“You’re taking advantage ’cause I can’t fight back anymore,” Big Mike said. “How low-down, sorry-ass is that?”
“As I recall,” Doc said, “fighting back never was your strong suit.”
“More like, roll up in a ball and beg for mercy,” Krysty added.
“If there’s more trouble ahead,” Ryan said, “that extra weight will slow us down. Mebbe slow us down enough to get everybody chilled. You want to follow along, you want to drink a share of our water, you want to eat later on, you’ll carry the load.”
“This ain’t right,” the big man said, but nobody was listening and he didn’t try to shrug off the garlands of meat.
After the companions had shouldered their packs, Ryan took the lead, setting off for the crater’s south rim.
“Now, wait just a nukin’ minute!” Big Mike shouted at their backs. “You’re going in the wrong direction!”
“Nobody’s holding a blaster to your head,” Ryan said. “You’re free to break your own trail anytime you feel the urge.”
“But not lugging our grub, of course,” J.B. added.
“Are you out of your rad-blasted minds?” Big Mike said. “I just came from that way. Nothing over there but Burning Man and the she-hes. You wanna keep on livin’ you’ll head north to Meridianville.” He turned and gestured. “It’s thataway.”
Even as he pointed, off in the distance, somewhere out on the plain above the crater rim, coyotes yip-yip-yipped. And it sounded like there were a lot more of them than just the two that had escaped.
“You wanna keep on livin’,” J.B. said, “you’ll shut your trap and get in line.”
“I’d stay real close to the rest of us, if I were you,” Mildred told him. “You’re pretty much a walking banquet.”
Big Mike opened his mouth, presumably to lodge yet another protest, then closed it without saying a word. His dirty face twisted into a scowl, he shuffled toward them, pinning the draped haunches to his chest with a forearm to stop them slapping against his bib-fronts.
Ryan figured he’d seen the light. On his own, in this heat without food or water, hiding in a hole from the coyotes, he would last about three days—three very unpleasant days. Ryan didn’t waste breath explaining the choice of route. He didn’t have to explain it to his companions. They had the same facts he did and they all knew the drill.
The sound of their massed gunfire would’ve carried tens of miles. If the baron’s sec men were still in pursuit, they would be heading this way on the run. While the old highway was by far the easiest path off the volcanic plain, it was also the most obvious. Sec men who knew the terrain could move quickly to the road and cut them off, front and rear. There was no cover along the ruined two-lane, either. They’d be easy targets for a triangulated longblaster ambush.
The lava field, as tough and as slow as it was to traverse, had some definite upsides to it. Because it was the least likely route for them to take, there was a good chance the pursuit, who couldn’t cover every possibility, would decide to ignore it. Tracking down a quarry over fields of rock was damn-near impossible unless you had a nose like a coyote, which was probably why the baron’s men hadn’t located Big Mike and his dead friend, yet. And then there was the chipmunk factor: a million places to take cover and foil an attack.
After picking their way single file across the crater floor, they climbed out of the depression, working their way up the jumble of rock slabs. When they got to the top, Jak took point and set a course for the southeast horizon.
Ryan and the others fell into a familiar rhythm of march behind him. Not too fast, not too slow. A pace they could maintain in the midday heat. A pace that allowed them to constantly recce their surroundings, keeping on the lookout for potentially hostile movement near and far. Every hour or so, Ryan or J.B. circled wide to the rear to check for pursuit.
No coyotes, no sec men.
As the blistering-hot afternoon wore on, Ryan’s confidence began to grow. It appeared they’d made the right decision by heading south.
Hours later, when the sun began to dip low on the horizon, the air temperature plummeted. As many miles of wasteland still lay between them and the Snake River, Jak went on ahead to scout some shelter for the night. While Ryan stood watch with the Steyr, the others fanned out and started collecting scraps of wood from dead limber pines that dotted the landscape.
They had gathered plenty by the time the albino youth returned. “Found good cave,” he told them. “This way.”
It was a few hundred yards to the southwest, down a small sinkhole, maybe fifty feet across and ten feet deep. There was a cleft in the far wall, and it led to a tunnel that angled back into the lava flow. The passage opened onto a low-ceilinged chamber, the result of an air pocket that had formed in the cooling magma. It was big enough to hold them all with room to spare. A sizeable fissure in the ceiling above a side wall let in a shaft of light. It was a natural stove vent.
The companions heaped the wood beneath it and shrugged out of their packs. With a grunt, Big Mike dumped his load of meat on the cave floor.
Jak and Krysty piled up loose rocks, building a long, narrow fire pit against the wall.
“We could get trapped in here,” Big Mike said.
“Not get trapped,” Jak said. “Picked good cave.” Crossing the chamber he pointed at a narrow opening in the wall near the floor. “Back way out,” he said. “Hard to crawl in, but cave gets wider after. Winds around, comes out long ways off, far side of cinder cone.”
“How am I supposed to squeeze through a little bitty crack like that?” Big Mike said in dismay.
“Better pray you don’t have to,” Ryan said.
Before the last of the daylight was gone they had a crackling blaze going in the makeshift hearth. The vent worked just fine, sucking the smoke up and out of the chamber. As the fire burned down and the heap of glowing coals built up, J.B. and Doc skewered the coyote hindquarters on to limber pine spits. Once the coals were plenty hot, they leaned the spits over them, between the fire pit border and the wall. Grease squirting from the meat made the fire flare up, but the resulting black smoke shot right up the chimney.
“Aren’t you worried something might get wind of that cook fire?” Big Mike said. “More mutie coyotes? Or those sec men? They could still be prowling around, looking for me.”
“No one’s after us,” J.B. told him. “No one anywhere close, anyway. We made plenty sure of that.”
“Even if the sec men could follow the smoke trail,” Ryan said, “there’s no moon, tonight. Anyone trying to track in this lava field is going to fall into a crack or a pit and break their legs, or worse. Like J.B. said, if the baron’s men are trailing us they’re still a long ways off. Odds are, they’ll hunker down just like we are until right before daybreak. By then we’ll be moving on, too.”
“Got to take our chances with the fire anyway,” Mildred said. “We’re not going to eat raw meat, not when we’re still at least a half day’s hard walk from the river. We get sick on the way there, we get dehydrated from being sick in this heat, we’ll never make it.”
Despite the constant, grease-fueled flare-ups, the companions didn’t bother knocking down the bank of coals. Instead they kept feeding the fire fresh wood to maintain the temperature. After about thirty minutes of frequent rotation, the charring on the meat was uniform. Doc deftly sliced into a haunch with the tip of his cane sword. “Done to a turn all the way to the bone,” he announced.
As Doc and J.B. moved the joints out of the fire to cool a bit, Big Mike smacked his lips and said, “You know, that doesn’t smell half-bad.”