LITMIR.BIZ

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just east of them with ware-houses sticking up out of green-brown water; the intact section of highway overpass to the south.

      “We inflicted grievous hurt on them,” Doc said. He was laboriously reloading his huge old handblaster, tamping down a bullet into a chamber over a fresh charge of gunpowder with a special rammer built into the LeMat. He was recovering with surprising quickness, given that he looked like Death got up for a last walk around. Times like these proved his claim that he was nowhere as old as he looked, biologically. “It must have been quite discouraging.”

      “There’s that,” Krysty said. “But mebbe they were afraid of what was in the woods. Or this side of them.”

      Ryan grunted. “Give us some good news for a change, why don’t you?”

      Her smile was like the sun coming out from behind storm clouds. “We’re alive, lover. And we’ve got each other. It’s worked so far.”

      He felt his mouth struggling to smile. He still had to say, “Always works. Till it don’t.”

      “‘Doesn’t,’” she corrected him.

      She had a temper on her, this redheaded beauty. But her mutie hair, sentient and prehensile, lay still across her shoulders. She just smiled more at him and wouldn’t be drawn.

      “Nothing here but misery,” J.B. stated simply. “Why don’t we go back?”

      “Back where?” Ryan asked.

      “To the redoubt.”

      “Not remember?” Jak said. “Nothing there, either. No ammo, no water, no self-heats.”

      Mildred mopped her forehead with the hem of her shirt. “Never thought I’d see a day when meals refused by Ethiopians tasted like ambrosia.”

      “I mean, try the luck of the jump,” J.B. said.

      “If we find a place with steak bushes and beer springs,” Ryan said, “it’ll be guarded by ten thousand coldhearts, sure as a dead man cools.”

      J.B. gestured around at the jumbled edges and angles and dust-softened mounds of the urban deathscape. “Don’t know if you noticed, Ryan, but every square inch of this place is guarded by muties as crazy as nuked yellowjackets, and it ain’t nothing but hammered dogshit.”

      “Boys,” Krysty said softly but firmly, “step back. Fighting among ourselves won’t fill our bottles or our bellies. Makes us more likely to fill cannie bellies instead.”

      “At times like this,” Doc said with a grand sweep of his arm, “I find it helps to seek the consolations of philosophy.”

      Everyone looked at him. He sat blinking vaguely.

      “Why are you all staring at me?” he asked.

      “Well,” J.B. said, “out with it.”

      “Out with what?”

      “The consultations of philosophy or whatever you were talking about.”

      Doc blinked in amiable puzzlement. “What?”

      For his part Ryan was taking note of how unusually talkative the Armorer was. Normally J.B. said just a little more than an old hickory stump, although when he spoke it was usually to the point and dead-on accurate.

      “What’s eating on you, J.B.?” he asked. “You don’t normally say so much in a whole month.”

      J.B. slapped his thigh. “Everything, Ryan. I just got bad feelings creeping up on me from every side.”

      Mildred frowned. “You wouldn’t think there’d be many people here. The place is a mess, even for taking a nuke west of here.”

      “Plenty to scavenge in the area,” Ryan said.

      “Those people who jumped us didn’t look like they’d bothered much with that. They barely had loincloths.”

      “I surmise they were cannibals,” Doc said, sighting along the barrel of his blaster to make sure the bore was clear before snapping the weapon closed. “When we parted company with them, the other side of these woods, I thought I saw them begin tearing at their fallen kin.”

      “Yeah,” Ryan said. “Chasing us probably worked up a double-big appetite.”

      “Muties,” Jak said.

      “No,” Mildred said, shaking her head. “I don’t think so.”

      “Not see? No chins, plus fingers.”

      “Typical symptoms of inbreeding, lad,” Doc said.

      “Yeah,” Ryan agreed. He’d seen it not far from his birthplace of Front Royal.

      “They have to have something to eat besides each other,” Mildred said.

      “They probably prey on scavvies,” Krysty said. “Cities usually draw those like flies to jam. Especially as the rads die down.”

      “But what do they eat?”

      “Game,” Jak said. “Plenty here.”

      “In a city?”

      He shrugged. “Always.” Then he nodded his pale, pointed chin back the way they had come.

      “Forest.”

      It was indeed. It wasn’t wide but it was significant. A lush and densely undergrown stand of trees ran in a broad strip from near the river toward the nuke strike a couple miles west.

      “Evidently this vicinity receives a great deal of rainfall of the nontainted variety,” Doc said.

      “Well, that’s another reason to be on the move,” Ryan said, looking at the clotting clouds rushing and swirling overhead. They had gone the color of mustard, with alarming orange highlights. “Looks like some of the ‘burn the hide off you’ kind is on the way. We need to get under cover triple fast.”

      “Trouble,” Jak said, turning suddenly.

      A bullet cracked off the top of the heap of rubble where Jak had lain, and his eyes skinned toward the woods for sign of pursuit. The shot-sound that followed a heartbeat later seemed to have come from the northwest, although the way everything echoed around these ruins made it hard to tell. Ryan turned to scramble up to the top of the heaped stone and concrete dust and flopped down behind his Steyr.

      Having only one eye was something the black-haired man had adjusted to years ago. Sometimes it was a drawback, but there was nothing he could do about it. Now he had to hold his good eye away from the scope initially to look for targets.

      And targets there were. If the gunshot hadn’t been a major clue, the way this new set of attackers was dressed showed they were a whole different breed compared to the crazy group that had jumped them. They wore real clothing, no dirtier and in no worse repair than what Ryan and friends themselves wore. Camo in various patterns was a consistent theme, as were predark cartridge blasters: rifles, shotguns, handguns.

      Scavvies, Ryan thought. Well-equipped ones, too. He cursed under his breath. At least half a dozen of them, advancing quickly but cautiously through rubble just north of the stadium. Like it or not there were others: he glimpsed them through big gaps in the walls of the building.

      The most dangerous attacker Ryan could see carried a remade M-16, with the nontapered A-2 foregrip. He swung the Steyr to cover the scavvie, then put his good eye behind the eyepiece of the SSG-70. His skill was such that, though the coldheart wasn’t dead-centered in the view-field, he was just a twitch away.

      Drawing a breath as he centered the single post reticule on the man’s chest, Ryan exhaled half as he gently squeezed the trigger. The 7.62 mm cartridge lit off, kicking his shoulder with the steel buttplate. Ryan reflexively worked the bolt, reloading for a follow-up shot.

      The M-16 man was in the process of folding onto his face. Ryan thought he saw a trace of pink mist hanging in the air behind him. It rapidly vanished. The

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