Demontech: Gulf Run Read Free Page B

casualties.
    In seconds all of the ambushers reported they were all right and that each had shot a Jokapcul. The enemy hadn’t had a chance to fight back.
    “There are two more down farther back,” reported the former Border Warder named Tracker.
    Haft looked to his left. Wolf wasn’t there. “The beast probably ran away when the fighting started,” he muttered. He breathed deeply. Not bad. They’d taken down thirteen of the fifteen Jokapcul in less than a minute and suffered no casualties of their own. The remaining enemy was in flight.
    “Let’s secure the bodies, see if any of them are still alive.”
    Hunter and Archer went down the back side of the ridge to check on the scouts, while Haft and the rest went down the front. He shouted orders as they went, and five of his men ran ahead beyond the farthest Jokapcul body for security while he and the others checked the bodies. Not all of them were dead yet, though only three were likely to survive their wounds.
    “Bandage them,” Haft said of the three who had a chance. “Gather all weapons and any horses that haven’t run off.”
    He looked up at the sound of men and horses screaming in the distance. “Hurry up!” He didn’t know why men and horses were screaming on their back trail—might there be bandits attacking the Jokapcul survivors? If there were, he didn’t want his small band caught in the open were the bandits to come this way.
    Haft looked up and down the road and saw that his men had collected weapons and six horses along with other supplies. Someone brought him the demon spitter used against them. Its tube was split along most of its length and the signaling mechanism was badly bent. The demon’s door was missing and the demon itself was nowhere to be found. He tossed the broken tube aside.
    “Let’s move out,” he ordered, pointing his right arm up then swinging it forward in their direction of march.
    Even though they now had horses, they went on foot. They left the wounded and dying in place. They’d barely made it through the cut before Wolf broke out of the trees beside the road to walk next to Haft. He looked up at the man.
    “Ulgh!”
Wolf’s muzzle and chest were bloody.
    “Did you get all of them?” Haft asked, not believing the wolf could actually understand his question.
    “Ulgh!”
Wolf nodded vigorously twice and gnashed his jaws together with each nod.
    Haft shuddered.

 
     
     
    CHAPTER

TWO
     
     
     
     
     
    Wheels rumbled on the road. Overladen wagons and carts creaked and groaned as they dipped and yawed over the rutted, uneven surface. Weary feet tramped and thudded alongside and between the wagons and carts. Curses and shouts came as people urged recalcitrant draft animals to haul when they wanted to stop, or dealt with dangerously shifting cargoes. Children shouted in play, or sobbed in fear and were hushed by fearful, tired, or exasperated parents. Babes cried until given breast. An infrequent echo reverberated, shocking in the confines of the forest that muffled and dulled most sounds. Sunlight splashed here and there, wherever it could break through the overarching foliage of trees that grew to the road’s verge and made a tunnel of it. Flying insects buzzed about the human and animal banquet that moved through their territory; people waved and swatted at them, and horses and oxen twitched their ears and whisked their tails. Unmindful of its casualties, the insect horde continued to dine. Only the occasional eddy that made its way down to the surface from the breeze that ruffled the high leaves disturbed the massed fliers.
    Spinner endlessly rode the two miles from the head of the column to its tail and back again, offering words of encouragement and an occasional helping hand, urging laggards to close growing gaps.
    They’d started out from Eikby with more than two thousand people under his and Haft’s protection. Most of them were the remnants of the town’s once-thriving population. Close to two