Playfair's Axiom

Ryan raised his Steyr again. An acid downpour was no joke; it could bubble unprotected skin in minutes, sizzle muscle away to leave yellow bone in a shockingly short time, depending on the strength and length of the downpour. But the really virulent falls tended not to last long.

Ryan laid the rifle’s iron battle sights on a goggled figure who had sprung up from a clump of brush that had grown around an old fire hydrant and was charging forward, holding a beat-up semiautomatic longblaster diagonally across his chest. He squeezed off a quick shot and saw the man jerk as the bullet took him in the left shoulder.

The attacker kept coming. Ryan cursed and dropped his aim. His second shot punched the man in the gut right above his web belt. He fell, rolling and squalling like a catamount.

The Armorer going down had rattled even the hard-core Ryan more than he realized. Until now. He’d just forgotten one of the prime rules of combat: the chest was mostly air, the very fact J.B. owed his survival to—for however long it lasted.

A man well-wired on jolt or just adrenaline overdrive could keep motoring on even with a collapsed lung, and the fact he might die horribly in a matter of minutes wouldn’t hold him back from busting your head open with a club before collapsing. The heart, like the head, was a tricky target actually to hit. And even a clean heart shot didn’t always drop a man, or big animal, that was already in furious motion. The working of his limbs could keep his blood circulating long enough to inflict a chilling wound on you. The best target for stopping a man was from the ribs down.

“The miscreants to the west of us are advancing as well,” Doc reported. He was reserving his own fire until the enemy gave him closer targets. It took a long time to reload his own black-powder revolver.

The M-4000 shotgun bellowed. Ryan heard Mildred grunt as the 12-gauge’s heavy recoil punished her shoulder. She was running rifled slugs through the blaster against targets too far away for buckshot to be effective. She knew to snug the steel butt-plate hard against her shoulder. But it was a painful weapon even for a man as big as Ryan or as battle-hardened as the stricken J.B. to shoot in sustained fire.

“Jak!” Ryan called, racking his bolt and slamming it shut on a fresh cartridge, one of his rapidly dwindling store. He wasn’t sure whether his last shot had hit the red-bearded scavvie he had targeted or if the man had dived to cover. They were under fifty yards away now. It would seem to be a walkaway for a precision-sniping piece like the Steyr, in the hands of an expert marksman such as Ryan, to take down targets that close at hand. And it would have been—had he been shooting at pebbles on fenceposts.

It wasn’t quite so simple when the targets were running, ducking and weaving. And shooting back. The heavy bolt-action rifle was never meant for close-in combat: it was meant to reach out and touch enemies hundreds of yards distant, a slow, measured, precise form of warfare. Nothing at all like close combat, which was crude and dirty and above all fast.

Ryan was just wondering if it was time to forget the longblaster and try to get his SIG handblaster into play when a figure loomed up right in front of him with a terrible screech.

Chapter Four

Desperately Ryan rolled back onto his butt, away from the low wall. He flung up the Steyr crosswise just in time to catch the haft of a rusty-headed tomahawk descending toward his face.

Heat stung his left cheek as Krysty shot the scavvie in the face with her short-barreled handblaster. Ryan sensed minute bits of unburned propellant clacking against the patch that covered that eye. Though the short barrel of the little .38 produced a shattering muzzle-blast that close up, he never heard it. His ears already rang from repeated booms from his big 7.62 longblaster.

He threw himself forward and up, rolling to his feet in time to buttstroke another screaming scavvie across the face. He felt a yielding instant and then a crunch as a cheekbone gave way. The scavenger staggered back, dropping a big 1911-style semiauto handblaster to clutch at its stove-in face.

Her face, Ryan realized. It meant no more to him than what species of bug he’d just crunched beneath his boot heel. Running with the Trader, he’d long ago learned the brutal lesson that those who came to chill you had no sex or age. They had to die if you wanted to live.

Quickly Ryan stooped to prop the Steyr against the wall. Even in emergencies you didn’t want to go dropping precision optics on the ground. Using the longblaster as a club was bad enough.

As he put down the rifle with his left hand he drew the big fat-bladed panga from its sheath with the right. The wounded woman, screaming like a stuck steam whistle with fury and agony, yanked a blade from her own belt and lunged toward him for payback.

Krysty’s S&W 640 boomed again. She either missed the knife-wielding woman or aimed at someone else. Ryan sensed other figures closing in. He slashed the scavvie rushing him slantwise across a trim belly left bare between a stained tank top and filth-crusted baggy camo pants. The wound was a rising, drawing cut that drew a red line across sunburned flesh. It opened like a red-lipped mutie mouth, spilling gray and purple loops of guts. They tripped the woman up and she went down howling.

Jak’s .357 Python ripped out three fast characteristic barks, sizzling with high-energy harmonics. “West! They coming!” the teen shouted. “We triple-screwed!”

Ryan yanked out his SIG, then ducked as a scavvie twenty yards to the north dropped to a knee to spray the defenders with full-auto grief from an M-4. As Ryan dropped he pushed Krysty’s right hip hard with the heel of his hand. Adrenaline boosted his own wiry strength enough to tumble the woman right over…and save her life as a burst of .223 bullets ripped the air where she’d stood a moment before.

With the ringing in his ears amped double by the fierce muzzle-blast of the short-barreled carbine, it took Ryan a beat to realize that he was hearing wild screaming from the other side of the wall. In two different voices, or rather, kinds of voices. One was human, uttering throat-tearing shrieks of wild fear and intolerable agony.

The other set came from something not even remotely human.

He risked a fast peek over the parapet.

“Screamwings!” Krysty exclaimed from his side. As resilient as a hard rubber ball, she’d bounced right back up and into the fight from her tumble, even though both landing on the sharp-cornered rubble and the punch Ryan had given her would have left deep bruises.

They watched wide-eyed as a chicken-size screamwing sank its talons into the blond dreadlocked sides of a goggled scavvie’s head so deeply that blood spurted. The screamwing struck like a snake at his face with its toothed beak. The goggles protected the man’s eyes—until the ravening flying mutie ripped them off and tossed them away with a screech of triumph.

And then the man cried out much louder than the mutant bird.

A flock of the winged horrors had descended as if from the churning orange-and-yellow clouds. After unleashing a few stinging droplets, the clouds had held off spewing lethal acid. But this fall of flesh and feathers and claws wasn’t much improvement.

For the scavvies, anyway. The monsters seemed attracted by the movement of the attackers charging the ring-shaped ruin. Ryan saw at least a dozen. Some battled as futilely as the blond-dreaded man who was sinking to his knees as the horror clutching his head ate his face. Others ran for all they were worth back the way they had come.

It usually meant they died tired as well as screaming. No matter how inspired they were to run, the screamwings flew faster.

And wheeling above, a black crucifix against the mustard clouds, was a shape that seemed as big as a predark light plane.

Not all the screamwings found prey. Some helped their comrades swarm the scavvies. Others turned their attention toward the defenders in the circular ruin. One uttered a squawk and swooped down from twenty yards up.

A blast of .33-caliber double-00 balls from J.B.’s shotgun caught it square and ripped it apart in midair.

The muties turned and flew away. Even the ones sitting and ripping strips of skin and flesh from fallen quarry, some of which still writhed and hollered, snapped open their wings and took off. They flew not in pursuit of the scavvie survivors, now in full retreat, but northwest, toward the top of the tall, dark tower. The ones chasing the scavvies sheered off to join them, uttering hoarse cries.

“Wow,” Mildred said. “I know I busted that one like a blood piñata. But I never knew screamwings to let a little thing like that discourage them so easy before.”

“Hey!” Jak called. “Other coldhearts run, too!”

The words hit Ryan like a fist to the gut. So remarkable, not to mention horrific, had the sudden screamwing attack been that it had all but hypnotized him. He’d stone forgotten they were being hit in a flank attack by what was apparently a second set of enemies.

His eye caught Krysty’s emerald gaze in passing as they both cranked their heads west. Pink spots glowed on her cheeks. She’d got caught up in their unlikely rescue-by-monster, too. And that kind of thing could get you chilled.

Ryan looked toward the flattened building and the stadium looming beyond to see a scavvie stagger and slap his hand to his neck. A short thick feathered shaft transfixed the man’s neck right to left. Ryan knew a crossbow quarrel when he saw one.

The boom of black-powder weapons echoed through the ruins, shot through with the sharp crackle of a full-auto smokeless blaster. Another of the west-side attacker fell. This bunch looked more clean-cut and less grubby than the others. The others turned to race back toward the cover of the collapsed parking structure, some loosing quick shots toward the south, others just beating feet.

“Uh-oh,” Ryan heard J.B. croak. “We got company.”

Something buzzed between Ryan and Krysty to strike off the stub wall with a crack and a little spray of concrete grit. Both tracked the crossbow quarrel as it fell to the mounded dust and broken masonry.

Then both turned as one to look toward the gap in the south portion of the ring that led to the ruined walkway-curved building. A half-dozen men and women stood or knelt there, leveling crossbows and longblasters at them.

Jak already had his hands hoisted over his head. He was normally as bitter-end a fighter as any of them. But a skinny kid in a T-shirt and shorts had appeared right across the ring-wall from him and held the twin muzzles of a long black-powder scattergun a handspan away from Jak’s pale right ear.

Ryan glanced at Krysty, who turned to stand by his side. She shrugged.

“Reckon you got the better of us,” he called.

“Reckon we do,” said a tall, lanky man with a fair complexion, a sort of narrow carrot head topped by a tangle of ginger hair. He wore loose khaki cargo pants and a green T-shirt, both too new-looking to be anything but salvage recently unwrapped from the original plastic. His voice was soft, and he looked a bit unhealthy to Ryan. But he carried the M-4 as if he knew which end the bullets came out of, and he showed no hesitancy in voice or posture.

Ryan dropped his panga beside him. “Do what you gotta do.”

Men armed with crossbows disarmed the companions. Like their leader, they were dressed in crisp predark clothing that mostly fit them. One of the benefits of living in or near a nuked-out city was the ability to reap its bounty.

One of their captors, a burly young man with brown hair, scraped the housing of the Steyr’s scope against the concrete wall.

“Careful with that, son,” Ryan rasped. “That’s delicate precision optics you’re dealin’ with, there.”