“Jump!” Bane screamed.
Trench already had his door open. Bane tumbled out his side an instant after him and an instant before the Ford climbed into the dragon’s mouth.
The monster coughed, spit it out up and over its head. The rear tires it used for feet dug deeper as its smaller front ones were parted from the ground. The dragon reared up on its hind legs, seeming to hover there for a moment before the weight of its massive shovel arm forced it to tumble over, metal screeching against hard gravel and forming a death scream as the metal creature slipped over the side, mouth first. Flames jumped up in its path.
Bane struggled to his feet, then limped over to Trench. Trench’s arms had been torn by the rocky surface, and his hands were reduced to mangled slabs of meat. His fingers trembled as he returned Bane’s gun.
“You’ll need it,” he said, his eyes pointing toward a convoy of lights, narrowly spaced like those of jeeps, climbing the mountainside.
An army was approaching, coming for Von Goss no doubt.
Bane saw Trench’s spent gun protruding from his belt. “I’ve still got two clips. That leaves one for each of us.”
And he was handing one to Trench even as they scampered toward a rock ledge leading to a plateau. Trench snapped it home, started clawing for purchase in the stone above him.
The parade of jeeps was almost upon them.
They climbed quickly, dragging hand over hand and squeezing fingers against stone until the tips of their fingers bled raw. The jeeps’ headlights slid against them as they reached the top and they dropped low, hugging the ground and holding onto the hope that they hadn’t been spotted until bullets pounded the ledge just below them.
Trench started to go for his gun, resigned to making their stand from right here.
“No,” Bane said, grasping his arm. He glanced around. The plateau they had reached boasted only a slight rise. Through the darkness, he could make out breaks in the dense forest. Trails … “Over there,” he showed Trench.
And they set out down the first one they saw. Bane bit his lip against the locking pain in his legs. His knees had suffered the brunt of the dive from the car, leaving his motions unsteady. Trench was not much better. His left leg was virtually useless and had to be dragged behind him like a chain, not to mention the horrible wounds on his hands. But with a trail to follow now they could make it. They could—
Bullets sliced the air in the path to their rear. Bane glanced quickly back and caught only the flicker of dark motion. No sense in wasting a shot; he’d need every bullet he had. Bane made out four sets of footsteps twenty yards behind them and another half dozen or so closing rapidly from the opposite side of the woods. The opposition had obviously found another route to the plateau and was exploiting the advantage to its fullest.
“We can’t outrun them,” he told Trench.
“Or outfight them at this point. Unless …”
Their eyes had locked on the same target simultaneously: an old, weather-beaten log cabin. Someone’s hunting refuge, no doubt left abandoned for years, standing in a clearing some fifty yards ahead to the right. Bane lit out toward it, helping Trench along.
Trench crashed through the door, but Bane didn’t follow. He swung abruptly back as he felt the shapes rushing in from the rear enter his sure-killing range. His move took them totally by surprise and by the time they had slid to a halt and readied their rifles, Bane had snapped off four shots, three of them kills and one just as good.
“I bought us some time,” he said, as Trench closed the heavy door behind him.
“For all the good it will do.”
Bane shrugged. He knew it was hopeless now, knew it was over. But it was not in his nature to give up. More than anything else that was what his training had taught him and more than anything else that was what he retained. Hopelessness had never existed for him. There were always alternatives, the problem being to find them.
The two side windows of the cabin shattered in a hail of automatic fire. Bane and Trench dove to the floor, instinctively toward opposite sides. Bullets thundered over them and more glass coated their backs. Each crept toward a window, palming the pistols which felt like toys against the powerful weapons of their attackers.
Bane chanced a volley, firing three shots at shadows in the dark, aiming only at motion. Two figures lurched backward. Trench fared even better. Four of the attackers chanced a rush in his direction and three ended up piled in a bloody heap, scarlet pumping from their neatly ruptured hearts.
Silence reigned outside, evidence of their attackers changing their strategy. The fact that taking them wouldn’t be a simple task was obvious now and the opposition would stop looking for a clean kill and try for something else.
The first grenade shattered the brief stillness of the night and the second followed immediately. Both were direct hits on the roof and sent a measure of the ceiling showering down, exposing Trench and Bane to the black air. A third grenade pounded the front door while another made it through a break in the roof only to be caught miraculously in midair by Trench who proceeded to hurl it back out the window with half a second to spare. The blast took out five more of the opposition, but Trench had exposed himself and he now felt a rapid series of spits cough into his abdomen and spine. He went down hard, holding tight to his pistol, then crawling back to his perch by the window and holding on there as death reached out for him.
Bane was about to move across to him when the next grenade blast tore a hole in the floor. Bane followed Trench’s dying eyes toward it. The hole was deeper than it should have been and Bane quickly realized why. It was a tunnel! This wasn’t a hunting retreat at all, but a hideout for someone who needed an escape route available at all times. The Poconos were full of such cabins, in past years used as hideaways for criminals on the run, and they had stumbled upon one.
Bane looked over at Trench.
“Go,” he grimaced. “Get out while you still can.”
For some reason Bane hesitated, as bullets singed the air around him.
“You’re the best, Winter Man, you always were. Go and save your world. I’ll …”—Trench struggled for breath and coughed blood—“… hold them back as long as I can.”
Bane nodded and slid his pistol across the floor toward Trench. He wanted to say something, do something more for a man who for so long had been his rival and would now die his friend. His hand reached out as if to grasp Trench, the gesture precluded by the distance between them, and Trench smiled slightly, motioning him to go.
Bane plunged into the hole. The tunnel was totally black but darkness had been a friend to him longer than it had been an enemy. He visualized himself back in the city twenty years before under the King’s careful tutelage. It was like having the blindfold on all over again. A training exercise, nothing more.
Bane snailed on through the narrow, blackened corridor on his hands and knees. The dirt was cold but firm, solid on all sides of him. Above, he could still hear muffled shots and explosions. Trench would not let them take him with merely bullets. He’d make them bring the whole cabin down on top of him, sealing the truth of Bane’s escape long enough for it to become complete.
The dirt ceiling lowered and Bane dropped all the way to his stomach, clawing his way forward against the cold dirt on his elbows the same way he had during fire fights in Nam. There was a blast from somewhere above him and Bane felt a shower of dirt rain down coating his back. Trench had made the opposition blow the cabin up, thus hiding the tunnel and Bane’s escape from them. His rival turned friend had done what he had to, and now Bane would do the same. He shook his head free of dirt and pushed his way forward, oblivious to the pain and the red rawness of his forearms.