Because the forest sounds around them—the squirrel cussing them out from up the tree and the Steller’s jays yammering at each other from the scrub—had gone as still as the grave.
Chapter Two
“Coldhearts!” Jak Lauren yelled as he burst through the scrub oak at the foot of the clearing where Mildred worked and the others watched. “Mebbe thirty, riding hard!”
“Shit!” Mildred said.
Instantly, Doc tossed her J.B.’s Smith & Wesson longblaster and unleathered his cumbersome LeMat percussion pistol.
Mildred’s hands were still encased in gloves of gore when she fielded the M-4000. She winced. J.B. was going have a fit when this was done. She preferred her own target-grade ZKR 551 .38-caliber handblaster, but unlike Doc Tanner, she wasn’t nutty enough to waste time swapping for it when the hammer came down.
Instead she threw the shotgun to her shoulder just as three riders burst out of the patch of mountain oak hard on Jak’s tail. One of them swung a club that looked like a baseball bat with nails driven into it, the heads snipped off at a bias to create a bristle of lethal spikes. The albino youth dived facedown into the tan grass and the horses thundered past him.
“Bastards!” Mildred yelled. She aimed the front sight right for the middle of the fleshy black-bearded face of the man who’d dropped Jak and pulled the trigger. The blaster bucked and roared; the face disappeared in a spray of red blood and white bone chips.
But the physician’s pang of grief was wasted. As canny and feral as a wolf, Jak had gauged the swing and dived to avoid it. He reared up to one knee and blasted off three shots from his Colt Python. A brown-haired coldheart with ochre stripes painted across his hatchet face threw up his arms in a spasm as one of the 158-grain Magnum rounds blew one of his vertebrae into powder, then carried on with the aid of bone-splinter shrapnel to pulp his heart and lights. A remade Mini-14 with a broken stock went spinning away as his horse reared and dumped him over its croup.
The third rider charged straight for J.B., a long black queue of hair with finger bones braided into it flapping like a pennon behind and blazing away with some kind of booming revolver. He had no more luck firing from a galloping horse than most did who tried such a double-stupe stunt. The Armorer coolly reached down, picked up his Uzi and held down the trigger one-handed. Copper-jacketed 9 mm slugs punched holes in the rider at the buckskin-clad thigh, walked their way up his filthy plaid flannel shirt, tore out one side of his jaw and poked a hole through one cheekbone. That rider went down, the horse screaming and veering off into the brush to get away from the terrible flame and noise that had gone off in its face.
Jak pelted upslope, stepping on the still-writhing body of the man he’d shot. “Ryan! Krysty!” he shouted. “Where?”
J.B. and Mildred looked blankly at each other.
RYAN STOOD with his rifle butt against his shoulder but the barrel depressed, seeking targets. The telescopic sight severely restricted the shooter’s field of vision. He didn’t want to be lost in the scope when an attacker appeared from a whole different angle. Krysty was beside him, her .38 Smith & Wesson model 640 in hand. It wasn’t an ideal weapon for a fight in the woods, even with undergrowth cutting down engagement range. Still, it beat a knife to hell.
The clearing they were in was much smaller than the one a hundred paces or so away, not far downslope from the entry to the redoubt where they had left their comrades to butcher the carcass of the deer Ryan had shot that morning. They heard crackling in the brush, glimpsed large shapes between the trees. Horsemen, Krysty mouthed to Ryan.
He nodded. Neither fired. Against a known enemy, ambush was mere good sense. But unless you were a stone coldheart yourself you didn’t shoot at strangers on sight. Enemies were plentiful enough as it was without going out of your way to manufacture more in the persons of vengeful survivors.
From the direction of the camp came shouts, shots, which changed everything. With Krysty ghosting along at his side, Ryan moved fast and crouched, not directly back to where the others were but at an angle down the mountainside. That way they might either take a force attacking their friends in the flank or possibly intercept enemies attempting a flanking maneuver of their own.
The forest had come alive again with sounds of a different sort: yells, the thudding of hooves, the crack of branches breaking. Apparently a substantial band of mounted raiders had stumbled upon their camp. Ryan had time to be thankful his group had camped so near the redoubt entrance. There were too many attackers to stand off and even in these woods a party of six would have had a hard time evading them.
The possibility of negotiation never entered his mind.
A warning cry from Krysty brought his head around. Three horsemen had appeared not twenty yards downhill, heading directly for them, trying to outflank J.B. and the others. One carried a dilapidated lever-action carbine with brass tacks hammered into stock and foregrip for decoration; one, a slab-sided 1911-model .45 autopistol; the third, a steel-headed lance decorated with feathers and what seemed to be scalps. Both riders and mounts were painted in fanciful patterns.
The horsemen faltered in surprise at encountering the pair. The carbine man threw his weapon to his shoulder. Ryan already had his Steyr up, cheek welded to stock. He laid the crosshairs just below the wrist of the coldheart’s left hand, which supported the carbine’s fore end. He squeezed the trigger. The rifle cracked and slammed his shoulder. The 180-grain, boat-tailed bullet, painstakingly loaded into the cartridge a hundred years before at the Rock City Arsenal in Illinois, passed through meat between radius and ulna without slowing, drilled a neat hole through a rib, began to yaw as it tore through his heart, knocking a huge plate of his right scapula out along with a bloody chunk of trapezius muscle as it exited his back. His horse, a buckskin with a blue ring painted around one eye, reared. He toppled right over the rump without firing.
The spearman uttered a blood-curdling scream and kicked his horse into a charge. Krysty crouched, holding her blaster at full reach of both arms, coolly waiting with her hair stirring around her shoulders. When the rider got within ten yards she began squeezing off shots. The rider screamed as a bullet entered his belly. Another smashed his shoulder. He fell and screamed more as his horse, sheering away from the redheaded woman, dragged him off through the trees at a panicky run.
The third rider had hesitated when the man with the carbine was hit. Then he turned his pinto away and booted its sides. He was just about to vanish among the trees when Ryan, having thrown the bolt and brought the Steyr SSG back online as quickly as he could, broke his spine just above the level of his heart with a shot. Ryan had no qualms about blasting an enemy in the back. It was just a way to make sure he didn’t circle around once out of sight to try his luck again, hopefully when your guard was down.
He looked at Krysty. She had the cylinder open, had spilled both empties and whatever unfired cartridges remained into her hand and transferred them to her pocket, and was feeding in reloads quick as she could. She could sort the spent casings from the live rounds later; what counted now was a full handblaster.
“You okay?” he asked.
She nodded and snapped the cylinder shut. “Let’s go,” she said.
AT THE CAMP J.B., Mildred, Doc and Jak had fanned out and taken cover. They didn’t have long to wait before more coldhearts arrived, eight riders charging them across the thirty-yard-wide clearing.
J.B. sprayed them with one long burst from his Uzi. A 9 mm slug was unlikely to drop a horse, at least right away. But back in the Trader days the Armorer had noticed something about horses: they had minds of their own and they didn’t like getting hurt, and they especially didn’t like the smell of equine blood. Also their legs, skinny by comparison to their big muscular bodies, were relatively fragile. So he deliberately fired low, hoping to cripple or wound as many mounts as possible as fast as possible.
Horses screamed, reared.