Where there was life in the hellscape, there were predators. Two-legged, four-legged, winged and slithering…
Running in the dim half-light, Mildred wished that Jak Lauren had been by her side. The ruby-eyed, white-haired, wild child could track a rabbit fart in a hurricane.
The base of the foothills stopped Mildred’s advance. Above her the slope’s blackness wasn’t quite absolute. Faint starlight reflected off basalt bedrock, making it look wet. It was not. Ancient lava dikes and arches radiated trapped day heat like a furnace. Above the bedrock were densely treed slopes, fully recovered from the wildfires of more than a century earlier. If the cannies had climbed into the tree line, she knew she would never find them this night. And by morning it would be too late to save the children.
Mildred scanned the rocky flanks of the hills while her heart thudded in her throat. Come on, you bastards, she thought. Come on. Where the hell are you?
Then she saw something odd—a flicker of light bouncing off the black rock a couple hundred feet up the hillside. It was there, then it was gone. Not from the stars, because it was the wrong color. Pale yellow, instead of dead white. Had she imagined it? Were her eyes playing tricks?
Breathing hard, she watched. After a minute or two the light reappeared. Then vanished. It was real. The Wallowa Mountain basalt was riddled with caves. Some were little more than shallow dishes. Others were long and winding. A campfire set deep in a cave, perhaps around a bend or two, would give off that kind of weak light. Light that could be completely blocked by some kind of barrier.
At least she knew where they had gone.
Mildred started to climb, careful not to dislodge any loose bits of rock. If there was an established track to the cave, she couldn’t see it. The sound of the gun battle was far behind her now. There would be no backup. And no going back.
The cave entrance, a low arch in the basalt slope, would have been hard to find even in the daytime. Without the intermittent flicker of light, she might have climbed right past it. No one stood guard outside. The cannies thought they had lost her.
Mildred brushed the sweat from her eyes with the back of her hand, then wiped her fingers dry on her BDU pants. By feel, she broke open her revolver, replaced the single spent shell, then softly clicked closed the 6-shot cylinder.
She didn’t know how many flesheaters were in the cave. Cannies usually ran in hunting packs. They used footspeed and the cover of night to snatch away the weakest, the dumbest, the easiest chills. This night the no-name ville had been hit by multiple packs simultaneously, all competing for the spoils. Cannies didn’t like to share. And when push came to shove they ate one another.
Mildred reached into her right pants’ pocket. With her fingertips she counted four, full speedloaders. She took one out and palmed it in her left hand.
The ZKR ready to rip, she stooped to enter the cave. Inside the arch, the ceiling was eight or nine feet high. The walls were about that far apart, too. There was no guard on duty. Moving quietly, Mildred followed the faint light around a bend. Beyond it, the cave walls necked down and a ratty, brown-polyester blanket blocked her path. It hung from the ceiling to the dirt floor, leaking yellow points of light from a hundred holes and small rips.
From the other side, she heard voices. And soft whimpering.
Mildred stepped up and peeked through a hole in the blanket. It took a couple of seconds for her eyes to adjust to the glare of light, which came from a stone-ringed firepit in the middle of a wide chamber. She counted four cannies. She couldn’t tell whether the cave went on or dead-ended. Strewed in a corner was a pile of fire-blackened human bones. From the angle she had she couldn’t see the children, but the whimpering was definitely theirs.
With a sweep of her hand, Mildred pushed back the blanket, looking over the ZKR’s sights. She caught the cannies flat-footed.
The Czech target pistol boomed deafeningly in the tightly enclosed space. The closest cannie, a tall man with a bushy, foot-long chin beard, took the up-angled round through his left eye-socket. His hair, skull and brain matter splattered the cave ceiling and he toppled over, rigid from head to toe with shock, like a felled tree.
Two others leaned over a boy and a girl who were huddled in a corner. The cannies whirled at the gunshot, the slivers of fileting knives flashing in the firelight. Unblinking, Mildred shot them both rapid-fire, placing one slug below each breastbone.
Heart shredders.
Muzzle climb was her old and trusted friend, and she rode it onto the fourth target who had grabbed up a blaster and was coming at her fast. As the cannie charged, he swung the side-by-side scattergun from the hip. The full-length weapon came around slowly. Way too slowly.
Center chest, point-blank, Mildred tapped him three times. As she pivoted away, the cannie’s filthy cotton shirt and matted chest hair burst into flames. Dead on his feet, he dropped to his knees, then crashed in a cloud of dust at her boot tops.
With the ZKR aimed at the ceiling, she broke open the cylinder and flicked out the smoking empties. Muzzle down, her feet braced wide apart, her steady, deft fingers fitted the speedloader in place and twisted the cartridge release.
She felt a rush of breeze on her neck as the blanket over the entrance whipped aside. In the next instant, something heavy slammed into the back of her head. Her knees buckled under her. Everything went black. She didn’t feel the ground when it flew up and hit her in the face.
WHEN MILDRED OPENED her eyes, the world spun madly around her. She had a splitting headache. She tried to focus and was overcome by a wave of nausea. Shutting her eyes, she leaned back against what felt like a rough wooden post. It was wedged tightly between the cave floor and ceiling. Her wrists were lashed around the post behind her; her ankles laced to its base. The bonds were skillfully tied. There was no wiggle room, and no stretch whatsoever.
As she waited for the vertigo to pass, she recalled the seconds prior to her blackout. She had been poleaxed from behind, and that was the source of her throbbing headache.
Opening her eyes again, she looked up into a gaunt, unshaven face.
At that moment she realized that a possible skull fracture was the least of her worries.
The cannie’s right cheek was marred by a burn scar, a swathe of shiny, pink, pockmarked skin where whiskers no longer grew. To Mildred, it looked like a near-miss from a close-range black-powder discharge. A victim fighting for his or her life had failed to hit the point-blank ten-ring. The cannie had no eyebrow or eyelashes on that side. His right eyelid was shriveled to nothing and the eyeball was milky-white, like a hardboiled egg, cooked in its socket by a flash of Pyrodex. The bastard’s breath stunk like a three-week-old corpse.
But that wasn’t the worst of it.
Stalactites of gray hung glistening from both his nostrils. The thick discharge had smeared and crusted like a snail trail through the dark stubble that covered his upper lip and chin. He was infected with the scourge of Deathland’s cannibal clans, a contagious, blood-born, inevitably fatal disease known far and wide as “the oozies.”
Mildred looked past him. There were two more cannies. Live ones. The trio had entered the cave as she had started shooting, probably rejoining their running buddies for a share in the spoils. With no one covering her back, she had left herself open to attack.
The two kids were still alive, huddled in each other’s arms on the dirt floor, crying softly. From stories told on their mothers’ knees, they knew what was coming next.
The scarred one smiled down at her, showing off yellow incisors filed to points. He was the pack leader, the alpha. Without a word, he reached around her hip and groped her buttocks. Not in a sexual way. His interest was entirely culinary. Mildred tried to twist away from his powerful fingers. He squeezed harder, until she stopped struggling, then he let go.
“She’s a tough one,” the alpha said to his pals. “We’ve got to pit roast her. Slow fire, wrapped