Deathlands 122: Forbidden Trespass Read Free Page B

eyes staring at her from beneath matted white locks were the same blood color as their friend’s. But Jak, despite the prejudice he frequentlyencountered—and tended to dispute loudly and forcefully—was no mutie himself, but an albino, subject to a genetic condition that predated the skydark by many generations.
    The face Krysty saw, staring at her, was not right, somehow. The nose and jaw seemed pushed too far forward. It was a mostly human visage, but not entirely.
    Then it was gone, and she saw other pallid bodies flitting out of clear view behind where it had been.
    “What do we do?” J.B. called as a foot-long branch with green leaves still on it bounced harmlessly off his fedora.
    A fist-sized stone bounced past Krysty’s right cheek. “Blast them!” Ryan shouted.
    The head-splitting roar of Jak’s .357 Magnum Colt Python was the first response to Ryan’s command. As a storm of blasterfire roared around her, the prone Krysty raised her Glock, but she had little to aim at. Doc’s “pallid shadows” continued to live up to their name, flitting just outside of clear sight behind the brush or among the boles of the trees around the sinkhole. Especially not knowing whether or when they might face a concerted rush by their unknown foes, she was happy to take single shots as a hint of target revealed itself.
    A scream rang out from above to Krysty’s right, long, shuddering and unnervingly humanlike. It startled her, but it was no big surprise: plenty of muties were human, for all practical purposes, their “taint” notwithstanding. Some of them were indistinguishable from norms.
    Like Krysty, whose mutant traits—with the exception of her sentient red hair—were hidden. As quickly as it began, the barrage of thrown debris stopped. The flitting ghosts vanished. Or at least Krysty abruptly lostall sight of them, even the furtive glimpses she’d been getting since the attack began.
    “Cease fire!” Ryan roared. “That means you, Ricky. Don’t waste ammo.”
    “Sorry, Ryan.”
    “Everybody fit to fight?” Ryan called.
    “I’m fine, lover,” Krysty said, catching his eye and throwing a wink. The others affirmed they hadn’t received so much as a bruise from the pelting.
    “So what just happened?” Mildred asked.
    Krysty glanced at Ryan. Her lover didn’t suffer fools gladly, or at all, and was sometimes inclined to be curt with Mildred when either her sharp tongue or her archaic sentimental notions got on his nerves. And on the surface, the question seemed pretty obtuse.
    Seemed. But Krysty found herself unsure, as well. Had they staved off a more serious assault? Had they overreacted? She wasn’t too concerned over the latter possibility—if you played pranks on a heavily armed party out in the wilderness, you had no gripe coming if you suddenly acquired a few more holes in your hide.
    Ryan shook his head. “No bastard clue,” he said. “Everybody try to find a position with halfway-decent cover and stay tight with eyes skinned. We don’t know if and when they might be back.”
    He didn’t say “with reinforcements,” but Krysty heard the words loud and clear anyway. She knew the others did, too. They’d worked together as a team for a long time and had been in so many similar situations that the words were a given.
    * * *
    B UT NO FURTHER attack came. When half an hour had gone by according to J.B.’s wrist chron, Ryan cautiouslycalled for everyone to stand down. Leaving the rest to keep watch, he went out with Jak to look for signs of the flitting ghosts.
    They found some broken branches, and blood spattered on leaves and the grass where the scream had come from. Reassuringly, it was red. What was less reassuring was the fact that not even Jak’s keen eyes and tracking skills were able to find any usable trails away from the sinkhole. “Right,” Ryan said, coming back to the lip of the sinkhole. The sun started to sink behind the western trees. “We still don’t know who they