from his grip, someone's arm around his throat, another attacker hanging on his waist, kicking at his legs. There was the stench of gasoline and sweat as he grappled with the oily bodies.
Despite the shock of the sudden attack, Ryan was able to immediately retaliate. Heaving up, feeling the hold loosen on his waist, he snapped an elbow back as hard as he could, hearing a rib break, and a strangled gasp of pain. The arm was off his throat, and he was able to wriggle to his feet, drawing the panga, the best weapon for hand-to-hand combat.
There were three of them.
Two men and a woman. Muties, like the ones they'd seen on the day they arrived in Louisiana. All of them were around five feet tall, stumpy, squat and muscular. Dressed in torn pants and shirts, they had flapping sandals of hacked rubber on their feet. They stared at him blankly, the sockets of their eyes surrounded by odd scars. The woman held a small crossbow, and the men were armed with machetes shorter and narrower than Ryan's own weapon.
They breathed noisily through open mouths, their arms hanging by their sides. Standing gazing at Ryan, they seemed to be waiting for him to make the first move. Suddenly the woman raised the bow, aiming it jerkily at Ryan's belly.
The thought darted through his mind that this was a squalid and foolish way to die. Alone in the muddy darks, gut-shot with a wooden arrow. He tensed, ready for a desperate dive at her, his senses telling him it would be too late and too slow.
The bow twanged, and the shaft hissed through the air several yards over his head. Ryan stared as the woman staggered sideways, her nailless fingers plucking at the hilt of the slim dagger that sprouted from her neck like a bizarre pendant.
'Take the others, stupe!' hissed Jak Lauren, darting from the undergrowth, a knife in each hand.
The fountain of blood from the woman's severed neck pattered around them; she fell to her knees, then rolled heavily on her back. Her legs spread, and Ryan noticed with revulsion that a small residual penis dangled from her naked belly.
An instant later one of the swampies was on top of him, its dank, noxious breath hot in his face. The machete hissed toward him, and he wriggled around, blocking the blow with his forearm. He stamped on the creature's foot, making it mew like a kitten, breaking away from him.
'Cut its throat!' called Jak Lauren, who was fencing around the other mutie, his knife glinting in the moonlight.
The noise might warn Baron Tourment that they were close. So it was important that they dispose of this threat swiftly.
The swampie came shuffling in, waving its steel blade, grunting with the effort of each feinting blow. Ryan backed off, considering drawing the SIG-Sauer P-226 9 mm blaster. But the ground underfoot was slippery. One mistake, and he would be down and done for.
He darted in and back, stooping as though he'd slipped, one hand going down into the slimy mud. As he straightened, he saw the mutie looming over him, blank eyes like a shark's. Ryan threw a handful of dirt straight into those eyes. The swampie staggered away, grunting in anger.
The eighteen-inch blade of Ryan's panga flitted out and back and out again. Slick with blood. He cut the swampie across the lower forearm, and again across the top of the right thigh. Both had been deep, slashing blows that opened up the flesh into scarlet lips. The creature's machete dropped, and it hopped back, squeaking feebly.
Ryan waited, remembering how hard it had been to kill the living-dead muties before. Dodging around his opponent, Jak Lauren had been grabbed around the chest. But the mutie howled in pain, releasing him, looking in bewilderment at its stubby fingers, which streamed with blood from a dozen cuts; the tiny slivers of razor-steel sewn into the albino's clothing again proved their worth.
The other swampie was moving in on Ryan again, stooping to reach for the fallen blade, fumbling in the dark mud. It was an opportunity that couldn't be missed. Ryan stepped once forward and once to the side, blade up, muscles poised for the downward hack. Steel whispered in the moonlight, then came a solid thunk and grating sound. The panga eventually sliced clean through the mutie's scrawny neck, decapitating, it, the head rolling into the mud, the body slithering at Ryan's feet, jerking and twitching.
Wiping blood from his face, Ryan turned to see if the boy needed aid. But there was no need for worry.
Jak Lauren was amazingly, dazzlingly fast in hand-to-hand combat. Maybe the best Ryan Cawdor had ever seen. He switched the knife from side to side quicker than the eye could follow. The mutie lumbered after him, making great ineffectual swings with its machete that would have sliced the lad in half if they'd landed. Jak pulled away, then sprinting in toward the swampie, took off with a great spring and actually leaped clear over the man. Turning a somersault in the air, he still had the control to slash at the creature's face. The thin knife cut across the eyes, blinding the mutie with streaking blood.
'Off with head, Ryan,' called Jak, landing in an easy forward roll, coming up in a fighter's crouch.
Dodging the mutie's helpless lunge at him, Ryan took a half step to one side and hacked with the panga at the neck. The living-dead mutie had a heavy build, and the blow failed to totally behead it. But the steel severed the spinal column and most of the flesh and muscle. The body fell, spouting blood that seemed black by the light of the moon. The round brutish head remained attached to the shoulders by a stringy thread of gristle and sinew, rolling behind it like an afterthought as the body pitched and jerked.
Ryan stooped to cleanse the blade of his panga in the stubby grass. At his shoulder, Jak Lauren was grinning. 'Easy as shooting sec men,' he said.
'Tourment'll have heard the fight.'
'Let him. Can't get off here. With his crooked legs, he can't run or swim. I'll take him.'
'Or me,' said Ryan, sheathing the panga, then he picked up his G-12, wiping it clean of mud.
'Yeah. You or me, Ryan.' Like a swamp wraith, the boy was off and running, visible mainly by the glimmer of his stark white hair.
The baron nearly managed to fool them. Despite his bulk and his clumsiness, he succeeded in lying quiet in the undergrowth until they passed. Then he made a lumbering charge for the boats before they could turn and follow. But Ryan heard him and yelled out a warning to Jak Lauren.
'Boats, Whitey!'
As Ryan sprinted back along the twisting trail, his boots kicking up spray around him, he glimpsed a monstrously tall man, striding as if he wore stilts, near the narrow strip of beach where the canoes waited. A triple burst from the G-12, fired on the run, didn't come within ten paces of Tourment, but it was enough to make him stumble and dive sideways for cover behind a low mud bank. Ryan, in turn, leaped off the path, finishing up flat against the trunk of a fallen tree, slippery with moss and cold to the touch.
A couple of shots smashed into the wood, only inches from his head, and he flattened down. He tried to identify the flat barking of the blaster. If J.B. had been there he probably would have guessed not only the model of the gun, but even figured out the year of manufacture; all Ryan could tell was that it was a big handgun. He strained his ears and caught the giveaway triple click of a hammer being cocked. That meant a revolver, which probably meant six rounds, but Ryan wasn't about to stake his life on that.
There was a blur of movement, topped with a streak, of white, and Jak Lauren dived to the ground behind another toppled tree a few yards away.
'Yonder,' called Ryan, waving the barrel of his handgun.
Two more shots were snapped off, both coming close. Jak fired once with his Magnum, its six-inch barrel gleaming in the moonlight.
'We got him,' he yelled. 'Got him cold as dead gator meat.'
'Want to talk, snow wolf?' came the voice, calm and measured. Utterly unhurried.
'Want to kill, bastard,' replied Jak Lauren.
'Want to talk, one-eye?'
'Want to kill you, Baron,' replied Ryan Cawdor. His words were rewarded with three spaced bullets, the last shot showering him with splinters of chipped wood. Glancing around the side, he was able to see the gun being withdrawn, and recognized it as a Ruger GP-110. Six shot.
