by James Axler
"So why you alive?"
"Possibly my inherent charm. Perhaps my insistence on the most scrupulous standards of personal hygiene. That is the very best that I can offer by way of explanation."
The mutie looked at Doc for a long time, making the old man feel the sudden awful certainty of his now imminent death. Then the stickie smiled at him, oblivious of a thick thread of greenish spittle that was trailing down over its receding chin. "You funny fuck."
"Thank you."
"We give you fucking funny hot death, old fuck."
"MASSACRE THEM ALL? " Michael sat with his head resting on his knees, hands folded in front of him as though he'd been interrupted in midprayer.
"This a problem, Michael?"
The young man didn't answer Ryan. His eyes were closed, and his face had gone pale.
Krysty knelt by him. "Gaia, Michael! Don't come over all pious now."
"You're going to try and shoot down...how many? Twenty or thirty of God's creatures without a word of warning or a chance of survival."
J.B. spit in the dirt. His normally sallow cheeks were flushed with anger. "Tell you what. You go on down, Michael, and ask them to surrender."
"They wouldn't." He looked up at the Armorer.
"So, it's double stupe to suggest it, then?"
"Yeah. I know what. Can't we tell them they got no chance and let them go if they don't harm any of the children or Dean and the rest?"
"Dark night! Stickies aren't down-home folks, you shit-for-brains kid!"
Krysty stood up between the Armorer and the sitting teenager, holding out a hand. "Keep it down, both of you. Or we'll have muties all over us."
J.B. sighed. "Sure, sure. You're right, Krysty." He lowered his voice. "Michael, will you listen to me?"
"Sure. Look, I'm sorry about-"
J.B. put his hand on the young man's shoulder. "I know you weren't born in Deathlands. You see things like a..." He changed direction. "Stickies are't human beings, Michael. It would be like worrying about treading on a poisonous scorpion. If we don't go in against the sickhead bastards on full-auto, then there'll be deaths on our side. Might well be anyway. Nobody can ever predict where the cards are going to fall. But you have to plan it best you can."
It was an unusually long speech for the normally taciturn man, but Ryan couldn't find a word to disagree with.
Michael stood up, offered his hand and shook with J.B. "I see that now. I'm ready."
"Fine," Ryan said. "Then let's go."
A PAIR OF PLUMP-BREASTED pigeons fluttered noisily out of the forest, southwest of the muties' camp, circling three or four times, and then flying off toward the lake.
Dean sat up and stared at the birds, glancing sideways to see if any of the muties had noticed the brief disturbance. He glanced across at Doc and Mildred, but both of them were lying down, locked into their own thoughts.
The boy half smiled and lay down again, trying to exercise his tightly bound hands to keep them supple. Ready in case he needed to move fast.
THE MUTIE CAMP WAS SET in a large clearing, about a mile inland from the lake.
Ideally Ryan would have liked the chance to wait, then move in at the optimum time, perhaps a couple of hours after midnight, when most of the Stickies would have collapsed into a drugged or drunken sleep.
But nighttime was when the perverted nuke mutations launched into their torturefests. To wait would almost certainly mean being too late.
Numbers were massively on the side of the stickles, but they seemed to be poorly armed. And there was no sign at all that they were worried about the possibility of anyone raiding them.
Which tipped the balance strongly in favor of the four attackers.
It was important to try to chill every one of the stickies. If a few escaped, then the retreat to the boat would be made that much more dangerous. The best way of ensuring that was for each of them to take a quadrant of the compass, and come in from four different directions to hit them hard and fast.
"Get the firstest with the mostest" had been Trader's basic ruling. When Ryan had once mentioned that to Doc, the old-timer had pointed out that it wasn't exactly original and had its origins with a commander in the ancient Civil War.
Before they separated, Ryan gave a last whispered warning to Michael and Krysty. There was no need to mention something so obvious to J.B.
"Danger is shooting each other. Aim low and keep a triple-red watch for the rest of us coming in."
There had been a momentary temptation to go opposite the Armorer, knowing that was safest. But he rejected the idea, choosing to go around to the north himself, leaving Michael to cover the south. Krysty took the lake side while J.B. circled to the east.
He and J.B. had chrons. The other two would have to rely on a measured count to make sure they were in position and ready to go in at the right moment.
Since there was no tearing hurry to initiate the attack, Ryan allowed a full half hour for everyone to get into position. At that point he would fire a single round in the air from the Steyr rifle.
"No questions?"
There were none. They'd agreed that they would set free the children if that proved possible, but only after they'd ensured the safety of Dean, Mildred and Doc.
As RYAN PICKED His WAY along the narrow trails between the tall trees, he heard a pair of pigeons rise noisily into the air, somewhere toward the lake, disturbed by Krysty's passing by. He hoped that none of the muties would have noticed it and made the connection.
When he was halfway around he wrinkled his nose at a bitter, acidic smell. He stopped in midst ride and waited, listening intently. The path ahead was straight for fifty yards or so, and he could see a pile of fresh droppings, still steaming slightly in the cool morning air. Ryan had never been a great tracker, but he guessed that some large carnivore was nearby, possibly either a bear or a puma.
But the woods were brimming with a deep stillness, and he began to move on north, looping around the stickies' camp, not heading toward the scent of the smoke until he'd made sure there was no outer ring of sentries.
He checked his timing, the tiny digital numbers flicking over to show he'd been moving for just over sixteen minutes. Nearly a quarter of an hour remained before he'd fire the signal bullet and all hell would break loose in the serene New England forest.
Now he could smell the foul odors that he always associated with stickle camps-rotting food, burned meat, unwashed bodies and the peculiar decayed, fish like stench that seemed to surround the creatures.
Most frontier villes would h ave any number of stray animals hanging around them, lean, slant-eyed mongrels and vicious feral cats. But there was something different about stickies. Even among then- own mutie kind they were regarded as outcasts, and it was rare to find any sort of living creature within range of their malodorous camps.
Ryan picked his careful way closer.
"IF THIS RESCUE WERE to be done," Doc muttered, "then it were well that it were done quickly."
"Couldn't agree more," Mildred whispered. "Don't like the way they're collecting kindling and brushwood. Looks to me like they're planning a big blaze."
"With us as their center-ring, numero uno star attraction." Doc sniffed. "We shall this night, by God's grace, light such a candle, my good Dr. Wyeth, as shall never be extinguished in this fair land." He sniffed again. "My nose itches alarmingly. But I fear that it would be an ill thing to ask one of our captors to scratch it for me."
Mildred managed a weak smile. "Do that and the sons of bitches would just cut your nose off, Doc. And, probably, your chattering head with it."
One of the stickies walked by them, carrying an armful of loose branches. It heard them talking and glared in their direction, silencing them immediately.
RYAN WAS CLOSE ENOUGH to hear sounds from the camp, an occasional shout and once a cry of sudden pain.
Just ahead of him there was a tangle of fallen timber, piled almost shoulder-high. He began to pick his way around it when he heard the sound of feet, com
ing fast toward him.
The one-eyed man dropped to a crouch, easing the rifle onto the ground, holding the SIG-Sauer ready, hoping desperately that he wouldn't have to open fire and get their attack off to a messy and premature start.
He could catch the guttural, bubbling voices of stickies and risked a glance through the tangled branches, seeing that there were two of the muties. One carried a single-shot musket of immense age, while the other had only a short-handled ax tucked into its narrow string belt.
He caught the words "fire" and "wood" repeated several times as they drew closer. Now they'd stopped, only just the other side of the big deadfall.
Ryan waited.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Krysty had gone right to the shore of the sunlit lake before starting to work her way eastward again toward the stickles* camp. She had immediately found the boats that they'd used on the raid on Quindley the previous night, though "boats" wasn't the best word for a motley collection of rafts and crude canoes tugged up onto the pebbles.
From there the trail was easy to follow.
Bushes had been broken down and trees hacked with machetes. Barely concealed in the undergrowth, a quarter mile from Shamplin, Krysty saw a protud-ing pair of bare feet. Flies buzzed around the bloodied corpse, and her heart nearly stopped with the jolting fear that it might be Dean.
But it wasn't. It was a younger child, barely five years old, with its throat cut so savagely that the whiteness of the spine showed through the clotted blackness.
"Gaia!" Krysty drew her blaster and moved on a little faster, to be in position when Ryan fired the warning shot from his rifle. She had calculated that just over half of the time had gone.
RYAN DIDNT HAVE a choice. The pair of stickies had started to strip away some of the dry wood from the deadfall, one of them walking straight to the side where he was crouched.
The SIG-Sauer P-226 was a fifteen-round, 9 mm automatic blaster. The four-and-a-half-inch barrel carried a built-in baffle silencer that had been developed during the middle and late 1990s. Like all silencers, prolonged firing greatly diminished its efficiency.
Ryan took a chance and jabbed the pistol into the skinny midriff of the surprised mutie, pulling the trigger twice. The explosions were doubly muffled, sounding no louder than a polite cough.
The stickie's mouth sagged open and it staggered a few clumsy steps backward, dropping the wood it had collected, tripping and landing on its back. The ax slipped from its belt. Its suckered hands opened and closed, reaching toward the two tiny black holes hi its stomach.
Ryan didn't stop to watch something he'd already seen dozens of times in his life.
The body crashing to the ground had made enough noise to attract the attention of the other mutie, on the far side of the deadfall. "What happen, Jez?"
It was carrying the musket, and it immediately began to fumble with the grotesquely long blaster, struggling to get it cocked and aimed at the one-eyed norm who'd suddenly sprung from the forest's ferny floor.
Ryan didn't hesitate. He bolstered the SIG-Sauer and stepped in close to the stickie.
He kicked it in the groin, the steel toe of the combat boot crushing the shrunken genitals up against the wedge of pubic bone. The mutie gave a squeak of agony, so feeble and high-pitched that it would hardly have disturbed a hunting bat. The old Kentucky long gun dropped silently to the dirt as the stickie started to double over. The breath seemed to have become trapped deep in its lungs by the shock of the attack. Blood was already trickling down its chin and chest from its open mouth where it had bitten the end off its tongue with its needle-filed teeth.
Ryan watched carefully, standing away until the thing was down on its knees, face pressed into the soft earth, rocking slowly back and forth. Then he stepped in, having checked all around him that the forest was deserted, pressed the barrel of the SIG-Sauer to the back of the stickie's neck and pulled the trigger for a third time.
This time the sound of the shot was a little louder, but he guessed that the light wind through the tall trees would probably have ridden over the noise.
The body of the mutie jerked once from the impact of the high-velocity bullet, then slid forward like a confident swimmer entering a deep pool, lying still. A river of blood began to leak from the massive exit wound at the base of the flattened nose.
Ryan looked around again, then picked up the rifle and slung it once more across his back. He checked his chron and saw that the chilling of the two stickies had taken him less than one hundred seconds from beginning to the ending.
It was now time for him to move in closer to the camp, ready to fire the signal round.
AT THE LAST MOMENT, Ryan had changed his mind and used the warning bullet to chill one of the stickies, putting the 7.62 mm round between the eyes of a white-haired mutie woman who was about to cut the throat of one of the Quindley children, two along from where Dean was tied.
It blew away most of the back of her angular skull, so that her brains exploded in a pink-gray mist, all over the row of young prisoners.
There was instant chaos and confusion-sound like ripping silk as J.B. walked calmly into the center of the camp, spraying lead from the Uzi, sending the stickies toppling like broken dolls; Kxysty, hair like flame, came in from the direction of the lake, picking her shots with great care, very aware that her blaster held only five rounds; Michael, last of the four to appear, some seconds behind the other three, confronted several of the stickies who had already chosen the south side of their camp as the best line of escape from the murderous shooting that had erupted from the forest around them, shooting into them with the Texas Longhorn, his lips moving in what could have been either a prayer or a string of pattered curses.
The next two and a quarter minutes were a merciless massacre of blood and screams.
THEY'D AGREED IN ADVANCE that Krysty would be the one to head straight for the prisoners, using her knife to free Dean, Mildred and Doc. Michael would try to help her, while J.B. and Ryan, holding the serious firepower, would beat off any attacks on them from the stickies.
Like most plans, it didn't turn out quite like Ryan had expected.
The main difference was that their ambush of the j camp was more shocking and successful than he could have hoped. In the first thirty seconds they managed to chill or mortally wound well over half of the stickies, while the rest of the muties screamed and ran around like headless chickens.
In the chaos and confusion, Ryan couldn't be certain, but his guess was that not a single shot was fired against them by the "defenders" of the camp. One woman threw a knife at him, and the hilt struck him a glancing blow in the small of the back. But he turned and shot her with the ninth of the ten rounds from the Steyr, the bullet sending her stumbling, her legs seeming like they wanted to move in five different directions. Until the wires went down and she slumped forward onto her face, with the loud crack of her nose splintering.
J.B. ran the Uzi in a careful, steady line, right to left, cutting down five stickies in that single burst. The bullets ripped them apart at waist-level, sending them rolling and weeping in a welter of their pale mutie blood.
Krysty would always remember the fourth of her five rounds. She had reached the line of prisoners, managing a reassuring grin for Dean. As she knelt, reaching for her knife, Doc barked out a warning of a stickie coming at her from behind, on hands and knees, trailing blood from a bullet that had smashed his left thigh apart.
She turned and snapped off the .38 at the crawling mutie. But one of the little girls from the ville, freaked into blind panic, jumped up at that moment and took the bullet through the throat. The heavy round nearly tore her head off her frail shoulders.
Krysty didn't flinch or hesitate, using the fifth and last bullet from her Smith & Wesson to chill the stickie, smack between the narrow, mad eyes.
She was never certain if anyone had seen the shot that killed the child and she never, ever mentioned it to a living soul.
Michael was ready to shoot,
as some of the fleeing stickies raced toward him. But most turned at the moment he opened fire, scattering in all directions, to be gunned down by either Ryan or J.B. Michael was never sure that he actually shot anyone that ferocious, crazed morning among the pine-scented trees.
Mildred tried to keep track of the mutie that had taken away her beloved ZKR pistol, but she lost sight of his ragged pink shirt in the panic.
Doc sat up, his hands still bound behind him, ready to kick out if any of the stickies decided they they were going to try to take at least one of the norm prisoners with them into their arid shadowlands.
Dean whooped with an almost hysterical delight- "Hot pipe, guys! "-every time one of their captors hit the dirt and lay still.
Ryan dropped the empty rifle hi the trampled earth and stood stock-still, his feet spread, holding the SIG-Sauer cocked. He moved it like the tongue of a rattler, tasting the dangers in the air, looking for a fresh target.