"Upon my soul, Mr. Cawdor," he'd said. "Surely a man must be permitted a little harmless deviancy, every now and again?"

The river grew closer, the sound of its rushing waters louder. The trees thinned out and the trail widened. Ryan stooped and examined the ground, seeing tracks that he recognized as elk, and the round pad marks of wolves. He knew from old books that in the olden times, before the long winters, wild animals had been limited to what had been called national parks. Bears and wolves lived only in the desolate high country, rarely seen by man. But since the nuking had decimated the population and destroyed every city, the creatures of the night had come back, growing bolder and often mutated into even more ferocious beasts than before.

The wolves were among the worst.

Something moved in the bushes to his right, and he leveled the G-12, finger tightening on the trigger. The gun was set on triple-burst, ready to cough out three rounds in a fraction of a second. His eye caught a slithery, gleaming animal, larger than an otter, scurrying across the damp boulders, making for the foaming edge of the Mohawk. It paused and stared directly at him, seemingly fearless. Its eyes were deep-set, glittering like bright emeralds, and its jaw hung open in a snarl of manic ferocity. Ryan held the rifle steady, ready to smear the creature into rags of bone and blood. But it turned its head contemptuously away and slipped silently into the water.

Only in the second it disappeared from sight did Ryan notice that the animal had six legs, tipped with claws like ivory daggers.

"If we could find a boat of some type, we could sail down to where the Mohawk meets the Hudson, just above Troy, and thence we could navigate clear to New York itself," Doc said, joining Ryan on the shore of the river.

"If we could find a copter and get some gas for it, we could fly to Front Royal and never get our damned feet wet," Ryan retorted.

They followed the water, heading south, picking their way along indistinct paths. Around noon Ryan called a halt for them to take a drink from the widening river and to open up a self-heat each. During the afternoon there was a rain shower that persisted, becoming a steady, dull drizzle that quickly soaked them all to the skin.

"Take us a year to reach Newyork if'n we don't find us some transport," J.B. said, looking up through the ceaseless rain to the west, where the sky was darkening. "Be night in an hour."

"Wait!"

They all stopped to look at Krysty, who stood with an expression of concentration on her face. Her saturated hair clung to her shoulders like a fiery, frightened animal.

"What?" Ryan asked.

"By Gaia, it's smoke! I can smell woodsmoke."

Ryan held his head up, ignoring the teeming rain that dripped over his face and ran behind the black patch that covered his ruined left eye. He sniffed at the air.

"Yeah, I can smell it, too. Wet weather keeps it low down. Can't be more'n a mile off."

"I will be liking getting warm," Lori said, wiping a strand of sodden yellow hair from her face.

"Not just warm," Jak said. "Fire means people. And in a place like this, people means boats."

"People also means guards and mebbe some chilling to be done. So, step cautious." Ryan led them on again, ever watchful.

It was a ragtag community of double-poor muties. Mud huts, covered in rough branches, had been built around a hewn clearing at the edge of the Mohawk. A large fire of green wood smoldered in the middle of the huts, and a rusty iron caldron was suspended over it. From the smell that bubbled up from the pot, it was some kind of fish stew.

The villagers were all small, not one of them topping five feet. Most were heavily muscled and had shaggy hair that hung over low foreheads. Their jaws jutted out, and they seemed to communicate in a language that consisted mainly of grunts.

They wore jerkins and breeches of a sackcloth, dyed dark green and russet yellow. It was difficult to tell the sexes apart. While Ryan and the others watched from the shadows at the edge of the forest, one of them came to pass water only a few yards from them. Krysty, with her sensitive nose, could easily catch the rancid stench of sweat and grease from the mutie's body. The sickle moon that swooped over the hills behind them also revealed to the watching six that the mutie was grotesquely sexually endowed.

J.B. caught Ryan's hand, pointing urgently beyond the farthest of the tumbledown houses. Hauled up above the level of the river was a crude raft. It was from hewn logs, bound with creepers and was about eight feet square. A stump of mast at its center and a steering oak, hacked from a single long branch, were the only signs that it might be maneuverable.

Ryan leaned closer so that his mouth touched the Armorer's ear. With muties, you never knew what kind of skill they might have. These primitives might be deaf, or they might hear as well as cave-born bats.

"Soon as they sleep," he whispered.

J.B. nodded his agreement, then passed the message quietly to Krysty, to Jak, on to Lori and finally to Doc.

The moon had disappeared behind a bank of cloud so dense it seemed like a floating mountain. A storm was brewing, and the air crackled with ozone. Ryan could feel his hair standing on end with static electricity. The stew had been eaten by the muties, and the fire was dying to glowing embers. The valley was less cold than the upper slopes, outside the hidden redoubt, but there was a biting dampness that seemed to creep through the layers of fur and leather, seeping into the marrow of the bones.

Ryan hooked the G-12 to a loop on his belt and drew the pistol, feeling its familiar weight. 25.52 ounces, precisely. Back when they'd been with War Wag One, J.B. had shown him the crumpled, brittle field manual for the SIG-Sauer P-226, and he remembered all of the details about it.

"Let's go, my friends," he said quietly.

There'd been no sign of anyone out on patrol around the filthy little hamlet. Apart from the rafts, there wasn't likely to be anything there worth stealing. With a wave of his hand, Ryan motioned for Jak Lauren to take the lead. Out of the six of them, the albino boy was probably the best at creepy-crawling. His bleached hair blazed like an incandescent beacon, making Jak easy to follow.

Ryan came second, with Krysty at his heels. Doc and Lori were together and J.B. brought up the rear, several safe paces behind to cover them in case of a sneak attack.

Against the rumbling backdrop of the fast-flowing river, it was hard to make out any other sounds. As they passed between the stinking hovels, Ryan heard a woman's voice. She was singing a mournful dirge, soft and low, with no recognizable tune to it and no words at all. It was fortunate for them that the villagers didn't seem to keep any dogs to warn of strangers. But their hamlet was so isolated that it was doubtful they even knew what human enemies were.

The raft had no sail, but there were a number of smoothed branches, each about ten feet long, that looked as if they were used to propel and guide the clumsy craft.

Jak turned, asking, "We go on this?"

"Yeah. Get ready to cut the rope. We'll have to push her out into the flow, or we'll beach on those rocks a few yards downstream."

In fact, the raft was so firmly grounded that it took all six of them to heave it off the sloping beach of shingle. It sat so low that the Mohawk bubbled over its logs. With six of them on board, Ryan knew they were in for a wet journey. Only the rope held it, knotted around a frost-riven boulder, high up on the bank.

"Get on, and move slow an' easy!" Ryan ordered, eyes raking the sleeping village for any threat.

"Keep to the center," Doc urged, folding Lori Quint in his long arms.