pink from his pouring sweat mixed with sprays of stickie blood.
As the echoes of gunfire faded, screams from the rubble field became audible. Anguished, rasping screams.
“Start up the bikes,” Ryan said, wiping the panga’s blade on his pant leg before he scabbarded it. “Come with me, Doc,” he called to the old man, who was recovering his sword sheath. As the two of them trotted for the remains of the travelers’ campsite, Ryan dropped the SIG’s spent mag into his palm and swapped it with a full one from his pocket.
Before they reached the edge of the bridge deck debris, three of the bike engines were running. Sitting astride the machines, J.B., Mildred and Krysty goosed their respective throttles to redline, making the engines whine. There was another sound, as well, much less encouraging.
Phut-phut-phut! Phut-phut-phut! Phut-phut-phut!
When Ryan looked back, he saw Jak stomping the fourth bike’s starter pedal, throwing his whole weight against it, over and over again.
“This way!” Doc said.
They hurriedly followed the moans, moving past the campfire pit and the traders’ abandoned, fully loaded backpacks. As they closed in on the source, the sounds became distinguishable as words.
“Sweet blessed Charity!” Doc gasped, stopping short.
“Chill me! Pleeeeease, chill me!”
The liquid, bubbling prayer came from a ruined hulk of a human being. He lay on his belly on the ground in the lee of a tipped-up slab of concrete, most of his clothes had been ripped away. “Please!”
As the trader begged, Ryan could see bloody molars and moving tongue through the huge hole torn in his right cheek. He had been scalped, as well, down to the shiny white bone. His right foot faced the wrong way, still in its duct-tape-patched boot. The other foot was missing altogether; his left arm hung semidetached, torn from its socket, hanging by a thread of golden sinew. Smeared stickie adhesive had sealed off the ruptured major blood vessels. The poor, broken bastard wasn’t going to bleed out, not anytime soon.
“End it!” the man plaintively croaked, stretching out the bloody claw of his good hand. “Use your blaster!”
Doc gave Ryan a questioning look; the one-eyed man minutely shook his head. Their bullets were in short supply, and the route to safety too long and too precarious. He pointed at the steel pommel and worn leather handle of a knife sticking out of the rubble. In the heat of battle it had fallen out of the reach and sight of the mortally wounded man. The Ka-Bar’s noble blade had been sharpened so many times it had been reduced to a steel sliver.
Doc used the point of his rapier to flip the knife closer to the whimpering wreck.
Without pause, without a nod of thanks, the trader grabbed the combat knife and propping the pommel on the ground, held the blade’s tip below his sternum. Grunting from the effort and the pain, he rolled over hard onto the knife, driving the long steel through his heart and into his chest to the hilt. After a moment of convulsive quivering, his body lay still. The point pitched a little tent in what was left of the back of his shirt.
A faint morning breeze swept down the river valley, carrying with it an awful odor. It wasn’t coming from the dead man.
“Do you smell that?” Ryan asked, pulling his sopping wet kerchief down under his chin.
Doc yanked down his mask, too. “Spoiled herring?” the Victorian said with a grimace.
Then the truth hit Ryan. Without a word, he turned and dashed for the chasm. Doc loped after him. As the one-eyed man looked down over the edge, into the riverbed, his stomach dropped to his boot soles.
Not rotten fish.
Spunk.
“Lord have mercy,” Doc intoned.
The bottom third of each of the bridge’s massive supports was black with stickies. Hundreds of them. They clung to the sides of the pillars, crawling, squirming over each other like bees in a hive.
Unfortunately, the dirt bike track ran right past the foot of the pillars and the puddled genetic muck before it crossed the dry riverbed to the other side.
Even more unfortunate, the smell of spilled blood from above, the screams and the gunfire and explosions had roused the writhing, hip-thrusting masses from their rut stupor. As Ryan watched, stickies disengaged and started to descend the ladder of slippery bodies to the ground.
They would follow the blood scent like a homing beacon.
“Quick!” Ryan growled, waving Doc after him as he raced back toward the campfire.
When they got there, they shouldered as many of the loaded backpacks as they could carry. As Ryan ran from the rubble field, over the sounds of the idling dirt bikes, he realized Jak’s motorcycle still wouldn’t start.
“Leave it!” Ryan shouted through a cupped hand. “Come on! Over here!”
The albino youth let the machine drop to the ground. Mildred passed her bike to him and climbed on the seat behind J.B. Krysty already had her motorcycle moving. When she roared up, Doc and Ryan jammed a couple of backpacks in the cargo rack, then battened them down with bungees. There was no time to check the contents.
“Gaia, what’s that smell!” Krysty exclaimed as solo-riding Jak, and J.B. and Mildred joined them.
“Hundreds of stickies copulating,” Doc announced.
“Down there?” Mildred said, pointing toward the drop-off and the riverbed.
“Oh, yeah,” was Ryan’s answer.
While he and Doc were tying down the backpacks, J.B. thumbed high brass shells into the loading port of his M-4000 as fast as he could. When the mag was plugged, he racked the action to chamber a round, stuffed a final shell in the port, then passed the scattergun back to Mildred.
“Stop for nothing,” Ryan told the others as he climbed on the seat behind Krysty. “All we’ve got going for us is speed and surprise. That means staying on the existing path.” He adjusted the Steyr strapped across his back, then unholstered his SIG. “If we try to break fresh trail and go around them, we might dump the bikes. If that happens, they’ll swarm us and we’re dead meat. J.B., let’s go!”
The Armorer screwed down his fedora, then roared away with Mildred pressed against his back. As Krysty and passenger Ryan, and Jak and passenger Doc followed, the lead bike vanished over the verge of the chasm. A few seconds later, the 12-gauge boomed.
Mildred was doing more than riding shotgun.
Krysty slowed a little to keep from going airborne when they hit the drop-off. As soon as the front wheel pointed down, she opened the throttle wide in second gear. The slope was steep, the dished-out path worn smooth. Along with the gut-wrenching acceleration, wind howled past Ryan’s ears and whipped at his clothes and his one good eye. Stickies who had been driven off the trail by J.B.’s passing and the shotgun blast watched dumbfounded by the combination of velocity and shrill engine noise.
As Krysty hurtled toward the stickie-covered pillars, Ryan leaned to the side and glimpsed Mildred standing on the dirt bike’s footpegs, knees bent, left hand
