“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.
“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.
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 sewn 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—”