down.
A pair of muties lay still at his feet.
“Clear?” J.B. called to him.
“Clear!”
“Secure the stairs,” Ryan commanded.
The corridor had emptied miraculously ahead of them. As Jak yanked on the door and rushed through the opening, J.B. increased his pace to full speed. Such as it was. Ryan had to keep his own steps throttled back to keep from overrunning his friend with his much longer legs.
“Be careful passing the open doors,” he yelled for the benefit of his friends behind him.
“We know that, Ryan!” Krysty called back. She sounded exasperated. “Just go, all right?”
He followed his own advice, cranking his head rapidly left and right to check each yawning door as he passed to make sure none of the muties had become emboldened enough to join the attack. He caught glimpses of knots of the creatures huddled back as far from the door as possible. Clearly they’d had enough of fighting for now.
They’ll be on our heels quick enough when the sewage starts to gurgle up around those black-nailed toes of theirs, Ryan thought.
J.B. reached the end of the corridor. He stopped and turned briskly left to peer that way with the longblaster presented at his shoulder. “Clear,” he called, then looked back over his shoulder.
He repeated his assurance.
“Move!” Ryan yelled to him.
He did. He flashed across the crossing corridor, hauled open the door Jak had disappeared through and followed.
Ryan barely broke stride to check the cross passage was still empty of threats. He caught the heavy door as it closed and threw it wide. A long arm in a black coat sleeve reached out to catch it and hold it.
“Ladies first,” Doc announced as Ryan dashed in to turn to look up the next stairs.
“Your ass, old man!” Mildred shouted. “Just keep moving!”
Ryan pounded up the steps to the landing. Jak was crouched at the next level, which Ryan could see was the top. Of this stairwell, anyway. J.B. stood on the steps right behind him, shotgun ready.
“Way out,” Jak said. “Clear.”
“Go,” Ryan ordered. It was getting repetitive. But it was still needed. Just because the situation they’d been dropped face-first into kept hitting them with simple yes-or-no choices didn’t mean the answer was ever clear. And as lead wolf in the pack, it was Ryan’s call to try to guess which alternative was bad and which was worse, every time, with no time to think.
He smiled, briefly and grimly, as he remembered a predark phrase Mildred sometimes used: “That’s why I get paid the big bucks.”
Jak popped out the door with J.B. right behind him. Ryan hastily followed.
As he did, he heard Krysty shout, “All the muties in the world are coming up after us!”
The first thing Ryan saw when he emerged from the open door to the stairwell was sunlight streaming in from tall, narrow, broken windows onto a concrete floor littered with fragments of tables and chairs and, incongruously, a scattering of dry, gray leaves.
He stepped quickly to one side. A doorway was a bad place to linger. It was set flush to the back wall of what had obviously been a store or restaurant, as if it gave onto a utility closet. There was no front door. The light was that of morning by color alone. He saw surprisingly lush trees across the street. Through the leaves he glimpsed yellow stone and a hint of some kind of tracery of stone or metal. It reminded him of the leading used to hold stained glass in predark churches.
J.B. had taken a position on the other side of the door to the hidden stair. Finding the room empty, he had switched to his Uzi. Jak slipped cautiously toward the window.
“No time!” Mildred yelled as she came bursting out the door on Doc’s heels. “They’re right behind us!”
Ryan heard the boom of Ricky’s Webley handblaster echo out of the stairwell and started moving toward the window.
“Looks clear,” Jak said, peering around the edge of the empty window. He promptly slipped around and onto the street.
Deciding that securing escape was more important than helping discourage the long-armed muties from following too fast, he went for the front door. The others came hot behind, starting with J.B.
Ryan burst out onto the street. The first thing he noticed was the humidity that hit him in the face like a wool blanket soaked in hot water. The second was how profuse the vegetation was—grass and flowers were pushing up through big cracks heaved in the pavement, and there were trees all down the block that extended to his left.
The third thing he noticed was a tall, skeletally thin woman with an electric-green Mohawk casually strolling around the corner of the building across the street to his right.
But there was nothing casual about the way she whipped up the M16 she’d been carrying in patrol position and aimed it at Ryan.
“Get down!” Ryan shouted to his companions. He snapped off a shot and threw himself back toward the door to the redoubt.
He bumped into Doc. That had been half his intention—to keep those behind from blundering out into the unexpected enemy’s field of fire. The other half was to try to back out of it himself.
The black longblaster snarled out a burst of full-auto fire. Ryan didn’t know where the bullets hit. He only knew they didn’t hit him.
Then J.B., who had come out right behind Ryan and taken a reflex step to his right, ripped off a short burst of his own. The woman dropped onto her buttocks. The front of her grimy gray T-shirt was already showing darker, redder stains overwhelming the old ones.
“More!” Jak yelled from his position crouched before the window to Ryan’s right.
Ryan had caught himself on one knee in the doorway. Now he saw more men and women fanning out diagonally across the street. They sported variations of partially shaved heads and spiked, outlandishly colored hair. And a nasty assortment of weapons.
“Pull back!” he yelled. He turned and scrambled into the cool dimness of the derelict room.
“But, Ryan—” Mildred began.
“Shut it! Get back in the corner.” He gestured toward the far rear corner where they’d come out. “Now!”
Shots were crackling outside with a sound like a big, dry tumbleweed going up in flames. By sheer bad luck the companions had come up against a sizable local faction. One with itchy trigger fingers—and the blasters and bullets to give them a hearty scratching. Bullets clattered off the stone exterior and whizzed through the vacant windows or snapped with tiny sonic booms. They ricocheted off the back wall and tumbled, whining, in random directions.
J.B.
