"Guess it did."

"More like Sodom and Gomorrah. And it received the scourge of the Almighty."

"It is like some sort of dreadful apocalyptic wilderness, isn't it? Something out of the Book of Revelations." Mildred looked around her, wonderingly. "They sure must've opened up the seventh seal here."

Doc seemed to have lost interest in their conversation, staring intently down at the surface of the water where Dean was playing.

Krysty caught his attention. "What is it, Doc?"

"I just suffered from a strange visual distortion. It seems to me that the level of that pool keeps on rising a little, then subsiding. Then rising a little farther again. I cannot for the life of me imagine why that should" He stopped, his jaw dropping, suddenly leaping to his feet. "By the"

He started to rush down toward the boy. "Dean, come away from there!" Doc's ancient knee boots slipped on the damp yellow-stained rocks, threatening to send him cascading all the way to the bottom of the large hollow. "Away for your very life!"

Dean stood, his dark curly hair matted to his head by the moisture in the air, looking up at the bizarre sight of the respectable Dr. Tanner leaping toward him like a deranged gazelle, waving his arms, face red, yelling some kind of warning at him.

"What?" he shouted, moving a couple of paces away from the small pool.

Everyone was up on their feet, Ryan and Krysty both taking a few steps in pursuit of Doc, who had nearly reached the boy, hands outstretched toward him, still shouting incoherently.

"Away! Before it blows!"

"Before what blows?" Trader asked, standing on the rim of the basin.

Mildred was quickest. "It's a geyser," she shouted. "Doc figures it's about to blow. If it does"

Doc had Dean by the hand, tugging him up the slope, the boy still bewildered, resisting the old man. "Run, son!" Ryan yelled. "Boiling fountain about to blow up behind you!"

Abe started toward the couple to try to help, but his feet skidded away from under him and he fell, yelping in alarm. Arms spread to try to save himself, he was rolling directly toward Doc and Dean, but he managed to grab hold of a spur of rock and pulled himself upright just before crashing into them.

Ryan looked at the pool, cursing his own lack of attention in such a hostile land. The level was much higher, and it was bubbling and steaming. The surface of the liquid surged and roiled with the unbelievable pressures beneath the earth.

"Keep back, friends!" Doc panted, now over halfway toward the crest. Now they could all hear.

A sullen roar that they could feel vibrated through their feet, like a long-caged beast thrusting up toward the murky sunlight.

The water in the dark pool was becoming violently agitated, swelling higher, then sulking back for a few heartbeats, then rising to twice its original height. Ryan had checked quickly where the prevailing wind was, knowing that even a light breeze could carry the boiling droplets for fifty yards or more.

Now Doc and the boy were close enough for helping hands to tug them up and over the top, pausing for a moment to gather breath. "Farther!" the old man panted.

They were less than a dozen yards away from the highest point of the rocky bowl when the geyser finally blew.

Everyone dived flat, covering heads, ears and faces, J.B. making certain that the Uzi and the Smith amp; Wesson M-4000 were both safely beneath his body.

Ryan risked a glance over his shoulder, seeing the great column of boiling water and superheated steam surge upward, at least a hundred and fifty feet in the air, its top drifting away from them on the small wind.

The noise was deafening, and the ground trembled beneath them, hot water splashing all around.

But Doc's reflexes had been just fast enough to save all of them from what could have been very unpleasant injuries from the geyser.

And fast enough, beyond any doubt, to save the life of Dean Cawdor.

Ryan clasped Doc's hand, feeling the way that the old man was shaking, from the shock and from the

exertion. "Well done," he said. "And thanks."

Dean, soaking wet, was wiping water from his eyes. "You saved my life, Doc."

"What friends are for, dear boy." He blushed slightly. "Just what friends are for."

"LOOKS LIKE WE'RE GETTING toward the end of this hot-springs part," Ryan said.

They'd stopped again, a quarter mile of winding trail farther on. The rad counter was now showing only the palest of yellow, shading toward the green of safety, indicating that the worst of the missiles had fallen very near the coast of California, triggering the quakes and letting in the ocean. Here, much closer to the Sierras, it was cleaner and safer.

There was still that deceptive alkaline crust on one side of the trail, and bubbling mud on the other. But it really did look as though the rising ground just ahead of them was going to be the end of the bad times.

They were strung out in the usual single skirmish line, Ryan taking a turn at the rear, with J.B. in the lead. The path doglegged sharply to the right, in front of them, round a sulfur-stained bluff with hot water streaming down it.

J.B. suddenly held up a hand, seeing a number of figures running toward him, through the mist-wraiths, waving spears and daggers.

Simultaneously Ryan glanced behind, seeing if their line of retreat was open and safe.

It wasn't.

At least a dozen more men were charging silently, the nearest less than a dozen yards away.

It was a perfect ambush.

Chapter Thirteen.

There was the brief moment of recognition.

Ryan didn't even have time to breathe the word "scabbies" before the first of the muties was on top of him. But his eye had sent that message through to his memory and brain.

Scabbies were a particularly repulsive type of mutie, often considered to be some kind of offshoot of the more common stickies. But they were found more often near regions where there were many nuke hot spots, combined with some kind of local climate or conditions that had bred the disgustingly hideous skin diseases that gave them their name.

They were generally believed to be a little more intelligent than stickieswhich wasn't saying much without the latter's profoundly perverse love of enormous bright fires and thundering explosions.

Like most of the mutated peoples, scabbies weren't keen on blasters, finding them too difficult to keep clean and much too hard to shoot accurately. They preferred to attack with old-fashioned edged and pointed weapons.

It hadn't seemed a potentially dangerous situation, with absolutely no sign of any sort of life, and Ryan had been walking along with the SIG-Sauer in its holster, the powerful Steyr rifle slung across his shoulders.

Now a scabbie was on top of him, its mouth opening in a screeching yell of hatred and triumph as it leapt at the defenseless man.

But Ryan Cawdor was never without a defense.

His reflexes took over. There was no time at all to try to draw any of his armory of weapons, with the scabbie already in the air, jumping at him, a broad-bladed notched knife clutched in its right hand.

Ryan stooped a little, reaching with his left hand for the mutie's right wrist. He locked his fingers and stooped further, pulling the helpless mutie onto his shoulders, then straightening at the perfect moment, heaving the scabbie high in the air, off to the left of the trail.

The battle cry of rage and hatred changed in midair to a scream of shock and despair, seeing his own inexorable doom rising up toward him.

He crashed down on his right arm, the blade of the knife snapping on impact. But the thin layer of crystallized salts wasn't thick enough to take his weight and he plunged through it, vanishing in an eruption of stone splinters and boiling, hissing water.

Ryan didn't have time to look to see what happened to the mutie, but the agonized yell and the frantic thrashing told its own terrible story.

A second scabbie attacked Ryan, lunging at him with a long-shafted spear, its point tied in place with thin strips of rawhide. There was a moment when they were face-to-face, and Ryan recognized the ghastly deformities that characterized the breed of mutie.

Every inch of exposed skin seemed to be a single festering sore. Flaps of whitened skin were peeling off across the forehead, dangling over the deep-set eyes. The mouth was lipless and toothless, surrounded by a nest of dried craters and fresh, yellow boils. One ear was missing, the other hanging loosely from the side of the skull, tethered by a strip of gangrenous gristle.

The hands holding the long spear were covered in a scaly golden rash of spots, spreading up the forearms, high above the elbows.

What hair there was on the head was limp and colorless, pasted flat by the steam in the air around them.

Ryan batted the clumsy weapon aside with his left hand, jabbing a vicious punch into the scabbie's solar plexus. The air whooshed out of the mutie's lungs and he started to double up, dropping the spear. He stumbled past Ryan, who chopped down a vicious rabbit punch on the back of his neck with the hardened edge of his right hand as he went by.

The mutie went off the opposite side of the trail to his colleague, tumbling headfirst into the deep, golden mud. He was swallowed completely, without even a scream, his feet sliding below the bubbling, boiling surface.

Ryan was aware of yelling behind him, then the tearing sound of the Uzi, fired on full-auto.

Two more scabbies charged him, undeterred by the awful fate of their two comrades. One of them suddenly stopped, staggered a couple of paces, then fell on his disfigured face. Ryan saw the taped hilt of one of Jak's throwing knives protruding from his throat.

In close combat, there was sometimes the temptation to go for the handblaster. But, as Ryan had learned over the years, that wasn't always the best option to take. You might get the chance only for a single shot, and if it didn't put your man down, then a blaster was a useless weapon for hand-to-hand.

He drew the eighteen-inch panga from its sheath in a single smooth, rehearsed action, feeling its familiar weight and balance.

Cutting from left to right, backhanded, he stopped the nearer of the scabbies, who was armed with a short-hafted ax. The mutie moved back from the intended blow, ducking and trying to slice at Ryan's legs.

But the one-eyed man had been expecting it, swaying away like a dancer, pivoting to his right and using the panga like a long dagger. He stabbed directly at the scabbie's neck, but the man was quick, hunching his shoulder, so that he only took a shallow flesh wound at the top of the left arm.

He whirled, his ragged clothes fluttering about his scrawny body, feinting toward Ryan's face, then changing the direction of the blow to his hand and wrist.

The ax rang on the honed steel of the big cleaver as Ryan parried it, feeling the shudder of the blow run clear up to his shoulder.

He heard a handblaster boom close behind him and saw another of the attackers throw up his arms and topple over onto the crust across the scalding lake, which opened to receive the body in a mass of steaming bubbles.

But all of Ryan's attention was concentrated on his own opponent, who was grinning at him from the leathery mass of corruption that masked his brutish features. He was panting from the grim exertion of the fight, whispering to Ryan in a harsh, croaking voice.

"Come, outie, come on Cut your outie heart and fuck'n eat it up."

Ryan didn't waste his breath.

Around him, he could hear all the sounds of a pitched battle. Several blasters were in operation, which made him think the firefight should be going their way. J.B. and the others at the front had been lucky enough to have a couple of seconds more warning, giving them the precious moment to draw and start shooting at the attacking scabbies.

The handblaster opened up again, close behind him, and another of the muties rolled backward, most of its face vanishing in a fountain of blood, bone and brains.

"Got the bastard!" It was Abe's voice, sent soaring up the scale by the adrenaline rush.

The ambush had failed.

Beyond his own opponent, Ryan could see that the rest of the scabbies had turned to flee, calling out in their broken, guttural voices as they ran back along the pathway, to disappear into the swirling bank of mist.

But the man facing Ryan wasn't about to give up. He was still swearing and muttering to himself as he tried to find a gap through the norm's impenetrable guard, lunging and swinging with the deadly ax.

"Let me take him, Ryan," Trader called. "Other shitters broke and ran. Those that still could."

"No!" The word was shouted angrily over his shoulder, his good eye not moving for a moment from the

scabbie's distorted, suppurating face.

The man was becoming tired. Ryan could sense it, almost taste the fatigue.

The hacking blows were slower, less skillfully aimed. It was nearly time.

Ryan realized that it had become silent, after the racketing of the blasters and the yells and screams. Now

there was only the bursting of bubbles of the scalding gas and the faint hissing of steam.

And the ragged breathing of the mutie who was trying to kill him.

Ryan hefted the eighteen inches of sharpened steel, as if he were about to cut at the scabbie's throat,

dropping his aim to the groin. As the ax was lowered to counter it, Ryan swung back toward the neck.

Sixty seconds ago the mutie would have been fit enough and fast enough to dodge or parry.

Now he wasn't.

There was enough residual combat skill in him to thwart Ryan's purpose of hacking the head off his