Ewald didn’t want tight ranks because he gave a radblast about their safety. The way he saw he it, the more baitfish there were in a school, the better the odds of being the one that didn’t get eaten.
Halfway along the gritty, weeping hallway he found the door to a stairwell. When he opened it, the stench drove them back on their heels.
“Nuke shit!” Tolliver groaned, clapping a hand over his nose and mouth.
“More deaduns down there,” Dunbar said. “Stairs could be some kind of a trap.”
“Yeah, but it’s the fastest way out of here,” Ewald said. “Mebbe the only way out of here. You got a better idea? Mebbe you want to spend some time exploring the nooks and crannies of this place?”
Dunbar shook his head so hard his belly flab trembled. They all shook their heads.
“Then let’s do it,” the ex-mercie said.
With Ewald on point, they carefully descended the stairs in close formation. The light from their torches didn’t penetrate far, and with every step, the odor of death grew more intense.
Two floors down they discovered its source. On the concrete landing lay the eroded remains of several corpses, their burned-out torches, and a pool of yellow bile. Tolliver scooped up a sawed-off, double-barreled shotgun that had either been dropped or thrown clear of the puddle. When he broke open the 12-gauge, its ejectors flipped out empty plastic hulls.
Ewald had already figured as much. On the facing wall were two, foot-wide, buckshot blast craters. One stood at belly height; the other was ten feet above it. There was no blood spatter in or around either of the craters. The shotgunner had missed twice at point blank range. Ewald guessed that either the second shot had been fired wild in the air, or the intended target was clinging to the wall up there. Stickies had suckers on their palms and feet; they liked to drop on unsuspecting victims. That didn’t explain the sword slice—stickies didn’t use weapons as a rule, preferring to tear their prey apart with their bare hands. Nor did it explain the goo.
A quick survey of the landing turned up a pair of black-powder revolvers submerged among the jumble of human bones. The Italian-made, Civil War replicas were useless; their loaded cylinders had reacted with the fluid, turning into crumbling masses of corrosion. There was no ammo for the scattergun, but Tolliver hung on to it, anyway—a club was better than no weapon at all.
On the steps below, their torches revealed still more bodies. These stripped skeletons lay on their stomachs. They’d died trying to crawl up the stairs. Without legs.
As Ewald started down, there was a distinct clicking sound. A metallic, ratcheting noise that came from the stairwell far below. At first rapidfire, it slowed, then stopped.
Though the sound lasted less than five seconds, it made a knot form in the mutie hunter’s gut. Stickies sometimes made soft kissing sounds before they attacked, but they never, ever clicked.
“Wh-wh-what was that?” Willjay said.
“Shut up and listen!” Ewald growled.
But there was only silence.
After a few moments Dunbar spoke up. “Could just be a busted ventilation fan down there somewhere,” he said. “Breeze might be turning the blades, making them hit something…”
The noise started again, echoing up the stairwell. Only this time, there was a definite pattern. Six quick clicks, each rising in pitch. A pause, then repeat. The hairs on the back of Ewald’s neck stood upright.
It wasn’t a stickie, and it wasn’t a busted vent fan, either, because the sounds were getting louder by the second. Whatever it was, it was coming at them.
And fast.
At his feet lay incontrovertible proof that the stairwell was a piss-poor place to make a stand. “Run!” Ewald shouted as he turned and vaulted back to the landing.
He hit the exit door and the others followed, sprinting for their lives down the pitchdark service hallway. Over the slap of bootsoles on concrete, Ewald strained to hear the stairwell door banging open behind them.
The bang didn’t come.
Ewald stopped around a bend in the corridor, and waited there for the others to catch up. If it hadn’t been for the smell, he might have missed seeing the breach in the opposite wall. Yellow fluid seeped from the bottom of a gash in the concrete three feet high, and three feet wide at the middle.
“What in blazes have you got there?” Tolliver said as he and Willjay hurried up to him.
Ewald couldn’t hazard a guess.
As Dunbar joined them, puffing hard, his face and folds of fat glazed with sweat, Ewald approached the opening from the side, this to avoid tracking through the puddle on the floor. He bent close with the torch. For as far as he could see, which was only five or six feet into the gash, yellow slime greased the walls. He used the butt of the torch to carefully poke at the sides of the hole. The edge of the concrete was soft, mushy even. Under pressure, it oozed like paste.
He’d never seen or heard of anything like it.
Without warning a gust of air blasted from the opening. The concussive force blew out his torch and turned the yellow fluid into mist. He felt the wetness on his fingers a split second before the pain hit. Galvanic pain, head to toe, like he’d thrust his arm into a caldron of boiling water.
As Ewald screamed and spun away, from deep inside the walls of the dam came a frantic scraping, scrabbling sound.
The burrow was a tight fit.
Chapter Three
The smooth pebble clicked against Ryan’s teeth as he shifted it from one cheek to the other. The steady rasp of his breathing matched the scrape of his boot soles on the desert hardpan. He moved in an almost effortless, economical glide, the stride of a man used to walking long distances over broken terrain. Overhead the pale violet sky was cloudless, the last visible stars rapidly fading. On the horizon to his left hung an orange half-disk of sun. A dawn wind shrieked across the ancient plain in buffeting gusts that peppered his face with grit.
It was already hot.
Soon to get hotter.
For the third night in a row, he and his companions had marched, dusk until dawn, by the light of the moon. Not their standard operating procedure by any means. Under more normal circumstances, they would have stopped in a likely spot well before sunset, set up a defensive perimeter and a guard rotation, and then hunkered down with their weapons close to hand until daybreak. Travel in Deathlands was always dangerous, but the nights were the worst time to be on the move; that’s when the big predators came out, the solo chillers and the pack hunters, human and otherwise. In this case, because of the heat, the distance they had to cross and their limited supply of water, they had to take the risk.
No predators had shown themselves, so far, which led Ryan to conclude that there weren’t any. To survive and breed, predators needed a dependable supply of victims. There was nothing in this hell-blasted landscape for large carnivores to hunt.
The uptilted plain of beige gulleys
