charged. A center-chest scattergun blast lifted and hurled the last of the dancers backward into the blaze, where it briefly thrashed, fried and died.
Suddenly sealed off from their goal by a row of blasters, the bike-pushing stickies stopped in their tracks. As they dumped the motorcycles, the last mutie in line spun toward the campsite, toward its brother-sister creatures who were merrily disjointing dead traders and tearing off their flesh in strips. The stickie opened the black hole of its mouth and from high in its throat, shrieked like a teakettle—for help.
Already locked on target, Ryan snapped the cap. As the sniper rifle boomed, it punched hard into his temple. The NATO slug slammed the stickie sideways and down, turning off the piercing squeal like a switch. Too late. As the gunshot resounded in the valley and the mortally wounded creature dervished in the dirt, arms flapping, legs kicking, the other muties abandoned their sport and scurried to the edge of the rubble field, regrouping for an attack on new victims.
Fresh screams and bloody meat. New bones to crack, marrow to spill.
Closing fast on the dropped motorcycles, the companions spread out in a skirmish line and fired at will. J.B. shot from the hip, Mildred from her Olympic stance; both with deadly effect. Smoke and flame belched from Doc’s ancient blaster, lead balls blasting through stickie chests and backs as they turned to flee.
J.B. and Doc quickly booted the corpses off the bikes while Krysty, Jak and Mildred used speedloaders to recharge their wheel guns. In front of them, fifty or more muties massed behind a slab of bridge deck. Waving their pale arms over their heads, the stickies made kissing sounds with their lipless mouths, jigging to their own silent, hardwired hip-hop, working themselves into a mindless fury.
Ryan’s predark longblaster was no longer an option. Single shots from the Steyr couldn’t turn back stickies swept up in a chill frenzy. Slinging the rifle, the one-eyed man vaulted for the side of the road and the crude bike trail. The downslope was close to sixty degrees, and the path practically a straight line. He half skiied, half fell 150 feet to the bottom. He hit the ground running, yanking his SIG-Sauer from hip leather.
At the same instant, the stickies broke from cover and rushed the five companions, who had closed ranks to concentrate the effect of their weapons. Because Ryan knew he couldn’t reach them in time, he sprinted wide right to flank the ten-abreast, mutie charge and give himself a clear line of fire.
In an elegant dueling stance, left hand braced on the silver lion’s-head pommel of his unsheathed sword stick, Doc started the fusillade with a mighty boom. A yard of flame and gout of black-powder smoke belched from the muzzle of the LeMat’s top barrel. A fraction of a second later the others cut loose a ragged volley.
Under the rippling smack of bullet impacts, the center of the stickie front wave crumpled and folded. Half of the closely following second rank crashed to earth, as well; some from high-velocity through-and-throughs, but most were simply tripped up, unable to avoid the sudden tangle of legs and torsos. Which, momentarily at least, saved their wretched lives.
The third, fourth and fifth rows of attackers split down the middle and veered around their own fallen, like a torrent flowing around a boulder field. The smell and taste of the aerosolized gore, the shrill cries of pain made them all the more frantic. As they reformed their inhuman wave, the companions’ blasters roared again.
The few muties in front who had escaped the first volley—heedless of their exposure, driven by urges too powerful to deny—high-kicked to close distance on the companions. As a result, the second round of fire was at near point-blank range, a cross-chest barrage that swept the stickies off their bare feet.
Ryan advanced on the mutie flank, holding the SIG-Sauer in a solid, two-handed grip. Because both he and his targets were moving, it wasn’t the time for fine shooting. The blaster barked and bucked again and again, action cycling. Ryan punched out rapid-fire, center body shots as the tripped muties tried to scramble to their feet. The mutie bastards were so pumped up by the prospect of more chilling, that unless it was a head shot it took two slugs to put some of them down.
A round punched through a scrambler and slammed the runner behind it in the side of the head. The others dashed past like they had blinders on, even as Ryan blew their packmates to hell.
His next shot smacked a sprinting stickie high in the upper arm, and the impact spun it around ninety degrees. It then launched itself at him, banshee wild, mouth gaping, needle teeth bared, open palms leaking strands of milky adhesive. Body language notwithstanding, the stickie’s black eyes were devoid of emotion, like a shark’s or a doll’s.
Ryan fired the SIG-Sauer into the center of the open yap. The mutie’s hairless head snapped back as if it had been poleaxed, eyes skyward as a glistening strawberry mist gusted from the back of its skull. Bright arterial blood shot from the creature’s nose holes as it crashed onto its back, the soles of its trembling feet black with crusted grime.
There wasn’t enough time to dump the SIG’s spent mag, reload, aim and fire at the stickies veering his way. He could have unslung the Steyr from his back and gotten off one or two shots before they were on him. Not enough to make a difference. Shifting the pistol to his left hand, Ryan whipped his eighteen-inch panga from its leg sheath.
He glanced to the left as the LeMat’s shotgun barrel thundered. Along with a plume of caustic smoke it spewed forth the combination of broken glass and potmetal fragments that Doc called his “facelifter” load—at a range of ten feet, that’s exactly what it did. It was his last shot. Doc immediately raised his edged weapon, neatly sidestepping to avoid an oncoming stickie, simultaneously rolling the wrist of his sword hand. With surgical precision and speed too quick for the eye to follow, the point of his rapier blade opened a second, grinning mouth three inches below the spike-rimmed maw the mutie had been born with. Blood sheeting down its naked chest, the hellspawn dropped to its knees in the dirt, then onto all fours.
Also out of cartridges, J.B. used the barrel of his M-4000 scattergun like a short club to bash and smash the heads of the monsters that lunged for him, beating back the horde, providing cover and time for Krysty, Mildred and Jak to reload.
From the git-go, based on the companions’ rate of fire, their weapons’ mag capacities, the stickie numbers and the size of the battlefield, Ryan had figured that combat would devolve to hand-to-hand. To be pulled down by this enemy was to be torn apart.
Fully aware of what was on the line, the one-eyed warrior met chill rage with chill rage. The heavy blade of his panga was made for chopping and hacking, and that’s how he used it. The panga sizzled as it cleaved the air, hardly slowing when it met mutie flesh and bone. It clipped wrists into stumps, left arms dangling free from shoulder sockets, and opened godawful, diagonal torso slashes, from nipple to opposing hip. In his wake, mewling stickies scrabbled on their knees in the dust, trying to collect and stuff back the slimy gray coils of their guts.
The sight of their fellows falling in pieces under the bloody blade didn’t give the stickies pause. As they threw themselves at him, Ryan’s mind and body were one, measuring attack angles, kill order, the necessary rhythm of perfectly executed forehands and backhands—all in a fraction of a fraction of a second.
Stepping around another set of outstretched sucker fingers, Ryan swung the panga so hard that he sliced off the top of the stickie’s head, front to back. Half a loaf of pale, cross-cut brain flopped steaming to the ground, followed by its stone-dead, former owner.
Their weapons loaded, Mildred, Krysty and Jak rejoined the fray. They split up to get clear firing lanes, then head shot the last of the surviving stickies at close range.
As quickly as he had switched it on, Ryan shut off the rampage,
