Three of the four were down and done in less time than it took to draw a deep breath.
The last of the dogs was a grizzled veteran, seamed along the flanks, one eye staring blankly ahead of it. It hesitated between the three potential victims for its slavering teeth. Krysty was off-balance, and Ryan saw the dog turn to her. He shouted, trying to distract it, drawing its attention to where he stood above the corpse of the chilled pack leader.
It came in on a crabbing, sidling attack, keeping its belly low to the earth, head to one side, watching Ryan through its good eye. In the brief pause Ryan could hear more dogs coming toward them. And the clatter of hooves. Someone was shouting in an enraged, hoarse voice.
"Watch it!" J.B. called out.
The warning wasn't necessary. This animal wasn't like those in the first trio. This was a wily campaigner that saw three of its pack dead or dying and a man with a long silver tooth in its hand. It came in, feinting to spring, then snapped at Ryan's knee. He only just dropped his guard low enough, cutting the dog along its shoulder.
But it was lightning fast, biting at Ryan's knife hand despite its own wound. The teeth missed, but the muzzle rapped him across the knuckles.
Making him drop the blade.
"Gaia!" Krysty yelled, quickly reversing her own knife to throw it at the dog, but the animal was too close to Ryan to take the risk.
The dog jumped for the throat, jaws gaping, its foul breath making Ryan gag. Its sightless eye rolled skyward, the other fixed on the man's face with a demonic intent. There wasn't time to dodge.
As it jumped, he braced himself for the charge, grabbing at the raking front paws, gripping one in his right hand and one in his left. A Tex-Mex puma hunter from down south, near Lubbock, had told him this trick during one long night of drinking.
Ryan had never had the chance to try it before now.
And he was only going to get one chance to try it. Or the crossbred black dog would rip his face off.
With all of his power, Ryan wrenched the animal's forelegs apart. There was a ghastly sound like splitting a hickory log with a long-handled ax. The hound's rib cage was burst apart by the savagery of the man's attack, rup-turing its heart and lungs in a single devastating moment. Its head snapped back, and its good eye glazed. The body shuddered as life departed, and Ryan was able to drop the lifeless corpse into the dirt at his feet.
"Nice," J.B. said admiringly. "Very nice."
"Thanks, friend." He stooped to pick up the fallen dagger and grip it ready for the next wave of attacking dogs.
"Getting real close," Krysty said, stooping to clean her own blade in the dry earth by her boots. "If they all come together, we'll go down."
It was undeniably true.
Over the years Ryan had seen a few vids from before the long winters and read some books as well. One or two were adventure stories, where the hero always seemed to have a plan. Right at that moment, Ryan didn't have any real plan at all.
Kill as many of the dogs as possible. Even take a few sec men along to the chilling. Live for an hour or so before buying the farm yourself.
Wasn't much of a plan.
Half a dozen of the pack appeared, muzzles foaming, red-eyed, on the edge of the clearing. They were hesitating, cautious, as they scented and then saw the dead dogs. Ryan, Krysty and the Armorer faced them, knives blood-slick and ready, knowing it wouldn't be easy to hold off so many of the killer animals at once.
"Back-to-back," Ryan said. "Don't let 'em get in behind us." He paused a moment. "For as long as we bastard can."
The dogs sniffed uncertainly at the trampled ground, edging closer to their prey. The open space reeked with spilled blood, and it quietened the animals, their howling sinking to low growls. In the woods beyond them, the noise of horsemen and shouting came nearer.
Ryan licked his lips, tasting his own sweat. It wasn't going to be long now. He was conscious, not for the first time in the past few hours, that he had fled the ville of Front Royal to save his life. Now, within a day or so of his return, after twenty years, he was going to lose it.
A whip cracked, and it seemed to trigger the crossbreeds. Like greyhounds loosed from the slips, they charged simultaneously. Ryan braced himself for the shock of the attack.
The burst of automatic gunfire scattered the dogs in a heap of kicking, biting, mewing flesh. Ryan's keen ear heard about a dozen rounds, continuous fire. Only one animal escaped the burst, and it turned tail and ran back toward the huntsmen.
"Thanks, Jak," J.B. shouted, grinning at Ryan and the woman. "One of the M-16s. Once you've heard it, you never forget."
The fourteen-year-old albino boy appeared like a ghost from the thick brush. He held the smoking rifle in his right hand, and his lips were parted in a broad smile.
"Found this in hand of dead sec man. Didn't want no more."
"Thanks, Jak," Ryan said. "Now they know we've got a blaster, it's a different game. They'll hold the dogs back and press us in toward the river. Trap us there. Spare ammo?"
"No. Bitch, ain't it?"
Krysty pulled at Ryan's sleeve. "I can hear them, lover. You're right. Calling the hounds in. I can hear your brother 'screaming for sec men to come in after us. No takers. Not with half a mag left in the blaster."
"Without the dogs, we could..." Ryan checked himself. "No. They'd... Fireblast! Best we got. Follow me."
"Where?" J.B. asked.
"Gas store," he threw back over his shoulder as he ran toward the northeast, farther into the Oxbow Loop.
"Killed how many?"
"A dozen of the bravest dogs, Baron Cawdor. Some with knives, others with Trooper Rogers's stolen blaster."
"And he's chilled by the twisting, turning, whoreson Ryan?"
"Throat opened, my lord," the sergeant said. He'd known things were going wrong ever since that mumbling dotard had turned up and broken off his rotting tooth. Then the embarrassment of the puppy being splashed all over the main hall of the ville. Now it was going from bad to much, much worse. A dozen hounds butchered. The best of the pack. And signs that the baron was about to slip over the edge into one of his trank-fueled rages.
"They can't get through to the ville?"
"No, my lord. Every yard across the neck of the land is patrolled. Not even a water rattler could slip by. No, my lord, your brother and his friends are still in the Loop."
"His traitor friends, Sergeant," Harvey said, smiling his crooked smile. Sweat was pouring off his lardy face in rivulets, drenching the ornate cloak.
"Traitors, indeed, Baron," the sec officer agreed. "We got the dogs leashed. Only place they can be is near the gas store, close by the Sorrow's banks."
"What if they get in there?"
"Then they never get out. We'll have 'em like flies in a bottle. Shall we all lead on after the dogs, my lord?"
"Lead on, bleed on, read on, weed on, bleed on and on."
The sergeant turned away, face schooled to impassivity from years of working for Baron Harvey Cawdor.
The gas store was a squat, ugly building isolated at the end of a narrow trail that cut off the main road away from the ville. It dated from before the holocaust, but nobody had ever known what its use had been. An old woman once told Ryan that she'd heard from her gran that it had been used for taking and storing ice from the Sorrow, before the turbulent river had been called by that name and before the nuking had upset some of the shifting rocks underpinning the Shens, making the Sorrow the untamed terror it now was.
Trees grew thickly around the store, which measured around thirty feet square. The walls were of stone, held together by crumbling mortar. There was a window at the rear that had been filled in a century before. The door was of iron, secured by a massive padlock, now rusting. Knowing what the price of failure would be, nobody from the ville or the country around would have dared to try to break into the baron's own store of gasoline. The liquid was stored in metal drums, placed along the inner walls of the building.