Shaking Earth. James Axler

like getting hurt, and they especially didn’t like the smell of equine blood. Also their legs, skinny by comparison to their big muscular bodies, were relatively fragile. So he deliberately fired low, hoping to cripple or wound as many mounts as possible as fast as possible.

      Horses screamed, reared. Two went down, one pinning its rider’s leg. One began bucking uncontrollably, and a fourth simply turned and ran away despite its rider’s cursing and hauling back on the reins.

      Like most late-twentieth-century people, at least from Western cultures, Mildred hated seeing animals suffer. She was actually fighting tears when she unloaded a charge of buckshot from J.B.’s M-4000 into the glossy brown chest of a bay. It reared, shrieking in an almost human voice. Its rider calmly aimed a sawed-off double gun at her. She fired at him rapidly and had to have hit him because he fell before his horse did.

      Jak blazed away at a rider charging him. Scarlet bloomed against the horse’s white neck but the animal only stumbled, then came on. The rider was returning fire with a handblaster but only throwing up clumps of pine needles near the albino. Jak rolled to the side as the injured horse ran right through the place where he’d lain prone. Its rider reined it in, pivoted in the saddle, trying to turn his blaster to bear on the albino youth.

      Then the coldheart dropped the handblaster and clapped his hand to his neck just below his ear. It wasn’t quite enough to stem the violent spray of blood from the carotid artery, severed by the leaf-bladed knife Jak had thrown.

      A wiry rider armed with a machete, to which some enterprising postnuke weaponsmith had added a spiked knuckle-duster by way of a handguard, rode a black horse with a white blaze straight for Doc, who was kneeling with his LeMat in one hand and his swordstick in the other. Doc had already fired several shots at other targets, but he emptied the remaining .44 rounds into the horse before the beast collapsed. The rider rolled over his mount’s neck, somersaulted, came up on his feet running right at Doc. He raised his machete over his head for the deathstroke.

      Then he looked down at his chest. A slim length of steel had transfixed it, right through the heart. Doc had unsheathed a rapier from his swordstick, and the coldheart’s run had forced him to impale himself. The marauder looked at Doc with an expression of complete surprise and collapsed.

      One of the coldhearts whose mount had been downed was kneeling, firing wildly with a .22-caliber Ruger autoloading rifle. Abruptly the right side of his head opened up in a cloud of pink spray. Ryan and Krysty had arrived in some brush at the edge of the clearing. The one-eyed man had popped a 7.62 mm round through the raider’s temple.

      There was a rustle and swirl of motion farther down the slope as the other coldhearts withdrew. From the shouting it sounded as if there were plenty of them left.

      “Go!” Ryan yelled, breaking from cover. Shots cracked from the trees, knocking out chunks of bark and raising little sprays of fallen needles from the ground. “We’ve gotta clear out while we got the chance. They won’t hold back for long!”

      Mildred looked toward the deer carcass she’d been gutting. A bullet cut the rope that suspended it from the branch. It fell into the dirt. Not even she had enough twentieth-century squeamishness left to care much about that—it’d wash off—but the damned thing was simply too heavy to try to pick up and haul off under fire.

      “Son of a bitch,” she said. She grabbed her pack and, still clutching J.B.’s shotgun, ran toward the redoubt entrance.

      With a running start Ryan reached the entryway first. Instead of ducking behind the granite protrusion that sheltered the entrance from view, he spun, knelt and began firing to cover the others. They came—Doc Tanner first, running with surprising alacrity, his elbows out to the sides and pumping; Jak, hair trailing like a cloud of white smoke; J.B. crab-walking alongside Mildred to make sure she made it while spurting quick bursts from his Uzi toward the unseen foe.

      Realizing their quarry was somehow getting away, the coldhearts raised an outcry of cheated fury. Riders burst from the trees and scrub like steel marbles from a Claymore mine, hurtling toward the redoubt entrance.

      Ryan dropped them as fast as he could throw the Steyr’s butter-smooth bolt. Krysty was beside him, knowing he’d insist on her getting to safety before he would, but wanting to stand by him as long as she could. “Go!” he told her. She turned to dart inside the entrance they’d left open as he fired the last shot in the SSG’s detachable magazine.

      A quick blur of motion, a sound like an ax hitting wood, a gasp, more of surprise than pain. Ryan took his eye from the scope to see Krysty slumped against the granite face with a crossbow bolt protruding from her back, just inward of the left shoulder.

      “Krysty!” he shouted. The word seemed torn from him like skin from his back.

      The woman came around. With her right hand she raised her blaster. The crossbowman was closing fast, dropping his spent weapon to reach for a Bowie-type knife in a beaded sheath under his arm. With cool deliberation Krysty aimed and shot him through his thick, dirty throat. He roared, the noise drowning in a gurgle of his own blood.

      As he fell, Krysty turned at last and stumbled into the redoubt. A rider loomed above Ryan. He was a big man with flying blond braids and an eagle feather at the back of his skull, grinning all over his bearded, painted face as he raised a battered CAR-4, a 9 mm submachinegun version of the venerable M-16. Ryan knew at once he was the coldhearts’ leader.

      “You lose, fucker,” the blond man said.

      But Ryan had already released the empty rifle with his right hand, still holding it in his left. His panga whispered from its sheath. With a thunk, the heavy blade severed the coldheart’s gunhand right above the wrist.

      The raider boss stared in gape-mouthed amazement at his own hand lying on the bare dirt, spinning as random dying neural impulses spasmed the finger on the subgun’s trigger. Blood sprayed from his arm like a hose.

      Ryan followed his injured woman into the redoubt, then keyed the blastproof door shut.

      Chapter Three

      Hardness against his cheek. Pulsing warm—or was he only feeling the heat being drawn out of his face into a floor cold as a baron’s heart?

      Ryan lay on his belly. He was unaware of having fallen. The world, slowly, ceased to spin around him.

      The groans of his companions made their way through the fog that wrapped his brain. It had been a bad jump, the kind that reached down your gullet and yanked your guts out your mouth.

      Krysty!

      His eye felt as if it were glued shut. He forced it open. The upper lid came away from the lower with a sick gummy sensation. His empty socket throbbed with scarlet pulses of ache.

      Krysty at least had begun the jump on her back, carefully laid down by Mildred and Ryan. She remained pretty much as they had left her, left arm strapped across her sternum to immobilize it. The right, which had been crossed over her stomach, now lay by her side. A thin trickle of blood ran to the floor of the gateway where she had clenched her fist so hard during the jump that her nails had pierced her palm. Her face was unnaturally pale, almost blue, contrasting harshly with her hair, which lay limp around her head like a tangle of red seaweed.

      Ryan crawled to her, more lizard than man, feeling as if a mutie the size of a mountain were squatting on his back jeering at his misery. He grabbed her right arm, felt for pulse inside her wrist. It was there and strong.

      Now that he knew his woman lived, Ryan allowed himself cautiously to become aware of more of his surroundings. The chamber had walls of orange-red armaglass that passed the dim illumination of the room beyond, which had automatically come on when the gateway powered up to materialize them, like the glow of a fire. There were bad smells, not the bland sterile smell of a long-unused chamber. There were sounds, too: dull distant thumps like giant stone fists being slammed together; pops and cracks like the fire of heavy blasters, the kind needed to be toted with a big war wag; and under everything a deep-note noise that wasn’t quite a moan and wasn’t quite