LITMIR.BIZ

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entrance, urinating torrentially against the cave wall. When Ryan saw Mildred tied to the post, the weight on his shoulders lifted. She was still alive. The children were huddled in a corner. Still alive, too.

      Ryan turned to the companions and held up three fingers. Three targets.

      “Mildred?” J.B. whispered.

      The one-eyed man gave the thumbs-up.

      At his signal, Krysty ripped down the tattered blanket. Ryan and J.B. burst into the death chamber, shoulder to shoulder.

      Before the bald cannie could stand, J.B. blasted him full in the face with a load of double-aught buckshot. The cannie jerked violently backward, a plume of skull and brains flying; J.B. cycled the M-4000’s action and fired again. The scar-faced cannie was already moving sideways, lunging for a nearby weapon. J.B.’s buckshot missed its intended target by a foot. Instead of taking off his head, the blast slammed the cannie in the left shoulder, bowling him over as a cloud of dirt and rock dust rained from the ceiling. The creature landed hard and stayed down.

      The remaining flesheater lunged toward the children through the swirling dust, his knife blade drawn. Leading him, Ryan squeezed off two shots with the SIG-Sauer. And hit the ten-ring. A pair of tightly spaced, 9 mm rounds in the head blew the cannie off his feet before he could cut throats. He crashed into a pile of bones at the base of the wall, and lay there, twitching.

      Doc rounded the firepit and covered the wounded cannie with his double-barreled LeMat. Krysty gathered up the children, who were bawling with relief.

      Drawing his eighteen-inch panga from its leg sheath, Ryan stepped over to Mildred. There was blood on her chin. The glistening stripe ran down the front of her neck and onto her T-shirt, which was speckled with pink bits of bone. She reeked of vomit.

      As Ryan cut her bonds he said, “Are you okay?” When she didn’t answer, he added, “Are you wounded?”

      Mildred shook her head minutely, but she wouldn’t meet his gaze.

      Ryan had fought side by side with this woman in countless pitched battles. Under fire, Mildred was intense, determined, fearless. He had never seen her like this in the aftermath of combat. Numbed. Shellshocked. What had the bastards done to her?

      He wasn’t the only one who noticed the change.

      There was concern on J.B.’s face as he returned Mildred’s revolver to her. “You did good,” he assured her. “It all worked out.”

      Mildred holstered her revolver. She let her arms drop to her sides. Then she slumped back against the wooden post, utterly deflated.

      “Mildred?” J.B. said. He stared helplessly at the dazed, blood-smeared physician.

      “For nuke’s sake, Jak,” Ryan snarled over his shoulder, “drag the chill out of the fire. Stop that rad-blasted stink.”

      The albino grabbed the corpse by the heels and pulled it from the blaze. Then he kicked dirt on its smoldering head.

      “Who was he?” Ryan asked the woman. He put his hand on her arm and gave it a gentle shake. “Mildred?”

      “Cannie I shot,” she replied in a barely audible voice. “The others decided not to let him go to waste.”

      Doc loomed over the sole cannie survivor, holding the LeMat’s shotgun barrel against his temple, and down angling the load of bluewhistlers so as to empty his cranial vault, top to bottom. As the old man cocked the black-powder blaster’s hammer, Alpha twisted his head around so he could look his executioner in the face.

      “Prepare to meet your maker, Devil spawn,” Doc said.

      The wounded cannie pursed his lips and blew Doc a juicy, gray-smeared kiss.

      Suddenly, Mildred came to life. “No!” she cried, lunging forward with arms outstretched. “Don’t chill him!”

      Chapter Three

      “Forgive me, my dear,” Doc said, decocking his antique weapon. “I didn’t mean to presume. You will, of course, wish to do the honors yourself.” As he stepped away from the wounded cannie, he made a sweeping gesture with his ebony swordstick, gallantly inviting her to have at her revenge.

      Mildred advanced on the monster with gun drawn.

      Ryan was gratified to see her back in action.

      His relief was short-lived.

      “When you gonna tell ’em, Mill-Dred?” cannie said, sneering at her. “When you gonna tell ’em our little secret?”

      Instead of immediately shooting the cannibal through the head as Ryan and the others expected her to do, Mildred braced her feet, and, grunting from the effort, started pistol-whipping him with the barrel of her ZKR 551. She literally beat the evil grin off his face, in the process knocking out several of his filed teeth, and cutting deep slashes in both his cheeks with the Czech blaster’s front sight.

      No one said a word. Her longtime companions looked on in astonishment. In the space of a couple of minutes, Mildred had gone from devastated to near-demonic, and in the process, turned her physician’s oath on its head.

      “Get him up on his feet!” she shouted to J.B. and Jak.

      The two men scrambled to hoist the cannie from the cave floor.

      Raising her arm, threatening to continue the beating, Mildred backed the monster against the post. “Tie him tight, Jak,” she said.

      The albino teen cinched wrists and ankles to the rough-hewn pole.

      When the cannie was immobilized, Mildred’s fury seemed to ebb. She viewed the blood on her gunsight with deep, deep disgust; she scooped up a dead man’s rag of a shirt and quickly wiped the muzzle clean.

      “I need to talk to Ryan,” she told the others.

      “So talk,” J.B. said.

      “I need to talk to him alone.”

      “We’ll wait outside the cave, then,” Krysty offered.

      “No,” Mildred said. “Ryan and I have got things to do here, just the two of us. It’s going to take a while, and it’s going to get loud before we’re done. I don’t want the children to hear and be scared all over again.”

      Jak stared at the battered, bound cannie, his ruby eyes glittering with menace, certain that rough justice was on its way.

      “Take the kids back to the ville, Krysty,” Ryan said. “Find their parents, if they’re still alive. Jak, Doc, J.B., go with her.”

      “Not a good idea for you two to stay here by your-selves,” J.B. said.

      “I concur most emphatically,” Doc said. “We either should all go, or all remain, for safety’s sake.”

      “We’ve got plenty of ammo,” Ryan said. “Daybreak’s not far off. We’ll be fine. We’ll catch up with you in the valley.”

      The companions didn’t like leaving them behind, but there were no more protests. Mildred had earned herself a private face-to-face, and private payback, if that’s what she wanted.

      “We’ll see you back at the ville, then,” J.B. said. With a wave of his arm he led the others out of the cave.

      Krysty touched Mildred on the hand as she herded the wide-eyed children past her. “You saved them,” the redhead said. “You saved them, and you survived. You did great, Mildred.”

      After the companions had filed out, Ryan threw another hunk of wood on the glowing coals and watched it slowly ignite. “What’s going on, Mildred?” he said.

      “Something real bad.”

      “Figured that.”

      “I wanted to tell you about it first,” she said, her voice tight, her words clipped.

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