Devil's Vortex

“A tigre?” Ricky asked. He stood just up the bank from her, where his buddy Jak had stopped his forward progress. “You mean, like a mountain lion?” In American Spanish, tigre—tiger—could mean any kind of big cat, including a cougar or a jaguar, although it was way too cold up here this time of year for the latter.

“No,” she said. “Tiger tiger. Big, stripes.”

“Bengal,” Jak said. “Real tiger. See prints?”

At that positive verbal outpouring from the reticent and cryptically spoken young albino, Ryan squinted his eye harder at the sand above which Jak was hunkered. He saw them then, plain enough: tracks as big as hands with fingers splayed.

“Fireblast,” he said.

The others muttered surprised concern. He felt the tension rise as they all looked harder at their surroundings, lest the giant bastard come springing down on them. Descendants of zoo beasts released by compassionate, or perhaps foolhardy, humans in the wake of the Big Nuke, some breeding populations of big exotic cats like leopards, lions and tigers, had taken root in various parts of the Deathlands. They were nowhere common, but where they ranged, they were nowhere rare enough—the big cats were not hesitant to snack on human flesh.

“But where did the brute go?” Doc inquired. He had both his swordstick and his outsized LeMat drawn and ready. Ryan reckoned all of the companions might just be enough to heat a leaping tiger past nuke red by the time its five hundred pounds landed on one of them.

Mariah shrugged as if the question bored her. “Away.”

“‘Away’?” Mildred echoed in alarm. “Just ‘away’? Where ‘away’?” She started whipping her head left and right.

The girl just shook her head.

“Nowhere,” Jak said.

Everybody looked at him.

“You care to be more specific?” Ryan said.

Jak stared at him if he were a complete feeb, which was how Ryan had commenced to feel the moment the question left his lips. What could be more specific than “nowhere”?

Not that “nowhere” made a lick of sense.

“Mebbe you could explain that a bit more to us mere mortals, Jak,” J.B. suggested.

“Tracks come. Don’t leave.” A white hand waved his Python handblaster in a semicircle. “No tiger.”

“By the Three Kennedys, he is right,” Doc said. “An impeccable syllogism, as well.”

“Congratulations,” Mildred murmured. “You win a cookie.”

“So where did it go?” Krysty asked Mariah.

“He was just there,” the girl said. “Then he wasn’t. I don’t know where he went. He just did.”

Ryan let go of a breath he wasn’t even aware he’d been holding in a long, exasperated sigh.

“This would have to make triple more sense than it does,” he said, “to make none at all. Jak, don’t you have anything?”

“No.”

“You don’t see any sign of where it disappeared to? Mebbe like it jumped off into the bushes out of sight?”

“Looked.”

“Look again.” Ryan was on the verge of telling everybody else to keep their eyes skinned and their blasters up. Then he realized that’d be a waste of words.

Frowning resentfully at the imputation he might have missed something—especially something as large as tracks made by a leaping tiger—Jak started to turn away to make another circuit of the area where the prints led and stopped. Then he froze and looked back to the bottom of the bank. His white features were still knotted around the brows and tight round the mouth, but it was no longer a frown of anger.

It was plain puzzlement.

“There,” he said, pointing at a small fourwing saltbush sprouting right on the verge of the empty streambed.

Ryan, still unwilling to move forward and risk disturbing tracks that he couldn’t see but Jak perhaps could, hunkered down and looked hard at the bush.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Blood,” Jak said. “Fresh. Still shiny.”

Then Ryan saw it: a few dark patches spattered on the branches and skinny little leaves. He could just make it out by a glint of starlight.

“Some there.” Jak pointed to the grass across the bed. “Drops fell there.”

He pointed at three randomly spaced depressions in the sand. They were smaller than even baby ant-lion larva traps. The albino’s red eyes hadn’t missed them—they didn’t miss much—but he had dismissed them as insignificant. Before he recognized blood spill.

“Tiger blood?” Mildred asked.

It was her turn to be on the receiving end of Jak’s furrowed-brow, tight-lipped glare.

“We don’t have any way to know,” Krysty said, compassionately throwing herself on that hand grenade of pointing out the obvious for the sake of her best friend. “Seems like the best bet, though, doesn’t it?”

“Could it be from a kill?” Ricky asked.

Ryan grunted. “Could be.” He tended to take the kid for granted, even though he had proved his value to the group by saving everybody’s life several times over. It occurred to Ryan that he was the last stray orphan they’d come across. Before the strange girl.

Doesn’t mean I’m not dropping her off at the next ville, he told himself sternly.

“That’s a possibility, too,” he said. “But we need a clean sweep of the area to make sure the bastard’s gone. All together, vee formation. Me on point, Jak scouting up ahead so he won’t pout.”

“And when we’re done, double watches the rest of the night.”

Mildred scoffed.

“Ryan,” she said, “after something like this, do you honestly expect any of us will sleep?”

Chapter Seven (#ulink_d8c92ab6-8de3-5de3-b2a6-c19b97693f68)

“Did you see the way I counted coup on that bastard coldheart?” Hammerhand was pumped and strutting back and forth between a pair of pickups parked twenty feet apart with their noses facing each other at the rendezvous spot. “I broke his nuking neck. Bang! Like that.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Mindy Farseer, leaning against the other truck, said. She had boosted it and driven to this low mesa several miles from the Buffalo Mob’s camp. Two other stolen wags were already parked a little farther off. A fifth was just pulling up, a big cargo wag, well loaded from the way it rode low on its suspension. “We saw it, Randy Macho Savage.”

“Uh, it was ‘Macho Man’ Randy Savage,” Joe Takes-Blasters said as he got out of the newly arrived wag and started walking over. He was literal minded and had a fondness for predark professional wrestling. He had the tattered remains of several wrestling magazines in his pack.