, arm pointing directly to where she could still see the escaping figure of their assailant. The bright morning sun danced off the vivid flames of her hair, making her an unmissable target if there were any more murderously inclined locals around.

"Back trail?" Jak asked.

Ryan nodded. "Sure. Gotta be over... yeah, down here."

The sniper's nest was unmistakable: a patch of trampled, muddied snow; a gnawed knuckle of what looked like a mutton bone; the spaced indentations of the elbows on the ridge, overlooking the front doors; the shape of the body, legs spread-eagled. A couple of steps away was a small area of yellow, smearing the white, where the man had taken a leak.

Jak stopped, tossing his fine white hair from his eyes. He picked at something on the ground and held it up to show them. A blur of gray stained his long pale finger.

"Black powder," he said. "Fucker's got shaky hands."

"Let's go," Ryan said.

"Easy as tracking a war wag down a main street at high noon," J.B. whispered, lips peeling off his neat, even teeth, in his hunter's wolfish grin.

Though their prey was obviously trying to move cautiously and fast, the trail couldn't have been more obvious. From the blurring of the footmarks, it looked as if the man were dragging a bag of some sort behind him.

It took only six or seven minutes to close in on him.

The man was stooped, scurrying along the narrow ditch with his musket slung across his shoulders. He was pulling a pile of furs, and he never once looked back.

Jak gripped the butt of his pocket cannon, gesturing toward the hunched figure ahead.

Ryan shook a warning finger. In a winter wasteland like this, food wasn't going to be easy to come by. If they could take the man alive, they might be able to somehow find out where the nearest ville lay. From the clumsy, halting gait of the man, it looked as if he was old, or maybe a crippled mutie. Either way, the three of them should be able to take him.

They'd only been out of the shelter of the house for a few minutes, but Ryan could already feel the biting wind numbing the skin tight across his cheeks, making his eye water. Without better clothing, a man would soon lie down and sleep in such an iron cold.

The three friends could only go in single file on the cramped path. If the man turned suddenly and had a good handblaster, he could probably get an ace on the line at them. Ryan had his own pistol, the SIG-Sauer P-226, drawn and ready, finger on the trigger.

They were only thirty yards behind, close enough to hear the fur-shrouded man grunting and mumbling to himself with the effort of heaving along his bundle. Then he paused and straightened. Ryan was half a heartbeat from chilling him with a bullet through the back of the skull, but the man hawked and spit a green ball of phlegm to the side of the trail.

Twenty yards.

Fifteen.

And the man turned.

Without a moment's hesitation, Ryan shot at him. But the old man was already falling to the snow, dropping his bundle, hands reaching for the sky. Only Ryan's honed reflexes saved the stunted little figure from a 9 mm bullet through the throat. Seeing, even as he fired, that the man was surrendering, Ryan was able to switch his aim higher, the shot singing harmlessly into the blue sky.

"Fireblast!" he said. "Close."

Jak and J.B. had fanned out on either side as best they could, fighting for a footing in the deeper snow.

The figure in front of them was lying facedown, fists clenched, feet kicking up a storm of powdered white, all the time maintaining a muffled series of inaudible and incomprehensible moans. Ryan cautiously stepped in closer, kicking the bundle of pelts out of the way. Jak took the far side, keeping the old man covered, while J.B. stayed back a few paces, watching carefully.

"That Russian?" the boy asked, head on one side, listening to what sounded like a croaking string of gibberish.

"Could be. Can't recall having heard much Russian spoken. Only time was..." His mind leaped back to another frozen wasteland and conjured a short, stocky man with a pockmarked face and a long, drooping mustache, bald head under a fur cap that carried a single circle of silver. If he tried, the name would come back, as well. The Russkie had introduced himself.

"Was when?" Jak asked, interrupting his train of thought.

The name slipped away. "Zim," something or other. The name would slide again into his memory when he didn't need it. There wasn't much chance of ever meeting the man again. The Kamchatka Peninsula was around four thousand miles away.

"What's he saying?" J.B. said, moving a single step closer, the barrel of his Steyr blaster never deviating from the cringing man's spine.

"Sounds like 'pomegat,' or some such," Ryan replied. "We could use the freezie here to do us some translating."

"Looks like shitting himself," was Jak's comment.

The old man was gradually quietening, risking a glance up from the snow at his captors when he realized that they weren't going to send him off to buy the farm.

The fur hood had slipped down over his forehead, so that his glittering blue eyes barely peeped beneath the fringe. Snow caked most of his face, like a clown, the lips red, the scarlet cobra of his tongue flicking nervously out. He fixed on Ryan and began to crawl very slowly toward him.

"Neschastni sluchai."

None of this had the least bit of meaning to any of the three men.

"Wish he'd get up," J.B. said. "Looks like he's rad-blasted scared."

"Should be. Trying to chill Rick like that. Guess it could have been a mistake. Saw movement and just let it go."

Ryan, standing with legs slightly apart, looked down and saw in the trampled snow and earth a tiny bunch of yellow and white flowers, delicate as a baby's breath.

The old man had wriggled closer.

His hand touched against Ryan's ankle, stroking the damp material of the combat pants. The words had ceased and there was just the whistling of heavy breathing. Ryan stared, still not letting his concentration waver.

Now the face of the old man was between his feet, on top of the little cluster of flowers, hiding them. Both hands gripped his ankles, and Ryan could feel pressure against his foot. He moved a half step sideways to see what was happening. The Russian was placidly licking his boots, the long tongue wiping at the snow and clotted mud.

"No!" Ryan shouted, pulling away, stumbling clear.

"Sure wants to live," J.B. observed.

The old man crawled after Ryan, flat on his belly, left hand reaching out imploringly, the right hand busily burrowing somewhere beneath all the layers of fur. The effort of wriggling through the snow pushed the hood completely off the old man's head, revealing his face.

Revealing the old woman's face.

"Fireblast! He's... It's a woman."

Despite the deep, dirt-crusted furrows, and the straggling downy mustache, it was unmistakably a woman's face, staring beseechingly up at Ryan.

"Doesn't make no difference," J.B. said calmly. "Get her up and find out about a ville and food. If she won't tell us, then we chill her. It doesn't make no difference."

Ryan stood back, gesturing with the barrel of his pistol for the woman to get to her feet. Hesitatingly, slowly, she obeyed him, eyes locked on his face. Her left hand tremblingly brushed snow from her lined face.

She looked totally pathetic, abject and defeated. She shuffled her ragged boots and edged a little closer to Ryan, who half turned to J.B. to help him question their prisoner.

His eye caught Jak.

The face of the albino was a distorted mask, lips pulled back, sharp teeth grating. The teenager's red eyes were wide, staring past Ryan. His white hair was caught in the cold wind, floating around the angular head like mist beneath a high waterfall. The Magnum dropped from the boy's fist, landing silently in the soft snow.

"What?" Ryan began, shaken by the boy's horrific expression. Jak reached behind his neck and withdrew a bone-hilted, leaf-bladed throwing-knife. His wrist whipped the feathered steel toward Ryan's throat.

"Don't move!" Jak yelped.

Then Ryan knew. Despite the warning, he started to turn toward the Russian woman, knowing he would be too late, too slow, a last curse bursting to his lips.

He heard the whirring of the knife as it missed his carotid artery by a couple of inches, heard the unforgettable thunk of steel finding its mark in flesh and bone.

Their prisoner had drawn an old walnut-hafted straight razor from somewhere under the furs and layers of rags, and she was slicing it through the frosty morning air toward the back of his neck.

Jak's aim was true.

Ryan had seen the ruby-eyed boy at his daily practice with his hidden knives, and marveled at his almost blasphemous accuracy. He'd seen him put three blades into a space the size of a man's hand at twenty paces, all three knives seemingly spinning in the air at once.

He realized, as he began to turn to defend himself, that his own bulk had shielded the old woman, leaving Jak the smallest of targets — a part of her face and one eye.

One eye.

The left, he realized with a momentary pang of sympathetic revulsion.

As she staggered, the white hilt bobbled like the body of some obscene insect that had attacked her, launching itself with a venomous accuracy into the gleaming orb of her left eye. There was little blood, but the force of the throw had driven the sharp point deep through cornea, iris and lens, clear into the central retinal artery, piercing the brain.

Her mouth opened and closed like a stranded fish, her hands waving, becoming claws. She was crying, a piteous, feeble sound.

"Done." J.B. holstered his own blaster and turned away, no longer interested in the old woman, knowing that she was down and dying.

Ryan also turned away, ignoring the moaning, kicking thing that thrashed around in the trampled snow and dirt. There were more important things to worry about now.

"Get knife," Jak said, stooping and plucking the blade from the Russian woman's eyeball, sliding it out with a sickening, sucking sound. He wiped it clean on the wadded fur cloak she was wearing. "Could use warm clothes," he added.

"Let's find where she came from. Could be furs, and could be drink and food." Ryan climbed a few paces out of the narrow draw and looked in the direction that the old woman had been heading. Very faint, like a smudge of gray against the blue, he could make out smoke. "That way."