by James Axler
"Be back before dusk. Keep a good look out for any sign of stickies."
Ryan had his bolt-action Steyr SSG-70 rifle, complete with laser image enhancer and Starlite night scope. His P-226 was at his hip.
Jak wore his Magnum on his hip and hefted an old M-16 carbine on his shoulder.
Krysty simply carried her snub-nosed Smith & Wesson 640, the double-action model that held five .38-calber rounds.
Jak led the way from the camp, his long hair, bleached whiter than wind-washed ivory, blowing in a freshening breeze.
It was a truly beautiful morning. The kind of day when every muscle in your body felt relaxed for the sheer pleasure of being alive.
Chapter Twelve
"FEEL SOMETHING, LOVER."
They all stopped at Krysty's words.
They'd covered about two miles, crossing a hogback ridge as a shortcut toward the box canyon where J.B. and Mildred were tending the stock. The only sign of life had been a yellow-flecked lizard, warming itself on a sunbaked spike of orange rock.
"What?" Ryan's right hand fell to rest casually on the butt of the SIG-Sauer.
She shrugged, pushing an errant strand of hair off her forehead. "Just something. It's like if you've got a wag that you drive every day. Comes the time you can sort of feel that something isn't running quite like you know it usually does. But you can't quite put your finger on what it is that's wrong. You know the feeling I mean?"
Jak answered. "Sure. Stickies, mebbe?"
"Gaia! I don't know, Jak. But it could be. Doesn't seem like a good feeling."
Ryan sniffed. "Let's move to orange and all take some extra care."
He went out to point, with Krysty walking about ten paces behind him. Jak was a farther twenty steps behind her.
All of them had their blasters ready.
The trail was steep and narrow, overhung with the long trailing branches of dense spruce. Every now and again the trees would clear, and it would become possible to see way down to the left toward the valley bottom.
"Canyon forks off another mile or so along here. You can get to it by going down along the stream, but this is quicker."
They stood together, the air around them filled with the wonderful resinous scent of the pines. They could faintly hear the whispering sound of the small river as it busied itself among the moss-covered boulders.
Jak's vision in bright sunlight was notoriously poor, but in less good light, like among the shadowing trees, he could see better than any of them.
"There," he said, finger pointing downward like an arrow of divine vengeance.
Ryan and Krysty looked where the albino teenager was indicating, and both immediately spotted the flicker of darkness in the dappled patchwork below. Even from that height, they could immediately read bad news.
The pair of figures were moving in a stooped, loping trot, heads down like wolves following a trail.
"Stickies," Ryan breathed.
The muties were about a hundred feet below them, the noise of the stream drowning out any sound from the trio above.
"Both got blasters," Krysty said, her voice revealing her disbelief.
Stickies never used firearms. No, that wasn't quite true. Ryan could think of a handful of skirmishes with the distinctive creatures where blasters had appeared. But they were exceedingly rare and never used with anything approaching skill.
"Look like smoothbores."
Jak nodded. "Homemades or patch-ups. Long blasters for stickies."
Again, that was strange.
The elongated barrels of what looked from a distance like Kentucky muskets, using crude black powder, were specialized hunting weapons.
The stickies vanished around the far edge of a granite bluff that protruded from the hillside on the opposite flank of the valley.
"They're heading for canyon." Jak whistled softly between his teeth. The breeze was tugging at the mane of snow-white hair that tumbled across his shoulders. "Be on top J.B. and Mildred real soon."
"Think they're deliberately hunting them? Know they're there?" Krysty looked around at Ryan. "What do we do, lover?"
"Go after and chill them."
There wasn't any other answer. Not when you were dealing with stickies.
Jak led the way.
It was his home terrain, and he knew it inch by inch. The only problem was that the teenager was so light on his feet that he was leaving Ryan and Krysty behind him.
Repeatedly stopping and turning, looking behind him along the winding path, his face betrayed his impatience.
"Quicker," he snapped. "They got faster trail. There first."
"Anyplace we can see them from above? We've got two long guns."
Jak hesitated at Ryan's query. "This track drops steep soon. Unless they stop won't get clear shot. Nowhere."
"Fireblast!" Ryan stood still, leaning a hand against the cool bole of an alder, closing his eye as he tried to consider all of the options.
"Depends on what the stickies are after," Krysty said.
"Cattle. Chilling J.B. and Mildred. Scouting. Mebbe all three."
"Right, Jak. Mebbe all three. Way they were running was creepy. Kind of hunting, but knowing where they were going."
"Talk's costing," Jak said, his crimson eyes glowing in the half dark under a big, overhanging spruce.
"Place where the stickies are going to reach the end of the box canyon."
"Yeah?"
"No way we can overlook it if we stay up high here?"
The albino considered the question for a long moment. "No," he said finally. "Mean picking way in trees. Too slow. Still wouldn't get clean shot. Have to chase hard."
"Right," Ryan said. "Then, let's do it."
THE TRAILS JOINED about a quarter mile farther on. The last hundred yards had been steep, with slippery, loose rocks. Krysty nearly lost her footing, only just saving herself by a teetering dance on the edge of the path.
In any kind of pursuit, Ryan was always conscious of the danger that the prey might have somehow turned and be the hunter instead of the hunted.
Down near the stream the path was damp and muddy, showing the unmistakable prints of a pair of stickies, moving fast and low.
A thread of water from a bank of glistening emerald moss was still oozing into the center of one of the impressions, showing Ryan that their targets weren't far ahead of them.
He stooped and picked a fallen sycamore leaf from the footprint.
"Can't be more than three, four minutes ahead of us," he told his companions. "Looks like they've slowed up some."
"Let me after them?" Jak's right hand brushed against the back of his camouflage jacket and reappeared holding one of his taped throwing knives.
"Could be more of them. Stickies go around in tens and twenties. Not just in pairs."
"So we follow them?" Krysty asked.
Ryan nodded.
THE TRAIL SQUEEZED between green-soaked walls of rock. The little river chuckled away to the right, oblivious to the lethal hunt that was taking place on its pretty banks.
"They drive stock along here?" Krysty asked very quietly.
Jak sniffed, wiping his nose on his sleeve. "Sure. Narrow track's best. No place else to go."
Ryan had been conscious of the machine-gun tapping of a woodpecker somewhere a quarter mile or so ahead of them. Had to be close to the entrance to the box canyon.
It had suddenly stopped.
"Listen," he said, holding up his hand.
"What?" Krysty had her double-action Smith & Wesson .38 already drawn.
"Bird."
"Don't hear it. In fact, I can't hear any birds at all." She looked at Ryan. "Course. What a stupe I am. Means the muties are near in front of us."
Ryan beckoned Jak closer, dropping his voice. "Whereabouts would J.B. and Mildred be? They camped this end of the canyon?"
"No. Under back wall. Pool there. Rock house built old ones."
"Old ones?"
The boy lo
oked puzzled. "Christina calls that. Old ones. Back before…before dark nights. Long, long before."
Krysty tapped Ryan on the arm. "Guess he means ancient Indian ruins. Anasazi I think they were called. Lots of their places are scattered all around the Southwest here."
"When did they live in these parts? Same time as Doc Tanner?"
Krysty smiled. "We're talking seriously old, lover. Thousand years and more."
"Oh. And they got some of these old houses in the canyon?"
Jak looked around as though he'd heard something. "Yeah. Under cliff."
Ryan finally reached his decision. "We'll take the stickies out. In case there's more of them close by we'll try it quiet."
JAK BENT AND STARED at the track beneath an overhanging wall of quartz-flecked granite.
"Only marks are stickies," he whispered. "Means not come here before. Scouting."
Since the ravening muties generally traveled in groups of a dozen or more, this almost certainly meant that there would be others close by. It also brought an uncomfortable prickling at Ryan's nape.
"Feel anything?" Ryan asked.
Krysty shook her head. "Been my time of the month. Always messes up the seeing."
She almost said something else, but she knew that Ryan hated it if he thought she was just blind guessing. For about a quarter of an hour now she'd had a blurred feeling of danger. But it was so vague and unfocused that she couldn't be certain. It might easily involve the pair of stickies ahead of them.
Or it might not.
The trees thinned out as the entrance to the box canyon grew nearer. The track became a little wider and climbed for about a hundred feet. Jak was still out in front and he suddenly stopped dead, holding up a warning hand.
With his jacket of melded browns, greens and grays, the teenager almost vanished into the dappled pools of shadow and sunlight under the sweeping branches.
"There," he mouthed as Ryan and Krysty joined him.
Ryan followed the white, pointing finger. "Let's take them," he whispered.
Chapter Thirteen
A WIDE, OPEN space sloped up ahead of them—loose, sandy soil, with scattered pebbles and a few large rocks. It was obvious that the ridge offered a good viewpoint down into the canyon where Jak and Christina's stock was being kept. And where J.B. and Mildred were currently camping.
From where Ryan stood with Krysty and Jak, they could see nothing beyond the rise—but they could see the two stickies lying on the soft dirt, side by side, legs splayed, each with a long musket clamped firmly to its shoulder.
It didn't take a giant leap of imagination to guess what the weapons were sighted on.
Jak was quickest.
The throwing knife whirred through the warm air and buried itself with a precise accuracy exactly where the skull joined the spine. The honed point drove into the spinal column and instantly shut down all lines of communication.
The stickie gave a hiccuping grunt and dropped the smoothbore blaster from nerveless fingers. Its toes began to kick at the sand as though they were trying to propel the breathing corpse over the brink of the ridge.
Ryan had dropped his rifle and had the SIG-Sauer half drawn, prepared to use the silenced blaster. But Jak's speed of reflex was even faster than he remembered, and the boy already had a second blade winging its way toward the other stickie.
The sudden gasp from its comrade, and the musket falling into the dirt, had alerted the surviving mutie. It started to bring the gun around.
Jak hadn't anticipated such a fast reaction from the thing, and the knife clipped the creature's right shoulder, cutting its pale blue shirt but doing no serious harm.
"Mine," Ryan called, steadying his right wrist with his left hand, dropping by long, long habit into the traditional shootist's crouch, side-on, to present a smaller target to his enemy.
He had a tiny shard of broken time to take in the appearance of the stickie.
Most of the mutated creatures that infested the darker parts of Deathlands wore, at best, rags. This stickie was dressed in a neat, clean shirt and pants, with a black slouch hat. Its feet were bare. Ryan saw the crazed anger in the mutie's face that he'd witnessed many times before. Wide eyes protruded like a frog's, and its mouth opened in a snarl of hatred.
"You fuckhead piece of shit," it raged with surprising clarity.
The mutie was rising to its feet as Ryan opened fire, squeezing off three rapid rounds. The P-226's integral silencer coughed discreetly.
The other stickie was still thrashing around, moaning like an old man with a fishbone jammed in his gullet. One of its legs shot out, kicking the crouching mutie hard on the thigh and sending it tumbling helplessly sideways.
It was enough to make Ryan's triple burst miss. The range was barely forty feet, but all three of the 9 mm bullets kicked up a small fountain of dirt.
"Fireblast!" He saw from the corner of his eye that Krysty was about to open fire at the mutie with her own snub-nosed Smith & Wesson. "No noise!"
Ryan was moving sideways, about to take out the stickie. But having only one eye gave him limited peripheral vision and he never saw Jak Lauren, sliding toward him through the loose scree, fumbling for the third of his concealed knives.
They bumped hard into each other. The boy dropped the weighted blade in the loose dirt and Ryan inadvertently squeezed the trigger on the blaster, sending a wasted round into the trees to his left.
The stickie, pale, raw lips peeling back in a triumphant smile, leveled the musket at the one-eyed man and pulled the trigger. Ryan winced, hearing the dry snap of a misfiring percussion cap.
"Shit," the stickie said in a strangely moderate voice.
"Mine." Ryan placed the blaster carefully by his feet and drew the polished steel blade of the eighteen-inch panga that he always wore sheathed on his other hip.
The hilt of the heavy machete fitted into his palm like a dream of childhood.
The stickie came down the slope toward him, gripping the useless firearm by the end of the barrel, swinging it onto its shoulder like a club.
Ryan glanced back at the albino. "Use my blaster if I get in trouble."
"Sure. Don't go close."
Part of Ryan's mind was intrigued by the fact that the stickie was coming at him so hesitantly. All his experience of the breed had been that they were triple-crazy fighters, rushing at any enemy with a screaming, blind hatred. Caution was out of the question.
"You chilled meat," it threatened.
"Mebbe," Ryan replied, shuffling his boots in the soft earth to try to establish a good footing.
"Maggot food."
"Sure. And you're two hundred pounds of dog shit in a fifty-pound sack."
The musket was swirling around in a maniacal circle, hissing like a runaway windmill. The mutie had the advantage of the higher ground, and Ryan realized that this wasn't going to be the slick and easy execution that he wanted.
"Yesss!" The mutie hissed out the warning as it suddenly charged.
The mutie's speed was alarming. Ryan barely had time to get the panga up to parry the blow.
The case-hardened steel rang out against the chipped wooden stock of the Kentucky musket. Ryan's arm was jarred clear to the shoulder by the force of the impact. The butt split lengthwise, exploding into white splinters.
The power of the crushing attack sent Ryan off balance. The mutie dropped its broken gun and lunged, its suckered hands grabbing at Ryan's arm and neck.
At such close contact, the long panga was useless and Ryan dropped it, concentrating on trying to hold off the grappling hands. He'd seen plenty of the horrific injuries caused by stickies. Their palms and fingers had tiny mouthlike suckers, almost like those on the arms of an octopus, but with an inhuman strength. They would grip on to smooth surfaces, like the armored flanks of war wags, enabling the stickies to climb effortlessly up the sides of speeding vehicles.
It was when it came to sucking contact with human flesh that th
e power of the stickies was so truly appalling.
A montage of hideous memories came shrieking into Ryan's mind.
A girl from a gaudy house near the Pecos River went outside to use the outhouse and was caught by a lurking stickie, who had ripped the skin from the length of her right arm, like peeling off an antique, elegant glove. Then the mutie had gripped her by the side of the throat and tugged away the deeper flesh, tearing the throbbing artery open.
One of the rear gunners from War Wag Two, who'd been a close friend of Abe, had been ambushed during a night camp in the Cascades. He'd stabbed his assailant and come staggering back into the circle of light from the crackling fire, screaming as if he were a doomed soul and holding his hands out in front of him like a blinded man.
A blinded man.
The devilish suckers had plucked both eyes from their sockets like boiled eggs from China cups, leaving raw pits that welled blood.
The Trader had spit out the stub of a cigar, grabbed his battered Armalite and shot the man twice through the chest, showing him a brutal mercy.
Worst had been a creche in a first-floor room of a baron's fortress, in a ramshackle ville that had been perched halfway up a hillside on the western flank of the Green Mountains. When the sentry had checked in at ten o'clock there'd been a dozen babies sleeping peacefully.
When he looked in again an hour later there was a bloody shambles that had driven him stark mad on the spot.
Ryan had heard the noise and been one of the first into the vaulted chamber. The guard was a middle-aged man with grizzled hair, and he was sitting in a lake of crimson in the center of the room, paddling his fingers in the cooling blood, giggling secretly to himself.
The soft skin of the little babies had been particularly attractive to those stickies.
Ryan remembered all of that, and more, in the jagged nanosecond before he and the mutie rolled in the dusty earth.