Guns of Mars 8
A Martian action-adventure by The Legend Chuck Dixon
CHAPTER 3.1
Pain drew him back to his senses. Pain that gnawed at each muscle and bone as blood returned to all six of his limbs. He tried to shift his weight and found his wrists, all four, were bound behind him.
Despite his agonies, he realized that he was warm. His nostrils filled with the scent of roasting meat.
Kal Keddaq opened his eyes and recoiled at the sight of a great white ape crouching on the other side of a cook fire. He pressed his back against something behind him in an attempt to rise to his feet. He found he was hobbled; a thong secured his ankles together.
“You’re alive,” the white ape said.
Kal now saw that it was a man not an ape who leaned forward to slice at a slab of meat dripping fat from a spit onto rocks that glowed red with heat. It was the bronze man dressed in a thick fur coat made from the hide of a white ape; a hood fashioned from the shock of white bristles atop the ape’s scalp was pulled up over his head to cover what Kal knew was rust colored hair. His legs were covered in breeches sewn from a hide of some variety. Boots had taken the place of the sandals the man wore when Kal saw him last in the labyrinth of ravines.
The bronze man had found him and drawn him back from the brink of death; a bounty man who saved him for a worse fate that lay ahead.
It was early morning, the sun offering watery light from a white sky. The tidy camp was sheltered from the wind by the carcass of Kal’s thoats. The ribs of the pack animal were exposed where the bronze man had trimmed away the steaks that now steamed atop the rocks. The bounty man’s thoat stood apart, its rump turned to the wind.
His rifle, saber, saddle, and other goods lay heaped behind the man.
“Eat this,” the bronze man said as he flung a slab of the roast that landed next to Kal with a wet thud.
“Undo my bonds,” Kal said.
The bronze man shook his head as he sliced himself a narrow strip.
Special Note: GUNS OF MARS is now available in a hardcover edition. It is available at Amazon and at NDM Express.
