sideways, down the river.
'Keep on it,' yelled J.B., nearest to Hennings, holding the black man as he folded into his arms, blood gushing from the back of his head.
Ryan sprayed the men on the bank with his blaster, getting a vicious satisfaction from seeing three or four of them go down, kicking and jerking. But the man with the musket had reached the safety of the fringe of low scrub.
The buggy jolted and tipped as it reached the far side of the river and moved up the sloping bank. The six wheels worked independently, grinding over the tangled roots of the bayous. Mud and water splashed up off the huge tires.
Low branches scraped across the top of the swampwag, leaves crowding in on the crouching men and women. The moment they were totally under cover, Finnegan kicked the engine to a stop, letting it idle and die in a grinding of fears; vaulting off his seat he got back to where J.B. still cradled Hennings.
'How is?..'
Both Finnegan and Hennings had ridden with the Trader on his expeditions for some years. They'd both seen a lot of deaths. Both of them knew the truth.
The leaden ball had struck the black man just above the right eye, leaving a neat dark hole from which a little blood seeped, bright scarlet against the skin. The exit hole was huge: a chunk of skull the size of a man's fist had been punched out in jagged fragments, blood and brains slopping all over the bottom of the buggy.
Krysty, Lori and Doc stood helplessly by, looking down at the felled man. Lori was crying silently, her shoulders shaking, tears sliding down her smooth cheeks, pattering into the spreading pool of blood.
Hennings's eyes were open, blinking in shock. Though the brain damage was clearly terminal, a shred of life still remained. His eyes sought Finnegan, fighting to focus on the red face of his oldest friend.
'I'm here, Henn,' said Finnegan, leaning over the dying man.
'Going dark, Finn.'
'Yeah. Mebbe a storm on the way.'
'What?..'
'What blaster?' guessed Finnegan. 'Some fucking musket from the cave days.'
'Good, shooting.' Hennings's tongue flicked out across his dry lips.
'Not fucking bad, friend.'
Not far to the west, there was a dazzling burst of sheet lightning, followed by a deafening peal of rolling thunder.
Henn struggled to speak. 'Do this mean what I think it do?'
Finnegan nodded. 'It do.'
Hennings's eyes remained open, but life slipped away, leaving them blank and empty.
As the first heavy drops of rain began to fall about them, Finnegan lowered his head and wept.
Chapter Five
For nearly two hours the rains came pounding down so hard that it was impossible to move. There was a stained brown tarpaulin inside the swampwag that they managed to pull up over themselves, keeping the worst of the storm off. But even then the rain was so devastating that it seeped through the canvas in a fine spray, soaking them all. Water collected in the bottom of the buggy, diluting the blood from Hennings's corpse, turning the crimson to pink.
It was the worst storm that Ryan Cawdor had ever experienced.
It wasn't the banshee gales Ч he'd heard those farther north in the Deathlands. But the lightning and thunder were almost continuous, pounding at the ears until the senses began to totter. The rain swept in, seeming at times as if it were a solid shroud of tumbling water. At one point J.B. stuck his head from under the tarpaulin, taking care to remove his glasses first, trying to see if there was any sign of the storm abating. He pulled back a few seconds later, blinking and gasping.
'Can't breathe. Drown out there, in open air. That's the trouble. No damned air. Just water.'
By the time it eased to a persistent drizzle, the noise of the thunder drifting inland, it was close to dusk. The purple-black clouds remained, hiding the setting sun.
During the two hours, Finnegan hardly spoke. Not that conversation was easy above the noise of the thunder and the drumming of the monsoon on the stretched canvas sheet. He sat, his head in hands, beside Hennings's corpse. He ignored all attempts to console him. Only Ryan's words about having iced several of the natives seemed to cheer him at all.
For some time Ryan had worried that their attackers might be creeping around, readying an ambush. But the experience of the Armorer convinced him that as long as the rains lasted they were safe.
But now it was quieting.
'J.B.? What d'you reckon?'
'Go.'
'Where?'
'Same way we said 'fore Henn bought the farm.'
'South. Way the blacktop was going. Move until it gets dark?'
'Yeah. Stay in the swampwag. Best chance we got. It's noisy as a butchered sticky, but it can go over any kind of land and water. We got the blasters to hold anyone off. Go south and then find a good defensive position for the night. That's the way I see it.'
Ryan agreed.
Hennings's sudden death had depressed him, made him question what he was doing as the leader of the group. When the Trader had walked off into the night and never returned, he handed over the command of the party to Ryan. And what had Ryan done with it? Taken a handful of comrades on a crazy expedition through a mat-trans gateway.
Then, in only a few days, three of the original eight were lost. Tall, sullen-faced Okie, one of the top blasters, a girl who kept her own counsel. Hunaker, with her cropped green hair and her incessant taste for anyone of either sex at any time.
And now Hennings.
'We're going to move,' he said, throwing back the tarpaulin, standing and stretching. He tasted the flatness of iron on his tongue, carried on the drizzling rain. There was also a hint of the sharpness of gasoline in the air.
'What 'bout Henn?' asked Finnegan.
If Finn hadn't been there, Ryan probably would have dumped the body over the side of the swampwag into the swollen muddy river.
'We bury him, Finn,' he replied.
The voice was sweet and pure, ringing like a crystal goblet, unsullied by the rain and the dark and a friend's violent death.
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound... That saved a wretch like me...
The digging was accomplished with a short-hafted trenching tool they found in the back of the buggy. After going a couple of feet down, Ryan and J.B. were for stopping, but Finn took the shovel, wordlessly continuing in a frenzy of action; mud and clods flew to either side as he bent to the task; he paused only when the grave was a full five feet deep, the sides slick with the rain.
'Now' was the first word he said.
With a touching dignity, the fat man lifted his friend's body and laid it out straight on the short, cropped grass. He took some rags from the buggy and wiped Hennings clean, then closed the eyes firmly. Folding the arms across the chest, Finn placed the HK54A submachine gun in the cold graying hands.
'Give me help with a piece of that tarpaulin, Ryan,' said Finn,
Together they cut a piece off, struggling to keep it as straight as possible. While Finn steadied the corpse,
