to make the Uzi do that. J.B. was the best—a master. Ryan snapped a shot from his own 9 mm handblaster at a figure with a black leather vest open to show a fish-belly-white washboard torso, aiming a sawed-off double-barreled scattergun. Fortunately it was clear across the street and unlikely to hit much at that range. Or not with many pellets, anyway. Though as Ryan knew well, they all hurt.
He never saw whether he hit the dude or not. He was already turning away to follow his advice and sprint to the rear corner of the dimly lit room, well back in the shadows. He heard Jak’s big Python crack. The albino had simply jumped back in through the window and was crouching to shoot out over the sill.
“Tables!” Ryan yelled. He sheathed his panga. “J.B., come on! Give me a hand.”
J.B. loosed a lengthy burst out the door as he wheeled away to obey. Then he and Ryan were each manhandling a pair of tables with tops a yard or so square toward their friends, who were already hunkered down in the corner. Jak joined them dragging a detached tabletop. Ryan decided the place had to have been an eatery of some sort.
“Hoist them up!” Ryan yelled. “Barricade yourselves behind them!”
He hurried into the corner with the others, right next to Krysty. She helped him shift the table so that one edge rested on the floor, whose covering had long since eroded to bare concrete, with the legs pointing into the room. His other friends did likewise.
Not an eyeblink too soon. The door to the secret stair puked muties. They gushed out in a blue-gray, squalling, whistling horde, waving their long-taloned arms in the air. At once they made for the open front door.
It took a moment before any even noticed the norms, huddled off in the shadows as they were. A pair turned toward them menacingly. Since that had been expected— he’d wanted the improvised tabletop barricades for cover—Ryan wasn’t too worried. He fired a couple shots from his SIG into one mutie. Krysty and Mildred blasted the other. One fell on its face. The other staggered back into the violent flow of its companions.
They flung it ruthlessly aside. Whether they were especially squeamish about getting soaked in the sewage, or just concerned with not drowning, Ryan couldn’t know and couldn’t care less.
The rest of the stream of oddly rubbery-fleshed muties shot straight out into the street. And into the faces of the gang of locals, who had deployed into a skirmish line and were advancing on the diner to mop up the intruders.
Through a window Ryan saw their jaws drop and their eyes widen in shock. “Fuck us,” somebody yelled. “It’s clayboys!”
The muties ran right into them and commenced to rip at them with their claws. Blood and bits of flesh and guts flew. Blasters roared. Men, women and muties screamed and flailed at one another. The locals who weren’t instantly overrun or caught up in the wild melee pulled back to fire into the geyser of panicked muties. Ryan saw a couple turn tail and run.
Though muties were still coming out of the stairwell, Ryan stood up from behind the table. None of the muties so much as glanced his way. Clearly they had something more urgent on their minds. The sulfurous stench that suddenly filled the room gave him a good clue as to what that was.
“Let’s power out of here,” he ordered. “Out the window and left down the street.”
Krysty jumped up. The table fell with a slam.
Ryan let her go out first. She was his woman after all—though as capable as a man in a fight and better than most. He followed, darting a few steps to the left as soon as he cleared the opening, then turning back to cover his friends’ escape.
They came popping out in surprisingly good order. Beyond them a pitched battle between locals and muties filled the street and claimed everybody else’s attention.
“You’d better move, Ryan!” Mildred called as she raced past.
Ricky was last out the window. He stumbled and almost fell on his face getting out. The youth caught himself, picked himself up and started running up the block away from the scrum. As he passed, Ryan did likewise.
The others sprinted past an alley and rounded the corner of the next building. As he flashed past the alley mouth, some instinct made Ryan glance over his shoulder—just in time to see a green-brown gusher of sewage blast out the door and windows of the redoubt’s surface false front and swamp the battling humans and muties in a reeking torrent.
“That’s not something you see every day,” J.B. remarked as Ryan reached the others.
“Keep going,” the one-eyed man said. “Unless you want to get wet again. We don’t know how far that stuff’s going to flood.”
They trotted down the cross street. From the angle of the sun and the time of year, Ryan knew they were heading southwest. What mattered most now was that they were heading away from the shit-flooded death trap the redoubt had become.
Turned out, the sewage didn’t reach far at all. Glancing back from a block or so away, Ryan saw a brown puddle flow out into the intersection and then stop. Apparently the pressure had finally equalized.
Which was a good thing. The very next block up the street from the hidden redoubt was effectively dammed by a skyscraper that had fallen to the east, knocking down the opposing building like a giant domino. Had the sewage continued to rise, things might’ve gotten way too interesting in a hurry.
“I don’t think they’re following us,” Krysty said.
Mildred laughed. “Understatement of the day.”
Ryan directed the group into a gutted corner building on the right side of the street. Its interior showed sign of a major fire, but from the lack of smell or even soot, it had burned out long ago. There was no furniture or serious trash buildup in the corners. Everybody sat on the floor to take a breather and a pull from their water bottles.
“I know where we are,” J.B. said as he stepped into the shade. As hot as it was inside it was still a relief after the blast of sunlight. He was tucking away his minisextant. “Detroit.”
“Outstanding,” Mildred said. “I’ve been here. It was crappy before the balloon went up.”
“Did you check your rad counter, J.B.?” Krysty asked. “Something busted the ville up pretty well.”
“Already on it,” Ryan said, looking down at the small rad counter pinned to the lapel of his coat. “Rad levels are high, but not enough to be a real problem in the short run. We’ll just have to keep our eyes skinned for fallout hot spots.”
Mildred shrugged. “Somehow the idea of dying of cancer in thirty years doesn’t really terrify me,” she said.
“I daresay that when you visited Detroit before,” Doc said, looking out a window to the southwest, “it looked substantially different from this. And I do not refer to the obvious damage.”
“I didn’t expect it to be this overgrown,” Mildred said. “I mean, it’s pretty humid here. This is Great Lakes country after all. There’s a river not far south and a smaller lake somewhere not too far east. But usually urban desolation is more, uh, desolate.”
“That may suggest where the water pressure came from to drive the flooding of the late redoubt,” Doc said.
“What could’ve
