Crimson Waters (18 page)

Chapter Twenty-Two

“That answers that,” J.B. muttered as they broke for cover to both sides of the trail.

Ryan dived to the left. He hauled out his SIG-Sauer handblaster in midleap and was shooting when he crashed into a bush covered in waxy oval leaves.

He hated to fire blind. That was the same as wasting ammo—most times.

But he heard Trader talking to him in his mind, clearly as if his mentor were standing right beside him and shaking his head.
You walk into an ambush, boy, your survival depends on your ambushers not being competent. Since they were smart enough to mousetrap you in the first place, you can work out the rest yourself
.

As, indeed, Ryan had. And what he’d worked out—before he and Trader parted ways, in fact—was that when the enemy had you locked up in his sights, anything you could give him to think about other than chilling your stupe ass worked on your side. And not getting his own hide punctured was a thing that might tend to distract an ambusher.

Ryan had no idea if he hit anything but trees before he was getting whipped by skinny branches and falling hard on a ground just barely cushioned by a mulch of rotting leaves and twigs. Odds were better than good he hadn’t. He did see a couple of muzzle flashes blazing from a place where the road turned right to pass around a hill about twenty yards ahead. He thought the shooters might be sheltering behind a fallen log. One flare was the unmistakable flicker of a full-auto blaster, some kind of AK by the deep, choppy roar.

He heard cracks from across the trail and behind as his friends opened up. He hoped they’d all gotten clear. There was no time to check.

Something had made the ambushers jump the gun and open up before the group walked right up to their concealed blaster muzzles, where even half-assed peasant conscripts could barely miss them. And he suspected this bunch was a higher cut of coldheart beef than that.

He rolled away from the trail. Jamming his handblaster back in its holster he squirmed his longblaster off his shoulder and into a firing position. He could just see where the blasters’ flashes continued to blossom ahead through the leaves.

Ryan tried to sight on one through the ghost ring. Of course, when he fired he’d give his own position away, but if he could cut their odds by even one shooter, that’d be worth the risk.

From somewhere ahead and off to the left he heard the sharp bark of a .357 handblaster. He actually saw some of the flash past a rough-barked tree bole. Somebody screamed and thrashed behind the moss-grown log.

Another figure reared up, swinging a remade Kalashnikov right, to bear on the sudden flank attack. Ryan twitched his sight onto the shape and fired. The figure fell away out of sight. The one-eyed man thought the longblaster dropped from his victim’s hands, but couldn’t be sure.

A person ran up the road, yelling. A blast of full-auto fire drowned the wordless battle cry. It was from J.B.’s Uzi machine pistol, which he was shooting from the hip in ripsaw bursts.

Then Jak launched a sudden attack on the ambushers’ right flank and changed the game completely. From having the hammer hand, the coldhearts were suddenly caught in a crack themselves. Ryan knew from his own brutal experience there was no nastier kick in the balls than that reversal.

The ambushers may have been more than grunts dragged out of the cane fields and bean farms a couple of days ago by EUN “recruiters,” but they’d had balls of vanadium steel not to flee from a madman with an autoblaster and an unexpected assailant who fired up their asses from a totally unexpected direction.

Ryan stayed where he was, looking for targets of opportunity to help his friends. As crazy and fast as J.B.’s move was, Ryan knew his friend and right-hand man seldom did anything without careful calculation. J.B.’s keen tactical eye and quick insight had told him this was the best shot they had.

He’d been right. An ambusher leaped up without a weapon in hand, and raced away in pure panic. Ryan swung his longblaster right to take him down, but another three-round burst ripped out from J.B.’s stubby machine pistol. Ryan saw dust fly from the back of the guy’s shirt. He screamed as dark blotches appeared on the fabric, clutched at his kidneys and fell.

Jak ran up to the log where the ambushers had lain in wait. Fire blossomed from the barrel of his big stainless-steel Python, straight down.

Voices began calling from off to the west, from behind where Jak had crept up on the ambushers. They sounded pissed.

“Fireblast!” Ryan exclaimed. “Time to power out of here! Head east, everybody, now!”

Ryan saw that Doc, Mildred, the new kid and Krysty were all fit to fight and had a head start on him.

He didn’t look left at Jak and J.B. He knew what they were doing.

Same thing he was: running for their lives.

* * *

“S
O
,” R
YAN
SAID
.
“Burnin’ ammo to chill the wounded?”

Lying nearby him between some purplish head-sized lava rocks that sprouted bushes like bad hair plugs, Mildred frowned. She was squinting at the far slope, west across the heavily wooded valley. As if her unassisted eyes were going to spot anything Ryan’s big longeyes wouldn’t.

They had fled east, away from the second force of ambushers. That was predictable, but necessary. But, contrary to Mildred’s intuition, rather than doing the sensible thing and heading north toward where their goal allegedly lay, Ryan had headed the party south, adding perhaps a half mile to their total journey. But in a race against the EUN, and adding in a delay to shake off pursuit, that could make all the difference in whether they reached the lost redoubt first, or El Guapo did.

“Didn’t want any of them coming back to life suddenly,” the armorer said, “and blasting us in the back. I didn’t have time to check them close, so I figured I’d just make sure. Reckon Jak saw things the same way—passing up a chance to finish off a coldheart with his blade, like he did.”

“Shame.” Jak’s voice floated down from above, as soft and colorless as ash.

“So why
didn’t
we head north while we put distance between us and the bad guys?” Mildred demanded, unable to keep it in anymore. “Why did we wind up going the wrong damn way?”

“You may not believe this, Mildred,” Ryan said, “but I thought of that, too. Right off the mark. We could use the opportunity to slip at least a hair closer to our target. Simple. Easy. Obvious.”

He paused a moment to let that last word bore into her skull.

“I haven’t lived as long as I have,” he said, “by thinking I’m smarter than my coldhearts. I thought of that. That means Tiburón could, too, if I guess right and he’s the man in charge of this little surprise party.”

His eye had never twitched from the glass.

“Oh, he is, Señor Ryan, be assured,” Ricky said. “You and your friends—I mean,
our
friends—are a most valuable prize. El Guapo wouldn’t trust a lesser man than his sec boss. And he wouldn’t trust any man at all, not even his filthy pet shark, to find the treasure ahead of him.”

Ryan nodded behind his longeyes. He shifted the device to the left. It was braced on his backpack. The man lay on his belly on that razor-toothed uncomfortable rock, same as the rest of them. Jak, however, squatted under a pink-flowering bush a few yards upslope of them, making sure nobody caught them from behind.

“And speaking of Shark Boy,” Ryan said suddenly, “I got a good ten men moving through the trees over there. Mebbe a dozen. And... Yeah. Shaved head, gray skin, more snout than skull. Big fucker.”

“De veres,”
Ricky said. “It is truly Tiburón you see.”

“Can’t you take him out?” Mildred asked, a trifle more shrilly than she would have liked. “You know, snipe him from here?”

Ryan shook his head. “No chance. Too long a shot to make reliably. Only thing it would do is give away our position.”

“It’s just as long a shot for them as it is for you, Ryan,” J.B. said. “And it would make them go to ground. Slow them down just that additional little bit to give us a chance to lose them.”

“It would,” Ryan agreed, “if this Tiburón hadn’t split up his force. Least two wings, I reckon, north and south of the main group.”

J.B. blinked, then nodded.

“Do you see them, lover?” Krysty asked.

“No. It’s just what I’d do, if I was a coldheart boss.”

He studied the distant hunting party a minute or two longer. Mildred felt her skin begin to crawl with nervous anticipation. What if he’s right? she wondered. What if there are more of the bastards, heading out to surround us? What if they’re closing in on us right now? What if they’re creeping up even as we dawdle here beating our gums?

She realized she’d hear the same thing from pretty much all her companions, maybe even Ricky, wet behind the ears though he was: we fight, we run. We win. Or we die.

Standard operating procedure.

“What’s so funny, Mildred?” Ryan growled, easing himself back down out of sight behind the rock and the bush.

She realized she had to have chuckled out loud. “Only me, Ryan,” she said. “Only me.”

* * *

R
YAN
HEADED
EAST
to increase the distance from the coldhearts as shadows lengthened and the sun sank toward the early end of a mountain day. The terrain that way was up and down, mostly wooded but with patches of open space and heavy brush.

“I’ll take us north or south, whichever feels right,” he said as they trudged up a rocky slope. It exposed them to observation from a lot farther away than he liked. But whatever he did, there’d be trade-offs.

“Any particular reason we’re headed right up this steep hillside?” Krysty asked. “Instead of around?”

“Yeah. I want to avoid the obvious high-speed routes. If we keep them guessing which path we take, it gives us better chances to slip away clear.”

He glanced back over his shoulder at the sun. “I’m looking to make it until nightfall,” he said, “then shake the bastards off for good. Tiburón doesn’t have him any ace trackers, does he?”

Ricky said he didn’t think so.

“What happened to always assuming the worst?” Mildred asked.

“If the worst happens,” Ryan said, “we’re stone chilled. Why plan for that?”

“Don’t you ever get tired of being right?”

“It hasn’t been a problem so far.”

He didn’t mind the banter. If they got to feeling so beat down they couldn’t speak their minds, they couldn’t help one another survive.

Ryan was a bit more concerned about Jak. The teen had been less than stoic when Ryan told him to keep an eye on their path and stay out in front. That was the direction pursuit was least likely to come from, which was his beef. Jak wanted to be the first to spot the danger to his friends. And perhaps the first to dig into danger with one of his pet knives.

But the threats they knew about came from behind and left and right. It was keeping an eye skinned for the danger you
didn’t
know about that kept dirt from hitting you in that selfsame eye.

Jak acted a tad testy. Krysty said he was feeling threatened by the new boy. Ryan would have thought maybe the kid would like somebody to talk to who was more his own age. But apparently that made him get on Jak’s nerves more.

Still, Jak would learn to adjust. He was a survivor.

He was also ace as a scout, but there was only so much he could do. As quickly became clear when a bullet cracked by Ryan’s head. From the report a heartbeat later, he could tell it came from his left. Off to the north.

One of Tiburón’s flanking patrols had spotted them.

Even before he glanced that way, Ryan shouted, “Run!”

“But, Ryan!” Mildred yelled. “I see them—”

“No!” he shouted before she could say
shouldn’t we shoot back?

Under normal circumstances, the answer was
yes!
Take cover and teach yet another bunch of bullies that they couldn’t miss fast enough to catch up with dead-aimed shots. But these circumstances were in no way normal. Even Deathlands normal.

“You want to get caught between fires?” he roared. “Run, for fuck’s sake!”

That, he reckoned, was enough to remind everybody that if Ryan had been right about Tiburón sending out the one patrol, he was definitely right about the pincers’ second jaw. Too close to bet your life against. And the southern team would be homing in on the ruckus right now, practically drooling in blood lust.

The main force didn’t concern Ryan much. He was fairly confident they’d left it well behind. The companions had taught the EUN some sharp lessons about getting frisky with them. And why bustle into an ambush when Tiburón had patrols out to hunt the quarry down and pin it so he could finished it off at leisure?

Ryan never looked back. At this point, his companions would follow. Or they’d die.

More shots cracked off from their left. He heard shouts. Glancing far enough ahead to be sure he wouldn’t put a foot wrong and twist his ankle, he finally looked that way.

The ground here was broken by short, steep hills and narrow valleys.

The EUN team was coming over a ridge he judged was a shave less than a hundred yards off. Actually, it was a pretty long sight line in this kind of country; bad luck the pursuers had gotten such a long glimpse at them.

Or was it? Ryan realized he’d much rather the enemy spot them at long range and let the usual coldheart chase reflex take over, causing them to hoot and holler and fire their weapons without much chance of hitting what they fired at, rather than announce their presence with a volley of blasterfire at powder-burn range, the way the first bunch had. His companions couldn’t keep riding their luck forever.

The trail led them through low scrub and grass, and jogged right around what looked like the end of a lava flow, higher than their heads.

When he dodged around it, he saw Jak’s face peering at him from a pink-flowered bush several yards ahead. The kid was heading back to lend his friends a hand.

Wrong call. “Go on!” Ryan shouted, waving at him. “Lead the way east! Make sure we’re clear. Go, go, go!”