Ten feet in front of Ryan and five feet behind Krysty, who was running ahead of him, another heavy-caliber rifle slug plowed into the concrete, sparked and whined off into the trees.
It was like being the turkeys in a turkey shoot.
Ryan and his companions handled the danger the only way they could, by blocking out the possibility that the next incoming round had their name on it and by concentrating on giving the snipers the most difficult targets. Seasoned fighters all, they sorely hated holding fire when under attack. But they knew they had to conserve their ammo and use it only when kills were absolutely assured. The only one with the firepower to reach out and touch their harassers was Ryan. And given the cover of the enemy and the distances involved, even he couldn’t be certain of a lethal hit with his scoped Steyr SSG-70 rifle.
The cannies’ use of snipers was a switch from the tactics and behavior Ryan and the others had come to expect. Flesheater packs usually chilled up close and personal, this so the chillers could battle over and take their respective shares of the spoils. Snipers who scored a hit from half a mile away would lose out to their brethren hiding much closer to the roadway. It was an unworkable situation unless the cannies were sharing the bounty in a more highly organized way, a way not based on brutal dog-eat-dog dominance. A real army instead of a gaggle of loosely knit bands.
Ahead was a testament to the effectiveness of this new strategy. A string of waylaid wags dotted the highway’s shoulder. The convoy was made up of crudely armored minivans, pickups, SUVs and RVs. The burned-out, overturned hulks were pocked with bullet impacts. Strewed along the ground were stripped, charred human skeletons, obviously cooked on the spot. No other convoy had passed this way in a while. The wrecked wags hadn’t been shoved out of the ruts to clear the path for traffic.
Cannies were picking apart the trade route, and doing a bang-up job of it.
Their cannie prisoner stumbled along near the end of the file. Doc acted as a rear guard and pacesetter, poking and whacking the flesheater with his sheathed swordstick whenever he started to lag behind. From the determined, head-down way Junior Tibideau ran, Ryan got the impression that he wasn’t sure his cannie kin would free him if given the chance. He was helpless, already trussed up, prime for spit-roasting.
Ryan had no doubt that cannies hid among the dense stands of fir trees above the highway. They were keeping well back from danger, letting the long-distance chillers do the work. If one of the bullets struck home, and the companions abandoned the unlucky victim, they would sweep in like cockroaches for the feast. Their bottomless appetites were balanced by a healthy fear of destruction. Darkness increased their courage and magnified their hunger pangs. The degenerate humans had largely become nocturnal hunters; that was when their chosen prey was the most vulnerable. Night blind. Sleepy. Easily approached. When cannies committed to an attack, day or night, they were almost impossible to turn back. Like cougars or jaguars, once switched on, once they had a target selected, nothing less than a bullet in the brain would switch them off.
The highway shooting gallery was the fastest and safest route to the Hells Canyon redoubt. It was the best of the bad choices available to them. Ryan could have led the others on a more direct forest route, shortcutting up and over the mountains, but the chances for a close range ambush there were too great. The trees were too tightly packed. Slopes too steep. Progress too slow. And it was perfect terrain for concealing deadfall and pit traps. Or antipers mines. Cannies weren’t fussy about picking their dinners out of the branches.
Besides, Ryan had mentally mapped this road on the descent; he didn’t know anything about the mountains. He had already selected the best defensive sites. There was no hope of reaching the spot where they had spent their last night on the highway and successfully turned back the cannies. They had gotten too late a start to make it all the way there. One of the secondary sites was going to have to do. A dead-end side canyon, mebbe. Mebbe a cave. A place with a single opening they could defend until dawn.
Daylight was already starting to fade around them, the sky edging from azure to brilliant turquoise to lavender.
Ryan sensed movement behind the dark trunks and thick branches of the trees on both sides of the road, but saw no targets. They were being tracked by more and more flesheaters; a gathering storm shadowed them. The intermittent rifle fire was the dinner bell ringing.
Fifty yards ahead, an enormous hump transected the ruined roadway from shoulder to shoulder. It looked as though a gargantuan tree root had torn through the pavement. On the way down they had made a detour around the partially heaved-up, ten-foot-diameter culvert.
Jak was within fifteen feet of the hump when heavy slugs slapped the earth; not one at a time, but in an un-godly hail, sending dust, bits of rock and bullet fragments flying. It was a triangulated crossfire from rifles stationed on the ridgetops on either side of them. These weren’t bolt guns; these were semiauto longblasters with 30- or 40-round magazines, all working in unison to frame and seal off a predetermined kill zone.
The albino youth ducked through the roiling dust and skidded down into the wide mouth of the culvert. It was the only hard cover close enough for them to reach. Krysty, J.B. and Mildred disappeared inside after him. Ryan followed, striding into the knee-deep, standing water. Doc and the cannie made it safely, as well, although Junior tripped and slid headfirst into the stagnant slop. Doc grabbed him by the collar and jerked him back up, dripping. The bath might have done Junior some good had the surface not been topped with a dense mat of bright green scum and floating human bones.
The clamor continued for a full minute as the cannie snipers poured fire onto the exposed top of the massive, corrugated steel pipe. It was ineffective in terms of penetration, but the roar of bullet impacts was deafening. They shook loose the crusted dirt from the top of the pipe; it fell on the companions’ heads and rained down into the water, making it hard to see and hard to breathe without coughing.
Then the shooting stopped.
Gradually the dust settled and the ringing in their ears faded.
“Everyone okay?” Ryan asked, looking from face to face.
There were nods all around.
“Not going to be so lucky for long,” J.B. said. “If they can keep us pinned down in here until sundown, we’re dead. Cannies can come at us unopposed from three directions.”
Krysty stared into the darkness that led under the highway. “This pipe is mebbe a hundred feet long,” she said. “Could be open at the other end, or ruptured someplace between here and there with a hole big enough for cannies to slip through.”
“Wouldn’t have to be that big,” J.B. said. “Just big enough to drop in a few grens, and we’d be their next meal.”
“Wonder why didn’t they spring this trap on us on the way down?” Mildred said.
“Trap not set,” Jak said.
“Mebbe they learned something when we slipped past them on foot the last time,” Krysty suggested.
“While it’s still light, I’ve got to do a recce up the pipe,” Ryan said. “If there’s no holes and if other end is blocked off, we might be able to hold out from here—we’ve got ourselves a ten-foot-wide shooting lane, if we mass our fire we can control the entrance and keep the bastards off us. If there’s another way in, we’re going to have to make a break for it.”
“Come, too,” Jak volunteered.
Ryan trudged ahead, sloshing through the vile water. He advanced with his handblaster drawn in case they already had company in the culvert. The deeper they went, the darker it got. The smell of death and corruption couldn’t have gotten worse. Again and again, Ryan nudged aside unseen floating objects with his knees.
After fifty feet, it began to get brighter and brighter, until he could make out a wide shaft of light piercing the gloom,