Just as it charged.
With the Commando on full auto, Blade sent a withering hail of slugs into the mutation’s head and neck. The searing lead stopped it cold but only long enough for it to shake its head as if in annoyance, and take a flying bound.
Still firing, Blade threw himself aside. His rounds stitched a zigzag pattern from the mutate’s front shoulder to its hindquarters as it hurtled past. Enraged, it wheeled to charge again.
The Commando went empty. As he’d practiced countless times, Blade ejected the spent magazine and slapped in another. Working the bolt, he cut loose as the mutate leaped, catching it full in the face and forehead. For a few harrowing moments he thought it would reach him but his .45-caliber hailstorm slammed it to a stop and brought it crashing to earth at his feet.
Stepping back, Blade let out a breath of relief at his close call. If not for the Commando, he’d be dead. As much as he liked knives—big knives—he stood no chance at all against a creature that size using his bowies alone. He’d never admit it to Hickok, but there was no substitute for the right gun at the right time.
He walked around the thing, studying it. The creature was proof that mutates were everywhere, not just the North American continent. It confirmed the Family’s belief that the widespread use of chemical, biological and radiological weapons had wreaked genetic havoc on the entire world. Somehow, the unnatural stew had drastically altered the metabolism of a host of animals. He’d personally encountered everything from a mutated squirrel to a mutated bear, and now, a mutated tiger.
That the mutates were still around so long after the Big Blast tended to confirm another Family suspicion, namely, that they were here to stay. Mutations were part of the new natural order.
Blade resumed his hunt for Hickok and Yama. He debated replacing partially spent magazine and opted not to. He must make the ammo he had last. There was no telling when, or even if, he would have access to more.
The jungle had fallen silent at the thunder of his Commando but now it came to life again. Raucous cries rent the canopy and snarls and growls issued from deeper in.
Blade had read in the Library that before the war Thailand was home to almost a thousand species of birds, and judging by the variety of gaily plumed examples flying about, he didn’t doubt it.
Monkeys chattered and scampered from limb to limb. A flying lemur sailed from one tree to another. Long-armed gibbons dangled from branches and eyed him suspiciously.
Blade got a grin out of the primates. He didn’t feel the same about the snakes he glimpsed. One, in particular, looked ungodly large. He was glad it was slithering slowly off.
Half an hour of hard slogging brought him to a low hill. As he skirted it, a new sound reached him; the thuk-thuk-thuk of a blading biting into wood.
Thinking it might be an axe, he cautiously advanced. The chopping grew louder.
Moving behind a ficus tree, he peered out a muscular middle-aged man in baggy pants and sandals who was using a long blade much like a machete to cut down a sapling. Nearby stood a woman in a plain sarong, watching.
Blade had another decision to make. Should he show himself or wait for them to leave? They might be at their wood-cutting all day. He could easily go around but on an impulse he stepped into the open, making sure to point the Commando at the ground.
The woman saw him first. She recoiled a step, her hand rising to her throat, and called out to the man, who stopped chopping and turned.
“Sawa dee,” Blade said, which was Thai for ‘hello’. Touching his vest, he smiled. “Peuang.” It meant ‘friend’. He figured that would show his good intentions.
The man with the machete evidently didn’t see it that way. He raised the machete and came at Blade in a rush.
CHAPTER 23
Hickok had seen a lot of strange things in his travels but it was safe to say few were as strange as the grotesquerie striding arrogantly down the middle of the street.
It was a man, or at least humanoid, in that it had two legs and a head, but that was where any resemblance ended. Over seven feet in height, its legs were twice as long as they needed to be, its torso stunted, its head so wide, it was out of all proportion to the rest. But then, the head needed to be wide to accommodate the four green slanted eyes that glared at those around it from under a sloping forehead that lacked eyebrows. Instead of a nose it had several thin red slits that constantly quivered. The mouth was a lipless maw rimmed with teeth that would do justice to a great white shark, teeth it bared in a perpetual sneer.
“I’ve seen some funny-lookin’ critters in my day,” Hickok said to himself, “but that one takes the cake.”
In a surreal touch of the macabre, the thing wore a uniform complete with knee-high boots and a wide belt that supported a curved sword on one hip and an auto-pistol of unknown manufacture on the other. The uniform was grey, its color a stark contrast to the creature’s purple skin.
People in the street couldn’t get out of the way fast enough. Many averted their gaze and not a few bowed.
Hickok started to move back into the shadows, slinging his Winchester to free his hands. Whether it was the movement or his buckskins, something caused the creature’s head to snap up and its four eyes to fix on him with baleful intensity.
“So much for lyin’ low,” Hickok said. Hooking his thumbs in his gunbelt, he ambled into the
