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Blindness hadn't slowed that part of his reflexes, and he caught the thing. Scrawny and hairy, struggling
like crazy, squeaking at him, its long tail lashing against his body.
Long tail?
"Fireblast!" he shrieked. "Krysty! Help me, I'm being attacked by"
"Rats!" she shouted from some way off, her voice distorted by the distance, the walls and the broken
doors and windows. "Stand up and swing the branch, Ryan. For your life! Now! There's dozens of the
mutie bastards!"
He was up in a nanosecond, throwing the rat from him, hearing the dull thump as its body smashed into a
wall. He flailed around with the long stick as the pack of vermin surged at him, feeling more helpless and
hopeless than ever before.
Chapter Eighteen
He was bitten a half-dozen times in the first couple of seconds of the one-sided fight. Two of the rats
were climbing up his body with a sickening nimbleness, light-footed as demons as they scampered toward
his face and throat.
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Ryan used the stick like a medieval quarterstaff, two-handed, swinging it in a tight whirring circle,
catching several of his attackers, hearing the dry snap of brittle bones splintering. The squeaking had
grown to a shrieking, and the animals were pressing around his legs, trying to bring him to the floor by
weight of numbers.
His first impression had been right. The rats were huge, bigger than cats, gigantic creatures spawned in
some postnuke inferno, fattened on the creatures that lived in and around the bayous. One tried to fasten
its grip on his hand, and he shook it off, shuddering at the realization that the thing had a double row of
murderous teeth. If he fell
There was the sound of a shot, repeated twice more, the familiar waspish snapping of Krysty's Smith
amp; Wesson 640. It wasn't a great blaster for any target much over forty feet away, but ideal as a stopper
at closer quarters.
For a moment Ryan felt the rats hesitate.
Krysty fired twice more and the rodents retreated, leaving Ryan a clear space for a few moments. One of
the mutie animals clung to the end of the staff and Ryan swung it to the floor with all his strength,
crushing the creature to death.
"Let's go, lover!"
For a moment he was totally disoriented. Had it not been for Krysty seizing his arm, he could easily have
blundered deeper into the rats' haunt or run out into the sluggish deeps of the swamp.
"This way."
His hands still held tight to the whittled stick, feeling on the one end the broken slivers where the rats had
gnawed at the hard wood.
"Close call," he panted. "They after us?"
Ryan guessed they'd run about forty yards from the building, out onto the almost-submerged causeway
that led eventually back to the ville of Bramton.
That much he knew.
Krysty slowed and twisted slightly as she looked behind her. "Nothing. The shots from the blaster did the
trick, though you were more than holding your own with that chewed-up bit of stick you got there."
"Wasn't chewed up when I started, lover."
Now they stopped, recovering their breath.
Ryan considered telling Krysty to reload, knowing that she'd fired five from five. But her rescue of him
had unsettled the balance of their relationship and he kept his mouth closed.
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"Real pisser having to depend on someone else like that," he said finally.
"If I hadn't been there, then you'd probably have made it clear yourself," she replied. "You were holding
them off all right, weren't you?"
"I guess so. But" he let the words drift off into the silent afternoon, knowing without a shred of doubt that
another minute or so among the mutie rats would have seen him down and done for, suffering a hideous
passing.
"Anyway, we have to get back to the ville, ready to go and meet the Family."
Ryan nodded. "Sure."
He was holding Krysty by the hand when the water to their right erupted in an explosion of noise and
violence, and something vast rushed up the shallow bank and snatched her away from him with awesome
force.
Ryan heard the single scream and the sound of the hammer of the Smith amp; Wesson blaster falling on a
spent cartridge. There was a hoglike grunt, then a tremendous splash to his left, the scream drowning
instantly.
And Krysty was gone, torn away from him by what he knew instinctively had to be a monstrous alligator.
She was gone, and he stood there blind.
Chapter Nineteen
Ryan found that he'd drawn the powerful SIG-Sauer, holding it cocked and ready in his right hand. He'd
automatically dropped the staff and drawn the blaster, without thinking for a moment what a futile gesture
that was.
There was some kind of massive disturbance in the water, sounding about a dozen yards out from him, a
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noise that could only mean Krysty was fighting for her life against the saurian that had taken her. The
fight would only have one ending as the great reptile rolled her under the frothing mud and rolled again
and again, possibly tearing off an arm at the shoulder, or severing her trunk at the waist.
Ryan stood there in total darkness, knuckles white on the butt of the useless handblaster.
"I'm coming, lover!" he shouted at the top of his voice, hearing flatness and desolation all about him,
aware of his isolation.
He bolstered the blaster and drew the eighteen-inch steel panga, feeling the familiar weight and balance,
which gave him a momentary sense of comfort.
He held his breath, closed his eye and hurled himself away to the left, half diving, half falling in a noisy
belly flop into the blood-warm soup of the lagoon.
Some of it went up his nose and some into his half-open mouth, making him cough and splutter, while
desperately trying to hang on to his sense of direction, working out that the noise was coming from ahead
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