Free Devil's Vortex by James Axler

that we’re still
looking
.”
    He sighed again.
    “There’s got to be more than this, Krysty, something better that’s staying just out of reach. If it comes our way, I wouldn’t say no.”
    “Why are you really so reluctant to let her come along with us, lover?”
    Ryan rubbed his chin. Even over the tinkling piano and loud gaudy joviality, she could hear the bristles rasp.
    “I can’t really put my finger on it,” he said. “There’s just something...weird about her, you know?”
    For a moment she gazed at him with her emerald eyes. She knew what kind of a bewitching effect they had on him.
    She gave her hair another twitch. Ever so slightly.
    He laughed. “Point taken. I should know better than to try to get one past you, Krysty.”
    “You know,” she said, sipping her beer, “you really should.”
    Ryan looked around. Their friends seemed occupied and as safe here and now as they ever were anywhere.
    “You know,” he said, “with what we got paid for that job from Hamarville, and what Baron Dugan’s giving us for this next gig, we could spring for a private room, just for you and me. What do you say we go check it out?”
    A third of her beer remained in her mug. She tossed it back in a single swallow. Then she wiped her mouth, smiled and set the mug down with a decisive thump.
    “I thought you’d never ask,” she said, rising to her feet.
     

Chapter Eight
    The companions hadn’t traveled more than half a mile down the road that led east from Duganville, between broad fields with workers steering mule-drawn plows, before Krysty stopped dead and said, “Something very bad is about to begin.”
    The words sent a jolt of alarm blasting through Ryan’s guts and tingling down the nerves of his arms and legs. None of his people were prone to crying wolf; Krysty had an advantage.
    The flame-haired beauty had a touch of a psychic mutation that gave her a limited ability to snatch glimpses of the future. Almost invariably bad ones.
    She rarely got those flashes of vision, but Ryan had no doubt she’d just had one of her bad premonitions.
    Walking point, forty yards ahead down the crude but often-dragged road, Jak whirled with his white hair flying in the morning sun.
    “Wags!” he shouted. “Coming fast!”
    “Off the road!” Ryan rapped.
    For just a moment, he thought about splitting the group out to either side of the road to prep an ambush, just in case. But he could hear the engine sounds now. There were a lot of them, mebbe not just four or five.
    “Left! Into the field. Hit the ditch and get down fast.”
    Sweetwater Creek was the lifeblood of Duganville, as well as its economy. It provided a reliable supply of water, enough for the ville’s population of several hundred and for hundreds of acres of croplands stretching up and down the valley. A system of irrigation ditches conveyed it to their crops. The nearest happened to be the one that ran north of the track.
    That was fortunate, because the mostly flat valley bottom didn’t offer much else in the way of cover and concealment.
    “What about those trees there?” Mildred called as they began to race for the nearest ditch. A couple hundred yards ahead and to the left rose a small stand of trees, an orchard.
    “No time!” Ryan shouted back. His boots thudded on freshly plowed furrows. It was bad terrain to run on, soft and uneven, but he and his friends had motivation.
    He heard whistles blowing. At first that surprised him, then he saw people racing west toward the shelter of the ville’s walls, others unhitching their beasts from the plows before driving them in the same direction. He realized the whistling was a signal system among the various Duganville workers laboring to get their crops in the ground, now that the frosts were done for the year, telling them to run for cover.
    Jak reached the nearest ditch that ran parallel to the road and plunged in, raising a splash of brown water. He had his Colt Python out and was aiming it