The girl’s scream ripped at Krysty’s heart like the strong digging talons the muties carried on their forelegs.
Though she knew it wasn’t safe, she took her eyes away from the open sights of her blaster to flash a quick glance over her shoulder. She wished she could assure Mariah that she and her companions would keep the monsters and their horrible sucking snouts away from her, but their chances of keeping the muties away from any of them weren’t looking good.
Mariah’s face, though dead pale, didn’t show the wide eyes and strained mouth of terror. Her brows were rammed together hard in the middle, and sheer fury flashed in her dark eyes. Her fists were knotted at her sides.
And blackness began to spool outward from her very pores.
“Ryan!” Krysty shouted. “Get clear! Now!”
Even though breaking their defensive circle was about the last thing in all the Deathlands any of them wanted to do in the face of an all-directions rush from monsters, the tall man reacted without a flicker of hesitation. He tucked his blaster across his chest almost in port-arms position and threw himself into a roll, forward and right.
The other person standing more or less directly in line with Mariah’s raging gaze was Krysty herself. She did the same as her man had, except angling to her left. There was no point in evading the whirling black death that was gathering around the child to hurl herself into a point-blank blaster shot from one of her friends.
She came up on one knee, with her left hand to the ground to arrest her forward progress. Ryan had come out of his roll in a near-perfect kneeling aim, with his Scout longblaster shouldered and ready to roar. As of course he would.
She was triple-graceful. He was a killing machine.
But before she could raise her M16, Mariah stalked past her. Her furious face and rod-stiff figure were barely visible within the whirling darkness.
The onrushing horrors froze in place. It seemed to Krysty that their bottomless black eyes went wide as they saw the girl—or more accurately, a black whirlwind with black-and-white stockinged pipe-stem legs—marching toward them.
They set up a wailing chorus in a new banshee key. It was shriller than their pain-piping but eerie in a way that would have raised the hair on Krysty’s nape even if it hadn’t been alive and capable of moving on its own.
Then the muties charged again. At Mariah.
Even the monster that seemed to materialize right in front of Krysty’s muzzle brake turned its tubular face away from her to hone in on the girl.
Mariah stopped. The whirlwind expanded to cover her completely.
The muties began running right into it. Krysty’s heart jumped into her throat for fear they would prove magically immune to its mysterious power, that they would suck her charge to pieces before her horrified eyes, then turn their attention back to Krysty’s friends—and to her.
But when the first mutie in Krysty’s line of vision sprang toward the cloud, the devil’s vortex simply unspooled it into rags and tatters and threads of green and black.
A dozen vanished without a sound—and without turning away.
“Dark night!” J.B. exclaimed.
Still the blue-green muties came on. “It’s like they’re attacking the cloud, not her,” Ricky said in wondering tones.
“Reload and stay frosty,” Ryan commanded. He didn’t call for a cease-fire, because nobody was still shooting.
Other muties came up from the ground through existing holes. Apparently the first wave to burst out had come from all the tunnels the creatures had dug for themselves. Eight or ten more appeared, one at a time. All hurled themselves to disintegration by the shortest possible path.
“What the nuke’s wrong with the things?” Ryan demanded in a hoarse voice.
“Perhaps they sense some kind of vibration from the...manifestation,” Doc said dubiously. “It seems to drive them into a frenzy.”
“Good an explanation as any,” Ryan said.
He signaled them to gather, then whistled for Jak. After the briefest hesitation, the albino hopped down. He wiped the big blade of his trench knife on a dead mutie lying by the wag, then trotted over to take his place with the rest. He looked matter-of-fact, but Krysty could tell by the lingering dilation of the pupils of his ruby eyes that he was more than a little freaked out by the attack.
The black wind continued to whirl on for half a minute after the last mutie appeared to dash itself to destruction in it. Then it collapsed into Mariah and was gone.
Krysty broke ranks to run to her and catch her in a hug. “Mariah! Thank you. Are you all right, honey?”
The girl’s slight figure trembled within her arms, but she nodded. And when she raised her face to look up at Krysty, her eyes were bright and her cheeks were flushed.
“Mebbe there are more of them,” she said. Her pigtails bobbed across Krysty’s arm as she turned her head to nod at the middle of the bean field. “Let me get them for you.”
* * *
RYAN RUBBED HIS chin bristles meditatively.
“You dig with that power of yours?”
The bean field around them was littered with the chills of blue-green muties. As the party had approached the mound where they had first seen the monsters, cautiously following a dozen paces behind Mariah and her deadly vortex, they had come erupting out from between the furrows in such numbers that the companions had been forced to blast them. If nothing else, to avoid being trampled beneath the muties’ talons in their frenzy to get at the girl.
Mariah looked at him. She swayed.
Krysty rushed to her side and put an arm around her thin shoulders. “It’s all right,” she told the girl. “You’ve done enough.”
But Mariah shook her head and smilingly pushed off from the tall redhead. “No, thank you, Krysty. I’m fine. Really.”
Despite the fatigue that clearly dragged at every word as it left her mouth, there was a force to her voice Ryan hadn’t heard there before.
Reluctantly, Krysty stepped back.
“I can try, Mr. Cawdor,” Mariah said. “Tell me where you want it.”
Mr. Cawdor? he thought. It’s Krysty, but Mr. Cawdor.
Aloud, he said, “How about right down that oversized anthill there?”
“Okay.”
She held out her hands as if sowing seeds. Shadow unfurled from her palms and knit itself into a spinning skein of blackness. She gestured as if urging it to go, palms up. Obediently it moved forward, mounting to the top of the low dirt mound.
“I’d be lyin’ if I said that didn’t give me a touch of the willies,” J.B. said softly.
“You and me both,” Ryan agreed.
The rest of the group was spread in a rough semicircle twenty yards to the ditch side of the mound. They had blasters in their hands but not pointed. Just in case.
Once at the top of the mound, the whirlwind promptly began to settle down into it. “It’s like a screw going into wood!” Ricky said.
“Yeah,” Ryan stated. “What do you say we don’t startle her, just in case?”
But Mariah had her face set in white concentration, willing the apparition into the earth. Without sound or apparent resistance, it settled down and out of sight.
Mariah tramped up the brief slope to peer down. Following Ryan’s lead, the others joined her.
The cloud was whirling a couple feet beneath the rim of the hole it had made. Expanded, really, Ryan reckoned, because the muties had already had a hole they were using to go in and out of. Mariah looked at Krysty, who looked to Ryan.
He nodded. The girl made patting-down motions. The whirlwind began to drill deeper.
He saw the mouths of other tunnels laid visible to his eye. The cloud continued to bore downward. The girl had to have limits to her ability to project the vortex and control it. But she hadn’t reached them yet.
Suddenly around the cloud he saw the surrounding walls open out.
“Can you cut that off for a moment?” he asked Mariah. He remembered that she’d said it hurt her to unleash the phenomenon. But then, she hadn’t seemed reluctant to trot it out here today. He needed to be sure he was seeing what he thought he’d seen around the fringes of the black mandala.
The cloud winked out. “Are those rocks of some kind?” Ricky asked.
Ryan saw them, too. They were hard to miss; they were strewed, huddled against each other, all across an area of earthen floor the whirlwind bore had revealed, which lay a good dozen feet below the deepest point the cloud had yet penetrated. Green ovals, about a foot long and six inches wide.
“Eggs,” J.B. said.
It was true. Not just because some lay split open, with some pale yellowish-green ooze slopping out if the fragments, but because he could see at least four tiny gray squirming figures. Even without the blue-green spines, those weird tube snouts made it clear what they were.
“Baby monsters,” Mildred said. “Doesn’t that beat all to shit?”
“I never would have guessed such beings were oviparous,” Doc said. “Perhaps they are some variety of monotreme, akin to the duck-billed platypus.”
“Well,” Ryan said, “we’ve found what the muties were so rad-blasted set on protecting. Can you clean them out, Mariah?”
“Are you sure, Ryan?” Mildred protested. “They’re just babies.”
“Baby monsters. I hate to say ‘nits make lice,’ because that’s just a bullshit excuse barons trot out to justify acting more like coldheart pricks than usual, but it applies.”
“But what if they’re, like, some kind of endangered species?”
“Fireblast, Mildred! Can you hear yourself? I only hope we’re endangering them enough.”
“These are no natural creatures,” Krysty said in a somewhat hollow voice. “Expunging them would be doing the Earth a favor.”
Ryan guessed she was treading on uncertain ground, emotionally speaking. She felt a connection to the Earth and to nature—almost to an obsessive degree, with how she personified the Earth as Gaia and all. At the same time, as a mutie of bizarre and unprecedented powers, her little friend Mariah wasn’t truly of nature.
And Krysty wasn’t either.
“I wouldn’t lose sleep over cleaning out a nest of baby stickies,” Ryan said, “if we ever came across any. Anyway, our job was to clean out this field. That’s what I mean to do.”
He looked to Mariah. Krysty was hovering over her like a mama bear, which was nothing new although still far from his favorite thing to see, considering. Mariah was standing upright, held her head high, and looked fit to fight. Fit as he’d ever recalled seeing.
Doing this black dust-devil stuff might hurt her, but it sure did seem to agree with her.
“How about rubbing out those eggs?” he asked her. “Do you feel up to it?”
She nodded vigorously.
“Okay. Go to it.”
She leaned over the widened hole her cloud had made and held her arms down into it. Blackness streamed from her palms. The vortex took form again at the bottom of the egg chamber. Like earth or stone or metal, the eggs and larvae vanished with neither sound nor trace.
“Good,” Ryan said. “Now can you, say, root around? Clear out a wide enough space to make sure we got all the little monsters?”
She looked at him. In the corner of his eye he thought to see the whirlwind waver as her concentration split, but it didn’t vanish.
After a moment, she nodded.
“Ryan—” Krysty began.
“I can do it,” Mariah said. “I can!” And the whirlwind came climbing back up the bore again.
She backed away from it. So did Ryan and the rest. Useful as it was—lifesaving, even—nobody was triple eager to get any closer to the terrible, all-consuming funnel of blackness than necessary.
When it reached the top of the hole, Mariah backed away a few steps. The cloud obediently followed, eating a line through the mound.
“How far?” she asked.
“Ten feet or so,” Ryan said. “That will do for a start.”
She stopped at about that limit, then ran the cloud back toward the first hole to begin spiraling it around and around outward from the center, widening the hole from the top slowly down.
“Wow,” Ricky said. “It’s like she’s routing it out.”
“So it is,” J.B. agreed.
“Old lady Dominguez and her kin aren’t likely to be thrilled with what we’re doing to her bean field,” Mildred said.
“Nuke them,” Ryan said. “We’re doing what they hired us to do. If they don’t want to pay, I’ll tell them we’ll just put the boogers back in their bean fields. Or mebbe their backyards.”
“But we can’t—”
Ryan gave her a look.