Huddled behind their crude but effective roadblocks, the dozen ambushers were popping up between reloads to fire away with mostly single-shot black-powder weapons. When they shot, the barrels of their longblasters were unmistakably pointed high. They weren’t actively aiming to hit the two-wag convoy they had so neatly trapped.
Jak was not surprised. It was clear they’d expected their targets to surrender meekly when they so totally and unexpectedly got the drop on them and that they still didn’t want to damage the merchandise, in the form of Pearl Dombrowski. They intended to intimidate.
Exactly what made the young woman such precious cargo, Jak had no idea. He cared less. All that mattered was his job.
He licked his lips as he leveled his Colt Python between the budding branches of a holly bush, snuggled close along the hip of a granite outcrop. He was barely ten yards from the nearest ambusher, not more than twenty-five from the farthest. They were a scabby-assed lot, he thought, even by the standards of someone who grew up waging a guerrilla war in the Gulf Coast bayous. They wore rags and scraps of poorly made homespun clothes, which seemed to be held together mostly by man grease and filth, as their heads seemed mostly held together by matted hair and beards. The albino could still smell their body funk over the rampaging sulfurous stink of their blaster powder.
Two of them looked a bit less scabrous and rat-chewed than the rest: a tall man in a mostly intact green plaid shirt and jeans, who was blasting away sporadically with a mismatched pair of black-powder cartridge revolvers, and a shorter, wider black man with a lever-action carbine. Along with their better weapons, both of them had clearly visible features instead of masks of fur and filth.
They were obviously the command element, which the brown-bearded tall dude confirmed when, during a break where his accomplices were reloading, shouted, “You all best surrender now, while you got the chance! We still promise we won’t hurt you!”
Right, Jak thought. His mind made up, he thumb-cocked his big blaster, took care along its vented rib and squeezed the trigger.
Although Jak’s first love was knives, he could shoot a blaster well, especially at short range. The high-velocity .357 Magnum hollow-point round planted itself in the long semigroomed brown hair behind partially visible hair.
The two-blaster shooter’s head came apart as if hit with a twelve-pound sledgehammer.
For a heartbeat or two no one on the barricade even noticed. Their attention was focused on their targets, who continued to pump brisk fire in their direction. Then the stocky guy with the lever-blaster jumped and turned his head when his apparent boss’s half-decapitated body brushed against his shoulder on its slump to the ground. He turned, his body language shouting confusion.
One thing Jak had learned fighting his bayou guerrilla war was to cut off the head first. He sighted on the black guy and fired his second shot. He aimed for the head, but an unpredictable hitch in his target’s motion sent the slug blasting through his right shoulder instead. Over the lingering echoes of his own blaster shot, Jak could hear the coldheart squall as a spray of flesh and blood was knocked out the exit wound.
This time that triple-loud noise of .357 Magnum handblaster going off caught the ambushers’ attention. Heads turned toward Jak’s hiding place.
He had already left it, sprinting down the short distance to the road, still using the concealment offered by dense brush and straight tree boles. As he ran, he drew his trench knife with his left hand.
Though freshly reloaded longblasters, as well as astonished if grubby faces, were turning his way, Jak was grinning ear to ear as he burst into the open behind the barrier.
It was time for some fun.
* * *
LOOKING FOR IT, with a rough notion of where it would come from, J.B. saw the yellow muzzle flash from Jak’s Colt Python as the albino fired his first shot from concealment above and behind the ambushers.
Even as the report slapped his ears, he stuck his head out the wag’s driver’s window. “Hang on, Doc!” he shouted.
He floored it even as he called his warning.
“Wait!” Mildred exclaimed as the big pickup truck shot forward—right toward the barricade. “What are you—”
The heavy pipe-work cage covering the wag’s nose hit the barrier. The dead trees were backed by enough heavy boulders not to budge far. The coldhearts had to have worked like jolt-walking beavers to build the thing. J.B., who admired little more than a job well done, would have to tip his fedora to them...after he took care of business.
He put the wag into Neutral, pressed his hat firmly onto his head, let go of the Mini UZI and yanked the door open. As he stepped out of the cab, his heavy machine pistol fell to the extent of the sling looped across his shoulder. He pulled his M-4000 shotgun out of the foot well and pumped it open enough of a crack to confirm it had a 12-gauge shell with tarnished brass base and red plastic hull nicely chambered.
Then in his standard manner—not visibly hurrying, yet moving with enough purpose that it worked out to be fast after all—he clambered up on the hood of the stopped wag.
Jak had fallen upon the ambushers from behind their backs like a white wolf on a fold of sheep. J.B. saw eight or ten defenders looking around in apparent confusion as the albino charged. He slashed a man a head taller across a bearded face—or what the Armorer presumed was a face, though he saw more hair and dirt than skin—and as that man fell over, clutching at a fount of spurting blood, Jak unloaded a round from his handblaster into the rib cage of a second coldheart as that one turned to try to aim a muzzle-loading longblaster at him.
From behind, J.B. heard the boom of Ryan’s Scout longblaster echo away between the steep, short hills. The Armorer had not worried about getting back-shot by the ambushers behind the pine they’d felled, but that was mostly because he never saw any amount of worry keep a bullet out of anybody’s hide. He’d be lying if he said the fact that his friend was giving that gang of bastards something else to put their minds to gave him no comfort, though.
Almost in front of J.B.’s perch, a wide-shouldered black man was trying to raise a replica Winchester 1873 carbine to take Jak down. Most of what J.B. could make out behind the chunk of granite he sheltered behind was his head. So the Armorer took quick aim and blew it mushy with a tight column of Number 4 buckshot.
Another coldheart, this one to J.B.’s right, swung a single-shot shotgun toward him. The Armorer loosed another roaring blast from his Smith & Wesson scattergun. The charge cut through a bushy gray-shot beard to take the bandit where his gullet met his upper chest.
As the ambusher toppled backward in an arterial spray of gore, J.B. raised his bespectacled eyes to look for more targets. And found none. He saw nothing but backsides and elbows as the surviving ambushers rabbited away up the narrow dirt road or bounced and tumbled down the slope to the rocky creek bed like so many spastic jackrabbits.
His pounce reflex engaged by the sight of fleeing prey, Jak stuck his Python back in its holster and started hounding after the fleeing coldhearts. J.B.’s shrill whistle brought the albino up short.
“Don’t chase them,” he called. “We need you close. Might be more.”
He felt a certain apprehension that Jak wouldn’t listen. The small, pale scout was as much wolf as man. He didn’t yield readily to authority at the best of times, especially when authority’s voice was delivered by someone other than Ryan. He did respect the Armorer, as a comrade and a killer, but that didn’t mean he felt any compulsion to obey him on nothing more than J.B.’s say-so.
But Jak’s overriding compulsion was to keep the others safe. By framing his words as the voice of reason rather than command, J.B. won a quick nod, accompanied by free-flying long white hair, and then compliance, in the form of Jak vanishing into the scrub to the left of the road, as swiftly as if he’d teleported out of there via mat-trans.
“Ace on the line,” J.B. said as he heard Ryan’s longblaster speak again. He knew Ryan was likely outnumbered worse than Jak, and the Armorer had been taking on the front ambush. But even though he didn’t have a lot of insight about what made people tick, J.B. had ground into him years ago that the easiest and best thing to attack in any fight was your enemy’s morale. Once you convinced him he couldn’t win—he couldn’t. And very little convinced anyone of that as quickly and effectively as a sudden attack from behind. That was what had sent this bunch skedaddling.
The group behind the second barrier would have been confident that even if their intended victims didn’t roll over and show their throats when they found themselves stuck in the coldhearts’ trap, they were still safe and secure—and it was their targets who were caught between two fires. To be met first by Krysty and Ricky opening up on them, and then finding themselves sniped by Ryan—who knew how to take his shot and shift to a new location without being spotted almost as skillfully as Jak could—would turn that confidence with its bare ass in the air.
But just to be sure, he jumped back down to the roadside before he started stuffing fresh shells in his scattergun.