Guns of Mars 12
A Martian action-adventure by The Legend Chuck Dixon
CHAPTER 4.2
Kal’s march the following day was more painful than before. He had shucked his sandals the night before. With his hands bound he had no way to restore them to his feet. Kal suggested the man help him by tying the sandals back in place. He was rewarded with a dry chuckle.
A cutting wind from the south blew across the ice in the afternoon. The air was soon a blinding mist of stinging ice crystals stirred from the polar surface by violent gusts. Kal bent near double to make progress against powerful winds that threatened to topple him.
Dropping to a knee, he turned to look back the way he’d come.
The bronze man and his mount were invisible in the icy gale.
Kal sat now, his back to the wind. He tested the thong strung between his ankles that restricted him to a hobbling gait. It was fashioned of leather rather than wound fiber. And it was frozen rigid by the radical drop in temperature brought on by the fierce squall.
He rocked onto his back and brought his feet together only to draw them apart with a sudden jerk. Three times he did this, and on the third attempt the thong snapped at the center.
Without further thought, Kal was up and moving as swiftly as he could. He ran at a full run, long strides carried him over the ice at an angle away from the course set by the man. With any luck, Kal could be lost to the sight of the man and over the horizon by the time the storm had passed.
His chances were poor of ever finding his way off the ice. Yet he preferred those odds to a certain fate as a captive of the bounty man. A long punishing trek followed by his return to the mercies of his tribal headman. Better to go to an eternal sleep in the cold than have the flesh stripped from him over weeks of torture.
Kal slid to a halt on the ice as a dark shape soared over his head to land before him. The slide caused him to lose his balance and drop onto his rump and nearly biting off the tip of his tongue upon impact.
The bronze man stood before him, a pistol aimed at Kal’s skull.
The thark rolled on his side and was on his feet and running once more. And once more he drew to a halt as the man appeared before him, a gun aimed unerring between his eyes.
He shifted direction and sprinted away, bent double, in the opposite course only to find the man before him, both hands filled with pistols. The blue eyes were hard and brimmed with cold rage. The bounty man was everywhere at once and Kal could not fathom how he had done this. Perhaps this John was a wizard of some kind.
“You like running, big man?” the bronze man said with a snarl. “Well, maybe we’ll see if you can run all the way to Samarium.”
Special Note: GUNS OF MARS is now available in a hardcover edition. It is available at Amazon and at NDM Express.
