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.
