of the muties were down. The other four hung back as if uncertain. Unfortunately, they were between Ryan’s group and the door.
A loud crack almost like thunder echoed through the facility. The floor shook once, hard, beneath Ryan’s boot. Raw sewage sloshed up the walls and on the inert, dark comp stations that lined them.
A grinding squeal sounded behind Ryan’s left shoulder. He snapped his head around. A section of concrete wall as high as his head split open, and a sheet of greenish-brown water shot into the control room. It splashed down.
“Aah, shit!” Mildred exclaimed as a wave of water broke as high as her waist. Ryan set his jaw against the stench. It wouldn’t kill him. The muties—or drowning in shit—might.
The long-armed muties dithered as if unsure whether to fight or flee. In other circumstances Ryan would have been glad to have his friends hold off, saving their energy, and ammo, to see if the creatures decided to bolt.
Unfortunately, the sewage was rising rapidly now. The sulfurous smell made Ryan’s eye water and his head swim.
“Power on through!” he shouted.
Following his own command, he charged ahead. He swatted a mutie in his path in the side of the head with the wide flat blade of the panga. Not because he was feeling unduly merciful, but because he didn’t want the knife getting stuck.
The door leading into the corridor was jammed open. Raising a brown wave from water already up to his thighs, Ryan sloshed down the hall, beating J.B. to a staircase and pounding upward. A mutie shambled down the steps toward him from the landing above. The one-eyed man gave the trigger a double tap, and both shots hit in the creature’s chest. It coughed in a very human-sounding way and fell against the wall. Ryan raced past. It didn’t even try to swipe at him with its claws. Just as he reached the landing, he heard the cry from below. “Ryan!”
He stopped and looked back. J.B., Doc and Jak were all on the stairs right behind him. Mildred and Krysty stood farther down with the foul water swirling around them, trying to drag Ricky up out of the sewage. Apparently it had either knocked him down or floated him off his feet. Muties were clinging to the youth with their long arms, holding him back from escaping the flooding corridor.
Ryan realized that the muties seemed to be using Ricky as a flotation device rather than trying to drag him to his doom.
“I have had enough of this shit,” Mildred declared. She drew her ZKR 551 handblaster, which she’d holstered to try to help Ricky. Aiming quickly, she shot both muties through their round heads. One uttered a croak of dismay as it let go and floundered back into the eddying sewage. The other threw up its arms and sank without a sound.
Ryan turned back and started moving again as the women got Ricky onto the steps. The water was following more rapidly now.
As Ryan turned on the landing to head up the next flight, Jak eeled past J.B., who halted, holding his shotgun muzzle up.
“More muties,” said the albino, who’d obviously slipped ahead to scout the next floor when Ryan paused.
“Waiting for us?” Ryan asked.
Jak shook his head.
“Most sleeping,” he said. “Some awake. Starting move this way.”
“Push on, J.B.,” Ryan said. “We can’t stay here.”
“On my way.”
He headed up, shotgun at the ready. Ryan bulled past Jak, intent on being right on J.B.’s heels when the little man hit the next level. Jak faded back against the wall to let Ryan pass, then followed close behind.
The next level was open space. The ceiling lighting had malfunctioned, leaving alternating areas of light and dark, interspersed with a few patches of flashing illumination. The stairwell itself was unenclosed. The open space was wide enough that its actual size was indeterminate in the shadows. It suggested a parking garage, though Ryan registered quickly that that was mainly because the sturdy structural columns were exposed to view.
The air was thick, barely stirred by the redoubt’s ventilation system. It smelled heavily of stale urine, feces, mildew and not-quite-human sweat.
Around him muties were stirring from what he could only think of as nests: little rough enclosures improvised of broken furniture and random scavenged material, with moldering cushions and bits of cloth for padding from the hard, bare concrete floor. Some muties began to shamble toward them, waving their arms menacingly, from a nest not twenty feet away.
J.B. raked them with two quick bursts from his Uzi, the copper-jacketed 9 mm slugs slamming the muties to the floor, where they lay clutching their guts and squalling piteously.
The noise roused the others, who came out of the well as J.B. headed up the exposed stairs.
Ryan followed J.B. tightly. He heard shots from behind.
“We’re fine!” Krysty shouted as the cracking concrete echoed through the vast empty space. “Keep moving! Water’s rising fast!”
Ryan moved. They hit the next landing and kept on going. A mutie turned onto the stairs from the floor above, silhouetting itself against a flickering glow from more malfunctioning overheads. It started down before registering norms were charging up.
J.B. slashed the creature with the butt of his M4000. It released an ear-splitting squeal and fell against the steel railing to the Armorer’s right. J.B. raced past.
Ryan split its teardrop-shaped head with an overhand stroke of his panga in passing and never even slowed. The creature toppled backward over the railing and plummeted to the floor.
The distinctive boom of the shotgun mounted on Doc’s LeMat echoed up the stairs at a volume that seemed to make the wall ripple. Ryan didn’t glance back.
“No more stairs!” J.B. called out as he reached the top of the flight.
“Find us a way out, J.B.,” Ryan said.
The Armorer let the M4000 fall to hang by its sling over one shoulder and scooped up the Uzi on the sling on the other. He hastily fired a short burst over the handrail. Ryan joined him.
This level was divided into rooms. A corridor ran along the near wall, while another stretched away from them at a T junction. As on the floor below, the lighting here was patchy.
By the flickering light and alternating patches of shine and shadow J.B. had just blasted a trio of muties coming at them along the corridor running away from the wall. One of them went down thrashing at the half-rotted rubber floor runners, spraying thick green blood everywhere. The others ran off twittering.
The bad news was they ducked into one of the doors standing open to both sides of the corridor.
Ryan took quick stock of their situation. They had three choices of which way to go from here—other than back down, which wasn’t happening. The corridor looked to move on to more lateral passages at either end. It was clear both ways for the moment.
“Gotta move!” Mildred’s
