Moon Fate Laurence James

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minutes.
The one-eyed man opened the hidden door a cou-ple of inches. "Coming, Jak," he
whispered.
"Ready."
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Axler, James - Deathlands 16 - Moon Fate
He crossed the lobby, knelt and wriggled under the makeshift barricade, alongside
the motionless figure of Abe, who stirred for a moment. "Recon the LMG action,
Trader," he said in a clear voice.
Ryan clenched his fist, ready to punch Abe out if he showed any signs of making
further noise. But the man had slipped back deep into his own personal darkness.
TIME PASSED.
Every nerve strained, Ryan could almost hear time passing.
As the night grew colder, the building began to shrink around him. Contractions
of the tiniest frac-tions of inches in the concrete and the underpinning steel girders
made faint sounds like a raw fingertip rubbing on the inside of a long-buried lead
coffin.
Every noise tugged at Ryan's attention. Each time it happened he listened harder,
wondering if it could be a stickie trying to crawl in through the broken win-dow at
the side of the building.
He glanced down at his luminous wrist chron.
It was just after eight o'clock.
The wind was rising, and Ryan's keen hearing could catch the shuffling sound of
dried leaves being whisked against the broken outer doors.
Ten more minutes crept by.
He wondered what was going through Charlie's mind, out there in the chill night.
THE LEADER OF the stickies was less than a hundred paces away, crouched in
the darkness at the edge of the forest, listening to the breeze as it stirred the
branches above his head. His force was stretched out behind him, waiting for his
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Axler, James - Deathlands 16 - Moon Fate
next order.
Charlie's mind was clear and calm, and he was humming a dissonant tune to
himself. He reviewed his options and thought back over the past twenty-four
hours.
"Good and bad," he whispered. "Bad and good. Bad times. Good times. Bood and
gad. Tad bimes and " His face suddenly shifted and contorted into a mask of
malevolent anger. "Fucking Ryan Caw-dor!"
The man behind him caught the words and leaned closer. "What, Charlie?"
"Nothing, Tony, nothing. Go back to sleep, will you?"
"Not sleeping, Charlie." There was a note of panic in the stickie's voice, as though
his heart had leaped for cover behind his ribs.
"Sure, sure."
From what Charlie had been able to piece together, it looked as though that triple-
slut Marcie had been up to her old tricks again.
At least she'd paid the final price.
Charlie felt a passing tightness around his groin as he recalled some sweating,
shuddering moments with Marcie.
It must have been the woman who'd liberated Ryan from the kiva at the very time
that the lepers had at-tacked. Charlie's first gut reaction had been that it had been a
crowd of norms storming in on a rescue mis-sion.
It had been a brief time of relief when he'd realized that it was nothing more
threatening than a mob of stump-fingered lepers.
But they'd been lucky, timing their strike for the middle of the night, when
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stickies were never at their best.
Charlie grinned toothlessly in the darkness. Stick-ies were never at their best.
Then there had been the fires and the explosions, beginning among the stores of
black powder and lamp oil.
The flames and thunderous booms had delighted the stickies, sending them
capering wilding into the gunfire of the lepers. For a time it had been in the
balance, and only Charlie and his Uzi had tipped the scale in his favor.
But the encampment had been destroyed, many of the ancient buildings finally
reduced to blackened heaps of shattered red brick.
Charlie had ordered a few of the older men to stay with the surviving women and
children, telling them to get everything ready to move to a new site while he took
the rest of the stickie men with him on the ven-geance trail.
"Clever fuckhead, Cawdor," he whispered, eyes raking the shapes of the small
ville ahead of him.
And he'd fallen for it, his mind clouded by the gib-bering antics of his followers,
letting them go surging down the steep side of the valley where the river pounded
and raged, watching them slide and fall. Only when one of the older stickies
slipped into the torrent and was whirled screaming to his death did Charlie finally
come to his senses.
"No. They've gone up!" he yelled. "Gone higher up."
The trail of the travois was the clue, the deep fur-rows along the damp mud,
sometimes vanishing where Ryan and his companions had lifted their wounded
man with them. Or wounded woman. Charlie didn't know which, and didn't care,
either.
Then it had been a question of plodding uphill. Stickies weren't great hikers, and
Charlie had to keep on chivying them, kicking and cursing the stragglers. At times
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Axler, James - Deathlands 16 - Moon Fate
he'd only had a half dozen with him, then they all had to stop and wait for the rest
to catch up. He knew he couldn't risk going up against the well-armed Ryan and
his group unless he had all his power with him.
Which meant around twenty in total.
Now darkness had overtaken them all and he was stuck in the wilderness by the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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