Chapter Six

It took Ryan a single heart-stopping moment to realize that their attackers were muties, some kind of rad-sick devil's crossbreed of scabbies and swampies.
They had to have spotted the outlanders coming along the path, between the densely packed trees, giving themselves enough time to prepare their assault.
The muties used a similar trick to that practiced by the Chiricahua Apaches of the deserts. Where the Apaches would dig a shallow hole in the dry dust and conceal themselves beneath it, the swampies would scoop out a grave for themselves in the soft, clinging mud, and wait there, naked and hidden until their unsuspecting prey came within reach of the ambush.
At first glance, they were all male, scrawny bodies streaked with mud, dappling their putrefying skin like animals that have been at the wallow.
The nearest swampie stabbed at Ryan with the short-hafted spear, giving him no time to use the blaster. All of the seven friends had bolstered their guns while they stopped to examine the samurai arrow.
It had been careless, and in Deathlands, carelessness cost.
Ryan parried the thrust with the edge of his right hand, moving to one side, finding that the ground beneath his combat boots was slippery and dangerous, giving a natural advantage to the screeching swampie in front of him.
The jostling throng of yelping, screaming muties outnumbered Ryan and his friends by at least two to one.
A taller swampie, armed with a pair of predark cook's knives, had joined his comrade with the spear. He grinned at Ryan from a toothless and lipless mouth, his face pitted with running yellow sores, which brought the idea of scabbies to mind.
The muties were poor tactical fighters, eager to strike the chilling blow and with no idea of team fighting. A halfway decent pair of average sec men from a midsize ville would have had Ryan down and dying by now.
But the swampies constantly got into each other's way, cursing and pushing. Their deep-set eyes were almost hidden behind flaps of gangrenous skin that had peeled off their foreheads. They had only one ear between them, and one mutie had lost its nose from the racing, flesh-eating rad cancer, with only a rotting hole in the center of its face where porcine, snot-smeared hairs bristled outward.
Ryan snatched at a moment when the muties were snarling at each other to draw the panga from its sheath, swinging the razored eighteen-inch blade in a murderous blow, aiming at the nearer mutie's groin.
The creature tried to pull back, squealing as the panga's edge opened up a deep gash along the top of its right thigh, blood running thickly down past the knee and puddling in the dirt. He staggered away, hopping on one leg, dropping both of his knives.
Ryan was just able to bring the panga back in time to block the lunge with the spear from his second opponent. The steel cut into the ash shaft, nearly slicing it in two. The mutie tried to strike again at him with the damaged weapon, but Ryan kicked out, snapping it into two useless pieces.
Now there was time to draw his SIG-Sauer, but he wasn't the first to manage to get at a blaster.
Doc had been near the back of the group and had used the precious extra second this gave him to draw his rapier from its ebony sheath. The needled point darted out like the head of a striking Western diamondback, pinking the shorter of his attackers in the throat with a wounding, but not a killing thrust.
Doc was getting better and better with the sword-stick. He turned his wrist to lunge at the other mutie, who was already falling back from the fray, trying to defend himself with a clumsy ax. The blade danced past the awkward weapon and pierced the mutie through the center of his ulcer-covered chest, sliding between the ribs and cutting open the pumping muscle of the heart.
" No me saques sin razn, no me envaines sin honor ! " the old man panted as he sheathed the Toledo steel, quoting the motto that was engraved along the blade "Draw me not without good reason, and sheathe me not without honor."
The Le Mat was in his fist, cocked, while Doc glanced around for a suitable target. He spotted three of the mud-streaked swampies pressing Dean against a thorny bush, gibbering and giggling at him as he stood helpless, trying to dodge the thrusts of the hunting spears that all three muties held.
The hammer on the commemorative gold-chased Le Mat was set over the single shotgun chamber.
Doc leveled the gun and squeezed the trigger, staggering a little with the impact of the huge 18-gauge round. He blinked through the cloud of powder smoke to see that the shot had starred out across the twenty feet or so and knocked down all three of the muties, leaving them writhing and screaming in the dirt.
That single shot was the turning point of the entire firefight.
The noise of the explosion was deafening in the small clearing, and every one of the hideous muties broke off from the fight to look around at their stricken companions.
From that moment on it was like shooting fish in a barrel.
Ryan took out the weaponless mutie, then put a second 9 mm round through the forehead of the man with the slashed thigh.
Jak had already taken out one of the swampie-scabbies with a throwing knife, but he used the stunned silence caused by the shuddering concussion of the Le Mat to draw his own .357 Magnum blaster, chilling one of the muties that was armed with a hatchet, then going on to waste the three screaming victims of Doc's archaic weapon.
J.B. had already chilled one of his attackers with the heel of his hand, jamming it up under the residual, ragged nose and forcing the splintering bone and cartilage up into the unprotected front part of the brain.
Krysty and Mildred had been fighting back-to-back, both of them having a moment to draw thin-bladed knives, but the pressure on them from the slobbering, disgusting muties had been growing almost overwhelming.
Until Doc and the Le Mat entered the fray.
Krysty was a nanosecond ahead of Mildred, snatching out her double-action Smith amp; Wesson 640 and firing twice at the swampies, the big .38 rounds drilling through their upper chests and knocking them both over.
Mildred fired only once with the ZKR target revolver, shooting the oldest of the muties in the middle of the forehead, the bullet angling upward and lifting out a chunk of skull the size of a baseball. The fringe of thin, lank hair drifted in the still air as the round slice of bone and poxed scalp circled like a nightmare Frisbee disk, eventually landing nearly twenty yards away from the twitching corpse.
Silence surged in after the burst of shooting and dying.
One of the wretched muties was still alive, gut shot, moaning in pain, head rolling from side to side, its swollen purple tongue protruding between its rotting lips. Both arms and legs were covered in open sores, many of them large, crusted pits of corruption. One eye was missing, the raw socket weeping clear liquid over the scarred cheek.
"Going to question him, Dad?" Dean asked. "Might give us news about any villes. Or food."
"Waste of time," Ryan replied.
"Dying scabbie's no better than a break-backed scorpion. Can't trust either of them. Just cut its throat and watch out it doesn't try and bite you. Trader used to reckon that a mess of muties all had rad-poisoned teeth that could kill you."
"Sure."
Ryan took the panga and approached the dying creature. The scabbie tried to grab at his ankles with its blood-stained clawed fingers. The one-eyed man dodged easily, feinting to the right, then quickly switching the eighteen-inch blade to his other hand, cutting down at the exposed throat of the mutie.
The sharp steel sliced through a nest of deep sores along the side of its neck, before cutting open the carotid artery, spilling the blood in a pattering fountain of crimson.
The sound of applause made everyone swing around to the left side of the dreary, blood-sodden clearing, confronting the lone man who had crept silently up on them under cover of the brief and savage firefight.
He was tall, well over six feet, but skinny as a lath. He had long blond hair tied back in a kind of pony-tail with a scarlet ribbon. His neatly trimmed beard and mustache were both white. The man's complexion was pink and rosy, setting off his piercing blue eyes.
He wore buckskins, fringed across the shoulders and down both arms. Riding boots, dappled with fresh mud, reached almost to the knee.
"I swear it's the ghost of Buffalo Bill Cody," Doc whispered.
Ryan noticed that the stranger was wearing a beautiful pair of matched Navy Colts, with flashy mother-of-pearl butts. A brass-hilted cavalry sword trailing on the left hip completed the dazzling ensemble.
He had been gently clapping his gauntleted hands together. Now, with everyone looking at him, he stopped. A fawn Stetson sat on his head, and he swept it off with an actor's flourish, bowing to Ryan and the others.
"An excellent performance, ladies and gentlemen. If only I had my cameras with me to record it all for posterity, I could have toured it for many a long year. Such courage. Such grace under pressure. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Johannes Forde and I make films."