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Without an instant’s hesitation Jak took off. He decided to run full-out, secure their way out. Speed was needed here more than caution.
J.B. followed him, less rapidly, and not just because his legs could never keep him up with Jak’s even though J.B. was taller than he was. He held his shotgun across his belly, ready to blast whatever made the mistake of jumping out to challenge the intruders. He heard the footfalls of his friends pounding close behind.
When he was just past the midway point to the brightness of the far exit, a voice shouted out from behind, “There the bastards are!”
And Jak wheeled around, his face a white mask of alarm.
“Stickies!”
Chapter Five (#ulink_e8f6865a-726b-5fb4-84b0-10e95d881e15)
J.B. spotted them right away, off toward a broad ramp descended from the level above.
The muties looked like tiny humans, not much smaller than Jak. They were as vicious as any creature in the Deathlands, human coldhearts included. Their noses were vertical slits, and their mouths were filled with needle teeth. They also had tough, rubbery skin, which contributed to making them double-hard to chill. Many needed a shot to the head to chill, but the companions had run across plenty who could be taken out by any kind of mortal wound.
J.B. now understood what had been tickling Jak’s sensitive nostrils, despite the overlying smell of death. It was the distinctive reek of stickies. The death stink that hid theirs probably came from victims, human or animal, the muties had either not finished eating yet or got tired of and just left to rot where they lay.
He gave the muties a couple blasts of #4 buckshot without even slowing them. Unless a lucky lead ball happened to punch through one of those big, staring eyes into the malevolent inhuman brain beyond, it had little chance of killing one of them. But one stickie fell down, shrieking and slapping at its body with its sucker-tipped fingers, and the other staggered back a pace or two.
“Full speed!” Ryan yelled.
Jak stopped long enough to hold his Python out the full length of his arm and trigger a shot. The blaster’s roar bouncing between the concrete floor and roof made its usually unpleasant noise seem to clap the sides of J.B.’s head like planks of wood. But that beat what happened to the stickie’s head. The 125-grain jacketed hollow-point round imploded its right eye and blew the brains out the back of its round skull in a black fountain.
Shooting broke out from behind J.B., more than his friends alone could account for....
* * *
RYAN LOOKED BACK. People stood in the street behind his companions. After just a handful of seconds inside the darkened parking structure, they seemed to swim against a sea of dazzle. A couple opened up with handblasters.
Ricky leaned out from around a stout concrete pillar painted in badly flaking yellow and fired a shot from his DeLisle. A figure went down, dropping a semiauto handblaster as it did. The other three or four pursuers continued to pop off shots into the structure.
Sooner or later, they’d catch a break and hit somebody.
Ryan rapidly holstered his SIG and unslung the Scout. Turning and dropping to one knee, he raised the longblaster to his shoulder.
There was no time for the variable-power Leupold scope. And at twenty, twenty-five yards max, no need. As soon as he had a target in his ghost ring he squeezed the trigger, sharp as he could without jerking it and pulling the shot offline.
A jeans-clad leg buckled under an enemy. The man dropped a lever-action longblaster as he fell flat on his face on the hot asphalt.
The other pursuers threw themselves down as well, but they kept shooting.
“Handblaster, Ricky!” Ryan shouted to the kid. “Covering fire, but keep coming.”
He turned as he straightened.
A gibbering, chittering horde of stickies was flooding the ramp now. “Run!” Ryan yelled at his companions. “Just run!”
He fired a snapshot into the mass. A couple of the muties squealed and fell as the 7.62 mm bullet punched through their torsos. It wouldn’t keep them down for long. But following muties tripped over them and fell. With their bloodlust amped all the way up, the creatures began to snarl, slap and snap at each other in crazy rage.
Others came flowing around them. They fanned out to attack the encroaching norms.
Jak was already by the far exit. He emptied his blaster at the stickies. Ryan saw another go down with the back of its head blown out.
He slung his longblaster and moved forward. Krysty, Mildred and Doc had already passed him and were racing for the exit. Doc stuck out his hand and unloaded the shotgun barrel of his LeMat into the face of a charging stickie. It took out its eyes and tore off the upper side of its face. The stickie uttered a human shriek of agony and despair and fell to its knees, clutching the ruin of its face.
For a moment Ryan thought they’d make it with a few steps to spare. But that was the thing about stickies—they could move bastard fast.
One darted toward Krysty. She veered and it missed its grab at her. But the suckers on its fingers caught the right sleeve of her shirt.
She yelped; other muties closed in, chittering triumphantly.
Krysty let the mutie turn her hand toward itself. In that hand was her Smith & Wesson 640. She emptied the five shots in its cylinder into the creature’s belly.
The horror barely even flinched. It opened its mouth wide and swept its free hand up to try to rip off her face.
“Krysty!” Mildred yelled. She grabbed the taller woman by her left upper arm and yanked her away.
But it still clung to her despite the blood leaking black through the holes in its abdomen. Other muties converged on what they took for a certain chill.
Ryan waded in. He booted away one that was trying to get around behind Krysty. Then he lunged forward and severed the hand that was stuck to Krysty’s sleeve just above the skinny wrist.
With Mildred’s help Krysty was yanked from the cluster of stickie hands. Ryan had had to overbalance to hack through the mutie’s arm. His right boot slipped on something wet and slick on the concrete beneath him. He dropped to one knee, hard enough to clack his teeth together and send a lance of pain from his kneecap up through his whole body.
But Ryan never lost his presence of mind. That was something he’d always had, that gift of constant, unswerving focus—on survival.
He batted away the grasping, suckered hands, slashing with his panga. And even as he fought desperately the awful screeching muties who swarmed around him, he was roaring, “Go! Get out of here!”
He moved his arms violently to prevent any fingertip suckers from latching on. But the stickies were cunning monsters. They adapted. One wrapped its arms around his right forearm, fouling his panga. It stretched its head out on its neck with jaws gaping wide to take a chunk out of the one-eyed man’s face.
In his peripheral vision Ryan saw something dark and slender, and yellow flame belched forth. It bathed the whole side of the stickie’s head with its yawning, sharp-toothed maw in fire.
The left side of the stickie’s head exploded. Its arms relaxed in death, releasing its hold.
Ryan thrust his panga into another flat stickie face, bursting a staring eyeball. The panga’s blade was much too wide to pierce through to the mutie’s brain, but the creature fell back shrieking.
Ryan saw a stickie head’s transfixed from his left to his right with a slender steel blade. Then hands were hauling him away from the stickies as handblasters spoke shatteringly from either side of him.
He got the rest of the way to his feet on his own. He saw it was Mildred on his left who’d blasted the stickie—and left him with a ringing in his ears that would last for hours. Krysty was to his right.
A quick flurry of face shots dropped three stickies and slowed the others.
Ryan drew his SIG with his left hand and shot a fourth through its open mouth as it vaulted a scrum of writhing bodies.
“Nuke it, the stickies didn’t get them!” a voice called from the street.
“Give the mutie bastards a chance,” somebody else yelled back.
The stickie swarm had split the party in two. J.B. had almost reached Jak, still lurking by the exit, when the mutie caught hold of Krysty. Now the muties were surrounding everybody else, gobbling and squeaking in triumph.
“Stay behind me,” Ryan yelled to Krysty and Mildred. The sickening stench of stickies was so thick now it made his head spin. The spilling of stickie blood, brain and guts didn’t make them smell any sweeter. “Doc, Ricky, right and left outside them.”
The women complied.
Though Ricky was the newest of the group of companions, he’d been with them for months now. He knew how they worked and how to work well with them.
Ryan led the way back for the exit away from the human pursuit, hacking with the big panga, warding off blows and attempted grabs with the SIG. He only fired when there was no other choice.
Doc, outside the two close-together women to Ryan’s right rear, was stabbing mutie faces with his sword and bludgeoning the ones who got close with his massive LeMat. Ricky held his carbine by its fat sound suppresser. He hacked at the muties with the butt to keep them away, alternating baseball-bat style with ax-type overhead action. Because it had been built out of a military weapon that was intended to bust skulls as a last resort, the DeLisle could likely survive the rude treatment with little damage.
But the companions had to survive for that to matter a lick.
The muties wouldn’t run, but they could be forced back. They weren’t big. Ryan had no trouble bulling through them, though not as fast as he liked, by just using his size and strength. And the women, holding on to each other for support, booted any stickies who got through the rough equilateral triangle of the males.
Then a mutie right in front of Ryan had its head smashed from behind by a downward butt stroke of J.B.’s M4000 scattergun. And the one beside it pitched forward with the back of its skull staved in by a punch from the studded brass-knuckle hilt of Jak’s trench knife. Ryan had to lash out with his shin to knock the creature aside and keep it from tripping him—or latching on to his jeans-clad leg with its suckers.
“Quit screwing around,” J.B. told Ryan. Without even seeming to look he jabbed the muzzle of his shotgun hard to his left. A stickie reeled back into its circling, capering buddies, wailing and clutching the spurting crater where its left eye used to be. “We’ve got to get going.”
The pair had waded back to help their friends. The stickies faltered, confused rather than scared. “Power on!” Ryan bellowed.
They all ran flat-out for the exit. Stickies that got in their way were knocked down. Ryan trampled one that J.B. had half spun with his shoulder. His friends ran over it without breaking stride.
The one-eyed man heard angry shouts from behind, then shots. A bullet cracked past his head to the right.
Then he was out into the bright, blessed sunshine of the Detroit wasteland. His friends, all miraculously still alive, were right on his heels. A whole pack of stickies was left behind to keep their pursuers off their asses.
A bullet kicked up fallen leaves and some concrete dust three feet in front of him.
Chapter Six (#ulink_dcf86e54-898b-515c-aed5-6cb50d833ab7)
“Fireblast!” Ryan shouted.
He checked himself and pivoted, bringing his longblaster to his shoulder.
A group of at least a dozen men was approaching cautiously from the direction of the big half-ruined building. They all carried longblasters and wore the distinctive dark vests of their original pursuers. They were still roughly fifty yards away.
Behind them, another garden lay past the structure’s southwest end. This one was enclosed by a barbed wire fence and more rolls of razor tape. Inside it were the jumbled remnants of what Ryan realized was a raised road that had once led to the circular structure. Now it was a spiral ramp. Apparently the big building had had rooftop parking.
Ryan fired a shot at the enemy. He didn’t hit anybody. They ducked anyway, a couple stretching flat on the ground.
They weren’t driven off, though. They promptly opened fire.
Caught between stickies in the semidarkness and so far inaccurate blasterfire in the sunshine, he had only one choice. Fortunately, before the first shot had alerted Ryan to more trouble approaching, he’d spotted a gap between buildings across the street and not twenty yards to the right of where he and his friends emerged.
“Go, go, go!” he yelled, waving his arm at the half-overgrown entrance to a street or alley. As his friends ran by behind him, he dropped to one knee and took quick aim.
His scope happened to fall on a blond head behind the receiver of a Mini-14. It looked like a woman.
That meant nothing to Ryan. If a person pointed a weapon at him or his friends, the person would die.
No exceptions. He pulled the trigger.
The Steyr kicked his shoulder with the buttplate. He held on to the stock, rode the recoil and brought the blaster back online with practiced ease.
A pink spray blossomed behind the shooter’s head when it reappeared in his telescopic sight. It plopped forward, revealing the ragged red mess where the back of the skull had been knocked out by the bullet’s passage.
He heard a rippling roar of blasterfire from behind him to the right.
“Haul ass, Ryan!” J.B. shouted. “We’re clear.”
He sprang up and ran for safety through a barrage that crackled around him like bacon frying on a grill.
Ricky knelt among weeds at the corner of a building, laying down covering fire with his suppressed longblaster. J.B. kept stepping out to fire a quick, short burst then nip back into cover.
“Here come more of them,” Ricky said as Ryan raced past him.
“Looks like the first bunch that set out after us decided not to mess with the stickies,” J.B. commented, putting his back against the wall out of the line of enemy fire. “Seems like shooting some of them just made them madder.”
“Happens sometimes,” Ryan called.
“What do I do?” Ricky yelled.
“Try to keep up!”
* * *
HER BREATH WHISTLING in her ears, Mildred slogged heavily through a muddy field of leafy green vegetables. The farmers who’d been tending it went flying in all directions at the approach of a heavily armed crew of strangers, flip-flops flopping and flat-cone straw hats falling back behind their heads to hang by chin straps.
The fact that a much bigger, just as heavily armed and amazingly pissed-off bunch of people in leather vests was running fifty yards behind the intruders probably didn’t reassure them.
Mildred felt bad as her boots squashed tender plants into the carefully tended soil. She knew these people worked hard at their plots because their survival was at stake.
But so was hers. So on she ran, heedless.
Though it couldn’t have been more than a handful of blocks, the whole flight had become a nightmare steeplechase in her mind: a blurred montage of cracked streets, shattered buildings, burned-out husks, riotous undergrowth and orderly plots like the one they were so industriously, if incidentally, violating.
The pursuers fired off an occasional shot. Like all the others—so far—it didn’t hit any of them. The bad guys were shooting on the run. Whoever it was chasing them so doggedly had discovered a few turns back that if they actually stopped to aim, they got left behind.
As they approached a half-collapsed building, Jak suddenly appeared out of a staring, blank doorway. He gestured to his friends frantically.
The place looked trashed. Once several stories tall, the building appeared to have mostly fallen in on and around itself, judging from the fragmentary sheets of red stone sticking out of the piled rubble. But the lower floor looked intact. The place still looked anything but promising, much less remotely safe.
Ryan headed for the door without hesitation.
The others followed. Ryan Cawdor wasn’t always right, but his decisions had kept them alive so far, through some of the worst situations imaginable.
At the door he turned, shouldered his Scout longblaster and fired back at their pursuers. Mildred didn’t bother glancing around. It only made her more likely to stumble or maybe twist an ankle, which would be fatal.
Anyway, there was no need. The men—and occasional woman—in vests chasing after them had had been taught caution by Ryan’s and Ricky’s marksmanship. They knew to duck when one or the other opened fire on them. They didn’t care to come too close yet, but they showed no signs of giving up.
