Ryan muttered. “Ace on the line.”
He looked up and around. What little he could make out through the wind-blown snow and grit suggested structures that had never been much to start with but were probably worse now.
“Eyes skinned,” he commanded, straightening. “We don’t know if the muties are still around.”
“Some are,” Mildred observed, sounding grim. “The bodies I can see from here are stickies. Or stickie parts, mostly. They’re everywhere.”
“It looks as if a bomb went off in a stickie colony,” Krysty stated.
Ryan moved on from the chill. Almost at once he came close to stumbling over a lump that he quickly realized was a green stickie torso—headless, limbless, about the size of a ten-year-old norm’s body. It was partly covered with drifted powdery snow.
“Could they have been fighting?” Ricky asked warily. He’d had to make some adjustments to his outlook on muties when joining up with Ryan and his group. His homeland, Puerto Rico, was called Monster Island, not just because it was overrun with savage monsters—it was—but also because large colonies of humanoid muties, including stickies, lived side by side with the human majority in perfect amity. Whereas on the mainland mutation was considered a taint—such that even the gorgeous Krysty Wroth faced discrimination or even violence whenever it was found out that she was, though nearly perfect in face and form, a mutie.
Of course, on the mainland, stickies had earned their reputation as monsters a thousand times over.
“Mebbe,” Ryan said.
He was starting to wonder himself. Abstract knowledge might not load many blasters, it was true. Which was why he’d long since learned—the hard way—to suppress his own lively natural lust for knowledge for its own sake. Staying alive took all the brain power even a man the likes of Ryan Cawdor could bring to bear.
But this was shaping up into a mystery whose answer might well affect their survival.
“Or maybe that dude we chilled killed them all with his ax?” Mildred suggested.
Ryan grunted. “Mebbe,” he said.
“That’d be an irony,” Mildred stated pointedly. “If that guy’s reward for heroically taking out a whole colony full of stickies was for us to blast him out of his socks.”
“Spilled blood won’t go back in the body, Mildred,” Ryan said. “You of all people should know that. Anyway, you might remember he thought we were stickies and was fixing to proceed accordingly.”
“True,” she said.
As Ryan cautiously advanced among the scattered stickie bits with his blaster ready, details of the handful of buildings became apparent. Clearly this had been a farm. Like so many others, buildings seemed to have been thrown together and rudely nailed in place from whatever could be scavvied, traded for or stolen. Planks. Timber scraps. Flattened tin cans. Cracked and sun-discolored plastic sheeting. A few rare chunks of corrugated metal. Sad and sagging but no more than most to be encountered in the Deathlands. And the farm had to have been relatively prosperous, judging by the number of structures.
Ironically, their number and size suggested that this had been a prosperous location. Relatively. A marginally better style of hardscrabble life.
“Looks like a sizable group lived here,” Mildred said. “Normal people, that is.” Stickie colonies could take numerous forms—like the rubbery-skinned little humanoids themselves—from massive piles of rubbish to what looked like outsized wasps’ nests. But never as orderly as this place was.
Even now.
“Might’ve been an extended clan,” Krysty said.
Ryan had seen no sign of norms other than the man he’d helped chill. But as Krysty spoke he saw a little girl lying facedown on the ground. Snow had already half drifted over her. She was clearly dead.
Neither Ryan nor any of the others made a move to examine her more closely. Her rough smock was torn and bloodied on the back. That she’d died by violence told them what they needed to know. And despite all being hardened survivors of years in the Deathlands, none of them wanted to see more horror than they had to. Not even Ryan, and he was reckoned a hard man.
They came across other chills, adults, both men and women. All bore the telltale sign of stickie violence: the red sucker imprints on their flesh left by mutie fingertips that could peel skin from muscle and muscle from bone with their terrible adhesive power. Some bore bite wounds, as well, divots scooped from sides or limbs, throats torn out. Some varieties of stickies lacked external mouths. Others had mouths filled with needle fangs.
These were that second kind. Or had been. Ryan saw a couple more or less intact stickie chills, one with a lower face and throat obliterated by what had to have been a point-blank shotgun blast, another with an ax still embedded in its round head.
“Blasters up, and stay ready, people,” Ryan called softly to his comrades.
A beat later Jak called out from somewhere, lost in the snow-swirl, “Hear something.”
Ryan crouched, handblaster at the ready. Beside him he saw Krysty and Ricky do likewise—the redhead with her full-auto capable 9 mm Glock 18C, the youth with his old Webley revolver, rechambered for .45 ACP.
Then Jak said, “Girl crying.”
Krysty’s pale and beautiful face, which had been an ice sculpture a moment before, softened. She straightened, lowering the boxy muzzle of her blaster.
“Don’t let your guard down, lover,” Ryan growled. “We don’t know it’s not a trap.”
She cocked an incredulous brow at him. “What? A stickie crying out in a little girl’s voice to lure us in?”
“Other muties have been known to do that trick,” J.B. reminded her. “Who knows what stickies might come up with. Some of them are bastard smart.”
Krysty’s other eyebrow arched up to match the first. She nodded. “Good point. But we still need to check. Just carefully.”
“It’s not our problem anyway,” Ryan said. He was talking to the woman’s back as she moved purposefully ahead among the eerie cluster of farm buildings. She had a mind of her own—it was one reason he loved her. And she had as keen a survival sense as he did. After all, she’d met the same brutal and deadly challenges he had across their years together on the Deathlands. Some he even hadn’t, when they were split by circumstance or necessity. She knew what she was doing.
But he also felt concern that her big, soft heart might dull the edge of her wits.
At this point the only thing to do was follow. He heard a rustle and glanced over his shoulder to see J.B. slide in behind him, his M-4000 riot scattergun held slantwise before his hips in patrol position. The little man flashed him a quick grin.
Getting my back, Ryan thought. Automatically. As usual. They were all sharp-eyed and sure shots, and none of them compared to Jak Lauren in the sensory-keenness department. But Ryan just felt better when it was his best friend and right-hand man in particular who was watching their asses. Especially going into an unknown situation.
He
