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Jak turned and moved swiftly through the trees until he was sure he was beyond sight and sound of the pack. He dropped onto the woodland floor and began to run, picking his way nimbly over the roots and the uneven earth. All the while, his mind was racing. By the time he reached the companions, there would be only the slightest of distances between himself and the stickies. Although he was moving fast, the extra distance in circling them would tell. It would be enough time for the group to adopt a defensive position and to try to blast their way out of trouble, but not enough time for them to move out of range and to safety. They couldn’t rely on keeping one jump ahead when they didn’t know what the terrain in front of them was like.
But this was a large pack, and whatever had stirred them up had made them a savage and vicious enemy that would attack regardless. Stickies were normally cowardly, and a taste of blasterfire would scatter them, fear overcoming rage. However, he felt that this pack had something stronger driving them on.
And that was another problem to weigh—what if the thing that enraged the stickies was hot on their tail? Fighting off such a large and maddened pack would be hard enough. To then have to fight another enemy may be a step too far.
Jak was in sight of the companions, who broke cover as he approached. He was barely breathing hard, despite his exertion, but it still took valuable time for him to spit out everything the recce had told him. As he came to the end of his report, the pack was within hearing.
“Fireblast and fuck it, we stand and fight,” Ryan snapped. “Too late to do anything else. They’re moving quick.” He directed the companions back to the positions they had adopted while awaiting Jak. “Fire on sight—just try to chill the bastards as they come through.”
They had one chance to clean this up quickly. Because of their pack mentality, and because the woodlands were becoming more dense, there was a narrow channel through which the stickies would probably try to squeeze. With the companions in cover on either side of this channel, they may just be able to take them out quickly and en masse as they formed a bottleneck to move through. Stickies weren’t smart enough to back off and spread out, striking back at an enemy by spreading their attack front.
The companions could smell the muties before they were upon them, the sickly sweet odor of their sweat filled their nostrils and made them gag. Stickies were vile enough in ones, twos or small groups; but this strong, and it was almost enough to make a challenger give up and run. The companions trained their blasters on the narrow channel, waiting for the first of the muties to hove into view. They had to be close. The noise they were making was now deafening, the smell overpowering.
The foliage trembled, shook and finally was ripped asunder as the pack of stickies burst into the clearing. The wait had been so tense that it was almost a shock when they finally broke cover. They were ripping up anything in their path, each almost oblivious to the others around it, their collective state whipped into a rage of fury and fear—fear that seemed to be coming off them in waves, and was driving them onward. The mass of mutie flesh filled the clearing in less than a few seconds.
Fingers had twitched on triggers, tensing and untensing for the moment when they would have to squeeze to unleash a barrage of blasterfire at the optimum moment to cause the most damage.
And now that moment had arrived.
“Fire!” Ryan yelled. “Aim at their heads.”
The roar of blasterfire was intense, so loud that it washed over the noise made by the pack, drowning everything in the liquid shout of the pistol and machine-pistol action. The screams of the first stickies to feel the impact were lost in the hurricane of sound, but the reactions of their fellows showed that the initial burst had registered through the ranks.
Jak’s Colt Python had the force of a Magnum round. The slugs he squeezed off ripped through their initial target, the rippling force of the bullets causing fatal damage almost instantaneously, the exit velocity such that the slugs cannoned into the head of the next stickie in line, taking it out at the same time.
Krysty, Mildred and Ryan had blasters that demanded more precision: the Smith & Wesson, the ZKR and Ryan’s favored Steyr all taking out one stickie at a time with rapidly delivered single shots that ran true and chilled.
But it was J.B. and Doc who could do the most damage. The LeMat percussion pistol’s second chamber, with its heavy ball, could do a similar job as the Colt Python, the heavily charged ball driving through one stickie and taking out the mutie directly behind as it retained enough momentum to cause lethal damage. It was, inevitably, the shot chamber that was the most deadly, the pellets striking home at a number of targets. Those that it didn’t chill immediately were either trampled beneath the feet of others as they fell, or turned and lashed out in blind anger and pain, fighting with their own.
However, it took valuable time to reload the LeMat, so it was as well that J.B. could fire repeatedly from his Smith & Wesson M-4000, each cartridge load of barbed-metal fléchettes causing damage to the stickie hordes. The pump action enabled him to fire swiftly, and his natural skill and affinity with weapons made reloading a fluid and fast motion, which seemed to come as second nature.
The channel into the small clearing was soon filling with the chilled and the injured, forming a block to the other muties. That should have been the end of matters. Stickies were normally cowardly and would run if attacked by any kind of superior force.
Not this time. Whatever had frightened and agitated them scared them far more than the prospect of being chilled by weapons fire. Instead of turning back to something that terrified them more than the blasterfire, they continued to advance. And if they couldn’t move in a straight line, they would try to find a way through the denser foliage.
Ryan cursed under his breath when he saw them begin to divert. It was always a risk to stand and fight such a large number of stickies simply because of the sheer weight of their numbers. The only advantage that made it even feasible was that the stickies would be likely to follow the same route through the woods and thus would be concentrated in a small area.
The fact that they were now spreading out, moving into areas where it would be hard for the companions to hit them in bulk, and would be able to use the cover of the trees, made it a much more difficult task—one that verged on impossible at the best of times, let alone now. The companions had been marching all day and hadn’t had time to recover from the previous night’s fight with the mutie raccoons. This had been—they had hoped—a similar situation. Not now.
“Spread out,” Ryan yelled.
“There’s a lot down, they’re thinned out,” J.B. shouted. “Watch for them circling…Jak, what can you see?”
“Less half left,” the albino mutie replied pithily. “Still moving blind,” he added.
“So are we,” Krysty yelled at the Armorer and Jak. “Be our eyes.”
Down on the forest floor, Krysty was right. The dense foliage echoed with the sounds of chilled and chilling stickies, mingling with the enraged cries of the remaining pack and the rustle of the foliage as it was disturbed. There were sounds from all around, making it hard to pinpoint the danger. The light was poor, the woodland in shadow and it was almost impossible to pick out movement through the density and the dark. She, Ryan, Doc and Mildred were blinded at ground level. But J.B. and Jak were still in position up trees and had a better view of what was going on around.
Better, but still not great.
“Shit, can’t see too much,” J.B. yelled over the noise. “Three of them to your right, Millie, about three o’clock.”
Mildred furrowed her brow, frowning heavily as she tried to pick out one noise from another. At the Armorer’s words she turned to her right and squeezed out three shots at the first noises she heard. Screams of pain confirmed that she had found a target with at least two of the shells. But the third hadn’t quite finished the job. An enraged stickie, pouring blood from a neck wound, crashed through the undergrowth and was upon her before she had a chance to move. It crashed into her, driving her backward into the bole of a tree and knocking the breath from her. Her lungs ached for oxygen and lights danced in front of her eyes as she was momentarily stunned. She felt the creature’s hot, fetid breath on her face and, as the lights cleared, could see the blind hate in its pinprick black eyes, all the more intense for the white and hairless skull surrounding them. The stench from its body made her mouth fill with bile. The feel of the suckers on its fingers made her flesh crawl.
It was the gag response that brought her just enough time to react. The stickie made her so nauseous that she projectile vomited into its face. The hot stream of bile and puke hit it squarely, filling its mouth and nostrils, stinging its eyes. The stickie screamed, suddenly blinded, and released its grip, staggering back and clawing at its face. Dragging air into her lungs with a painful, rasping gasp, Mildred brought up the Czech ZKR so that it was level with the creature’s face as it managed to blinkingly clear its eyes. The last thing it would have seen was the barrel and dark maw of the 551 as Mildred squeezed the trigger to release a slug. The exit wound took half of the creature’s thin, eggshell skull with it.
Mildred spit onto the ground, trying to clear her head and the bitter taste of bile from her mouth. That had been too close for comfort.
She dragged herself upright from the bole of the tree, shook her head to clear it and entered the fray once more. She was needed….
Doc was having problems. The LeMat was difficult to reload in a hurry and a cry from the Armorer had alerted him to the fact that a couple of stickies were headed in his direction. Realizing that he wouldn’t have the time to reload the cumbersome percussion blaster, he rapidly holstered it and withdrew the sword from within the silver lion’s-head swordstick that contained the blade tempered and made from the finest Toledo steel. The seemingly old and frail man was deft and quick with the blade, as many had found to their detriment, and he had to use all his skills when one of the stickies burst through the undergrowth and was on him before he had a chance to drag the blade fully from its sheath.
“By the Three Kennedys, I’m not falling that easily,” he breathed, putting his weight on his back foot to stabilize himself as he flicked his wrist, the tendons straining as he rolled the blade emerging from the stick, changing its upward trajectory into an arc so that, as the tip cleared the sheath it flew toward the stickie, arcing across its throat and slicing into the thin, pliable flesh. It parted like rotting meat, the carotid artery severed. The creature stopped in its tracks, mutely clutching its torn neck before tumbling to the ground.
Meanwhile, Ryan had shouldered his Steyr and had drawn the SIG-Sauer. The rifle was fine for distance shooting, but close-quarters fighting required a handblaster. He started to fire at the sounds coming from the undergrowth, but it was so dense that he couldn’t tell if his shots were having any effect in the bedlam.
“Where are they?” Krysty yelled to J.B.
“I don’t know. They’re getting lost in the woods,” he replied, switching from the M-4000 to his Uzi, which he set to single shot as he slipped down to ground level. “Just keep triple-red. Try to pick ’em out.”
Picking them out was something that Doc could do only too well. With an instinct that told them he was less dangerous because of his lack of a blaster, the stickies were concentrating on him, somehow communicating with one another in a way that only they could understand. He was holding his own, the sword a flashing blade that sprayed the air with crimson as he claimed victims. But he was outnumbered and having to spin in circles just to keep the weight of the numbers at bay.
Jak, picking off those he could from up in his tree, could see that Doc was being overwhelmed. He smiled. A cold, vulpine grin of expectant bloodlust. Time to help Doc out.
Slipping down the tree after a last look around to take in the positions of both his companions and of those stickies visible in the density, Jak slid the .357 Magnum into its holster. The Colt Python was a formidable blaster, but inappropriate for the kind of fighting he would have to engage. In close quarters, there was always a chance that the Magnum shells would pierce a stickie and go clean through, possibly damaging a compatriot too close to the action. He didn’t want to chill Doc while he was trying to save him.
As Jak ghosted through the trees, he could almost taste the stickies as they converged on the old man. Their smell cloyed his sensitive nostrils, sharpening his hunger to thin them out a little.
Doc was fighting hard, fighting well, but he was hugely outnumbered. The stickies came at him from every direction and it was all he could do to thrust, parry and slice a few at a time. His actions drove back those whose blood spilled onto the ground, but they were just replaced by others, equally as intent on ripping Doc to shreds. He was backed up against a tree, holding them at bay on three sides, and praying that none would approach from the rear to pin him to the bough.
“Doc!” Jak yelled by way of warning.
“Thank heavens. I could not wish for any more,” Doc gasped breathlessly.
The stickies were so intent on their task that they paid no heed to the shout from behind them. They couldn’t ignore the whirlwind that swept into their midst, however, rending them asunder with an attack of staggering and intense ferocity.
Jak had palmed a razor-sharp, leaf-bladed knife from the many hiding places in his patched and tattered camou jacket. He had one in each hand, held loosely to facilitate movement, but firm enough so that they wouldn’t drop. His eyes glittered as he focused on the pack in front of him. Some had been cut by Doc; they smelled of blood and fear. It was a sweet smell to him, goading him into action.
The albino teen became a grim-faced chilling machine. Moving quickly, he sliced and chopped, going for vulnerable body areas that would slow and disable first. Many of the stickies he slashed would die from internal injury or loss of blood, the pain preventing them from fighting; to chill every last one of them, one by one, would be too slow a task. Speed was of the essence, here, so unless he was able to strike a chilling blow first time, it was better if he disabled the stickie, returned to it later to finish it off, after Doc was safe.
The blurring form of Jak cutting a swathe through the pack caused enough disturbance for those at the forefront to be distracted, torn between continuing their attack on the old man or turning to face the new enemy.
It was all Doc needed. The distraction Jak caused enabled him to get off his back foot and begin an offensive. He stepped forward, the flashing Toledo steel blade proscribing fatal arcs through the air, striking home chilling blows on the stickies in the front ranks before being swiftly withdrawn and put to the test once more, striking true and removing the enemy from the fray.
Between them, the two companions were able to cut through the muties with ease, turning to deliver chilling blows to those who were still alive and twitching.
It felt as though the tide was beginning to turn. But not, perhaps, for Mildred and Krysty. At shouted cries from both Ryan and J.B., they had all tried to find a central point at which they could converge, a point from which they could fight back-to-back, knowing that they stood no chance of hitting each other if they were the source of noise, directing fire. It would have been a simple enough plan if not for the fact that darkness was descending too rapidly in the already gloomy cover of the forest and the noise was such that it was hard to pick out direction as they exchanged calls, desperately trying to locate one another.
Stickies loomed in and out of the darkness, confused by the shooting, angered by the chilling of their fellow pack members, bloodlust fuelled by the smell of their own dead—and driven almost to distraction by the sound of beating hooves and distant cries that could faintly be heard over the pandemonium.
Whatever had whipped the pack into such a frenzy in the first place was now catching up with them. It would be a case of “shoot first, ask questions after.” The four companions, isolated in their search for one another, fighting off stray stickies who stumbled upon them in the darkness, knew that they would also be easy prey for whatever pursued the stickies.
Ryan and J.B. had holstered their blasters, unwilling to indulge in a firefight when there was a good chance of hitting each other in the confusion. Ryan had taken the panga from its thigh sheath; the heavy blade was causing stickie blood to flow copiously. Likewise, J.B. was using his Tekna knife, taking out the mutie attackers as they stumbled across him, or vice versa as he tried to find the others.
For Mildred and Krysty there was no such luxury. The women didn’t have knives. Unwilling, like the men, to indulge in hazardous blasterfire, both used their blasters as clubs. It was fortunate that the muties were prone to blindly rush into attack and that the women were trained and practiced in unarmed combat. It was relatively easy for them to use their skills to stop the muties laying hands on them, even though the clammy, sticky-padded fingers clung to their clothing and flesh when the muties were able to lay hands on them—hard to dislodge and repulsive to the touch. Once the creatures had been disarmed and brought to ground, the butts of the handblasters delivered fatal, skull-crunching blows, the thin skulls of the muties caving easily.
But it was the weight of numbers that caused the women to tire rapidly.
Jak and Doc had dispatched their opponents with ease and were about to set out to find their companions when Jak stayed Doc with a hand on his arm.
“Listen,” he said simply.
Doc’s face screwed and contorted with the effort to distinguish one noise from another in the melee. Then he turned to Jak, an astonished expression on his features.
“Men on horseback? Truly, we are fortunate,” he enthused.
“If friendly,” Jak commented wryly. “We not trust. Find others.”
“I’ll certainly agree with that,” Doc concurred. “I fear we would be better trusting to your skills in this task than mine, so perhaps you should lead,” he added.
Jak smiled, a brief ghost flickering across his white, scarred visage. “Good call,” he said wryly.
The two companions plunged into the mayhem. With their blades still firmly grasped, they were able to dispose of any opposition they encountered on their search for the others.
Mildred was their first find. She was in the act of dispatching one stickie with a jackhammer blow to the side of its skull while twisting to evade the sucking grasp of one that had approached from the rear. Doc’s sword carved the air and took off the stickie’s left ear before slicing down into its neck. With a high-pitched scream of pain, it whirled away from Mildred, releasing her to turn to Doc. Before the old man had a chance to follow through on his attack, Mildred clubbed the back of the mutie’s skull, reducing its brains to mush.
“I have never—and I mean, never—been so glad to see you, you old buzzard,” she breathed heavily.
“I shall take that as a compliment, my dear Mildred,” Doc replied. “We must find the others. Another enemy is almost upon us.”
“Aw, shit, this is just going to be one of those nights, isn’t it.” Mildred spit.
“This way,” Jak commanded, leading them off. He could hear Ryan cursing loudly as he hacked at an enemy. He was heading in that direction when Krysty came crashing out of the undergrowth.
“Gaia, but am I glad to see you,” she said. “Where—”
“This way. Quick,” Jak snapped, interrupting her. He moved toward the sound of Ryan’s voice.
The one-eyed warrior pulled his panga from the neck of a chilled stickie. He looked up as he heard them approach.
“Thought that didn’t sound like stickies,” he noted, eyeing them. “Where’s J.B.?”
“Here,” came a voice from nearby, followed shortly by the Armorer as he crashed through the trees. “Shit, that was hard work,” he panted, pushing his fedora back on his head and wiping his brow with the back of his hand. “We must have been closer than we knew. It’s just so fucking dark now.”
“Yeah, and we’ve got more company,” Ryan commented, wiping down his panga before sheathing it and unholstering his SIG-Sauer. He checked and reloaded as he said, “Must be what was driving those stickies berserk. Figure we’ve seen most of them off, and the others are probably running from whoever this is—but I don’t know about you, but I’m too tired to run.”
“I’ll go along with that,” J.B. agreed, taking down his Uzi and checking before smoothly clicking it on to rapid bursts.
Jak frowned. “Wait—spreading—trying round up stickies.”
Ryan lifted his head and listened intently. Jak was right. He could hear the remnants of the mutie pack being driven back toward them.
“Fireblast! They’re coming right through here,” he yelled. “Cover, now! Triple-red!”
The companions sought whatever refuge they could in the cover of the trees. They had converged on a natural path formed by an avenue of trees and it seemed that the horsemen were intent on driving the muties back through this path.
The stickies were being encircled and pincered, there was no doubt about that, either, but there was no escape. What was going on?
The few stickies that were left were driven past the companions’ cover. Once level with the area where Ryan’s people were in hiding, a volley of shots rang out from blasters carried by the horsemen. The few remaining stickies were mowed down in the hail, their bodies jerked by the impact and thrown across the path. They remained still, smelling of death: that unpleasant odor of cordite, blood and excrement.
Ryan could see exactly where all his people were. They would have been hidden to the casual view, but he had noted their cover. In turn, they knew where he was. He signaled them to remain in hiding. Let the horsemen make the next move.
One rider came into view, walking his horse slowly. He had a Remington slung over his shoulder and was clad in animal skins tied over ragged leggings and a jerkin. He had a beard flecked with gray and long hair tied back from his face. He stopped almost directly in front of where Ryan was in cover, and looked around from his mount.
“You might as well come out, people. We know you’re here and we’ve got you surrounded. Chill me, and you’ll be as fucked as these mutie bastards.”
Chapter Three
Ryan knew from the sounds of horses and men around them that the stickies had been driven and chilled at this spot for a reason. The riders had heard and possibly seen some of the battle that had taken place on their approach, and they were making a point. Now they were all around, and there was no way that the companions could escape.
Casting his eye over the hiding places of his companions, Ryan could see that they were as aware of this as he was and were waiting for a sign.
The bearded rider kissed his teeth. “Come on. You know you’re surrounded and you know we could drop you where you hide. It wouldn’t be hard. But why haven’t we done that? We want to parlay first, see who you are. One thing—you’re not stupe. You could chill me now, no prob, but that would just bring the rest of us down on you and you know that’s bad move. So I’m still here. And I appreciate that. But we don’t have forever.”
Ryan signaled to the others, hoping they would see through the gloom, and stepped out, hands loose at his sides, no weapons in view.
“You’d think we did have forever, the way you can’t stop talking,” he said calmly, stepping into the clearing, avoiding the stickie corpses but still making sure he was out of range of the mounted man’s foot. Although his body language bespoke relaxation and compliance, he kept himself alert and ready. Careless meant chilled.
“I only talk so much when I have to wait,” the bearded man said. “My name is Ethan, Baron of Pleasantville. Looks like we ran these fuckers right into you. Wasn’t the purpose.”
“I kind of gathered that,” Ryan returned guardedly. “It’s not the usual thing to do with them.”
Ethan paused, then laughed. It was a loud, hearty laugh and showed no malice at Ryan’s comment. “I don’t know,” he gasped finally, “it could be a kinda new sport, I guess. But it’s the last thing you needed, right? After all, I know most what goes on around here and I don’t know you—so you’re either traveling through or lost from somewhere.”
Ryan nodded, almost imperceptibly. “Got that right.”
“So why don’t you call the rest of your people out, then we can get back to Pleasantville and you can rest.”
Ryan smiled, his eye showing that there was no humor in the gesture. “Rest, yeah, that’d be good. But mebbe it’ll be a permanent rest, nice and cold…nice and chilled.”
“One-eye, I could have had that done right from the start—and you know it,” Ethan said in a low voice.
Ryan knew that he was speaking the truth. To root out the companions and chill them wouldn’t be much harder than culling the stickies. The riders surrounded them and the companions were fatigued from two extensive firefights. Odds were that the baron of Pleasantville was genuine, and Ryan had little choice but to play the odds right now.
“Okay, you win,” he said softly, raising his arm and gesturing.
From their concealment, the companions came forth, until it seemed that Jak, Krysty, Mildred, Doc and J.B. had joined Ryan in forming a circle around the baron. All of them were careful to keep their arms by their sides, hands free of weapons.
