Read Playfair's Axiom for Free Online

orange-and-yellow clouds. After unleashing a few stinging droplets, the clouds had held off spewing lethal acid. But this fall of flesh and feathers and claws wasn’t much improvement.
    For the scavvies, anyway. The monsters seemed attracted by the movement of the attackers charging the ring-shaped ruin. Ryan saw at least a dozen. Some battled as futilely as the blond-dreaded man who was sinking to his knees as the horror clutching his head ate his face. Others ran for all they were worth back the way they had come.
    It usually meant they died tired as well as screaming. No matter how inspired they were to run, the screamwings flew faster.
    And wheeling above, a black crucifix against the mustard clouds, was a shape that seemed as big as a predark light plane.
    Not all the screamwings found prey. Some helped their comrades swarm the scavvies. Others turned their attention toward the defenders in the circular ruin. One uttered a squawk and swooped down from twenty yards up.
    A blast of .33-caliber double-00 balls from J.B.’s shotgun caught it square and ripped it apart in midair.
    The muties turned and flew away. Even the ones sitting and ripping strips of skin and flesh from fallen quarry, some of which still writhed and hollered, snapped open their wings and took off. They flew not in pursuit of the scavvie survivors, now in full retreat, but northwest, toward the top of the tall, dark tower. The ones chasing the scavvies sheered off to join them, uttering hoarse cries.
    “Wow,” Mildred said. “I know I busted that one like a blood piñata. But I never knew screamwings to let a little thing like that discourage them so easy before.”
    “Hey!” Jak called. “Other coldhearts run, too!”
    The words hit Ryan like a fist to the gut. So remarkable, not to mention horrific, had the sudden screamwing attack been that it had all but hypnotized him. He’d stone forgotten they were being hit in a flank attack by what was apparently a second set of enemies.
    His eye caught Krysty’s emerald gaze in passing as they both cranked their heads west. Pink spots glowed on her cheeks. She’d got caught up in their unlikely rescue-by-monster, too. And that kind of thing could get you chilled.
    Ryan looked toward the flattened building and the stadium looming beyond to see a scavvie stagger and slap his hand to his neck. A short thick feathered shaft transfixed the man’s neck right to left. Ryan knew a crossbow quarrel when he saw one.
    The boom of black-powder weapons echoed through the ruins, shot through with the sharp crackle of a full-auto smokeless blaster. Another of the west-side attacker fell. This bunch looked more clean-cut and less grubbythan the others. The others turned to race back toward the cover of the collapsed parking structure, some loosing quick shots toward the south, others just beating feet.
    “Uh-oh,” Ryan heard J.B. croak. “We got company.”
    Something buzzed between Ryan and Krysty to strike off the stub wall with a crack and a little spray of concrete grit. Both tracked the crossbow quarrel as it fell to the mounded dust and broken masonry.
    Then both turned as one to look toward the gap in the south portion of the ring that led to the ruined walkway-curved building. A half-dozen men and women stood or knelt there, leveling crossbows and longblasters at them.
    Jak already had his hands hoisted over his head. He was normally as bitter-end a fighter as any of them. But a skinny kid in a T-shirt and shorts had appeared right across the ring-wall from him and held the twin muzzles of a long black-powder scattergun a handspan away from Jak’s pale right ear.
    Ryan glanced at Krysty, who turned to stand by his side. She shrugged.
    “Reckon you got the better of us,” he called.
    “Reckon we do,” said a tall, lanky man with a fair complexion, a sort of narrow carrot head topped by a tangle of ginger hair. He wore loose khaki cargo pants and a green T-shirt, both too new-looking to be anything but