"Shelter." The Armorer took Mildred by the hand. "Come on, now."
The street ahead of them looked like it had been a mix of stores and apartment houses. Many of the buildings lacked roofs, and there wasn't a single pane of glass for miles around. But walls still stood firm against the elements.
Ryan led them quickly along, avoiding pits of thick mud that looked like they could easily have been fifty feet deep. Rats, as big as dogs, scattered at their coming, some of the bolder ones stopping and going up on their back paws as if they were prepared to do battle.
Dean drew his big handblaster and started to level it at a particularly large, verminous brute with scarred flanks. But Ryan warned him to put the weapon away.
"You don't know what's living in this place," he said.
"Ghoulies?" Dean looked around in the deepening gloom. "Good place for them."
Krysty held up a hand. "Got a strong feeing about this place," she said. "Some things walking here, and they aren't walking alone. You feel them, Emma?"
The young woman shook her head. "Sorry, but I'm not getting anything right now."
Jak suddenly pointed to their left. A tall, skinny body lay sprawled, half in and half out of a doorway. It didn't look like it had been there very long. It was barefoot and shirtless, but still had on ragged pants.
They moved a little closer, everyone now with blasters drawn and ready. The chest had been ripped open, and all of the organs had been torn out. The face had been stripped of flesh, leaving only the smeared white of the skull. Something had sliced the throat open from ear to ear.
"Look at the poor bastard's hair," J.B. said. "Remember the Lincoln Inn?"
The corpse had dyed hair-half blue and half green.
"I told him," Emma said in a small sad voice. "Told him what would happen." Her words were almost drowned out by the wind that was surging to a full gale.
The roaring sounds also covered the noise of the approach of a party of a dozen ghoulies, hiding them from Ryan and the others until they were almost on top of them.
Jak was quickest, spinning and tossing one of his throwing knives straight to the throat of the nearest mutie, sending it staggering back with a gurgling cry of shock and pain.
Ryan squeezed the trigger on the 9 mm SIG-Sauer as he turned, but his foot slipped in the slimy dirt, and the bullet went wide. Next moment he was fighting for his life against two of the ghoulies. He was vaguely aware of shooting and screams and shouts, bodies jostling against one another.
But the wind had become a hurricane, and it had started to rain, pounding down like steel rods, blanking out visibility and isolating every fighter in a howling world of his or her own.
Ryan shook his head, dashing water from his good eye. The action was so close that he could only use the pound and a half of steel as a clumsy club, swinging it to try to buy himself a little space in the soaking, deafening maelstrom.
The ghoulies were both male, with the characteristic pallid skin of their type, displaying the strange bluish sheen that was said to glow in total darkness. They had enlarged eyes, looking like someone was trying to push them out from inside the sockets. Their mouths were open, showing the filed teeth and reptilian tongue that typified the ghoulie, creatures who dwelled in the darkest corners of city ruins, waiting to rend and chill.
Once they'd made their kill, they would stash the corpse somewhere until it had reached the right degree of stinking decay that they so loved.
This pair was armed with blades, old knives honed thin as whipcord, tied to hilts of whittled wood two feet long, making them somewhere between a dagger and a spear.
They were panting with their desire to slaughter the norm that had wandered into their demesne, pushing and jostling each other, giving Ryan a slight edge over them.
But their attack was so frenzied that the one-eyed man had no chance to level the blaster and shoot them down. It was desperate work, dodging and weaving, trying to parry the lethal weapons of the ghoulies with the four-and-a-half-inch barrel of the SIG-Sauer.
The curtain of solid rain parted for a moment and a small bedraggled figure, dressed all in black, stumbled over the edge of the sidewalk and cannoned into the taller of the ghoulies, sending him sliding into his colleague.
It was the heartbeat of space that Ryan needed.
He snapped off a shot at the shorter of the muties, the bullet exploding into the center of the skinny, rag-covered chest, killing him instantly. The second one fought for balance in the wash of mud, like a failing skater, waving his half spear at Ryan, missing by a clear yard.
The SIG-Sauer barked once more and the ghoulie went down with the full-metal jacket reaming the brains from the inside of his angular skull.
Ryan glanced at Emma to thank her for coming to his rescue, but she had vanished.
The air was filled with a deafening roar, like a hundred war wags on full-throttle.
Like a theater curtain being lifted, the rain stopped, and Ryan stood frozen for a moment, unable to believe what he was seeing. The clouds were circling above his head and the noise was staggering. To his right he saw Jak holding Emma by one hand, a short-bladed throwing knife in the other, backing away in front of a stout ghoulie armed with a cleaver tied to a broomstick.
Doc had his Le Mat drawn, his nose bleeding, trying to blink the rain out of his pale blue eyes.
Krysty was to Ryan's left, a dying ghoulie, shot through the lower abdomen, writhing bloodily at her feet. She had one arm around Dean, protecting the boy from another pair of sword-bearing muties.
J.B. had taken off his glasses, blinded by the rainstorm, and was holding the Uzi at his hip, three dead or dying muties ranged around him. Mildred was standing back-to-back with him, in a classic shootist's stance, her Czech ZKR 551 in her right hand. There were five or six of the muties still on their feet. Everyone was soaking wet.
But the fight had suddenly taken the back burner to the force of nature that was bearing down on them. Scything along the wide avenue, keeping to its center, was a tornado.
The funneled top looked to be a mile or more wide, circling like a great whirlpool, while the fifty-foot-wide tail was skipping along, sucking up small trees and chunks of debris. As Ryan stared at it, he saw the whole wall of a house sucked into oblivion, hundreds of bricks scattering out of the side of the whirlwind funnel, like mortar shells.
"Get under cover!" he roared at the very top of his voice. But he could barely hear the words echoing inside his own head, and he knew that they would have been inaudible to the others in the group.
The heart of the storm was nearly on top of them, less than a hundred yards and closing like a runaway wag.
Ryan could do nothing for the others.
He had half a dozen beats of the heart to save himself.
Glancing quickly from left to right, he saw the half-open door to a three-story building. He sprinted for it, bolstering the blaster as he moved, shouldering through the door, splintering it off its hinges and crashing inside.
His feet were running on nothing, and he had only a nanosecond to realize that someone had taken out the entire floor for fires, and he was falling into the basement, landing not with a bang but with a whisper.
He slid inaudibly into deep mud, the consistency of molasses, cold and noisome. Even as he began to sink helplessly into the clinging ooze, Ryan heard the pounding thunder of the tornado, raging right on top of him.
Then came darkness and silence.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Krysty scooped Dean under one arm, carrying the kicking boy to the right-hand side of the street, heading for a detached house that still had a third of its roof in place. There was no door and she dived in, seeing in the pulsing gloom that most of the staircase remained.
"Under there!" she yelled, throwing the boy under the cover and jumping on top of him.
J.B. and Mildred went for the building opposite, spotting Ryan crashing into the storefront next door. The noise of the rushing tornado was cataclysmi
c, so overwhelming that there was a temptation to give up and lie down and await the lethal embrace of the storm's heart.
There was an odd display unit near the door, and they both went for it, hugging each other tightly.
Mildred was praying, though nobody could hear her desperate words-nobody but herself and God.
Emma had looked at the raging tornado as though she saw her own death riding toward her. For a moment she resisted Jak's hand as he pulled at her to try to steer her toward safety. Then she allowed him to drag her to the same side of the street as Krysty and Dean, where they both flattened themselves against the front wall, directly beneath the broken window. There had been no time to find anywhere safer.
Doc was last and slowest of the companions to seek shelter, hindered by one of the ghoulies, its eyes and mouth stretched in a rictus of terror, who blocked him off from getting under cover in one of the buildings.
"Damn you! Get out of my buggering way!" Doc spit, pressing the Le Mat deep into the mutie's stomach and squeezing the scattergun trigger. The.63-caliber round almost cut the ghoulie in two, wrapping his pulverized intestines around the shattered remnants of his spine.
Doc pushed the dying man aside, his knees creaking as he powered himself into a laborious, clumsy sprint for safety in a doorway.
RYAN CRIED OUT IN VAIN as the pressure in his ears rose and fell sharply, while the heart of the tornado passed directly over the building where he'd run for shelter, with its still, small voice of calm.
The roaring sound stopped for a few long seconds, then resumed again, and he was aware of dozens of predark shingles, finally loosing their hold on the remnants of the roof, and whirling around like discarded playing cards.
The joists of the first floor of the building were a dozen feet above his head, stained with mold, several of them either rotted away or taken for fuel like the boards.
The cellar was roughly twenty feet square, and Ryan had landed more or less in its center, immediately sinking to midthigh in the cold slimy ooze.
Only when he looked around him did Ryan realize that one of the murderous gang of ghoulies had made the same mistake, leaping for safety from the teeth of the storm, landing in the deep lake of mud that filled the basement.
The man, barely five feet tall, had landed near one of the walls and had immediately tried to reach the furrowed brickwork and breeze blocks to steady himself. But he'd failed and had gone facedown in the stinking tentacles.
Ryan kept himself very still, remembering Trader's advice about quicksand. Throw yourself flat and don't try to struggle-you'd just drown yourself that much quicker.
It looked like the ghoulie had followed that advice which, unusually for Trader, didn't seem very sound.
The mutie was dying in front of Ryan's eye, the sucking pit of mud pulling him down, bubbling and heaving like a sentient creature as it shrouded him.
Ryan had bolstered the SIG-Sauer and sheathed the panga, waiting with all the patience he could muster for his friends to come and rescue him. He had no doubt that they would have been able to see off the attacking ghoulies.
What Ryan hadn't reckoned on was the tornado, blindly erratic, revolving about its own axis and coming back along precisely the same path.
THE NOISE WAS WORSE, the buffeting shock far more powerful. Once again it brought rain racing ahead of it, like a solid wall, bursting over the derelict suburbs of the Hole, bringing down walls and roofs, filling the very air itself with a bedlam of screaming chaos.
Doc had thought it was over and was in the act of returning to the open air. When he glimpsed the sinister funnel, hissing its way toward him along a narrow corridor of total destruction, be dived into the building that he thought Jak and Emma had chosen, reaching it just as the whirlwind struck again.
AFTER THE TORNADO had finally gone raging away toward the west, the first thing that J.B. did was to remove his spectacles from one of the pockets of his coat and carefully check them over for damage or dirt. Next he gave the Uzi and the Smith & Wesson M-4000 scattergun the once-over. After that he turned to Mildred, who was lying on the floor alongside him, hands still clasped over her ears, eyes tight shut, her plaited hair soaked and filthy.
"You all right?" he said.
"What?"
He gently moved her hands. "I asked if you were feeling all right?"
"Jesus, John. If I'm still alive, then I guess I'm all right. Not something I want to go through ever again. Has it finished?"
"Yeah. Think so."
"Are the others?"
"Let's go see."
THE GHOULIE HADN'T lasted long in the mud. Ryan figured that the man had inhaled a mouthful of the watery slime as soon as he fell in, and it had been downhill from then. The movement had stopped, and only the hump of the mutie's shoulders and one arm were visible above the filth, now sinking very slowly, held up by pockets of air in the ragged clothes.
He was now waist-deep himself, with nothing below his feet to indicate the depth in the cellar. The stuff was too thick and clinging for there to be any possibility of swimming. Ryan had already decided that he would make a last effort if it got to his chest.
And if that failed he'd swallow the muzzle of the SIG-Sauer. It was as simple and final as that.
"Anyone there?" he shouted, his voice stifled by the rising gruel and by the enfolding walls of the basement.
Nobody answered, and Ryan was left alone in the stinking dimness with the corpse of the mutie.
DEAN PUSHED HIS WAY out of Krysty's protective embrace, walking out into the aftermath of the morning storm. It was still raining, but the sun had broken through, casting a rainbow to the south of the Hole.
The red-haired woman was at his heels. "Get your blaster out, Dean," she snapped. "You know better than that. Ghoulies could be around."
"Tornado sucked them up and spread them thin all over," he said. "Nobody out here."
Krysty joined him, the short-barreled Smith & Wesson 640 in her hand. She looked around, shocked at the devastation left by the receding storm.
"Doesn't seem possible," she said. "This part of the old ville was already a total wreck. How can anything happen to make it so much worse?"
Water glistened off the few remaining roofs, but the streets were covered in shingles and slates and piles of bricks. The tornado had done more damage across the narrow path of its passing than had been done to the suburb for nearly a hundred years.
The wind was still close to gale force, and Krysty steadied herself against the crumbling wall behind her, catching movement out of the corner of her eyes, from across the street. She swung the blaster around to cover J.B. and Mildred, both looking like they'd been dragged through a hedge backward.
"You two okay?" the Armorer called. "Where's Ryan?"
"Not with us."
"Doc chilled one of the ghoulies," Dean said. "Saw it just before we made safety."
The whirling funnel of the tornado was still visible, dancing away in the distance. A strange orange light seemed to glow in the depths of its black heart. The rain was easing, and the storm's noise was almost gone.
"Listen," Krysty said, turning her head to try to focus on what she'd heard.
"Dad!" Dean exclaimed.
"Wait!" J.B. snapped. "If Ryan's calling for help, then it means he's in trouble. Don't go and jump into the same trap that's caught him."
RYAN HEARD THEM and saw a shadow thrown across the wall above his head. By now he'd sunk to the middle of his chest, feeling the pressure tugging him down. The corpse of the trapped mutie had finally vanished.
"Watch out!" he yelled. "No floor."
It was the Armorer's narrow face, the spectacles glinting, staring down at him.
Mildred peered over his shoulder. "Well," she said. "Here's another fine mess you've gotten yourself into."
"I'll start laughing when you get me the fuck out of this stuff."
Dean and Krysty were also in the doorway. "You all right, Dad?"
"Sure. Sinking into a l
ake of cold shit is the best fun in the world. I like to spend my mornings this way. Do it whenever I get the chance."
"Sorry," the boy muttered.
"You reached the bottom yet?" the Armorer asked.
"Not so you'd notice. There's a dead ghoulie someplace around, and I don't even know if he's reached the bottom yet."
"Can we get you out, lover, and cut out all this talk?" Krysty said anxiously.
Ryan had already unslung the Steyr SSG-70, holding it clear of the surface of the mud, and he now balanced himself, ready to throw it up to J.B. The Armorer had lain down on the floor, reaching to try and grab it, but it was just out of reach.
James Axler - Deathlands 27 - Ground Zero Page 20