“Yeah, my ass just bleeds for your pals,” Ryan said.
The youth blinked at him. “Others bitch you? Thought you chief, bitch them!”
“I think you’re lucky I didn’t really understand that.”
“You were talking about a pattern?” Krysty said.
“Yeah,” Mildred said.
“Surely you ladies do not entertain the possibility that Princess Emerald might have survived?” Doc said.
“Why not?” Krysty said.
“She survived the last impossible situation just peachy, seems to me,” Mildred said.
“Yeah,” Ryan said. “I wouldn’t bet anything against this rad-blasted girl that I don’t care to lose!”
From somewhere in the dusk came a long, nerve-
freezing howl.
Scratch put back his head and howled back.
Ryan backhanded him across the face. “Shut that shit off!”
In a sinister fluid motion Jak drew and leveled his big Colt Python at the cannie’s head. Krysty knocked his hand up. His red eyes flashed, but his reflexes—and for once his self-control—were so good he never triggered a shot.
“Why do that?” the albino teen asked with vibrating outrage.
“No time,” Krysty said. “Just run!”
Ryan drew his panga. The cannie flinched. Ryan stepped behind the chair and brought the big knife down fast.
The rope that held the prisoner’s hands parted and fell to the floor. The big knife never made a mark on Scratch’s filthy hide. Then Ryan backhanded him with the fist that held the knife and knocked boy and chair sprawling and clattering into a corner.
“Why cut loose?” Jak asked.
“We had a deal,” Ryan said. “Now run or get eaten!”
S
EVERAL 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 with 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.