“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.
