Deathlands 124: Child of Slaughter by James Axler Page A

went down hard on the wet sand, then scrambled to his knees. He quickly caught sight of the Mini-Uzi and launched himself after it, determined to regain what little advantage he had.
    But his invisible enemy, whatever it was, swatted him from behind and took him down again. This time, the fall knocked the wind out of J.B. and left him dazed.
    “What is this damn thing?” Sitting up, he shook his head hard, trying to clear the cobwebs. As he did, he heard a hissing sound passing alongside him, and he leaped to his feet.
    The hairs on the back of his neck stood at attention as he looked for some sign of the unseen creature…and found it. Right where he’d heard the hissing sound, he saw the sand compressed in a track like a shallow, rounded ditch, as if something tubular were moving through it. It looked like the kind of trail a giant snakelike creature might make, except for the star-shaped claw-prints pressed into the sand on each side of it. Each print had five sharp points grouped around a circular central pad; the span from claw tip to claw tip was at least ten inches.
    And it was impossible to tell how many feet were making those impressions. From what little J.B. could see, there might be two, or four, or even six. And they provided no real clues about the creature’s anatomy. Was he dealing with a mammal, a reptile, an insect or something else?
    All he really knew was that it was toying with him. From the tracks and the hissing, he could tell it was circling him from four feet away. It had to know it could strike at any moment, and he would be at its mercy.
    Not that he was going to go down without a fight, even against an invisible whatever it was.
    Watching the tracks and listening, J.B. swung around his Smith & Wesson M-4000 scattergun and pumped the magazine, loading a shell in the chamber. When he thought he knew the beast’s location, he aimed at the thin air there and pulled the trigger.
    He was rewarded with a monstrous howl from the same direction. He heard thrashing, saw the wet sand churn and moved to follow up the first tag with another.
    But before he could pull the trigger, something heavy crashed into him from behind, and he went down. As he hit, he heard a blistering roar, saw fresh tracks from another direction and he suddenly realized something that made a chill rush through his body. The game, which had been difficult enough to begin with, had taken a turn for the worse.
    Because there were two invisible creatures trying to kill him instead of just one.

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    Chapter Twenty
    When Doc topped the latest in a long line of hills, he found himself staring down through the pouring rain at a ville unlike any he’d seen before.
    It was located in a depression in the sand, a bowl rimmed by tall hills that provided shelter from the rest of the Shift. From above, it looked like a tumble of wreckage, a cluster of corrugated metal and plastic sheets, wooden timbers, broken glass, canvas and cardboard strewed over the wet, dark sand.
    But as Doc peered into the ramshackle mess, he soon saw people going about their business down there—muties with the same crimson skin as Ankh and the other shifters. They moved easily among the ruins, darting in and out of half-buried doorways, clambering over smashed rooftops and into shattered windows, leaping from collapsed stairways and diving into pipes and ductwork.
    There was activity everywhere, in fact. What looked like jumbled wreckage was actually a thriving community, a veritable anthill of mutie endeavor.
    “This is it,” Ankh said. “The ville I told you about.”
    “Incredible.” As the rest of the shifters swarmed past him down the hill, Doc stayed at the crest and gaped with open fascination. “It looks as if it has been destroyed and rebuilt numerous times.”
    “Too many times to count,” Ankh told him. “What you see before you is a record of our people’s struggle to survivethe elements. Which is why the place is called Struggle, of