Ice and Fire

by James Axler

  Ryan swung his legs to the floor and cat-footed across the creaking boards. He pulled the edge of the curtain back and peered out, letting one hand gently caress Krysty's nape. She eased her body against his, the dazzling crimson hair brushing over his fingers.

  There was Priest, with his beard trimmed, on his Triumph twin; Ruin, wearing sunglasses with one lens missing, on a flame-streak BMW; the huge bulk of Riddler, oozing off both sides of the saddle of his enormous motorbike, which had been chopped together from a variety of different machines; and the bare-headed Dick the Hat.

  "Wanna come for a run, Jak?" Ruin bellowed, staring up at the albino boy.

  "Mebbe."

  They saw Ryan behind the curtain. "Hey, Cawdor. Wanna come for a run?"

  He wrestled with the stubborn window, finally managing to lever it upward. "Where?"

  "Death Valley Road

  . See if we can find us some stickies."

  "Don't go, Ryan. Could be a trap. Got a bad feeling about it." Krysty's fingers tightened on his hand, squeezing hard enough to make him wince in surprise.

  "Sure? I can't see those double-stupe rednecks ever getting a stickie."

  "How about the stickies getting themselves some double-stupe rednecks, Ryan?"

  "Got a point. I'll go along with Jak. Kind of keep an eye on things."

  Krysty smiled and kissed him on the cheek. "Since you've only got one eye, lover, that's about all you can keep on him."

  "You coming?" Dick the Hat shouted.

  "Can go?" Jak called eagerly to Ryan.

  "Sure," the one-eyed man replied. "Bring your blaster."

  Jak rode pillion behind Ruin on the big BMW bike. Ryan clung on to the rear seat of the Triumph, balancing to the bends and bumps in the road, seeing ahead over Priest's shoulders. The light blue ribbons in the long, greasy hair fluttered in the wind of their passing.

  Ryan hadn't ridden on a two-wheel wag for years, but the breathtaking rush of exhilaration came speeding back. His own hair was ruffled, and he could feel the warm desert air plucking at the patch covering his left eye. He'd left the caseless G-12 checked at the Rentaroom, contenting himself with his handgun and the long steel panga.

  "You ever seen ?" Priest shouted, his words almost whipped away by their speed.

  Ryan leaned forward to reply, suddenly catching the stench of the rider's stained blue denims. "Seen a few," he said.

  "We never catch 'em. I seen some, in the distance like. But they all fucked off when they heard us coming. Got no balls for a mix with the Last Heroes."

  "They giving you trouble?"

  Priest didn't reply immediately, concentrating on swerving the heavy chopper around a massive hole in the road. It looked like a landie had gone off, by the size of the crater.

  "Yeah," he finally grunted. "You know we got a lotta gas. Ground's full of it out near where we have our base. By the old park. But there's some outlying wells. That's where we're going now, the one toward Death Valley."

  The knowledge that none of his companions had ever actually faced gave Ryan pause for thought. Of all the muties that roamed the Deathlands, stickies were among the worst—ferocious and inexorable in their desire to attack normies. He wished that he could have warned Jak about what they might be riding into. But the noise of the hogs and the speed at which they were traveling made that impossible. A glance at the speedo told Ryan they were racing along the shifting surface of the old highway at something close to seventy miles an hour, which was about as fast as he'd ever been. Because of the poor quality of processed gas, few wags could manage much more than forty. A tuned-up war wag with all its armor was lucky to reach fifty.

  Jak was leaning perilously on the BMW, hands locked in the small of his back, his keen-edged reflexes allowing him to roll with every movement of the powerful two-wheeler. His long hair blew behind him like a streamlined helmet of purest white and his eyes, as he turned to grin across at Ryan, flamed like living embers.

  The boy gave a piercing banshee scream of unbridled pleasure, punching the air with his right fist, making the rider wobble and yell a curse over his shoulder at the teenager.

  The land was a monotonous reddish orange, with occasional relieving areas of gray or pale yellow. The road unrolled itself, mainly straight, with an occasional dip and swoop. On one side the ruins of an old post-and-wire fence leaned drunkenly toward the distant hills. They saw no signs of life. Twice they passed abandoned drilling rigs, twisted and rusting.

  "Any snakes around here?" Ryan shouted.

  "Not this way. All in the brush between the ville and the mountains. Nobody goes far that way. Azrael and his brothers and sisters see to that."

  The sky was a rich pink, streaked with blue, stippled with fragments of high, scudding chem clouds. Once Ryan spotted a circling hawk, riding a thermal far above them. It was so high that he couldn't judge its size, but the wingspan seemed unusually wide.

  They stopped after a half hour for Riddler to relieve himself, standing by the side of the highway, legs spread, whistling loudly to himself.

  Dick the Hat was waiting, close by Ryan. "When you get to join the Last Heroes, you get your colors initiated like that."

  "Like what?"

  "Put on the denims and lie down and all the brothers stand around and piss all over you."

  "Fireblast!" Ryan said. "Sounds a whole wag of laughs."

  The Angel looked at him suspiciously, but said nothing.

  "MUCH FARTHER?"

  "Five miles. Road gets worse. Gotta slow some. Beyond that bunch of hills."

  Eye watering from the dusty wind, Ryan squinted around the bikers back and saw that the highway was rising slowly, leading toward a group of mesas. As they drew nearer he could make out that there had been some major earth movements and rocks had slipped down across the blacktop.

  Ruin was in the lead, and he held up a hand as a warning to the others that they were swinging off the pavement onto a dirt trail with deep ruts that coiled to the left. Speed dropped to a little more than walking pace; dust billowed around them, choking and blinding. The three other Last Heroes dropped back, spacing themselves to avoid the orange clouds.

  "Nearly there!" the biker shrieked, his face a mask of sand-covered sweat.

  The rocking and bouncing was almost unbearable as the bike jolted over the bumps, its century-old suspension creaking and rattling. Ryan had to hang on to Priest's back to keep himself on the bike, trying to breathe through his mouth to avoid choking.

  Dimly, on either side of the Triumph, Ryan could make out walls of tumbled, frost-riven boulders, rising forty feet or more above them.

  Concentrating hard on breathing and staying in the saddle, Ryan had neglected his fighting senses. The hair at his nape had begun to prickle, warning him that this was a dangerous place to be.

  He was taken completely by surprise when a semi-naked, mewing creature launched itself at him from out of nowhere, hurling him from the bike. He landed flat on his back in the dirt, with needle-sharp teeth questing toward his neck and a suckered hand reaching for his good eye.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  RYAN HAD FOUGHT MUTIES before, all kinds, shapes and sizes. But there was nothing on God's nuked earth to compare to close combat against a stickie.

  Part of Ryan's brain told him that the stickies must have been attracted by the powerful roaring of the engines of the two-wheel wags. Another part of his brain wondered how many of them there were in the ambush.

  But most of his mind locked instantly into the fundamental problem of staying alive.

  The skin of a stickie always seemed slippery, like moist rubber, but sand was clinging to this one, enabling Ryan to grip its arm and prevent the hand with its greedy suckers from fastening on his face. Years ago he'd seen one of the drivers off Warwag Two, Harpo, go down in a skirmish against stickies.

  The screeching creature had slapped its hand over Harpo's forehead and eyes. The grip was unbelievably powerful. As the mutie pulled its hand away, half of the ma
n's face came with it, including both eyes, ripped from their sockets by the appalling suction of the fingers and palm. All of Harpo's skin and much of the flesh beneath also came away at the same time.

  It hadn't been a good ending.

  Ryan could hear shouts and screams all around him, as well as the engines revving and choking, wheels spinning and thickening the whirling bank of sullen sand.

  The face of the stickie was only inches away from Ryan's as he struggled against its great muscular power and almost reptilian agility. The creature was breathing hard, hissing between a triple row of pointed, edged teeth, spewing foul, rancid breath—a soughing eructation from a rotting, age-old swamp. Its tiny eyes, with pupils that divided vertically, gazed straight into Ryan's eye, blankly hostile. The mutie wore only a pair of torn shorts, and like all stickies it was weaponless. Even the skillful use of a knife was beyond its mental powers.

  With a great effort Ryan managed to raise a foot between the creature's legs and push it away from him, sending it staggering backward, until it completely disappeared into the dust storm. As it went, its fingers brushed against Ryan's arm and he felt and heard his shirt tear as the suckers dragged at the material.

  He could still hear yelling and squeals of pain, and the snuffling, grunting sound that a stickie makes when it has its jaws clamped on flesh and is gnawing inexorably through to the delicious marrow of the bone.

  One by one the engines faltered and died, choked in the dirt. As they stopped, the veil of orange sand began to clear and Ryan was able to see what was going on.

  Without even realizing he'd made the move, Ryan found that the SIG-Sauer filled his left hand, the warm hilt of the panga in his right. Seven stickies.

  Dick the Hat down and dead, his neck ripped apart. Suckers had peeled skin and flesh away, showing the whiteness of bone beneath the welter of blood. One of the stickies was on its knees, face buried in the pulsing wreckage of the biker's throat.

  Jak was standing, half-crouched, a small knife in his right hand, facing two gibbering stickies that danced and capered in front of him.

  Ruin had lost his sunglasses and was wrestling with another of the muties, screaming as the suckers tore strips of bloodied skin off his right arm.

  Priest ran up a steep slope, pursued by one of the stickies. It chased him in an odd, skipping, shambling run, like a child. He tried to draw his .32 as he ran, but the fall from his bike had dislodged his holster.

  Riddler was the only one who looked like he was making any progress. He'd felled his opponent with a roundhouse swing of his huge fist. As the stickie scrabbled in the dirt, shaking its bald head, thick blood oozing from the corner of its lipless mouth, the Angel was drawing a short-hafted ax from the back of his belt. It looked to Ryan as if Riddler might be doing all right.

  Ryan's own stickie was crouched behind the fallen Triumph, clenching its fingers and chattering in a tiny, high-pitched voice. Gas was leaking from the tank of the chopper, close by its feet, and the creature put its round head on one side and sniffed the air, dipping a hand into the liquid and licking it.

  "Know what that is, you double-chilled bastard?" Ryan said conversationally. "That's gas. One pyro-tab and you'd be dead meat."

  But the gas soaked instantly into the dry sand.

  The mutie stood only fifteen feet from Ryan, who took careful aim with the powerful pistol then pressed the trigger once. With the integral silencer the explosion was muffled and soft, no louder than the snap of fingers.

  The 9 mm bullet smacked home right between the little eyes, drilling a neat, blackened hole that immediately began to drip dark blood. The exit hole wasn't much bigger than the one going in, and didn't take out a fist-size chunk of bone—as it would have done with a normie—due to the gristly, cartilaginous skull of the stickie.

  But it was still a killing shot that punched the mutated monstrosity back, away from the tumbled two-wheel wag. Its hands went up, as though exploring its own wound. The suckers were activated in its death throes, tearing out one of its own eyes as it toppled down in the dirt, dead.

  Meanwhile, Riddler had successfully defended himself, swinging the ax in a short, brutally effective blow to the side of the stickie's neck, very nearly severing its head from its repulsive body.

  "Two down and five to go," Ryan muttered to himself.

  But all the successes weren't on the side of the humans.

  Finding that Jak's speed and aggression were too much for them, the two stickies that had been threatening him decided to go for easier game.

  One went after Priest, the other joining the creature that was rolling around in the dry earth with Ruin. The mutie that had butchered Dick the Hat was still busily occupied with its feasting. Ryan thought for a moment about putting a bullet through the top of its soft skull, but there were more important things to take care of.

  Ruin was screaming and cursing, a stream of noise pouring from his open mouth. He'd managed to break one of the stickie's arms. A jagged end of bone protruded through the creature's torn flesh. But his own injuries were severe. Blood gushed from his gashed arm, and the stickie had succeeded in getting a grip with its good hand on the inside of the bikers left thigh, near the groin. The suckers shredded the denim of his jeans and began to strip skin and flesh from the long femur.

  Priest had finally managed to draw his rebuilt .32 and leveled it at the nearest of his attackers, pulling the trigger. Ryan actually saw the bullet pass clear through the body of the stickie, in a gout of blood, just above the waistband of the tattered pants. The mutie staggered but didn't go down. Priest fired again and again. Each round found its mark in the body of the advancing stickie, but the creature wasn't even knocked off its feet.

  "In the head!" Ryan yelled. "Only way to chill them!"

  Priest was too locked into his own panic to register Ryan's advice, and repeatedly fired his weapon, riddling the chest and stomach of the stickie. By now it was only a few paces away from him, hands reaching out to draw him into its lethal embrace.

  Jak tried to help, throwing two of his elegant knives. Each found its target with pinpoint accuracy, thudding into the neck of the mutie, making it falter for a moment.

  "Why not fucking down?" the albino yelled turning to look at Ryan.

  "Told you. Stickies aren't like anything else. You can rip their guts open and it hardly slows them. Gotta hit their fireblasted heads."

  Ruin had kicked his way clear of the one stickie, but it clutched a dripping haunch of meat in its hand. Blood was pouring from a gaping wound in the leg of the Last Hero. Ryan had seen enough fatal wounds in his time to know that the odds were effectively down to five against four. Three if you counted Priest as doomed.

  At last Ryan could get in some clean shooting.

  Standing with his feet a few inches apart, blaster firmly held in his hand, he fired three carefully placed shots.

  One stickie had already closed on Priest, who'd turned at the last second to try to run from his slobbering, gnawing nemesis.

  But the other mutie was halfway up the slope and the 9 mm bullet smashed into its head, exiting close to its left eye, sending it crashing down the face of the slope, legs and arms thrashing and twitching.

  The second bullet hit the stickie that was chewing at the hunk of Ruin's upper leg—precisely where Ryan had aimed, near the mucous-rimmed pits of its pig-like nostrils. Angling sideways and splintering teeth, the round exploded through the side of the head, above the residual knobs of gristle that were the creature's ears.

  The third round struck the stickie that had been moving toward the dying Ruin, chattering excitedly to itself in its own guttural tongue.

  It was half turned toward Riddler, who'd screamed at it to try to distract it. The stickie had raised a hand when it had seen Ryan's raised blaster, and the bullet smashed through the nest of suckers in the middle of its palm, carrying on, entering the right cheek. The slug tore out the inside of the face, leaving the palate in tatters of mangled skin and flesh.
<
br />   "Two of them and three of us," Ryan said.

  "Five." Jak pointed to the kneeling figure of Ruin and to where the small, bearded Priest had vanished over the top of the rise.

  "Three," Ryan repeated.

  Ruin made a last desperate effort to get up, half falling, clawing his way toward his beloved chopper. But the blood loss from the torn femoral artery closed him down and he finally lay still in the dirt, his outstretched fingers inches from the dusty metal of the BMW.

  "Come on," Ryan ordered, leading the way up the slope, followed by Jak. Riddler, clutching his blood-slick ax, waddled along at their heels.

  The three of them paused at the top of the ridge, looking down into a shallow dip on the far side.

  "Yeah," Jak finally agreed. "Three."

  Priest hadn't made it far. He lay facedown in the sand, naked, the ragged remains of his clothes scattered around him. The stickie was crouched over the corpse, dabbing its hand at the bare flesh, each time bringing away a dozen tiny circles of crimson, raggedy skin. A maze of red rivulets trickled down its chin, testifying it was already relishing the feast. The creature became aware that it was being watched and looked up, snarling its venom.

  "Me," Riddler demanded, hefting his sawed-off scattergun. "Me."

  "Not at that range," Ryan replied. He'd been reloading his blaster as they stood there. Trader had always drummed into anyone who rode with him that a man had to keep his blasters fully charged whenever he could. Because you might not get another chance.

  "Me," Jak said, pulling out his .357 Magnum.

  "Head," Ryan reminded him.

  The stickie was up and moving, leaving the ragged body of Priest behind. Its eyes were blinking, hands reaching out.

  Only minutes had slipped by since Ryan had ridden into the ambush.

  The noise of the handgun was deafening. After the mild popping of the .32 and the muffled sound of Ryan's silenced blaster, the air sang with the violence of its explosion.

  The Magnum was so much bigger than Jak that the boy had to clutch it in both hands to fire it.

  The white-haired boy was quite brilliant at close combat and knife fighting, but Ryan didn't rate him very highly when it came to blasters.