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they weren’t going to make it out of this alive, after all. It was a thought he couldn’t come to grips with, and instinctively smothered.
    Then the pirates started laying on the lash to make the terrified slaves rise from their benches.
    Whipped hard across the shoulders from behind, J.B. lurched to his feet, his face twisted in outrage. For a second, Ryan’s old battlemate lost all semblance of control. He jerked at his chains like an animal, trying desperately, futilely, to break free, to get his hands on his grinning, dreadlocked tormentor.
    At least J.B. wasn’t pissing himself, which is more thanRyan could say for some of the other slaves around them. The Padre Islander kid, Garwood Reed, looked stunned, frozen like a jacklit rabbit. The companions had done their best to protect him during the torturous journey—though young the orphaned boy had proved himself in battle—but apart from their each giving up a bit of the scant rations to keep him going there was little to be done. “Stay close to me, son,” Ryan told the teen. “No matter what happens, stay close….”
    Ryan felt it was his responsibility to get the companions clear of this mess, somehow, some way, but as things stood that feat was impossible. Looking at the mob, he knew he couldn’t keep his friends from being torn limb from limb, if that’s the croaking that fate held in store.
    For their part, never had J.B., Krysty and Jak been confronted by so many agitated people at one time. In Deathlands a big crowd might be a couple of hundred souls. Krysty’s prehensile hair had drawn up into tight ringlets of alarm. The expression in Jak’s bloodred eyes was unreadable; the albino had retreated somewhere deep inside his own head. Mildred and Doc, both born in earlier eras, before Armageddon’s large-scale population cull, had experience with masses of humanity. And Ryan who had been kidnapped to Shadow World, a parallel earth where the profusion of people had overrun all other forms of life, was no virgin when it came to mob scenes. However, none of them had ever been the focus of such furious and overwhelming attention.
    Flogged until they all got to their feet, the rowers were linked ankle to ankle and then driven toward the waiting gangplanks.
    As Ryan and the companions edged forward to the tug’s gate, he saw men in red sashes and straw hats pounding back the crowd with cudgels and the metal-shod butts of sawed-off,double-barreled shotguns. The sec men swinging clubs carried fold-stock, 9 mm submachine guns on slings over their shoulders. With brute force, they opened a lane in the packed bodies to three stake trucks that were idling on the pier. The sec men held the path open with difficulty. As spectators surged forward, they had to be beaten back.
    When Ryan stepped into view on the gangplank, the mob on either side went crazy, pointing at him, jumping up and down. They started up a chant.
    “¡Shi-ball-an-kay!”
    “¡Shi-ball-an-kay!”
    “¡Shi-ball-an-kay!”
    Krysty leaned forward and hollered in his ear, “Didn’t I say you were famous!”
    “What are they saying? What’s it mean?” Ryan shouted at Mildred.
    “Damned if I know!” she shouted back. “It’s not Spanish!”
    A superamplified voice, syrupy-smooth and talking a mile a minute, bellowed through a megaphone mounted atop the roof of the lead truck’s cab. The rapid-fire speech was backed by recorded accordion, drums and trumpets gone wild—which competed with the other music pouring out of the pier’s speakers.
    At blasterpoint, Ryan, his battlemates and young Reed were forced to climb into the back of the first stake truck. Like the other two vehicles, it was aimed toward the city center. When the bed was crammed full of slaves, thirty or so in all, a sec man slammed shut the wooden rear gate. The remaining trucks were likewise loaded and locked.
    Red-sashed sec men surrounded the vehicles, laboring to keep the crowd from surging forward and overrunning