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their wounded friend.
    He felt impacts on the back of his shirt and head. He heard a frying-egg sound and smelled a nasty stench like burning hair as the concentrated acid in the rain dissolved its proteins.
    J.B.’s head hung between Ryan and Krysty. He moaned as an acid drop hit his cheek, clinging and burning like napalm.
    “Run!” Ryan shouted. He didn’t care what their captors had to say about it. If they decided their prisoners were making a break for it and chilled them, it was an easier death than acid.
    But the dozen or so locals were concentrating on not getting dissolved themselves. Those who could held bits ofclothing over their heads for cover, or yanked their shirts over their heads. The angry welts some of them sported on their backs showed they’d made this particular unpleasant choice before.
    The four friends carrying J.B. were already straining. But as the rain began to sting like wasps they accelerated anyway. They were used to walking and even running long distances. But each of them, Ryan realized, had been holding back out of concern for jostling J.B.
    Now that was forgotten. As always, the demands of survival overrode everything else. They ran flat out, and the rain hissed in the white-gray dust that lay on the frost-heaved asphalt beneath their feet.
    Toughened as they were, their chests were working like bellows when the section of highway a hundred feet over their heads cut off the rain as if flipping a switch.
    They staggered a few paces and then laid J.B. beside a thick concrete support pillar as near the middle of the span as possible. Then they collapsed around him, gasping like so many beached Sippi giant catfish.
    Around them their captors took up a defensive perimeter. Some splashed water from canteens on their comrades to wash away acid. The rain pattered hard on the blacktop around them and the overhead pass. It raised a stinging stink that made Ryan’s eye water.
    A couple of blocks north the wounded scavvies who’d been left behind by their bugging-out pals were screaming. It was surprisingly loud at this distance. Or maybe, not so surprising.
    Ryan tuned it out. He’d heard people dying in unspeakable agony before. It wasn’t as if he liked those bastards melting alive out there.
    Mildred was on her knees cradling J.B.’s head on her thigh. She was still a pro; though she stroked his wispybrown hair tenderly she didn’t waste breath begging him to speak to her.
    “How’s he look?” Ryan asked, taking a pull from the canteen at his waist.
    She shook her head. “Not good,” she said. “But if he’s got internal bleeding he’s not showing any sign it’s gotten worse from being jogged around like a bag of mail.”
    “Not bubbling out nose or mouth,” said Jak, who squatted nearby, panting like the bipedal white wolf he resembled. “Good sign.”
    The skin went tight at the corners of Mildred’s eyes and mouth. Then she forced herself to relax. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, it is.”
    “So who are you?” Ryan said as the tall patrol leader approached. It suddenly struck him: what he’d taken for unhealthy pallor was clean skin. These folk were well-scrubbed by usual ville standards, even after however many hours on patrol.
    “Aren’t you getting things backward?” Tully said. “We got the blasters. Who the hell are you? ”
    Ryan shook his head. “Just folks passing through,” he said with unfeigned weariness. “My name’s Ryan. The woman here’s Krysty. The other’s our healer, Mildred. The sawed-off runt she’s tending to’s named J.B. Old guy’s Doc and the teenager’s Jak.”
    “Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner, at your service,” Doc said. He managed to make his introduction sound grand despite the fact he was sitting on his bony old ass on an ancient weed-cracked highway. He gestured with his ebony walking stick. Ryan was startled to see their captors had allowed him to keep it, apparently presuming he needed it to walk. None of them seemed to