by James Axler
They could basically crawl right along the side of the structure. Which they did, with needled grins.
He gritted his teeth. The temptation to let go and drop to a quick, clean death never entered his head.
He’d never abandon his friends, nor was it in Ryan Cawdor to give up without a fight.
He actually picked up his pace, scrambling reckless-fast, ignoring the pain and increasing slickness of his torn and bleeding hands, jumping heedlessly from girder to girder. Under normal circumstances that would have been triple-stupe. Now, what did he have to lose?
The stickies coming along the girders toward him actually seemed to pause, then they saw him speed up. Then, laughing their hideous gurgling giggles, they redoubled their pace.
When he got within twenty feet of the lead stickie, he hauled out his SIG and shot it through the face. Given the eyes were black lenses sunk in round pits, it was hard for them to show emotion. Nonetheless Ryan thought he saw surprise in the horror’s right eye when the left one erupted in viscous black ooze. The creature broke away and plummeted without a sound.
The others chittered in consternation. Ryan halted, then shot two more off the girders. Looking down, he shot two that were fast approaching Krysty and the others.
Beneath him fire blossomed. Muzzle-blast whipped his pants legs against his calves. Krysty had drawn her short-barreled handblaster and was clinging with one hand and shooting with the other. The unexpected muzzle flare momentarily blanked Ryan’s vision, but he heard a squeak of dismay and guessed she’d at least knocked her target loose from its perch.
Gritting his teeth and blinking away purple after image blobs, Ryan scrambled forward. Trying to cling to his SIG as well as the steel at the same time, he went down a slanted girder, trying to ignore the fact that to either side of him was an unobstructed drop to the water’s black surface.
A stickie ran at him like a monkey on a branch. He shot it in the face. The mutie fell, but there was another right behind. His next shot hit that creature in the shoulder. It didn’t even slow down. Instead it launched itself for him.
For an endless moment the mutie seemed to hang suspended in air. Ryan saw the sucker-tipped fingers reaching to pull the skin and muscle from his face; saw the gap of the monster’s mouth fringed with narrow inward-curving teeth; smelled the abysmal stink of rotting flesh and intrinsic corruption that flowed out of that open gob.
Then he acted. He shoved the muzzle of the SIG-Sauer right into the black reeking gap of the stickie’s mouth and fired.
The stickie’s cheeks expanded comically, like a balloon being blown up. Its eyes stood out of their sockets. Ryan wondered if it was only his imagination that he thought he saw muzzle-flash glaring orange around them.
The stickie’s left eye popped out of its skull. The skull itself burst open in the back, a chunk swinging right like an opening gate.
Ryan let himself fall back, catching himself at the last instant with his left hand on the girder. What remained of the stickie’s face planted against the rusty steel with a squelching sound. Writhing, the horror brushed against Ryan’s face as it bounced off, tumbling like a rag doll into the night.
“Ryan!” he heard Krysty scream. “Above you!”
He looked up to see another stickie posed on a vertical beam ten feet above his head, just about to spring for him. He tried to bring up the SIG, but his right arm had swung wide when he flung himself away from the girder to avoid being grappled by the dying reflex of the stickie whose head he’d blasted apart. He couldn’t recover in time.
A bright white flash split the sky open right over his head. The stickie squealed as something blasted through its skinny, rubbery torso front to back in a spray of black blood. It might not have been a fatal wound for a stickie, or at least not a wound that would stop it coming, but its convulsive reaction to the wound plucked both its hands off the beam. It fell.
Ryan looked farther up in time to see Jak in midflight, white hair streaming behind his head. He hit the beam the stickie had occupied, wrapped his left arm around it and clung like a baby lemur to its mother. A stickie gripped the outside of a girder that angled up from the base and swung itself at the albino teen. Jak pistol-whipped it across the face as it flew near. It back-flipped into a gibbering, shrieking cartwheel all the way down.
Ryan got his left arm around the pillar he clung to, extended his right arm and fired the SIG to slide-lock as fast as he could work the trigger. He guessed Jak’s plan and was laying down covering fire. A couple of stickies dropped from the bridge. Others flinched long enough to allow the youth to make his move. Meanwhile the three companions still below, hanging on as best they could, added their own firepower.
With mad agility and utter lack of nerve Jak launched himself from angled girder to upright one to angled girder. Pausing to tuck away the big Colt Python, he gathered himself, a dozen feet up a vertical beam. Then he launched himself over the heads of the torch-bearing stickies crowding toward him onto the end of the bridge’s level and intact cantilever arm. Performing a neat midair somersault as he passed through the flame of an upheld torch, Jak landed lithely on three points amid the third rank of stickies, scattering them like the sparks from his hair.
Then he sprang upright. He lashed out furiously with a fighting knife—a big clipped-point single-edge trench knife with a knuckle duster protecting the grip—in his right hand and one of his leaf-bladed throwing knives in his left. Black blood flew; stickies squealed in pain and confusion.
Clicking on the safety, Ryan jammed his blaster into its holster. He clutched the beam with both arms, drew his knees up and kicked out with both boots into the face of a stickie springing at him.
The creature got three suckers of its left hand stuck to the sole of Ryan’s right boot.
“Ryan!” Krysty screamed again. This time he heard fear vibrate in her voice.
He let go, twisting his body. His boot came down on the horizontal rail that formed the side brace of the structure with the stickie’s arm between sole and steel. Thin bones broke with loud snaps. The stickie shrieked, its suckers releasing Ryan’s boot. He raised his foot to let it fall.
He hadn’t quite recovered his balance and toppled backward. Jackknifing with all the power and speed of his core, he managed to whip his right arm over the horizontal rail that followed the roadway and arrest his plunge to doom.
A blur of motion. A stickie had slithered down an angled beam and was reaching for his face.
Ryan swung back his legs, then flung himself up and onto the rail. He wasn’t sure how he managed to haul himself upright again without going over, but he did.
“Let’s go!” he shouted, flinging himself forward. “Jak needs help!”
He plunged heedlessly the last few yards to the level roadbed. He swung himself over a yawning gap to strike the front rank of stickies boots-first.
His hurtling mass bowed the smaller creatures over. He landed hard on his side, rolled over, then got to his feet with his panga in hand.
A stickie thrust a torch at his face. He heard the flame crackle and pop. Turning sideways, he leaned far back so that the burning torch-head went past his face. Then, seizing the torch between flame and rubbery hand, he thrust it upward while turning hard counterclockwise with his hips.
The fat blade of his panga whistled down and severed the stickie’s arm just this side of the elbow. Black blood jetted.
Ryan kicked the howling mutie away from him. Blasterfire crashed and flamed from close behind. His friends had begun to gain the roadway and join the fight from level footing. Slashing madly with the panga, clubbing stickies with the blazing torch, he smashed and hacked a path to Jak.
The albino youth had just gone down under a wave of the hideous muties, who promptly discovered they had a problem. He curled himself into a ball with his arms protecting his face from their lethal suckers. And when they grabbed at his back and shoulders they found their hands gashed by the jagged bits of metal, razors and glass he’d sew
n into his jacket.
A stickie sitting atop Jak reared up, waving a blood-spurting hand and shrilling. Ryan thrust the torch into its face. The flame went with a hiss and a horrible smell. The stickie screamed.
Ryan kicked it away, then hacked down two more. A third, attempting to scrabble away on all fours, had Ryan’s left boot come down hard on the small of its back, shattering its spine. It began to thrash and froth from the mouth.
With obvious effort Jak sat up. He planted the throwing knife in the gut of a stickie that closed on him from the left, then smashed the trench knife’s pommel into the face of another attacking from the right.
Krysty waded in with her truncheon to the left of them. To the right Mildred butt-stroked a stickie so hard its forehead caved in and it dropped straight to the asphalt. Doc laid about left and right with his cane, then poked a stickie neatly in the eye with its ferrule. Black blood and pale aqueous humor spurted up its length.
Suddenly they were alone. The stickies broke and fled, waving their suckered hands and bawling in fear. Some were so panicked they ran straight between girders and into space, to hang a heartbeat over nothing, windmilling wildly before falling to their deaths. Others, in better control of their tiny malicious minds, used their stickers to swarm down the side of the bridge and beneath.
Ryan looked left and right. The way stood clear. He was breathing like a bellows now. Blood and sweat ran in torrents down his face. It trickled beneath the patch and made his scar itch unbearably.
“Closing triple-fast behind!” Jak called.
Ryan looked back. The stickies pouring out of the Admiral had torches now, too. They scuttled along the girders and frame of the half-fallen suspended span without slowing. Some even held torches in their teeth to move faster. The yellow flames glittered evilly in their black eyes.
“Time to go?” Mildred said.
“Time to go,” Ryan said. They sprinted across the bridge for the eastern bank, soon leaving the chittering horde behind. Even Mildred, with her relatively short legs, easily outdistanced the pursuing stickies.
As they neared the descending ramp they saw, approaching through the woods, the uneasy glow of more torches. Many of them. The companions slowed to a trot.
“Who do you think they are?” Mildred asked.
“I have no clue,” Ryan said.
“I find myself disinclined to presume anything but the worst,” Doc said. He was starting to puff some.
“Stickies don’t usually like roaming the woods,” Krysty said.
“You sure enough about that to bet your life on it?” Ryan asked. He was busy checking flaps and seals on his pack with his hands, making sure everything was secured.
“Well,” the redhead said, “no.”
“Great. Me neither. Make sure you got everything cinched down, people.”
Eyebrows rose. But the one-eyed man’s tone did not invite discussion. Everybody made sure their gear was sealed tight. As they did so they jogged forward, beginning to descend the long ramp. For whatever reason, ahead of them lay no visible sign of the highway that had once run from the bridge. Nothing remained now but a trail through dense brush into night-black hardwood forest.
“All tight?” Ryan asked.
“Yes,” Krysty said. “But—”
“Follow me,” Ryan said. He turned abruptly right, ran to the rail and jumped.
Chapter Twenty
“So whom do you suppose that was coming through the woods, my friends?” Doc asked. He stood in the brush that lined the shore, wringing out his frock coat. His sodden backpack lay against a gnarled tree root beside him.
Ryan hunkered by the softly sloshing water. He had his SIG-Sauer with the mag out and the slide open, blowing down the barrel to make sure it was clear of water.
Up on the bridge itself a tremendous fracas was going on. There were shrieks and chitters and the light of torches being waved furiously back and forth. Occasionally a body toppled over the rail on one side or the other to land in the sluggish Sippi with a resounding splash.
“Got no clue,” Ryan said. He held up the handblaster so that the torchlight from the bridge shone through it. The bore was as dry as could be expected. He nodded, picked up the magazine, jammed it in the well and let the slide drive home.
“Wasn’t it a little unfriendly to let strangers blunder blithely into a pack of ravening stickies?” Mildred ask.
“Mebbe more enemies,” Jak remarked. He stood with his backpack on and arms crossed. He divided his attention between the bridge and the woods behind them.
“Yeah,” Mildred said. “And maybe they weren’t.”
“Whoever it was,” Ryan said, snagging the strap of his pack and standing up with it, “wouldn’t you rather it was them who run into the stickies than have the mutie bastards still chasing us?”
“Since you put it that way,” Doc said, “I do believe, better them than us.”
Mildred shook her head. “Ryan, you are one cold article.”
“You just getting around to noticing?” Krysty said with a smile.
“Anything in the woods, Jak?” Ryan asked.
The albino teen shook his head.
“All right. Take point. Mildred, left flank, Krysty, right. Doc, behind Jak. I’m pulling drag again. Head us straight into the woods mebbe thirty yards. We don’t cut trail, cut right and we’ll follow the river along through the brush.”
“Where’re we going?” Krysty asked.
“Lover,” Ryan said, “we’re going to town.”
WELKOME TO EAST VILLE read the sign painted on a jagged-edged sheet of plywood and nailed twelve feet up an old wooden telephone pole, the words visible by the red light of a fire guttering in an ancient oil drum that was more holes than rusty steel.
Beyond it stood, or perhaps slumped was a better word, a good old-fashioned Deathlands pesthole. While it looked as if it were possibly built on a core of at least partially intact predark building, cinder block or prefab, it was mostly knocked together from tin sheets, planks and plywood scrap, and several tens of thousands of cans hammered out flat and tacked together.
They had come upon the remnants of a road that ran inland paralleling the shore. It lay close to an old rail causeway, whose embankment was evidently the only thing that kept the Sippi from washing out the buckled asphalt strip, or burying it in silt. The waters now came up right to the base of the railroad.
By the light of a rising moon the travelers followed a path cleared through a mostly fallen-down highway bridge. A few hundred yards south of that the road cut inland. It then turned south again to cross the ramp leading down from the combined railway-and-highway structure Mildred identified on the far side as the MacArthur Bridge, and continued south to the lights of what proved to be the booming metropolis of Eastleville. Population several hundred at least, or so Ryan judged.
The ville occupied a dirt crossroads in the midst of deep forest interrupted by sudden tall tangles of old tanks and pipes and other artifacts of once-major industrial activity. One road led a short ways west to the docks, a makeshift affair of scavenged blocks of concrete and platforms of warped planks. A couple of decent-size watercraft were tied up there, as well as a number of others all the way down to rowboats bobbing in the lights of lanterns suspended from poles on the dock.
The smells of burning kerosene, fish oil and rancid cooking grease emanated from the ville, as well as various shades of yellow and orange light, competing strains of music played on violin, slightly out-of-tune piano, guitar, flute, saxophone and enthusiastic banging of spoons on galvanized iron pans. The friends heard the blare of loud conversation and braying laughter.
Whatever it was by day, it seemed the postnuke river-town gave itself over by night to drinking and debauchery of the most enthusiastic sort.
“I almost feel like I’m coming home,” Ryan said, stretching his arms wide and arching his back. His shoulders and upper back ached from hiking—and running—long distances humping the heavy pack. Plus the weight
of his longblaster.
“I thought you had a more genteel upbringing,” Mildred said.
He shrugged. “That was way back there. Seems like I really grew up in places just like this.”
“Depending on one’s definition of growing up,” Krysty said.
They walked into the town. They were immediately hailed by barkers shouting the virtues of the establishments they fronted. With the ease of long practice they ignored them.
Jak stopped and pointed. “Looks interesting,” he said.
It was a false-front two-story shack, not too sturdy-looking, whose front was ablaze with the lights of lanterns and candles. Painted grandly across the facade was the legend Hotest Gaudy Sluts Eest Of The Sippi!
“That’s a pretty major boast,” Mildred said, “given that we’re all of what? Maybe two hundred feet east of the Sippi.”
Doc whipped his cane under his armpit and straightened like an old-time gentleman out for a promenade on the town. “Come, lad,” he said to Jak. “One thing this prematurely aged cavalier can assure you of—when an establishment feels it necessary to assure you of such a thing, it is most certainly lying!”
“But mebbe true!”
Being careful of the sharp bits sewn to his shirt—some of which had their glitter diminished in the garish light by a rust-colored matte coating of dried blood—Krysty grabbed the albino youth by the sleeve and towed him down the dirt street.
“Well, we aren’t going to find out now,” she said.
“Yeah,” Ryan said. “We aren’t splitting up.”
“SO,” RYAN SAID, leaning an elbow on the bar, “did you see a lone young black woman out of St. Lou come through here, week or two back? Or hear tell of such?”
The bartender was a tall, cadaverous party with a sort of long hound-dog face and long sideburns. He stood behind the plank-and-barrel bar rubbing dirt around in a mug with a gray bar rag.
