They had covered less than a hundred yards when Jak called a halt to the advance. Kneeling, he holstered his .357 Magnum Colt Python and carefully examined the narrow strip of churned-up ground.
“Cannies dropped kids,” the albino announced.
“No bodies here,” Ryan said as he looked around. “They must have been alive. Looks like they got away.”
Jak walked on a few more yards. “Cannie tracks both heavy on one leg,” he said.
“They’re still carrying a kid each,” Krysty said. “I saw them take four from the ville.”
“I wonder why our Mildred did not stop to round up the escapees?” Doc asked.
“They probably hit the ground running,” Ryan answered. “Even if she saw them she couldn’t catch them in the dark.”
“That way,” Jak said, pointing due east.
The companions resumed the chase. They moved triple fast and triple quiet. There was only the soft hiss of their bootheels on sand as Jak led them across the valley, toward the dark screen of mountains.
As Ryan ran, he thought about the ville they had just left, and the dozens of bodies strewed in its rutted dirt lanes. How many of its folk had died fighting? How many had been carried off to meet a worse fate than a bullet? How many women and children had either been suffocated by smoke or burned alive in their underground hiding holes? The exact cost of victory was impossible to count until after daybreak, which was still hours away. The shambling shacks could be rebuilt, of course. The stacked logs and heaped earth of the defensive berm could be repaired, and its design much improved. But Ryan knew it would take years to restore the human population to its former size.
All the while with flesheaters hammering at the gates.
Taking the battle to the cannies, finding their dens and chilling them one by one, was the only way to tip the balance. It was a daunting task, given the mountainous terrain and their apparent numbers. Even before the attack there hadn’t been enough ville folk to handle the job. Unlike Deathlands numerous mutated species, cannies were still essentially human beings. Humans gone psycho-renegade. They fought with blades and blasters instead of teeth and claws. This night they had been particularly well-armed with semiauto and full-auto centerfire weapons. Several of them weren’t remades.
Over the years, after numerous skirmishes, Ryan had cannies pegged as cunning, cowardly adversaries. Their normal strategy was hit and git, like true pack-hunting predators. Cannies worked a vulnerable territory until it could no longer support them or until they were chilled or driven out.
Because they looked human, cannies sometimes infiltrated villes and mingled with norms, then struck without warning. Children and the dimwitted simply disappeared overnight. Cannies were blood traitors to their own species, universally despised and feared. The happy downside to the cannie lifestyle was the oozies, a horrible, wasting disease that ultimately claimed them, one and all. It was widely assumed that they got it from eating the infected brains of their own packmates.
No one knew their exact origins. From the time-honored campfire tales, it appeared cannies had been around since skydark, when nuke winter had forced the surviving humans to make awful choices about protein sources. Although the companions had come across isolated small bands that roamed Deathlands interior, Ryan had never seen or heard of cannies unleashing a coordinated, mass attack on a bermed ville. Their organization had always stopped at the pack level, the primary hunting group.
The hellscape was full of mysteries. Explanations, when they came, were usually incomplete.
Jak somehow picked out Mildred’s trail in the weak light, leading the companions across the high desert valley on a near dead run. How the albino managed the feat was a puzzle to Ryan, especially after Mildred had explained her twentieth-century understanding of albinism to him. Before the Apocalypse it had been a well-documented genetic disorder, caused by a random mutation that stopped production of a chemical vital to normal development of skin pigmentation, eyes and brain. According to Mildred, predark albinos always had poor vision, were susceptible to sunburn and had blue-gray or brown eyes. Jak had exceptional eyesight. He never sunburned. And his eyes were ruby-red. The youth vehemently insisted that he wasn’t a mutie—those with mutie blood were Deathlands untouchables, often chilled on sight—but the evidence said otherwise. Whether he was seeing the bootprints in the sand, or smelling out the track, or using some other extra-norm sense that had no name, Jak was bird-dogging. The pace he set was grueling, but no one complained, and no one asked for a rest.
Ahead, the impenetrable black of the mountain crags loomed larger, the landscape tilted underfoot, and the companions began to climb the gradual incline of the valley side. As the physical effort increased, body heat built up. Sweat peeled from Ryan’s hairline, down his forehead, burning into his good eye. The other socket was an empty hole, covered by a black leather patch. A livid scar divided that eyebrow and split his cheek, a secondary wound from the knife slash that had half blinded him. Ryan ignored the growing ache in his thighs, pushing the pain aside as though it belonged to someone else.
Mildred Wyeth was more than a treasured friend, more than a trusted comrade in arms; she was a resource the companions couldn’t afford to lose. Mildred had been a physician; she understood the workings of predark science and technology. She had come from a time not only with different knowledge, but very different values.
Would any of the other companions have taken off on their own to rescue the children?
Mebbe.
Mebbe not.
When the five reached the base of the mountains, they paused for breath, faces upturned, searching the black vastness above.
“Where’d she go?” J.B. said softly.
Jak tugged on Ryan’s sleeve.
“There,” the albino teen said. “Cave mouth.”
Above them, weak firelight flared against bedrock, then it was gone. They all saw it.
“How can you be positive that’s where Dr. Wyeth has gone?” Doc asked.
“Can’t,” Jak said.
“That fire didn’t start itself,” Krysty said. “Got to be cannies hiding inside. Nobody else would be out in the bush around here.”
“Nobody in their right mind,” J.B. added.
“We need to have a look-see,” Ryan told the others. “Spread out, take it slow, make sure of your footing. We don’t want any rockslides on the approach.”
The companions climbed the mountain flank, closing in on the cave entrance with blasters raised, safeties off. They saw no movement and met no resistance. The cannies weren’t expecting company. Probably because they considered themselves well-hidden and figured no one would try to hunt them down before dawn.
As Ryan neared the cave mouth, he smelled wood smoke, charring meat and burning hair. His stomach twisted into a knot.
Not Mildred, he thought. For nuke’s sake, not Mildred…
He ducked under the low arch, entering the outer chamber, where the trapped smoke and stench hung like an evil fog.
When all companions were inside the arch, he led them through the smoke, toward the source of the flickering yellow light. Around the cave’s bend, they spread out on either side of the blanket that served as a door, weapons aimed, fingers resting lightly on triggers.
Holding the SIG-Sauer braced against his hip, Ryan leaned forward and peered through a rip in the fabric. He saw two men, one bald and the other with a badly scarred face, crouched on the far side of a roaring fire. There had to be a vent in the ceiling, he thought, a fissure in the rock drawing most of the smoke up and out. The cannies were eating with their bare hands, pulling greasy strips of charcoaled meat off the shoulders of a human corpse. They had removed the dead man’s clothing but hadn’t bothered to cut up