For a moment Ryan thought they’d make it with a few steps to spare. But that was the thing about stickies—they could move bastard fast.
One darted toward Krysty. She veered and it missed its grab at her. But the suckers on its fingers caught the right sleeve of her shirt.
She yelped; other muties closed in, chittering triumphantly.
Krysty let the mutie turn her hand toward itself. In that hand was her Smith & Wesson 640. She emptied the five shots in its cylinder into the creature’s belly.
The horror barely even flinched. It opened its mouth wide and swept its free hand up to try to rip off her face.
“Krysty!” Mildred yelled. She grabbed the taller woman by her left upper arm and yanked her away.
But it still clung to her despite the blood leaking black through the holes in its abdomen. Other muties converged on what they took for a certain chill.
Ryan waded in. He booted away one that was trying to get around behind Krysty. Then he lunged forward and severed the hand that was stuck to Krysty’s sleeve just above the skinny wrist.
With Mildred’s help Krysty was yanked from the cluster of stickie hands. Ryan had had to overbalance to hack through the mutie’s arm. His right boot slipped on something wet and slick on the concrete beneath him. He dropped to one knee, hard enough to clack his teeth together and send a lance of pain from his kneecap up through his whole body.
But Ryan never lost his presence of mind. That was something he’d always had, that gift of constant, unswerving focus—on survival.
He batted away the grasping, suckered hands, slashing with his panga. And even as he fought desperately the awful screeching muties who swarmed around him, he was roaring, “Go! Get out of here!”
He moved his arms violently to prevent any fingertip suckers from latching on. But the stickies were cunning monsters. They adapted. One wrapped its arms around his right forearm, fouling his panga. It stretched its head out on its neck with jaws gaping wide to take a chunk out of the one-eyed man’s face.
In his peripheral vision Ryan saw something dark and slender, and yellow flame belched forth. It bathed the whole side of the stickie’s head with its yawning, sharp-toothed maw in fire.
The left side of the stickie’s head exploded. Its arms relaxed in death, releasing its hold.
Ryan thrust his panga into another flat stickie face, bursting a staring eyeball. The panga’s blade was much too wide to pierce through to the mutie’s brain, but the creature fell back shrieking.
Ryan saw a stickie head’s transfixed from his left to his right with a slender steel blade. Then hands were hauling him away from the stickies as handblasters spoke shatteringly from either side of him.
He got the rest of the way to his feet on his own. He saw it was Mildred on his left who’d blasted the stickie—and left him with a ringing in his ears that would last for hours. Krysty was to his right.
A quick flurry of face shots dropped three stickies and slowed the others.
Ryan drew his SIG with his left hand and shot a fourth through its open mouth as it vaulted a scrum of writhing bodies.
“Nuke it, the stickies didn’t get them!” a voice called from the street.
“Give the mutie bastards a chance,” somebody else yelled back.
The stickie swarm had split the party in two. J.B. had almost reached Jak, still lurking by the exit, when the mutie caught hold of Krysty. Now the muties were surrounding everybody else, gobbling and squeaking in triumph.
“Stay behind me,” Ryan yelled to Krysty and Mildred. The sickening stench of stickies was so thick now it made his head spin. The spilling of stickie blood, brain and guts didn’t make them smell any sweeter. “Doc, Ricky, right and left outside them.”
The women complied.
Though Ricky was the newest of the group of companions, he’d been with them for months now. He knew how they worked and how to work well with them.
Ryan led the way back for the exit away from the human pursuit, hacking with the big panga, warding off blows and attempted grabs with the SIG. He only fired when there was no other choice.
Doc, outside the two close-together women to Ryan’s right rear, was stabbing mutie faces with his sword and bludgeoning the ones who got close with his massive LeMat. Ricky held his carbine by its fat sound suppresser. He hacked at the muties with the butt to keep them away, alternating baseball-bat style with ax-type overhead action. Because it had been built out of a military weapon that was intended to bust skulls as a last resort, the DeLisle could likely survive the rude treatment with little damage.
But the companions had to survive for that to matter a lick.
The muties wouldn’t run, but they could be forced back. They weren’t big. Ryan had no trouble bulling through them, though not as fast as he liked, by just using his size and strength. And the women, holding on to each other for support, booted any stickies who got through the rough equilateral triangle of the males.
Then a mutie right in front of Ryan had its head smashed from behind by a downward butt stroke of J.B.’s M4000 scattergun. And the one beside it pitched forward with the back of its skull staved in by a punch from the studded brass-knuckle hilt of Jak’s trench knife. Ryan had to lash out with his shin to knock the creature aside and keep it from tripping him—or latching on to his jeans-clad leg with its suckers.
“Quit screwing around,” J.B. told Ryan. Without even seeming to look he jabbed the muzzle of his shotgun hard to his left. A stickie reeled back into its circling, capering buddies, wailing and clutching the spurting crater where its left eye used to be. “We’ve got to get going.”
The pair had waded back to help their friends. The stickies faltered, confused rather than scared. “Power on!” Ryan bellowed.
They all ran flat-out for the exit. Stickies that got in their way were knocked down. Ryan trampled one that J.B. had half spun with his shoulder. His friends ran over it without breaking stride.
The one-eyed man heard angry shouts from behind, then shots. A bullet cracked past his head to the right.
Then he was out into the bright, blessed sunshine of the Detroit wasteland. His friends, all miraculously still alive, were right on his heels. A whole pack of stickies was left behind to keep their pursuers off their asses.
A bullet kicked up fallen leaves and some concrete dust three feet in front of him.
“Fireblast!” Ryan shouted.
He checked himself and pivoted, bringing his longblaster to his shoulder.
A group of at least a dozen men was approaching cautiously from the direction of the big half-ruined building. They all carried longblasters and wore the distinctive dark vests of their original pursuers. They were still roughly fifty yards away.
Behind them, another garden lay past the structure’s southwest end. This one was enclosed by a barbed wire fence and more rolls of razor tape. Inside it were the jumbled remnants of what Ryan realized was a raised road that had once led to the circular structure. Now it was a spiral ramp. Apparently the big building had had rooftop parking.
Ryan fired a shot at the enemy. He didn’t hit anybody. They ducked anyway, a couple stretching flat on the ground.
They weren’t driven off, though. They promptly opened fire.
Caught between stickies in the semidarkness and so far inaccurate blasterfire in the