James Axler Deathlands 056 Sunchild

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forearms crossed, catching the mutie's head in the middle of the cross. A
flexion of the powerful muscles and a twist of his body weight insured that
the mutie's soft-
boned neck broke.
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Axler,_James_-_Deathlands_56_-_Sunchild
He was dead before he hit the dirt, and Ryan had already turned his attention
to
Harvey's predicament.
Ryan covered the few yards in a matter of seconds, but he was still not quick
enough. His SIG-Sauer was holstered, and by the time it was unsheathed a clean
shot would have been impossible, with the Sunchild and the sec chief too
entwined.
Harvey, for his part, was taken completely by surprise. The Sunchild threw
herself about his neck, attempting to drag him backward. His attention focused
entirely on what was to the front of him, it was only the wiry man's strength
that stopped him tumbling back under the sudden force from behind.
Harvey could feel the warm blood trickling from her, her fetid breath in his
ear and on his neck, the panting and grunting of her breath as she tried to
pull him down with all the strength she had left in her body.
The sec chief fought against it, pulling himself forward and attempting to
throw her over his shoulder. But her weight was centered too far down her
body, and the whole force was dragging too much for him to get any momentum on
his own movements. Even more urgent was the fact that her arms were locked
around his throat, and he couldn't breathe properly, gasping for breath. He
hacked at her flesh with the Emerson, but in her dying condition she seemed
impervious to pain, and not even the razor-sharp blade cutting through the
flesh of her fingers could force her to relent.
Ryan could see the difficulty the sec chief was having, and unwound the scarf
from his own throat. The long scarf was weighted at each end by carefully
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Axler,_James_-_Deathlands_56_-_Sunchild concealed and secured weights, which
made the scarf a useful and unobtrusive weapon.
Useful like now. With a flick of his powerful wrist, judging the distance
exactly with his practiced eye, Ryan kept hold of one end of the scarf and
sent the other shooting toward the mutie. The tip of the scarf, weighted as it
was, gained momentum in flight and cracked against the temple of the woman's
head. A large bruise, weeping a thin trickle of blood, grew up almost as soon
as the weight hit home, and she grunted heavily, her consciousness dimmed by
the blow.
Harvey heard the crack, felt her heavy breath as she grunted, then felt her
grip ease as her weight increased and became dead. She slipped away from him
and down to the earth, still bleeding from her throat wound, and now with no
consciousness to impair her way to death.
"Thanks, Cyclops," Harvey said hoarsely, rubbing his sore throat.
Ryan retrieved the scarf and wrapped it around his neck once more. He fixed
the sec chief with a glare. "Don't thank me. Just remember you owe me," he
said shortly, before plunging on into the fray.
Mebbe just mebbe that favor would count for something&
THE BATTLE WAS finally over. It had been short and bloody, and the vast
majority of the casualties belonged to the Samtvogel dwellers.
"When I was still a fairly young man," Doc remarked to Krysty as they watched
the Raw war party moving among the chilled Sunchildren to gather blasters or
to chill any muties who might still be alive and therefore a threat, "when I
was still
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Axler,_James_-_Deathlands_56_-_Sunchild in that time before the whitecoat
horrors, they would take the Native American and treat him like this."
"Uncle Tyas McCann used to tell us of those days," the flame-haired woman
replied. "He used to say that the law of dog-eat-dog was all that ruled. And
the inherent stupeness of it was that he'd never seen a dog eat a dog unless
they were put into a ring to fight for men."
Doc smiled. "An interesting point, my dear. And appropriate, I think. Yes, in
some ways. Fear can do strange things. Is this the way a man like Alien seems
to rule the rest of the time?" he questioned, sweeping the area with the end
of his walking stick. "Was it necessary to lay waste to their lives?
Certainly, they had coexisted long enough."
"Sure, but that was before the nuke."
"Before the whitecoat horrors," Doc said softly. "They will always return to
haunt us, I believe." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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