by James Axler
The impact made a hollow, wet sound, but the skull shattered like a dinner plate.
Forward motion was the key to Ryan’s strategy, a strategy that Doc’s swordstick would have furthered immeasurably. In the back of her mind, Krysty was still stinging from the way he had abandoned them. She was still furious, and not just at the old man. She couldn’t imagine what the two mutie hunters could have offered that could lure him away. Maybe they hadn’t offered him anything. She knew how vulnerable Doc was when he was having one of his spells. Sometimes the companions had to tie a rope around his waist just to keep him from wandering off. They should have seen the breakdown coming, and done something about it.
Caught up in the headlong advance, Krysty didn’t look around to see how Mildred was doing. Because the woman was keeping up the pace, Krysty figured her friend was using the same technique she was, for the most part cutting rather than stabbing with her predark bayonet, slashing throats instead of trying to pierce hearts.
Krysty could hear the swish-swish of the islanders’ sabers behind her. And what sounded like cabbages being chopped in two, one after another. The crisp crunch wasn’t from cabbages, of course. Nor from anything vegetative, for that matter. The islanders’ sword slashes were sending bald heads leaping from necks, arcing away into the melee.
Ryan’s strategy worked like a charm. The shattered column of stickies found itself caught between gauntlets of norms. The recruits attacked them from one side and the companions and islanders from the other. Three deep, the trapped muties were battered front and rear by blades and ten-pound hammers. In panic, with nowhere to go, they leaped straight up in the air. Steel rang on steel as they were chopped down.
Krysty joined in the slaughter. She could see the blood-spattered faces of the recruits on the other side of the stickies’ wildly jerking bodies. The eyes of the ex-mercies and sec men were full of triumph—at last they were getting the upper hand.
As she whipped the blade point across the neck of the stickie facing her, a sledge hammer came down on its head from behind. The weight of the impact drove the mutie instantly to its knees. The rounded top of its head had become a concavity, all the way down to its earholes. The dead black eyes stared at eternity while a long strand of drool swayed from its chin. Then it fell on its face.
Another mutie side-hopped inside her guard, straddling the one who had just been dropped. If it hadn’t been for the wide stance, it would have had her by the throat.
Before it could grab her, Krysty jumped off her left foot to gain momentum, then snap-kicked with her right leg. The toe of her boot connected solidly with the point of the stickie’s chin. With a loud crack, its head whipped back and the chin aimed not just skyward, but somewhere over its right shoulder. The body toppled backward.
As she brought her blade up, on the other side of the gauntlet, she saw stickies jumping on the backs and heads of the recruits. The forces at the rear of the mass of muties had broken ranks, circled around the norms, and were pulling them down from behind.
Rapidly the neat battle lines blurred and the companions’ forward momentum slowed. As knots of fighters, norm and mutie, tried to surround and isolate each other, combat became chaos.
Krysty and the other companions moved into a back-to-back position. No command was necessary. No discussion. It was standard protocol, the only way to survive under the circumstances.
With Ryan on one side and Jak on the other, the tall redhead fended off her attackers, striking with blade and boot. Overhead, the Wazls swooped, snatching at their heads with claws and beaks. The lizard birds didn’t seem to care for the taste of stickie. They ignored the muties and concentrated on the norms. It was an instinctive choice. Wazls couldn’t be tamed or trained to hunt. The wounded recruits who managed crawl away from the stickies were subject to savage attack from above.
Under the leaden sky, with music written for dead heroes hammering their ears, the companions valiantly fought on.
RYAN PUSHED between the shoulders of the norm fighters, heading for the tip of the stickie spear, the point of their deepest penetration. He knew he couldn’t turn back the muties, but he could force them to either side; with his size and momentum, his chilling power, aimed a small focal point, the enemy had no choice.
The last of the recruits jumped out of the way and Ryan drove into the pale, writhing mob. He literally stomped down the first few stickies in his path, cracking their long bones under his boot heels.
When a mutie jumped at him, its needle teeth bared, Ryan punched instead of stabbed with his panga hand. The hard straight right had every ounce of his body weight behind it. His fist landed just above the nostril holes and he could feel the crunch of yielding bone all the way up his arm. With two hundred pounds of moving mass behind it, the blow jolted the stickie off its feet and sent it helicoptering sideways into the chests of its fellows.
A row of pale dominoes toppled. More bones yielded—sternums, ribs, skulls, pelvises—to the one-eyed man’s crushing boots.
Another mutie leaped from the left. Ryan down-blocked it with the edge of his forearm, and as the body swept past him to the right, he ripped the panga blade across the front of its throat.
Then it was back and forth with the eighteen-inch panga, cutting down the stickies who didn’t step aside. As Ryan charged and hacked, pushing deeper into the mutie ranks, he could hear the islanders’ rumbling baritone war chant behind him.
“Patu! Patu! Whakangaro! Patu! Patu! Whakangaro!”
Under the circumstances, Ryan didn’t need a translator to get the drift. The three-hundred-pound, tattooed warriors were bellowing, “Chill ’em all! Chill ’em all!”
The war chant was punctuated by the whoosh of Calcutta steel. It didn’t matter that the blades were dull and nicked, that the metal had been forged more than a century ago in a dirt floor foundry. The islanders’ swings were so powerful they could have beheaded their foes with three-foot lengths of unmilled bar stock.
As Ryan plowed into the muties’ midst, he saw that some of them were otherwise engaged. The stickies farther back in the column, separated from the hand-to-hand by their brethren, were kneeling or squatting, taking the opportunity to feed on the fallen recruits. They raised gory mouths from the whipsawn carcasses as he bore down on them. They looked up at him with dead black eyes, still chewing.
Ryan would have had to lean down to strike them with the panga, which would have cost him time. Instead he kicked them in the head with his heavy boots. The impacts sent shock waves to his hip sockets. His bootprints branded their vacant faces. Vibram, stamped in reverse.
Because the feeding stickies farther along could see him coming, they were forewarned. Ryan rammed headlong into multiple attackers. He fired off a straight kick into a stickie’s chest, knocking it sprawling. Then he backhanded the panga, side-slashing across an undefended throat, opening yawning second mouth under its pale chin. The forehand stroke that followed hacked into the side of the next mutie’s neck. As the stickie spun away, its arterial blood spurted in a fine spray.
This was slow-mo war, combat as brutal and primitive as it could get.
Fighters crashing together, bone on bone, for the viewing pleasure of a jaded audience of one. Blaster chilling at eleven hundred feet per second and ranges of a hundred yards was warm milk and cookies by comparison. In this savage brand of warfare you had to look into the eyes of the thing you were butchering. You had to watch as the power of your muscles unzipped a kissing face from ear to ear.
Ryan been in the eye of this hurricane many times before.
He knew its secrets, its pitfalls—and its allure.
Being turned loose with a sharp blade or a heavy bludgeon on a mob of inhuman murderers, without rules of engagement, with no limitations of honor or respect for the enemy’s innate right to life, imparted a terrible freedom, the freedom to act without conscience or regret. At some point under such conditions, after the fear of death vanished in adrenaline rush, when the fighter was no longer
battling out of desperation for the sake of survival, an unholy desire took hold.
The desire to do his or her worst.
Not simply to win, but to devastate.
Ryan saw that urge as part of his animal nature. It was something that couldn’t be denied, or altered. Without that deeply buried spark, he could never have become the warrior he was.
Perhaps the stickies felt the same thing when they blew kisses to their intended victims, when they chased down defenseless prey, when they pulled it apart with their sucker hands. In their case, however, the primal urge was right there on the surface. Whoever or whatever had created the stickie race, human bioengineer or forked-tail devil, it had fanned that awful ember and made it all-consuming. A bonfire of chill lust. Stickies enjoyed no camaraderie. They had no villes, they farmed no land. They were a predatory swarm.
In all his past entertainments, Magus had created a mirror of the world, a funhouse mirror, rippled and distorted by contrived situations, by intricate slaughterhouse tableaux that laid bare the darkest secrets of the species that had spawned him.
Gassing people in a circus tent.
Mocking their terror with Mozart.
Staging combat to the death on a scrap of rock.
Mocking the fighters’ heroism and pain with the melodramatic strains of Wagner.
If the other recruits believed they would be all right once they wiped out the stickies and Wazls, they were in for an unpleasant surprise. From past experience with Steel Eyes, Ryan knew the stickies and Wazls were just the beginning.
As he saw it, there was only one hope for the companions’ survival. After fracturing the enemy point and dividing its column, they had to continue to drive their own spear through the stickie ranks, all the way to the cone’s double doors. If they could reach that gate and control it, they could stop the flow of mutie reinforcements and control the field of battle.
If they failed to reach those steel doors, he had little doubt that they were all going to die.
With that in mind, Ryan cut a six-foot-wide swathe through the mutie forces. After hammering the skull of a stickie with the pommel of his panga, he hurtled the unconscious body onto those coming up behind. Before they could get out from under the tangle of limbs, he was on them. As he stomped their pale necks, he caught a blur movement around the edge of the bowl, above the sea of bobbing heads and waving arms. Stickies were sprinting to the rear, trying to outflank the norms.
He shouted a warning, but his voice was lost in the clamor.
Ryan had to watch as the stickies pounced on the shoulders of the recruits, sucker fingers grabbing for the eyes, dragging them backward onto the ground, then ripping off their skin and muscles.
How many norms had they lost already? In the confusion of battle, it was impossible to tell.
How many stickies were left? The way they jumped around, there was no way to count them.
One thing was for sure—all the freshly spilled blood, and the promise of more to come, was making the muties go even wilder. Their frenzied counterattack forced Ryan to slow his advance or risk being cut off from the others. As the norm flanks buckled around them, the companions pulled together, fighting for their lives.
J.B. JOGGED ACROSS THE DISH in the three-spot behind Ryan and Mildred, on the left. The stickies who moved out of the one-eyed point man’s reach, who survived the slash of Mildred’s bayonet were his responsibility. Undeterred by their narrow escape from death, or perhaps energized by it, the muties lunged back into the fray with a vengeance, hands groping for the Armorer’s face. J.B. tomahawked them as he ran by, swinging only at the heads he knew he could hit squarely. His sizzling, backhanded ax blows sent the muties crashing face-first onto the rock.
As the companions thrust deeper into the column of stickies, backed by the sword-wielding, shouting islanders, the other recruits regained their courage. They pressed the attack on the momentarily distracted muties, hamstringing them with low chops of their knives and axes, clubbing them over the head with their hammers.
Stickies dropped like ten pins. While they twisted and thrashed, unable to get up, the islander sabers scythed necks, and the Cawdor juggernaut kept rolling forward.
J.B. knew where Ryan was heading, and he recognized the importance of speed in getting there. Like his old friend, the Armorer had acquired a handle on Magus’s modus operandi the hard way. From experience, he knew that what they were facing now was just prelude. There would be new beasts to fight soon enough, new beasts aplenty. Short of a complete turnabout, the wearing down of the norm forces was inevitable, as was their defeat. He knew there would eventually come a point when he wouldn’t be able to lift the tomahawk, let alone swing it with chilling force. Unless they could shut those double cone doors, permanently.
The window of opportunity for that was short.
Between the companions and the goal stood a savage, utterly fearless and unpredictable enemy.
With Ryan on point, the stickie column split and kept on splitting, like water under the bow of a streaking ship. Running in his wake, the companions moved forward so quickly that they couldn’t avoid stepping on bodies, alive and dead, and on parts of bodies, norm and mutie.
One of the badly wounded stickies jumped from the ground just as Krysty passed by. The redhead expertly dodged and deflected the attack across her body. As she did so, her long blade flicked in and out of the stickie’s side. J.B. saw the mutie was going to land to his right, inside the wedge, and too close for comfort.
Automatically, he switched the tomahawk to his right hand. He thought the stickie was probably dead meat, but he intended to give it a whack in passing just to make sure. When the stickie immediately sprang up, its mouth open, its needle teeth dripping, J.B. had already begun his compact, powerful downswing. Falling steel crunched through rising bone. J.B. skipped around the halo of backsplatter.
Although the expression in the black eyes did not change, the way the skull caved in, it was lights out. Permanently.
J.B. had only turned to the right for a second, but that was long enough for a poised, crouching enemy to find a clear lane of attack. Before he could completely turn back, a pale shape flew at him in a flat-out dive with arms outstretched.
J.B. couldn’t bring the tomahawk to bear across his body, so he squatted, making the attacker miss. The mutie dragged a hand as it flew over J.B.’s head, trying to snag hold of his face with its suckers. Moist fingers slammed into the side of his skull, then cool air hit sweaty hair. His head felt light. Fedora gone, his wire-rimmed glasses dangled off one earhook.
“Shit!” J.B. growled, glancing back over his shoulder.
The stickie had landed on its feet behind him. Clutching his treasured hat, it coiled to hurl itself on Jak’s unprotected back.
“Look out, Jak!” he cried.
Captain Eng was already on the case. In two long strides, he closed the distance. Swinging with both arms and putting considerable snap into the strike, the islander brought his blade down at a forty-five-degree angle, from right to left. With three hundred pounds of tattooed fury behind it, the saber’s heavy middle section sliced cleanly through the stickie’s eyes and eye sockets. Eng’s hip-pivoting follow-through took the sword all the way through the soft skull and out the base of the neck. Freed from the body beneath, the entire back of the bald head sloughed off. As it did, blood geysered up from the arteries that fed the brain pan. Stepping neatly around the mutie’s falling body, the captain snatched the fedora out of the dead hand.
Still running, the islander grinned down at his prize. For a second, J.B. thought he was going to try on the hat—a ridiculous prospect considering the size of his head. Then, with a snap of his wrist, Eng sailed the hat back to the Armorer, who caught it with one hand and screwed it back down on his head, swearing a blue streak.
The fucking thing had stickie on it.
The advance slowed as the norms reaped the rewards of mutie confusion. Their formation broken, the stickies found themselves surr
ounded. J.B. waged point blank war on the dead-eyed monsters, clubbing them to the ground with full power blows. As he brought his tomahawk down in a coup de grâce on an already mortally wounded stickie, he saw rapid movement at the fringes of the battle that was counter to the flow.
The flanking maneuver was perfectly timed and executed. The recruits facing J.B. were pulled down by dozens of pale hands. In the blur of flying bodies, in the screaming din, he saw men pinned to the ground and bitten, bald heads savagely shaking, needle teeth tearing out chunks.
Under the weight of the counterattack, the recruit gauntlet collapsed. In arm-waving droves, stickies broke through the holes they’d torn in the ranks. J.B. was forced to back up or be overrun. Cutting the tomahawk left and right, he kept the snarling muties at bay.
The Armorer sensed the companions were pulling in behind him, battle mates drawing together, shoulder to shoulder, for mutual defense. It was the last-stand formation. Out of the corners of his eyes he saw Jak’s flying white hair on his right and Mildred’s strong brown arms on his left. Their blades flashed dully in the weak daylight. Blood varnished the steel.
Overhead the Wazls dipped and dived, buffeting them with wing-wash and snatching at their heads with black tri-talons. The lizard birds knew the game was just about up.
J.B. could see the islanders had moved into a similar back-to-back fighting formation a short distance away. The huge men circled right to left, chanting their war chant, stomping their bare feet, their saber points out. They were a human-powered cutting machine. Anything that came within thirty-five inches fell to pieces and died.
Under any other circumstances the sight would have made the Armorer smile.
