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try to get his SIG handblaster into play when a figure loomed up right in front of him with a terrible screech.

Chapter Four
    Desperately Ryan rolled back onto his butt, away from the low wall. He flung up the Steyr crosswise just in time to catch the haft of a rusty-headed tomahawk descending toward his face.
    Heat stung his left cheek as Krysty shot the scavvie in the face with her short-barreled handblaster. Ryan sensed minute bits of unburned propellant clacking against the patch that covered that eye. Though the short barrel of the little .38 produced a shattering muzzle-blast that close up, he never heard it. His ears already rang from repeated booms from his big 7.62 longblaster.
    He threw himself forward and up, rolling to his feet in time to buttstroke another screaming scavvie across the face. He felt a yielding instant and then a crunch as a cheekbone gave way. The scavenger staggered back, dropping a big 1911-style semiauto handblaster to clutch at its stove-in face.
    Her face, Ryan realized. It meant no more to him than what species of bug he’d just crunched beneath his boot heel. Running with the Trader, he’d long ago learned the brutal lesson that those who came to chill you had no sex or age. They had to die if you wanted to live.
    Quickly Ryan stooped to prop the Steyr against the wall. Even in emergencies you didn’t want to go dropping precision optics on the ground. Using the longblaster as a club was bad enough.
    As he put down the rifle with his left hand he drew the big fat-bladed panga from its sheath with the right. The wounded woman, screaming like a stuck steam whistle with fury and agony, yanked a blade from her own belt and lunged toward him for payback.
    Krysty’s S&W 640 boomed again. She either missed the knife-wielding woman or aimed at someone else. Ryan sensed other figures closing in. He slashed the scavvie rushing him slantwise across a trim belly left bare between a stained tank top and filth-crusted baggy camo pants. The wound was a rising, drawing cut that drew a red line across sunburned flesh. It opened like a red-lipped mutie mouth, spilling gray and purple loops of guts. They tripped the woman up and she went down howling.
    Jak’s .357 Python ripped out three fast characteristic barks, sizzling with high-energy harmonics. “West! They coming!” the teen shouted. “We triple-screwed!”
    Ryan yanked out his SIG, then ducked as a scavvie twenty yards to the north dropped to a knee to spray the defenders with full-auto grief from an M-4. As Ryan dropped he pushed Krysty’s right hip hard with the heel of his hand. Adrenaline boosted his own wiry strength enough to tumble the woman right over…and save her life as a burst of .223 bullets ripped the air where she’d stood a moment before.
    With the ringing in his ears amped double by the fierce muzzle-blast of the short-barreled carbine, it took Ryan a beat to realize that he was hearing wild screaming from the other side of the wall. In two different voices, or rather, kinds of voices. One was human, uttering throat-tearing shrieks of wild fear and intolerable agony.
    The other set came from something not even remotely human.
    He risked a fast peek over the parapet.
    “Screamwings!” Krysty exclaimed from his side. As resilient as a hard rubber ball, she’d bounced right back up and into the fight from her tumble, even though both landing on the sharp-cornered rubble and the punch Ryan had given her would have left deep bruises.
    They watched wide-eyed as a chicken-size screamwing sank its talons into the blond dreadlocked sides of a goggled scavvie’s head so deeply that blood spurted. The screamwing struck like a snake at his face with its toothed beak. The goggles protected the man’s eyes—until the ravening flying mutie ripped them off and tossed them away with a screech of triumph.
    And then the man cried out much louder than the mutant bird.
    A flock of the winged horrors had descended as if from the churning