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aware of Krysty and J.B., following his headlong dash.
Ryan had reacted so quickly that not a single shot was fired from the men in
the jeep. By the time the Russians clambered down from the vehicle and ran to
the place where the trio had vanished, there was no sign of them.
The woods were lonely, dark and deep.
"WE GOT MILES TO GO," Ryan said, crouching against the bole of a dead spruce
tree.
"Back to the house?" Krysty panted, throwing off her furs, wiping sweat from
her forehead.
"No choice. If the freezie'd been with us we could have bluffed our way. I
heard one warning shout from the guys in the jeep. Once you stop, you're dead.
Mebbe they'll think we don't hear too good. Or we're scared by the way they
appeared."
J.B. was trying to clean his glasses on a kerchief from one of his capacious
pockets. "Yeah. We have to go back. Be stupid to get holed up like that. Now
we know they got sec men out. See the badge?"
Ryan shook his head. "No."
"Like you described those troops up in the snows. The Russkies. Single silver
circle. No doubt about it."
"If they're regular soldiers then they could have radio communications. Call
up reinforcements. Sooner we get away from here the better. That door to the
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Axler,_James_-_DeathLands_9_Red_Equinox gateway's well hidden, but not good
enough if we finished up trapped in there.
Few pounds of ex-plas'll bring the place on our necks."
"Back to the trail?" J.B. queried. "Figure it's the only way. We try and
circle around and we're in trouble deep."
"They could be waiting," Krysty said, replacing her pis-tol in its belt
holster.
"This wood's so thick that we could get close enough to chill 'em from cover,"
J.B.
suggested. "Long gun like those Kalashnikovs& great in the open. Useless in
here.
Can't see more than six feet in any direction. Knife's more use."
"Time's wasting," Ryan said. "Longer we wait, the more they got to cut us off.
Let's go."
THE APPROACH OF EVENING brought a return to the colder weather. But it was not
nearly as lethally chill as it had been the previous day. The temperature
slithered down toward freezing, but the mixture of mud and thawing snow
re-mained semiliquid. It was difficult and treacherous to walk through.
There was no sign of the jeep along the track, though a set of double wheel
marks showed it had driven as far along as the miserable little ville, and
then returned in the general direction of Moscow.
Ryan led the way around the hamlet, taking care to keep out of sight, guessing
that the sec men could have given some sort of warning about strangers in the
area.
The dog's corpse had been dragged away from the killground.
"Going to be a struggle to get to the house before full dark," J.B. warned.
"Still a good few miles to go."
"No point trying to hole up. It's the best place we got," Ryan replied.
They heard the wolves when they were within the last mile, far off, almost at
the
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Axler,_James_-_DeathLands_9_Red_Equinox edge of hearing. The howl was a
susurrating ghost of a sound, rising and falling, like the keening of a mother
for her dead child. Across a distant valley, the noise echoed back from unseen
hills, making it difficult to judge where the pack was running. Ryan put the
direction some way behind them and to the south. But the noise was coming
closer. Louder.
In the century since doomsday, many wild creatures had come back from the
brink of extinction: cougars and rat-tlers, grizzlies and wolves. During the
tired embers of the 1990s the creatures had been illegally poached and hunted
into the remote high country and the desert fastnesses.
It hadn't taken long for them to realize that their most bitter enemy, man,
was all but gone from the land. So they returned. And they bred and they
flourished. And, in some cases, they also mutated.
"How far away, lover?" Ryan asked.
"Five miles. Getting nearer."
"Hunting pack?"
Krysty nodded. "Sure. Moves around fifteen to twenty miles in an hour if
they're on a warm scent. And if they're hungry. If it's been, a bleak winter
in these parts, they could be real hungry."
The sun was long gone, with only the palest hint of its passing tinting the
western sky. A three-quarter moon was sailing calmly through tattered relics
of cloud.
During the warmth of the day a surprising amount of the snow had melted away,
patches of white remaining only in hollows and shadowed places.
"Don't want to lead them to the others," Ryan said.
"Can keep 'em out easy of that place. There was shut-ters against the broken
windows on the first floor. Doors were sound."
Ryan agreed with the Armorer. "Sure. But if they set outside for a while, it
could
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Axler,_James_-_DeathLands_9_Red_Equinox kind of attract some attention to us."
"If we were closer to the hut we could have cut some flesh off the giant
mutie.
That would have sidetracked them."
J.B.'s suggestion was a good one, but the loping wolves could be on top of
them within fifteen minutes. Ryan looked at the narrow stream, at that point
less than a dozen feet in width.
"Come on," he said, wading in, gasping at the coldness as it soaked instantly
through his breeches. It was nearly waist deep on him, and came up over the
belt of J. B. Dix, who took off his fur coat and removed the blaster before
stepping into the fast-flowing stream. Krysty Wroth came last, whistling
between her teeth at the biting shock.
"Gaia! All I need. Perfect end to a fruitful, perfect day."
"Tomorrow we do it again with Rick to field the ques-tions. Crazy to think
about doing it this way," J.B. panted.
"Long as the freezie don't die on us," Ryan added, stepping cautiously over a
submerged branch.
The old trick worked. Without it they could have found themselves fighting the
wolves off from the very steps of the American country dacha. They heard the
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