Sooner Dead (Gamma World) - Mel Odom [116]
Hella used her knife to fish the mud-encrusted coneys from the coals. She’d left the fur on and caked the whole animal in mud. The heat from the coals had baked the mud hard and, she hoped, cooked the meat inside. Rapping the egg-shaped chunk with her knife hilt, she broke open the mud crust to reveal the coney. The fur peeled easily away with the dried mud and left the cooked meat intact. She handed that one to Stampede then fished out another for herself.
She cracked open the second rabbit, peeled away the mud and fur, then slit the creature’s belly with her knife. She poured the guts onto the pile Stampede had made with his then told Daisy she could eat. The mountain boomer lapped the bloody mess up with her long tongue and chomped happily. Hella pinched the cooked flesh from the rabbit and popped it into her mouth. The meat needed seasoning, but it was succulent enough.
“When do you want to go see the expedition?”
“As soon as we finish these rabbits.” Stampede gnawed industriously. “We’ll give them time to settle in good for the night.”
Swaddled in the shadows on the mountainside a half klick from the expedition, Hella lay prone on the ground and peered through her binocs. She’d switched the lenses to low-light properties so she could see almost as plainly as day.
Less than half of the defense bots remained from the initial number, but Riley—assuming he was still alive—had them assigned to the perimeter.
“Not exactly on stealth mode there.” Stampede’s whispered comment carried over the comm link. Ocastya hadn’t been happy about staying behind at the cold camp, but she had.
“Riley isn’t big on stealth.”
“He likes having a presence, getting noticed.”
One of the nocturnal creatures only partially kept at bay by the light from the encampment got too close to the perimeter. A defense bot’s gun roared to life a moment later and threw a hail of bullets into the transgressor. Even with the binocs, Hella never saw what it was. Whatever it was, it writhed in agony for just a few seconds then lay still.
Two hardshells left the camp to confirm the kill. They moved cautiously but quickly. Once they’d finished, they returned to their posts.
“Riley still has a lot of firepower.”
“Gotta be going through it fast, though.” Hella tracked her lenses through the camp and finally found a hardshell she recognized as Riley. The knot in her stomach loosened a little; then she felt ashamed almost immediately. Riley was the enemy. She couldn’t lose sight of that. Riley would have killed her and Stampede if he’d gotten the chance. Still, part of her was glad he was alive.
Another burst from a defense bot ripped through the trees. A severed branch and a small cloud of leaves fell to the ground as a furry mass flailed in spastic reflex.
“That was a slayer?”
Hella watched two hardshells duck through the trees and check the mutated raccoon’s mangled body. “Yeah.”
“Riley wants to be careful and not pull a colony of them down on the camp.”
Mutated raccoons could be fierce and were often called masked slayers by the locals. The largest were a meter and a half tall and weighed eighty pounds, though still svelte enough to hurl themselves through the trees. They also possessed near-human intelligence and tool-making abilities and could be total terrors when they took up the revenge trail.
Self-consciously Hella glanced up in the trees around her, making sure none of the masked slayers lurked nearby. Once they got it into their heads that humans were targets, they didn’t care which humans they attacked.
Stampede chuckled in her ear. “Nervous?”
“I hate those things. When you’re in the middle of them, you never know where they are until it’s too late.” They’d had a few encounters with the mutated raccoons and had always been good enough—or lucky enough—to escape with their lives. “They don’t know when to stop until you bring out fire.”
“Riley and his people are following an old road, right?”
Hella trained her binocs on the area before and after the camp. She felt bad because she hadn’t noticed the unnatural