The fat young man could have been good enough, but he wasn't lucky.

"Here we go!" he shouted.

The wind had died away, and there was a faint crackling as the undercarriage brushed through the low scrub. Ryan readied himself, one hand on the release buckle of his harness, knowing that death in any crash could often come from being trapped and burned.

They were moving appallingly fast. Quicker than he'd ever been. Or so it seemed in those last blinking seconds before the impact.

Layton managed to get one of the wheels down, but it dug immediately into the soft sand, making the air wag slew around. The tip of the propeller snagged a boulder and the whole craft lurched sickeningly forward onto its nose.

Ryan's head was filled with the noise of splitting wood and snapping wires. He thought he heard a scream, but it could have come from him.

He was enveloped in darkness.

Chapter Thirty

Ryan hadn't slipped completely into the stygian depths of unconsciousness.

Despite the crushing force of the impact, he'd managed to brace himself. The straps across his chest held him tightly, making his ribs creak. He found himself dangling, upside down, with something warm and sticky running down his forehead, over his face, behind the broken glass of the goggles and into his good eye, blinding him.

His nostrils were filled with the overpowering stench of spilled gasoline, and he could feel the chill of it, soaking through his pant leg. His right ankle was twisted and held in place by some part of the plane that had been rammed backward in the crash. And he could hear someone moaning.

Apart from that sound, there was a deathly stillness. His ears had been battered and deafened by the racketing of the engine, and only now was his hearing slowly returning to normal.

He became aware of the pit-pat of dripping liquid. With an effort he lifted his right hand and pulled off the goggles, wiping cautiously at his good eye and wondering where all the blood had come from. If it was his, he wasn't surprised that he felt no pain. He knew from experience that the body had some strange and effective defense mechanisms when inflicted with a major injury.

His vision cleared. "Oil," he said quietly. Thick oil had oozed from a ruptured part of the air wag's engine.

"Time to be moving," he muttered.

Now that he could see, Ryan realized that the middle of a tangle of broken wood and varnished fabric wasn't the best place to be if the oil ignited and fired the gas that had splashed around. Even in that dire emergency, Ryan's logical fighting brain told him that there couldn't be that much fuel, since the plane had crashed because of a lack of gas.

He couldn't see anything of Layton, but he could hear the man groaning.

"I'll get you out," he called, but there was no response.

The buckle opened easily, and Ryan clung to what had been the front of he cockpit, swinging himself carefully around and down, dangling for a few moments with his feet scraping the air. The drop was only a short one and he let go, landing and rolling onto his knees. His ankle was cut just above the top of his boot, but he'd been able to pull free without difficulty.

Ryan stretched and straightened, automatically checking himself for any injury. Apart from some stiffness in his neck and a little blood from a cut lip, he'd gotten away almost scot-free.

The plane was tipped on its nose, the propeller splintered and snapped into several pieces. Strips of wire hung to the ground, black against the sun. They reminded Ryan of the clusters of crepe paper that had been pinned to so many front doors of Snakefish, to cry out the homes of the recently dead. The wings on the starboard side of the air wag had been sheared off and lay a few yards from the rest of the fuselage.

Then he saw the pilot.

Layton's immense weight had thrown him forward in the crash, snapping the seat belt like rotted canvas. He'd then pitched sideways, his hips gripped by the collapsing walls of the cockpit. He was pinned upside down, his head only a few inches from the dirt. Blood darkened the front of his flying suit and flowed over his face in a steady, gurgling trickle, crimsoning the earth beneath him.

Cautiously Ryan stepped closer, ready to throw himself clear at the first flicker of golden fire among the wreckage.

Now he could catch words, muttered in a low monotone.

"Sorry 'bout this, Dad. Going down. Hold on tight. Mom, we're going in."

Ryan reached out a hand and pulled away a jagged section of one of the wing struts. Then he could see the injury. The cockpit glass had shattered when Layton's bulk was crushed against it, and some of the shards had buried themselves deep in the rippling walls of the young man's stomach.

Ryan had seen enough abdominal injuries in his thirty-five years or so of living to be able to tell major from minor, serious from terminal.

Layton Brennan wasn't going to be seeing another sunset. Even if Ryan had been able to get him out of the wreckage without worsening the wound, it would take a skilled doctor to patch up the gashes.

Ryan looked around. They had come down in a dip in the ground, and he couldn't see how far they were from the ville, but he could hear the noise of some sort of wag and one of the Heroes' hogs moving his way. Obviously the watchers in Snakefish would have seen them losing altitude, swooping lower and never rising again. But rescue wasn't needed for him, and it would come way too late for Layton.

The muttering faded, and the baron's nephew quivered once and died. The blood continued to drip from his forehead for several more seconds and then that, too, stopped.

"Edgar's near a breakdown," Carla said angrily. "All this at once. Too much for him. You've got to do something, John!"

J.B. scratched the side of his nose. "Not that easy. Seems like the Motes have damned near the whole town on their side. We got the firepower. Sure, we could probably chill those bikers, mebbe even take over the ville. Then what?"

"We're moving on, Carla," Ryan said with a quiet finality.

"They murdered Layton and tried to kill you, as well. Nearly made it."

Ryan nodded. "I hear what you say, Carla. But you have to realize that this isn't a game. Not some idle story in an old vid. There's no half measures in real life, Carla."

"How d'you mean?"

"I mean that if I kill Mealy I have to kill Zombie. And the rest of the chapter. And the Motes. And Dern. And any of the ville's folk who back them. It'll be full-out bloody war."

The woman sat slumped in a chair in the bedroom shared by Krysty and Ryan. The others were there, except for Lori, who'd gone out an hour earlier.

"So, you're just going to walk away."

"He who doesn't fight but walks away lives to walk away another day," Doc said.

"Just like that," Carla muttered bitterly, standing up and walking to the door. She turned to look at J.B. "I was wrong, John. Wrong about you. And I'm real sorry for it."

"Yeah. Me too, Carla. But there's some things a man just has to ride around."

His last words were overlapped by the sound of the closing door.

Lori still hadn't reappeared by late afternoon. When Ruby brought up a tray of her coffee with some pecan cookies, Doc asked her if she'd seen the blond teenager.

"Mebbe I have and then again, mebbe I haven't, Doctor Tanner." There was a curl to her lips and a leer in her eyes as she spoke.

"I would be most obliged if you could see your way clear to elaborating that statement, my good woman."

"How's that?"

"I mean that I'd like you to cease your petty-minded prevarication and tell me where the girl is!" Doc roared.