Before Ryan could raise a hand to stop him, the albino took off, running at full tilt for the cages. Some of the carny folk saw him coming and tried to block his way with widespread arms, but he feinted, swinging his white head one way, then squirted past them. Staring at his rapidly accelerating back, the empty-handed roustabouts yelled for someone to get him.
“Dark night,” J.B. muttered, “we were supposed to go in nice and quiet, and recce first.”
“Better back his play,” Ryan said, waving the companions after him.
J.B. pulled Doc along like a stubborn calf.
Suddenly the howling got a whole lot louder, and it changed in timbre. Instead of coming from deep in a huge set of lungs, it came from high in the throat.
It went from misery to absolute joy.
Then it stopped altogether.
There was no one left to try to turn back the companions. All the carny folk had rushed over to one of the trailered cages.
And with good reason.
It appeared that the agile intruder was getting eaten alive.
Jak had his head stuck between the bars of the cage, holding on to them with both hands. For a split second, Ryan’s heart dropped in his chest. He thought the young albino was a sure goner, his head half inside the great carnivore’s open maw. But then he saw Jak wasn’t getting chewed.
He was getting licked.
The mutie mountain lion’s tongue slathered his face so hard that even holding on to the bars with all his might, Jak couldn’t keep his boots on the ground.
The great cat made a loud purring sound, like a wag’s big diesel engine fast idling, as it scrubbed the albino’s face and neck with a wide pink tongue that had to be a foot and a half long.
“What the nuking hell?” J.B. exclaimed as he came to a stop beside his one-eyed friend.
“It’s the lion, J.B.,” Ryan said. “They’ve got the lion.”
The companions—except Doc, who was still wearing the thousand-yard stare—needed no further explanation. Some time ago, Jak had been made a prisoner in Baron Willie Elijah’s mutie zoo. He had been caged up with a mutie mountain lion. After an initial, violent and lengthy misunderstanding, the two had got on famously. They were both wild things, so well matched physically and spiritually that they could communicate without words, with their eyes and with touch. Brother beasts of the hellscape.
Once freed, the big lion hadn’t run off, but had followed Jak and the companions. Only when it refused to enter a mat-trans unit was it left behind. This, it seemed certain, was that selfsame noble beast.
“A captive again,” Mildred said glumly.
“Unlucky,” Krysty said.
“Mebbe,” J.B. stated. “Mebbe not.”
“What do you mean?” Krysty asked.
“Found Jak again, didn’t he?”
“Step back from the cage, mutie,” one of the roustabouts shouted as he shouldered up to the bars. He was a big, thick-bodied man with a heavy blue-black shadow of beard stubble, and matted black hair on the tops of his shoulders and the backs of his arms. He outweighed Jak by more than a hundred pounds.
The albino paid him no mind.
“I said, step back!”
With no one to stop them, the ville folk pressed forward for a good view of the action. The show was starting a day early.
Jak pulled his head out from between the bars but didn’t move away. His fine, shoulder-length white hair was plastered to the side of his head.
“Let cat out,” Jak said, his ruby-red eyes glittering.
“Yeah, right,” the roustabout replied sarcastically.
Then he turned to address the gathered carny people. “Turn loose a thousand pounds of man-eater on your say-so.”
This remark was met with peals of laughter from the ville and carny folk alike.
“Let him out,” Jak repeated. His voice was flat, calm, controlled.
The smile melted off the hairy man’s face.
“Get closer,” Ryan told the others.
Even as they began to move, the hairy guy snarled, “You’re begging for a major ass-kicking, Snowball.” He looked around to make sure he had backup, then added, “And by skydark you’re gonna get it!”
Before the hairy roustabout and his pals could take a step forward, the albino’s right hand was up and full of .357 Magnum Colt Python. He showed them all the dark hole in the crowned muzzle, the hole where death slept, until called.
Jak spoke again. This time it wasn’t a polite request; it was a threat. “Open cage now….”
Ryan lunged and used his momentum to throw a shoulder into the hairy man from behind. The blind-siding impact sent the roustabout stumbling to his knees, hard. He cursed as he immediately jumped back to his feet. He was very nimble for a big man.
In the next instant, weapons were out all around.
The carny folk waved nine mill semiauto blasters, mostly KG-99s and Llamas. Blue-steel, high-capacity cheapies, in excellent condition.
Ryan held his scoped Steyr SSG-70 rifle at waist height. Krysty had her Model 640 Smith & Wesson .38-caliber revolver in a double grip. Dean likewise braced his Hi-Power. Mildred one-handed her .38, a Czech-built, ZKR 551 target pistol. J.B. balanced his 12-gauge Smith & Wesson M-4000 pumpgun against his hip. Seeing the deadly turn of events, the ville gawkers turned and ran, scattering for the cover of the plant beds like so many jackrabbits.
The tense moment stretched on and on.
No one on either side wanted the shooting to start. They were standing way too close to each other to miss. Once the blasting began, there weren’t going to be any survivors.
Nobody moved.
Nobody even blinked.
Then, from over by the circle of wags, someone shouted, “What in the rad-fucking-blazes is going on here?” A tall man in a red tailcoat stormed out of the side door of the biggest wag. At his side was a naked, three-foot-tall, immature stickie.
The tailcoated man and his little shadow slowed their charge as they approached the fracas.
With his KG-99’s sights locked on Ryan’s chest, the hairy roustabout explained the deadly stalemate. “Snowball there,” he said out of the corner of his mouth, “wants us to let the nukin’ lion out. Started waving his blaster in our faces.”
As if it understood what the albino was trying to do, the mountain lion reached a huge paw between the bars and placed it lightly on his slim but powerful shoulder.
“Not gonna happen, son,” the red-haired, red-goateed carny master told Jak. “That’s one smart cat. The smartest, meanest, damnedest mountain cat in all of Deathlands. He’s playing you for a triple stupe. Open that cage door and he’ll gut you from windpipe to goobers with one swipe of that big old friendly paw of his. Then he’ll carve up the rest of us, just for fun, before we can do jack shit about it. Same way he chilled three of my best handlers over the past two months. One second they were alive, and the next they were torn clean in half—legs here, the rest of them way the fuck over yonder.” To illustrate, he gestured over his shoulder with a hooked thumb.
Ryan sidestepped over to Jak and whispered in his ear, “It’s not the time for this fight…we got other business first.”
The albino youth didn’t