Krysty knelt, carefully depositing the pack she held in her right hand in front of Ryan. He saw that it was his own, with his Steyr Scout strapped to the back of it.
“You managed to liberate our weapons and gear, too?”
Krysty grinned. “And managed to drag them along. They thought it was an ace idea to stash them in the same tent where they stashed us. I guess they thought of us as just more sundry valuables, lover.”
“Seems like they also thought of us as the gentler sex,” Mildred said, gratefully unburdening herself of the weight of J.B.’s pack with Uzi and M-4000 shotgun strapped to it. “Wrong.”
“We should probably get out of here as fast as we can,” Krysty said.
Ryan searched the dead sergeant for anything useful and came up dry. “Don’t want to stay too long,” he said. “But seeing as how they stuck us out here away from the rest of the camp, probably to keep us from being a bad influence on the other grunts, we ought have a little breathing space. Especially seeing as Mildred used that whisper-quiet longblaster and—”
“No,” Mildred said, looking strained. “You don’t understand. Ah, we took care of Buddy before we left.”
From the center of camp they heard a marrow-chilling scream. It went on and on, rising higher and higher until Ryan actually saw sweat bead on Krysty’s taut pale face in the firelight.
The scream broke off.
“That wasn’t pain,” J.B. observed, picking up his fedora and dusting it off. “Leastwise, not the physical kind.”
“It was the cry of a man who just found his son dead,” Krysty said grimly. “Buddy attacked me, but I made sure he wouldn’t be raping any more women.”
“So which way do we go now, gentle friends?” Doc asked. “I perceive these environs are due to grow uncomfortably warm in the very near future.”
“West,” Jak said with certainty.
Everybody looked at the albino teen.
“Horse corrals that way,” he said. He didn’t have to explain the smell had told him. “Figure, better we ride, they don’t.”
“Two pronouns,” Mildred said in wonder, “in the same sentence? Jak, you’ve gone and used up your whole year’s allotment!”
“I do admire the way he thinks, though,” J.B. said.
“Yeah,” Ryan said, as lights flared up in the middle of camp and commotion began to grow. “So why are we still standing here jawing about it?”
Chapter Five
As silent as a panther, Jak crept through the night.
Since he approached with the wind in his front—to keep the horses from detecting him and showing nervousness—the equine smell was almost overpowering. He didn’t need it to track the sentry, whom he’d spotted standing bolt-upright in the open, a shadow-form in starlight.
Then Jak heard a snap, smelled sulfur, saw an orange firefly ember arcing tightly upward. Unbelievably, the sentry was lighting a smoke. Tobacco, by the acrid smell.
Apparently the Protectors had no fear that their enemies would try to raid this particular herd. It wasn’t an entirely stupe notion, Jak thought. They had cavalry pickets riding circuits of the camp pretty close in, as well as random-sweep patrols like the one that bagged Jak and his friends earlier that evening.
They were about to learn that they had just made a whole new set of enemies. As far as Jak was concerned, his bunch was a bigger threat than the whole army of sheepmen coming any day of the week.
The breeze had freshened, bending the spring-green grass. It also covered the sound of Jak’s passage over it...had he made any.
Puffing on his stinking smoke, the guard swung around toward Jak just as the youth gathered himself to spring. The glow of his cigarette underlit an expression of utter shock.
The man wasn’t shocked enough not to try to swing up his bayonet-tipped musket, which he had leaned against his side as he’d rolled and lit his cigarette.
Rattlesnake-fast, Jak grabbed the rising barrel with his left hand. His right slashed his big bowie knife across the man’s throat.
Then he pivoted briskly to the side to avoid the gusher of blood, black in the starlight, from the man’s severed throat.
The sentry tried to scream, but all that came out was gagging and gargling as blood filled his throat and fouled his windpipe. Clutching his neck futilely with both hands, he fell into the grass to thrash away the miserable, brief remainder of his life.
“Frank?” a voice called tentatively from behind Jak’s new position. “Frank, what’s goin’ on?”
Jak whirled. His left hand was already grabbing for the grip of his Colt Python handblaster.
A man was emerging from a brushy little draw, pulling the strings that held the fly of his baggy canvas trousers. He had a bayoneted musket tucked under one arm. His eyes widened as he saw Jak standing above the still-flailing, still-spurting form of his partner, Frank.
He began a mad effort to get a grip on his longblaster so he could shoot the pale intruder. At the same time he opened his mouth to cry a warning.
Jak already knew he could blast the man before the man could blast him. But what he could not do was prevent the alarm from being given. Whether the man shouted out loud or Jak shot him—and Jak’s .357 Magnum revolver was probably as loud as that smoke-pole the guy was juggling, with a sharper report that carried farther in the night air—the whole damned army would be alerted. Including the mounted pickets that still lay between Ryan’s companions and the open prairie.
Standing off a good distance, Ryan, who was never one to waste ammo on something like mercy for strangers, had finished both off with head shots from the sniper longblaster he carried before he got his new, handier Steyr.
Thanks to Krysty’s killing Baron Jed’s son and heir, the camp was already pretty much on full-alert. Alerting the vengeful baron and his hundreds of uniformed sec men to exactly where they were wouldn’t end well.
Even as he turned and grabbed for his own blaster, Jak cocked back his right arm to throw the bowie. He knew his chances of doing enough damage fast enough to the sentry to keep him from raising the alarm were about the same as the chances of riding a motorcycle naked through an acid-rain cloudburst. But even the skinniest-ass chance was better than the stone certainty they were all triple-fucked.
Suddenly the lower half of the sentry’s face erupted in a black cloud. He staggered. The musket fell to the turf as he clutched at his face. His head jerking to the side, he dropped straight down in that boneless way that told Jak he was an instant chill.
From the darkness stepped Ricky Morales, jacking the bolt of his funny, short longblaster with the sausage-fat barrel. Jak grinned and nodded his thanks.
When the kid first joined up, more or less by accident, Jak didn’t see the point of him. He sure did now. Also, it was kind of nice having somebody pretty much his own age...younger, even. Ryan, Krysty and the others were family, but they were still a great deal older.
Actually, until just about exactly now, Jak hadn’t really seen the point of having the Puerto Rican kid back his play, either. He’d basically humored Ricky, on condition the newbie hang back and not spook the game.
Jak made a peet-peet-peet sound, like a killdeer flying in the night. An owl hoot answered. The rest of the group was hustling up to secure their four-footed transport pool, which hadn’t even been spooked by the commotion, since Ricky’s funny blaster made so little noise, and the smell of blood was also carried away from the herd by the stiff breeze.
“How so quiet, blaster?” Jak nodded to the carbine as his friend