“Looks like a pack of wolves or coyotes,” Ryan told the others. “Real big ones. A couple dozen at least. They’ve chilled something large and they’re ripping it apart. Can’t see what they’ve got, but it isn’t fighting back.”
The shrill cry rolled over them again.
“There’s at least one victim still alive down there,” Mildred said.
“It appears to be begging for mercy,” Doc said.
“Begging the wrong critters for that, from what I saw,” Ryan said as he lowered the rifle.
“Guess we won’t be eating fresh meat tonight, unless it’s haunch of wolf,” Krysty said with dismay.
“In my experience,” Doc said, “no matter how it’s sauced, simmered, or pounded, wolf meat tastes like old boot.”
“A boot that’s stepped in shit,” J.B. added. “Okay, we’ve had our look-see. We should move on, and triple quick before they catch our scent.”
“We can’t leave whoever it is that’s trapped down there,” Mildred protested.
“More likely it’s a ‘whatever,’” Dix told her. “A scalie or some other mutie. And if it’s an ankle-biter, I say more power to the wolves.”
Ryan raised the Steyr to his shoulder, dropped the safety and surveyed the kill zone through the scope, waiting for the feeding melee to come back into view. No matter their complaints, no matter how nasty the meat tasted, he knew he and his companions would choke it down somehow, and with any luck it would keep them going long enough to get past the lava field.
Doc and Krysty were still discussing recipes when, a moment later, targets reappeared downrange.
Ryan held the sight post in the middle of the circling animals. He took up the Steyr’s trigger slack and held it just short of the break point, slowing his breathing and, by extension, his heartbeat. One of the creatures paused in the pitched battle. Panting hard, it straightened to full height, turning itself broadside to him.
To hit a bull’s-eye at the distance and with the twenty-degree down-angle meant taking an aim-point eight or nine inches low. Ryan dropped the sight post that far beneath the animal’s chest, and tightened down on the trigger. When it broke crisply, the Steyr boomed and bucked hard into the crook of his shoulder. He rode the recoil upward, working the butter-smooth action in a blur. Fresh round chambered, he reacquired the sight picture in time to see a puff of dust explode on the critter’s near shoulder. The .308 round drove it into the rocks hard. It bounced once, ragdoll limp, and stayed down.
The sound of the rifle shot and the echoes that followed turned the other animals into statues, but only for a second.
As they began to scatter, Ryan got off another round. His intended target juked an instant before the bullet struck, and a heart shot became a spine shot. Dust puffed off the animal’s back just in front of its hips. Its rear end and tail dropped like a deadweight. Meanwhile, the rest of the pack zigzagged away through the slabs—like the critters had learned how to avoid long distance rifle fire—and vanished into the lava field.
Through the scope Ryan saw the wounded animal crawling for cover on its front legs, dragging the back ones limp and useless behind it. “Two down,” he said, ejecting the spent cartridge. “The others took off.”
“Think they’ll keep their distance?” Mildred said.
“Depends,” J.B. said. “On how hungry they are.”
“They looked plenty hungry to me,” Ryan said, slinging the Steyr and unholstering his SIG-Sauer P-226 handblaster. “Stay alert and stay close.”
Weapons drawn, the companions carefully descended the crater rim after him, jumping from block to basalt block until they reached the bottom. Then they began working their way, single file, toward the center of the depression.
They walked in silence, except for the occasional scrape of boot soles. There were no more piercing screams for Ryan to home in on. The screamer had either been chilled by the pack of predators, or it was laying low in the wake of the gunfire, waiting until it sussed out the shooter’s intentions.
When they reached the kill zone, Ryan immediately signaled for the others to fan out and secure a perimeter. He and J.B. quickly tracked the wounded animal to a narrow opening in the lava. From the blood trail it had left on the rocks, it wasn’t likely to ever crawl out of the hole. Or live long enough to starve.
“Better have a look at this, Ryan,” Krysty called out. She and Mildred, wheelguns in hand, stood over the body of his first victim.
“Now that is what I call butt ugly,” J.B. said.
The spindly-legged corpse’s gray fur was mottled with yellow; amber-colored eyes stared fixedly into space. Its bloody canines were a good two inches long, and a purple tongue drooped out of its mouth. The .308 round had blown a cavernous hole crossways through its chest, sending a plume of pulverized flesh, bone, fur, and blood spraying across the hot rock behind.
Ryan could see things squirming in the puddles of gore. Thin, wiry things.
Parasites.
None of that was the “butt ugly” J.B. referred to.
Ryan dropped to a knee beside the body. The patch of color on its overlarge skull wasn’t composed of hair after all. From above the ears and eyebrows to the back of its head, the creature had a cap of brilliant, reddish orange skin; naked skin, wrinkled and seamed like a peach pit. He gingerly poked at it with the muzzle of his SIG.
Spongy.
The hairless patch rose to a massive sagittal crest, the anchor for jaw muscles powerful enough to crack the long bones of an elk.
“Look at the muzzle and the shape of the eyes,” Krysty said. “It’s not a wolf, it’s a coyote.”
“Part coyote,” Ryan said. “Definitely part somethin’ else.”
“A four-legged, nukin’ buzzard,” J.B. spit.
Ryan looked up when Jak appeared from behind a slab of basalt. He held a battered combat boot by the toe. It dripped thick blood off the heel; the laces were still tied and it still had a foot in it. The splintered end of a shin bone jutted out the top. “Rest over here,” Jak said.
The rest was quite a mess, and spread over a wide area.
“Sweet merciful Lord!” Doc said as he took it all in.
Spirit reduced to flesh, Ryan thought. And mercy had had no part in it. He had seen many terrible deaths in his time. This one was right up there with the worst.
The head had been torn from the neck and was missing, no doubt carried away, as were the four limbs, which had been gnawed off at the elbows and knees. The belly-up torso was nothing short of a wag wreck. And the wag wreck was what Ryan had seen the coyotes fighting over. The body cavity was chewed open, neck to crotch, ribs clipped to angry stubs, the organs and guts yarded out through the gaping wound—perhaps while the poor, luckless bastard was still alive. The torso was wrapped in a few bloody rags, the remnants of clothes. Gobbets of bone and flesh, drops of blood and hanks of long brown hair were spread over the ground.
Ryan sensed how quiet it had become in the crater. The weight of the silence seemed to press in on his eardrums. Then he got a whiff of superconcentrated funk. Rotting meat. Vile musk. Ammonia-stinking urine. In that instant he knew the mutie coyotes had doubled back on them, keeping out of sight by following the deep crevices in the rock. Pulse pounding in his throat, Ryan thumbed off the 9 mm SIG’s safety.
“They’re comin’!” Jak exclaimed, putting his back to the others and swinging up his Colt Python in a two-handed, fighting grip.
There was no time for a further warning.
A unison banshee howl was followed by a scrambling of claws and a concerted rush from all sides