by James Axler
SEVERAL BLOCKS AWAY they paused and ducked into another building to catch their breaths and bearings. It had been a tavern. There was still an area on the floor they could see by the failing light where the bar once stood. It had to have been broken up for fuel long ago.
“Perhaps your mercy was misplaced,” Doc said to Krysty. He was bent over with his hands braced on his rail-thin thighs. Everybody was winded. They were all in good shape from ceaseless walking but their sprint had been full-out, holding nothing back.
“Where are we now?” Mildred asked.
“Think it’s the last building before the bridge landing,” Ryan said, straightening. “The one the cannies chased Emerald over, if that little nuke sucker was telling the truth.”
“I rather think he was,” Doc said. “He seemed proud of the sordid affair, on the whole.”
“Yeah. There’s no accounting for cannies.”
“Wait!” Jak yelped. “You mean big stickie nest ship other side building?”
“Reckon so,” Ryan said.
“I don’t see what a ship would be doing there,” Mildred said. “Maybe it’s some kind of boat, got stranded by a flood.”
“We have to pass it,” Krysty said. “Better do it now, before it gets full dark. Sun’s setting now.”
“Are we sure about this, people?” Mildred asked. “Shouldn’t we at least look for a place to rest up, wait for daylight to try to cross? From what that kid said I get the feeling the bridge is half fallen down.”
“Every cannie in Landing on butts now,” Jak said.
“Well, how badly do we want to have every stickie in the damn Landing on our butts at the same time?” Mildred demanded. “I’m starting to wonder if it’s not time to think about slipping back to Soulard and liberat—Damn!”
She whipped the heavy scattergun to her shoulder and fired. A huge yellow flame erupted from the muzzle. The noise in the closed quarters of the room almost imploded Ryan’s skull.
The shot charge did worse to the stickie who’d suddenly appeared on the sidewalk right outside the window. His skull exploded. The slimy green body fell flopping to the pavement.
“Shit!” Jak cried. “They on us!”
“This way!” Ryan led them north through the building. Mildred brought up the rear. The shotgun boomed again as she turned and fired in a doorway to the next section.
“That got their heads down,” she shouted to the rest as she charged after them. “We—Whoa! Holy shit, it’s the Admiral!”
The others had crouched just inside a blown-out window on the building’s north side. They were staring out at the landing that the big cantilever bridge took off from—or rather past it at the peculiar streamlined shape of a huge ship, four or five decks tall, tilted high in the air, its silvery superstructure bronzed by the last rays of the setting sun.
“Who?” Ryan said.
“The Admiral, an old riverboat. It was moored and used for a casino, last I heard. A big barge tow rammed it and knocked it loose.”
“What it do there?” Jak demanded. He stood near the door through which they’d entered, watching their back trail.
“New Madrid Fault!” Mildred exclaimed. “Remember that crazy’s story? ‘New Mad Rid’? It’s south of here, down on what used to be the Tennessee border. When all those big quakes cut loose right after the war, it must’ve gone up big-time. Probably sent a tsunami up the river that tossed that ship like a football.”
“What do we do now?” Krysty said.
The .357 Magnum Colt Python had a peculiarly virulent muzzle-blast. Ryan felt the shocks hit him in the back of his head when Jak loosed two fast shots through the door across the building.
“Pick quick!” the albino youth shouted. “Company soon!”
“Fuck it,” Ryan said. “We’re going up the ramp and across the bridge.”
“Right past the giant stickie nest?” Mildred yelped.
“I’m thinking more of the stickies we know are about to be crawling up our asses in fifteen seconds. Now, run like hell!”
Krysty set the example, vaulting the low sill and racing across the old parking lot and street, holding her trophy Mini-14 before her with both hands. Ryan gave Doc a hand. Meanwhile Mildred swarmed over next to them. She turned and knelt, training the shotgun back into the room.
“Go!” she shouted. “Jak, come on! Covering!”
Ryan paused only long enough to see Jak spin away, white hair flying, and dart toward the window. Then he ran for the long highway ramp.
They had to backtrack a bit to their left to get onto it. Krysty was already well up the sloping roadway. She stopped and swung the muzzle of her carbine down to cover the building they’d left as Mildred fired another blast into it. Then she turned around.
And froze.
The boat’s blunt hull towered high above as if it were about to fall on her. The Admiral hadn’t actually been thrown against the bridge by whatever had happened. Instead it had landed on a brick building and crushed it into a mound of rust-colored debris dense enough to prop its weight at about a thirty-degree angle. Ryan had seen bigger ships—in fact they all had—but he was bastard sure he couldn’t recall one that looked so nukin’ huge.
That wasn’t what rooted Krysty momentarily in place. That would be the sight of stickies, dozens of them, swarming off the vessel like startled roaches.
“Well, fuck me,” Ryan said, and scrambled up the ramp. “Krysty, move!”
As he ran, he realized it was getting dark fast. They had taken longer at their capture and interrogation of the young cannie than anybody realized. A glance over his shoulder showed him a tiny blinding arc of the sun just vanishing behind the cracked-egg top of the great dome that had housed some kind of arena for a sport unplayed in generations.
It also showed his other friends scrambling onto the ramp, and stickies streaming to meet them from the grounded ship.
Without breaking stride he hauled out his SIG-Sauer and fired a couple quick shots at the swarm. He saw one mutie jerk to a probable torso hit. It kept coming as if nothing had happened. Stickies were incredibly durable. Often only a brain-pan shot was really guaranteed to bring them down. Or a hit that broke the pelvic girdle. Nothing that stood on two legs could, when its support framework was busted.
But Ryan was out of position, and the range was long for a handblaster even if he were stopped and in a braced position. Shooting on the run was a low-percentage play at the best of times.
A flash lit the rapidly thickening twilight. A boom echoed between the buildings. Ryan saw one stickie fold over as it took most of the charge from Mildred’s scattergun in the green gooey gut. It dropped to its knees and kept crawling forward. Another behind it reeled as a pellet or two ripped into it but wasn’t slowed.
Another stickie’s head erupted in blackish goo. It went straight down on the ruin of its face and didn’t move. Ryan tilted his head to see Krysty kneeling at the top of the ramp firing aimed shots from the Mini. It had been a hell of a shot for a carbine over open sights, especially in bad light, over at least one hundred yards.
Again and again the carbine spit flame. Ryan raced up the ramp and turned to throw himself on his belly beside the redhead. As he did, he unslung the Steyr from behind his back, disentangling it from the backpack with the grace of long practice. He twined the sling around his left forearm, braced the elbow on concrete still sun-hot and assumed a prone firing position.
“Go!” he shouted. Krysty didn’t argue. She was up and running like a deer onto the cantilever bridge’s first span.
Before shifting focus to his glass, which would crank his world down to a near pinpoint, Ryan took quick stock of his companions. Jak brought up the rear, blasting at stickies crawling on all fours out of the building they’d just fled. Mildred was stuffing single red plastic shells into J.B.’s shotgun and firing them. It was a difficult feat on the run, but she managed. Doc stood on the ramp’s far side, nearer the great looming promontory that was the hull, booming away wit
h his immense handblaster at stickies coming from that way.
“Doc, leave it!” Ryan shouted. “Everybody just run! I got it.”
Without waiting to see if his commands were obeyed, he shifted the longblaster until it bore on the mass of stickies rushing the ramp in the face of Doc’s aimed fire. With barely enough light to aim by, Ryan got a hairless head onto the top of the post in his scope. It was a hideous sight, something he never got used to: two sunken round black eyes like pits straight to hell, a nose that was little more than two vertical slits in a low mound of slimy skin, a round mouth ringed with teethlike needles.
He led slightly as he let out half of a deep-drawn breath, began to squeeze the trigger. The big blaster bucked and slammed into his shoulder with a stunning roar. When he brought the rifle back in line, with a fat fresh shiny yellow cartridge already cranked into its receiver, it was dead-on target. The stickie he’d aimed at was falling with the far half of its head simply gone.
“Get up from that, nuke sucker,” he murmured as he sought another target.
He fired three more times. Two more stickies fell. The third one moved in an unexpected way just as the trigger broke. As far as Ryan could tell, that shot missed everything, even in that mob of the mewling monsters. Cursing, he snugged the steel buttplate back to his shoulder and sought a new target.
He had another problem: it was rapidly coming down to dead cave-belly dark. The Steyr’s scope made it darker. Very little light came in the objective lens. All he saw were erratically bobbing blurs.
“Forget that, Ryan!” boomed a familiar voice from close nearby. He glanced up to see Doc high-stepping by, with his sword stick in one hand and the LeMat in the other, his coattails flapping behind him in the gloom like a heron’s wings.
“They’re coming, and the only thing now is to ride shank’s mare as fast as she’ll go!”
Ryan only understood that in the most general way. It was more than enough. He may not have gotten the exact words but it meant beat feet before they swarm you!
A glance over the top of his telescopic sight housing told him that was sound advice. Jak sprinted past. Mildred came chugging up the slope with a determined expression on her face, a few feet away. And about a hundred feet behind her came the first of the stickies, making disgusting bubbling squeaks and their sucker-toed feet slapping nastily on the pavement.
Ryan saw Mildred start to slow as if intending to provide covering fire while Ryan ran on. “Keep moving!” he yelled.
Her brow clenched rebelliously, and he felt a flash of fear she’d defy him. He pushed off anyway, snapping himself upright as fast as he could for all the weight of his heavy-loaded pack and the big longblaster. He was ready to grab the woman and tow her if need be. None of them was expendable, and he hated the thought of leaving a friend to face what the stickies would do to a person who fell into their suckered paws.
But for all the catching up she’d had to do as a twentieth-century freezie, Mildred had gotten more than a little seasoning during her time in the Deathlands. And one thing she was not was a slow learner. She powered right by Ryan, her short but strong legs moving in a blur.
He turned and ran after her. The Martin Luther King bridge was a wide roadbed supported by a sort of swooping angular cage of steel girders and strutwork. Such open-worked metal structures tended to survive nuke blasts pretty well, unless they lay in what was called a radius of total destruction. The heat pulse of a thermonuclear weapon was over too quickly to seriously weaken the steel unless it went off really close. And there just wasn’t much to a framework like that for the dynamic overpressure—the blastwave—to push against.
Something had done some damage, though. The highway buckled and cracked as if waves had been frozen in the asphalt. Girders were twisted like taffy. Some had broken and stuck out at odd angles.
Ryan didn’t waste a lot of time on whys and wherefores. He turned, drawing his handblaster.
The stickies had fallen behind a bit. Some had gotten distracted ripping apart their fallen kindred. Not just the dead ones, either. He saw that a writhing mass of rubbery flesh beside the ramp was half a dozen stickies swarming the gutted one who had been crawling.
He aimed, shot. It was an easy hit now even at almost thirty yards because his targets were running right at him. He put two down with head shots out of three rounds fired and turned and sprinted on to find the others standing stock-still in the middle of the roadway several hundred yards along.
“What in the name of nuke death are you doing?” he shouted as he ran up on them. “Keep moving!”
“Perhaps not so easy a task, my dear Ryan,” Doc said. He gestured grandly with his sword stick.
The central span was in ruins. It had simply fallen sideways, as if hinged on. Hundreds of feet long, it hung now by mere struts and beams along the side, like a mostly severed limb held only by tendons. The high girder-work still stood over it.
Right before their toes the Sippi was a southward moving uneasy blackness, like a living endless shadow.
“I didn’t think a cantilever bridge was supposed to do that,” Mildred said. “What now? We’re stuck.”
“Emerald made her way across,” Krysty said. “We can, too.”
“Are you so certain of that?” Doc said. “One might judge it likelier she fell into yon black waters yawning beneath our feet.”
“There’s ways across,” Ryan said. “That metal framework’s still up there. And whatever it is still keeping up the road. There’s ways.”
“Swim?” Jak suggested.
“We would more likely break our bones, hitting the water from such a height,” Doc said. “A peculiarly unap-pealing form of death.”
About a mile south, Ryan noted a yellow-orange glow that spilled off the bank to the river. Its actual source was obscured by trees.
“Must be Eastleville,” he said.
Jak’s Python cracked deafeningly from Ryan’s left.
“Stickies come now,” the albino teen shouted.
“Give it to them hard and fast,” Ryan said. “We don’t want them grabbing at us when we’re crossing.”
They turned and cut loose on the mob of stickies. The muties had shorter legs than norms and weren’t especially good runners. Their hips seemed to be jointed-up. They were still a good fifty yards back, which wasn’t good enough.
Ryan unslung the Steyr and shot, using his open sights. It was way too dark to see anything in the scope by now. Mildred was adeptly feeding rifled-slug shells into her scattergun round by round. Krysty fired rapid but aimed shots from her Mini with the folding stock extended and shoulder-braced. Doc stood with his LeMat held out at arm’s length like a duelist; Jak knelt and aimed his own handblaster with both hands.
It was long range for handblasters, especially in the dark, but they had a lot of targets, jostling one another in their eagerness to get at their norm prey. Ryan blasted through a full magazine and started on another before the stickies broke and started milling back in confusion. By that time at least twenty shapes lay still or writhing in the causeway.
“That’ll hold them for a few minutes,” he said. “We better use them well.”
They all turned and stopped dead.
Several dozen torches were approaching the far brink of the fallen span. They looked like flickering orange fireflies.
And beneath each torch was clearly visible the misshapen head of a stickie.
Chapter Nineteen
“One way or another,” Mildred said, “this is really gonna suck.”
Although this clan of stickies favored living right on water, like all stickies they loved and were fascinated by explosions and particularly by fire, to a degree approached only by the most dedicated of human pyromaniacs. Most especially they enjoyed experimenting with what fire would do to norms if they got their suckers on one. It could provide them endless hours of enjoyment.
The norm generally enjoyed it a good deal less.
“What now?” Doc said softly.
>
It was times like this when Ryan most keenly missed his friend and hard right hand, J. B. Dix. Quite rightly did old Doc Tanner call him the Master of Stratagems. He had a special gift for getting into—and more importantly, to Ryan’s way of thinking, out of—tight places.
“We push on,” Ryan said, coming to sudden decision. “Try down the side. Looks like the struts continue beneath the level of the old road.”
“And the stickies?”
“We fight the ones ahead, or we fight the ones behind,” Ryan said. “Or we go in the water and drown and die. I say we fight. Since we got to fight anyway, I’d rather do it moving forward.”
“Better start now,” Krysty said. To emphasize her words she slung her handy little carbine and climbed over the railing. Her head dropped below the road level.
It was the controlled drop of a person climbing down, not an uncontrolled plunge to the concrete-hard surface of the Sippi.
“Ryan’s right,” her voice floated back up to them. “The struts do run across the gap.”
The others followed her. Ryan snapped a couple more shots at the pursuing stickies and then replaced the depleted magazine with a full one. Stuffing the partially empty box in his pants pocket, he set out, too.
But he didn’t take the low road. He took the higher one, scrambling up and down the zigzag girder-work bracing. His main intent was to outdistance his companions.
Nuked if I let Krysty be the first to face those muties on the other side, he thought grimly.
He made rapid progress. The rusted metal ripped at his callused fingers and palms. He had to wipe his hands frequently on his jeans to keep them from getting too blood-slippery, but he pressed on fast as he could.
Glancing down, he saw he was passing above his friends, just as he intended. Then he looked forward and his stomach did a slow roll inside him.
Stickies were climbing toward them. Both the way he was, along the angular network of girders, and along the struts that ran beside and beneath the original causeway like Ryan’s friends. Only the muties had an advantage: the suction pads on fingers and toes that gave them their name.
