Another cultivated plot grew at the building’s far end, where the elevated track had gone down. From there, several figures in dark vests jogged into the street in front of Jak and Ricky. One of them, with brown hair hanging to his shoulders, knelt and aimed a longblaster at Ricky.
A sharp
crack
punched at his left ear. He yelped and swerved.
The man with the longblaster dropped the weapon and folded over backward. What Ricky had heard, as his rational mind belatedly informed him, was the miniature sonic boom of a longblaster bullet going by him faster than the speed of sound. But it was fired from behind him. Ricky recognized the boom that reached him as the enemy gunman fell as the sound of Ryan’s 7.62 mm Steyr Scout.
Not that Ricky was accustomed to hearing it from way out in front of its business end.
Jak swerved right into an intersection. Ricky followed, even as he heard Ryan yell, “Covering fire!”
Jak reached a concrete building corner. He hunkered down, leaned around and fired an ear-shattering blast from his Python.
Ricky joined him a few heartbeats later. He pressed his shoulder against the wall. Wishing he were a lefty so he could shoot without exposing almost his entire body, the youth stepped out enough to get a look at the new pack of pursuers. They seemed to be coming out of a gap in the wall of the big building. Long slabs of the fallen track lay behind them, tilted at random angles amid thick, low vegetation.
He laid his iron sights on the bare chest of the man running in the lead and pressed the trigger. His hefty longblaster fired a pistol cartridge, so it didn’t have much of a kick, and the suppressed weapon barely made a sound.
The shot took the man at the upper-right top of his rib cage arch. Ricky could tell because he saw the blood splash red from beneath his target’s right nipple. The man took a header, dropping his long-barreled single-action revolver and rolling over and over on the cracked blacktop.
Jak’s big .357 Magnum Colt Python made more than enough noise for both weapons. When he cranked off another shot, three of the vest wearers hit the pavement. Ricky had no idea if his friend had even hit one of them. There was no way he could’ve nailed all three, even with the Python’s tendency to overpenetrate. At least two people fired back, and Ricky and Jak had to duck hastily as chips of concrete flew from the corner.
Shots were fired from up the street, too close to be the original pursuers—they had to come from Ryan and company. Ricky bent to avoid making his head a ripe target by poking it out where it had been before and risked a quick look at the enemy.
Their pursuers were picking themselves up off the street and racing back for the far side. They left only two of their comrades lying there: the rifleman Ryan had shot and the runner Ricky got.
Their five friends pelted by, turning up the same street they had.
“Better move along,” J.B. called in passing. “The first bunch got themselves sorted out, and they’re not happy!”
Ricky and Jak looked at each other and grinned. Then they headed out after the others as J.B. fired a quick burst back the way he’d come, then pivoted to loose another across the street.
* * *
A
S
R
ICKY AND
Jak moved on, J.B. took station against the textured gray wall a few steps down the street. He held his Uzi ready. No new targets presented themselves immediately, from either the original pursuers storming out the front entrance after them or the new set from the giant building’s far end. He knew they wouldn’t stay out of play for long.
Ryan ran past him, turned and knelt, bringing up his Steyr.
“Into the garage!” he shouted.
J.B. promptly wheeled right and trotted toward the entrance. It was wide, meant to allow two-lane access for cars going in and out of the parking structure. He slung his Uzi and took up his shotgun.
Jak slipped in first. He still had his Python in one white fist, which looked like a child’s compared to the big blaster. Concern was written all over his pinched features.
Ricky waited beside the open bay, clutching his DeLisle and peering uneasily inside. Krysty, Mildred and Doc stood in the street, out of direct line of the wide door, covering the street and the bluish building across it. They kept their handblasters ready.
Unspoken but obvious—even to J.B., who didn’t take hints—was that
they
weren’t any more anxious to plunge into the depths of the garage than Ricky was.
“Back me up,” J.B. told his apprentice as he went by. He entered the building without waiting to see if Ricky followed. He would.
The Armorer took a step to his left to clear the fatal funnel of the doorway. Nothing good could come from standing there silhouetted by the bright daylight. While his eyes adjusted, he covered the interior with his M4000 held almost but not quite at shoulder level, ready to whip the rest of the way up at the first sign of trouble.
Jak squatted next to a thick pillar that supported the next level. In the daylight that filtered in through the building’s open sides J.B. saw lots of humped shapes—cars stalled by the Big Nuke and left here to rot. Some had been torn open by scavvies. In places he could make out what looked like piles of fiberglass body panels that had been torn off by industrious scavengers looking to reclaim the metal frames.
J.B. wondered why they hadn’t been far more thoroughly mined out. A colony as populous as the big ruin looked to be could always find uses for that much steel and other metal, either for itself or as valuable trade goods. They could also muster the manpower to cut up even heavy frames by hand into chunks small enough to haul away.
“Keep moving,” Ryan said. “Out the other side and right.”
The others were already inside the building. Ryan fired a couple quick blasts out the way they had come, though glancing back J.B. could see no targets. Evidently the one-eyed man was just reminding their pursuers of the possible consequences of sticking their noses around the corner to peer in after their prey.
J.B. doubted it would discourage them. For long, anyway. But he knew Ryan’s mind and realized the idea was to keep them off everybody’s asses
long enough
.
He walked forward briskly. Jak was still where he was, looking around. He clearly wasn’t happy, which meant J.B. wasn’t happy. He wasn’t ready to charge ahead until he knew what was eating the albino.
“Not like,” Jak said. “Smell...something.”
J.B. had already smelled something disquieting: death. A dead creature was rotting somewhere not too far off.
That didn’t mean a bent cartridge case. At any given moment, tons of dead things were rotting away around the Deathlands. Some of them once had names. No doubt plenty of various sorts of chills were decomposing away right here in the Detroit rubble.
Jak knew that as well as J.B. did. It could be a bad sign, sure. But it wasn’t bad enough news to hold Jak back.
“What?” J.B. asked.
Jak shook his head. “Not tell. Something.”
The death stink, somehow sweet, pervasive, infinitely horrible no matter how often you smelled it—which in all their cases had been often—could mask a host of other odors. Bad luck. But the potential dangers that smell hid were that—potential.
The pissed-off people chasing them were real. And immediate.
“Gotta go,” J.B. told him. “Double fast.”
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
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....
* * *
R
YAN 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.