Horses of the North by Robert Adams

Author:Robert Adams [Adams, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter VIII

To men accustomed to stalking close enough to deer and other game to bring them down with a single arrow, the stalking of the nighttime sentries walking the perimeter and the settlement that once had been the Utah town of Laketon proved absurdly easy of accomplishment. Razor-edged knife and deadly garrote did their sanguineous tasks of severing or crushing human windpipes, quickly, brutally, but very efficiently, in silence so absolute that not even the domestic animals of the settlement were alerted. Milo and those few older men who had done this sort of thing before, long ago, in another world, were very proud of their proteges on that night.

They had left the wagons, the carts, the herds and the women and children several miles to the north and come in on foot, leading their mounts for the last mile or so in the darkness. When the yodel of a loon, repeated three times, then twice, notified the waiting men that the last of the sentries was down, they mounted, rechecked their weapons and moved out, those with torches lighting them from a watchfire as they walked their horses and mules across the now-unguarded perimeter and into the sleeping town.

All were armed with the automatics, short shotguns and handguns taken from the ambushed motorcycle outlaws years before, for unlike the other rifles and shotguns, these weapons were utterly useless for hunting, their sole utilization being the purpose for which they had been made or adapted: man-killing at very close range. In addition, some of the better archers bore bows, the arrow shafts wrapped near the heads with lengths of rag impregnated with oil, resin, lard and other flammables. Milo carried the last two grenades—one fragmentation, one concussion; the grenades had disappeared over the years in the Snake River country simply because they were a sure way to harvest large numbers of fish from a lake with little or no effort.

At the directions of the leaders, the archers uncased their first arrows, fired them from the blazing torches, then loosed them into anything that looked flammable—roofs, buildings with wooden siding, three half-buried strongpoints roofed with logs and weathered timbers, and the like. Other men dismounted to open the gas caps of vehicles, dip strips of cloth into the tanks, light the outside ends and run back to their horses. Detached units had dealt similarly with the flotilla of powerboats at the lakeside docks, then opened the cocks of the fuel storage tanks, following which—and from a goodly distance away—Milo had used one of old Paul Krueger's homemade spring projectors to send the single available concussion grenade to bounce along the cracked concrete in and out of the widening pools of gasoline for the few seconds it had taken for its fuse to set off the fiery main charge.

The first explosion brought armed men boiling out of five of the larger buildings directly into the withering barrage of automatics, shotguns, pistols and even a few arrows. No unarmed man or woman was

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