Playfair's Axiom. James Axler

winked at Ryan, pale in cloud-filtered daylight. These new attackers were no cowards. They also weren’t stupe enough to just keep walking up on someone who had them in the sights of a big-bore longblaster from good cover.

      Instead of pulling off another shot, Ryan slid back down the brief slope. He felt the hard hot chunks of rock and debris roll against the hard muscles of his gut. His right hip throbbed where a hard corner had caught him when he went to his belly. He barely noticed. It was just pain. And for Ryan Cawdor, pain was just a reminder he wasn’t yet chilled.

      The gray-white concrete dust that rose up to invade his nose and mouth and turn the inside of his eyelid into sandpaper as it scraped across the vulnerable cornea was a greater problem. He blinked furiously as he rose to a crouch and ran south after his companions.

      They stumbled through a nightmare of urban devastation. The concrete dust, which seemed to dry quickly despite frequent rains in the valley of the great river, sucked down their boots, and concealed pockets and loosened blocks that could snap an ankle like a dry twig. So they couldn’t run very fast. And no matter how desperate their need they had to pay attention to where they put their feet, slowing them even further.

      At the edge of a relatively clear stretch of street Ryan stopped, spun and knelt to cover their backtrail with his longblaster. A bearded head appeared above a heap of gray rubble. Ryan lowered his head behind the scope, carefully maintaining a distance between his eye and the lip of the telescope eyepiece that protected the lens. Otherwise the sharp recoil of a 7.62 mm NATO cartridge lighting off would die-stamp the eyepiece housing right into socket, giving him a nasty half-raccoon mask of purple bruise or even cutting a ring in his flesh.

      His target hadn’t learned the real danger in pursuing armed prey. Unfortunately for him. Ryan held the reticule centered on his forehead, and he could see the sweat etching rivulets in the black grime that covered the man’s face, see his lips working inside his rat’s-nest beard as he cursed the effort of climbing up the low but treacherous slope. He was carrying a rusty double-barreled shotgun in one hand and using the other to climb with.

      At the top of the heap he paused. For the first time he raised his eyes to scope the longer distance before him.

      That pause was what Ryan waited for, knowing it would come. It wasn’t that a head was a hard target; the target was barely fifty yards off, an easy shot for a marksman like Ryan over open sights. What made it a challenge was the way the target tended to move around.

      As the grubby hair-fringed face came up, Ryan was releasing half of a held-in breath. The trigger cracked; the rifle bucked and roared. Ryan jacked the bolt as the weapon rode up and then settled back down.

      The scavvie lay slumped with his face in the dust. The back of his head was a steaming mess.

      Though his ears rang from the shot, Ryan heard the man’s buddies curse in guttural fury. One stuck a remade M-16 up over the top of a low stub of yellow-brick wall and triggered a random burst.

      Even though Ryan had pulled his eye back from the scope so he could cover a field of vision wider than the tiny little circle the glass gave him, he couldn’t see where the shots hit. He didn’t even hear the secondary cracks when the needlelike .223 bullets passed.

      He turned and sprinted across a mostly level stretch, covered in what looked like a mix of river silt and concrete dust. To his right, a building appeared to have fallen mostly west. He raced for the far more promising cover of the ruin in front of him. At one time it had been a circular tower. Now all that remained was a chest-high ring of white masonry.

      Ryan vaulted the remnants of a broken wall. Mildred and J.B. knelt inside the rubble, covering the one-eyed man’s dash for cover. J.B. had his shotgun shouldered, while Mildred had her blocky ZKR 551 target pistol in a two-handed Weaver grip, left hand folded over right, elbow bent down to provide stabilizing tension against the almost-straight gun arm. Ahead Ryan could see Jak cautiously scoping the remains of a low-curved structure, at least half-intact, that led from the first ruin circle toward a much broader tower a hundred yards south. Krysty and Doc knelt to cover the albino teen.

      “Got it,” Ryan shouted.

      He turned and hunkered down behind the wall, placing the Steyr’s forestock into a sort of notch in the solid masonry of the broken wall. As Ryan searched the ruins behind for targets he wondered why the scavvies were pressing them so hard. The scavvies kept dogging the companions despite losses, and were willing to burn way too much ammo to do it. Even if they were cartridge-flush from trade or finding caches, it didn’t make sense to burn so many bullets just for the fugitives’ own handful of blasters and the contents of their backpacks, whatever those may hold.

      Must be Krysty they really want, he thought grimly. And Mildred, too.

      Krysty was a beauty with the stopping power of a 12-gauge slug, even by the standards of the glossy mags and vids that survived skyfall. Mildred—Dr. Wyeth—wasn’t to Ryan’s taste, frankly, a little too stocky. But she was still far better-looking than most women in Deathlands.

      What drove them so hard, likely, was pure lust: for the use they’d get out of the women themselves, and then for the jack or barter they’d reap from selling them in what would still be considered prime condition, even if they wound up badly bruised and shy a tooth or two. Selling a pair the likes of Krysty and Mildred would bring them more than two months’ good scavenge, if the going rate in St. Lou was comparable to other places Ryan had known.

      The one-eyed man heard and felt Krysty and Doc peel away from either side of him. Then there came the crack of a bullet passing fast, followed by thump and a grunt of surprise as much as pain.

      And then Mildred’s piercing scream.

      Chapter Three

      “J.B., no!” Mildred cried. The despairing echo chased itself mockingly around the circular ruins.

      Ryan’s heart seemed to seize in his chest. He ducked behind the wall and turned.

      The Armorer stood as if rooted in place. Ryan could clearly see where a few threads of his leather jacket had been pushed out a fraction of an inch behind him by the heavy-caliber bullet that had blown right through the small man’s chest, front to back.

      Time froze. A thin streamer of blood hung in the air behind J.B.’s back, fractionating into round red droplets as it distanced itself from him. With a roaring silence in his ears and an abyss of emptiness opening in his gut, Ryan watched his oldest living friend, his best friend, the man who’d had his back since he was a pup, spin and topple to lie on his back in the dust with his glasses disks of emptiness, reflecting the troubled yellow sky above.

      Mildred scrambled toward the fallen Armorer. Though tears dug gullies through the dust on her cheeks, her professional training and experience had taken over. She was kneeling over J.B., checking his vital signs even before Ryan snapped out of it.

      “He’s still alive!” she called. “Missed the heart.” She shrugged frantically out of the straps of her backpack.

      Ryan’s attention snapped back into focus. The blood pennon had streamed away east toward the great river. That meant the shot had come from the west. Bringing the Steyr to his shoulder, Ryan turned his blue eye that way.

      Fifty or sixty yards away what looked like a parking structure had pancaked, creating a stratified slab a story or so high. At least half a dozen people in scraps and oddments of salvaged clothing advanced across a broad area overgrown with green weeds to their knees, pausing to shoot then charging on. Four were men. Two looked to be women.

      As Ryan watched, one man rocked back to the recoil of what he reckoned to be a battered Springfield M-1A, the semiauto-only civvie version of the old M-14 battle rifle. The same caliber as Ryan’s Steyr, it was a weapon well prized in the Deathlands. It was likely, Ryan thought, this was the bastard who shot J.B.

      But he wasn’t shooting at Ryan. Instead he aimed north toward the rubble of the westward-fallen building that the companions had bypassed. The scavvies who had been chasing them appeared to be taking cover