Blood and brass, screams and smoke filled the dusty air, and breathing became difficult. A rain of clubs took another norm, and J.B. threw an antipers gren at the muties. The staggering blast rocked the building, and pieces of bodies went flying everywhere. But another flight of spears pelted the group, and more norms were chilled. Red blood and gelatinous ooze seemed to be everywhere.
Fighting their way to the stairs, the companions and remaining sec men ducked again as thrown clubs came spinning out of the dwindling pool of fire, closely followed by spears. Another man fell, mortally wounded, his belly ripped open wide, the intestines slithering onto the floor like greasy rope. Dropping his blaster, the dying man grabbed the internal organs with both hands and began to wail as he tried to shove them back inside his body. With calm deliberation, Baron O’Connor flipped the lever of the Winchester to chamber a fresh round and shot the sec man in the heart. The piteous shrieks stopped instantly.
“Keep it up!” Ryan shouted, dropping a clip and slamming in his last spare. “They can’t see us any more than we can see them!”
“Use all of the bombs!” the baron shouted, dropping the spent Winchester and pulling out his handcannon. The old Glock .44 pumped copper-jacketed bone-shredders into the stickies, and every round chilled with gory efficiency.
Coughing from the thickening smoke of the chem fires, sec men obediently threw more bottles into the blaze, the crashing of the glass causing a gush of heat and noise. The smell of the roasting stickies was worse than cooking sewage!
Suddenly there came the sound of boots on the stairs and Sec chief Stirling appeared with a dozen more sec men brandishing weps and bottles. At the sight of reinforcements, everybody cheered and redoubled their efforts, the barrage of homie scatterguns, black-powder blasters and yammering rapidfires, reaching a deafening crescendo.
Temporarily out of brass, Ryan holstered the SIG-Sauer and did a fast side arm throw of a high-explosive gren onto the escalator. Releasing his rapidfire to hang by its strap, Jak did the same, and Baron O’Connor unexpectedly added a short pipe bomb.
“Move!” Ryan and the baron shouted in unison.
But the groups needed no encouragement, they were already pelting down the steps at a breakneck pace. Seconds later, the assorted mil ordnance cut loose and concussion shook the building, shrapnel from the staggering detonations throwing shards of broken floor and twisted metal everywhere. Breaking apart, the escalator groaned as if it were dying, then something loudly snapped inside the machine and metal parts sprayed out in every direction. Hit in the head with a spinning gear, a stickie perished trying to stuff its own brain back inside the broken skull.
With a cry, Stirling fell to one knee, a dagger of blue stone jutting from his shoulder. But the tough man rose and stumbled away, dribbling crimson in his wake. Reaching for the Steyr, Ryan felt white-hot pain along a forearm, and saw that he was pumping his lifeblood. Hugging the wound to his chest to try to staunch the blood loss, Ryan fumbled for the Steyr. Only five rounds left in the longblaster. He had to make every one count.
Just then, the foam tiles lining the ceiling collapsed and a half dozen stickies fell upon the group of sec men. Caught completely by surprise, the startled men began to fire among themselves, hot lead smacking into other sec men in their blind haste to chill the hooting muties. Ryan got the longblaster up in time to ace a stickie in the throat. Then another monster made a swipe at him, and Krysty hammered it to hell with her barking rapidfire. Doc shot one in the face with both handcannons and blew off its head, the skull shattering like an egg under the double assault.
A stickie grabbed Porter by the sleeve and yanked, but only took away the shirt. Unharmed, the man emptied his blaster into the mutie, shouting curses. Swinging his handcannon, Baron O’Connor pumped two booming rounds into the thing, and it went sailing backward over the railing to crash onto the reception desk in the lobby on the ground floor.
“Everybody outside!” Ryan bellowed, heading for the open doorway. He could see the two sec men there, shooting into the chaotic lobby, their black-powder blasters sending out plumes of acrid smoke that temporarily masked the exit.
Incredibly, more muties appeared at the top of the stairs. Their rags were smoldering, and many oozed bodily fluids. But their eyes were fierce and they moved without a sound, aside from the slap of bare feet on the shattered floor.
Spinning, one sec man tripped and another ran over his fallen comrade, uncaring of the trampled man. The baron gunned down the coward, and grabbed the sec man on the floor to haul him up, then shove him toward the door.
Desperate to buy seconds for the others to get out, Ryan and J.B. both flipped grens across the lobby, and the entire area was filled with the searing flash of willie pete. In response, the stickies hit the walls and crawled past the hellzone the same as before. Now they dropped to the floor, and, amazingly retrieved their thrown spears, then rushed at the norms in a picket charge, all the while hooting as their staring eyes choose victims.
A wounded sec man was slow to reload, and as he closed the wheelgun, a spear took him through the chest. The norm stood there for a long moment, staring in stark disbelief at the wooden shaft sticking through his blue uniform. Then he sighed deeply and lay on the filthy floor as if merely going to sleep. Somebody else grabbed his fallen blaster and emptied it into the stickies, before turning to run away.
Pouring outside, the companions and the few remaining sec men scrambled down the stairs and across the foyer to explode out the front door. As they dashed across the sandy street, the Metro went into action. The catapult thumped and a dozen Molotovs rained upon the granite steps, erupting into a huge fireball.
Trapped in the foyer, the stickies hooted angrily and threw some spears at the war wag. Those only bounced off the armed sides, and the sec men behind the sand bag wall returned fire with crossbows. A dozen muties fell, their mottled bodies feathered with arrows. The ville sec men took heart at the display. The muties might have weps, but they couldn’t aim worth drek. Time to press the attack.
“Cover the rear!” the baron shouted, firing his revolver. “Make a ring of fire! Use every Molotov!”
A spear flashed by his head just then, but the one-armed norm didn’t even flinch. “Every Molotov! Save nothing!”
Hoisting clicking bags, a team of sec men rushed to obey, while the rest continued to shoot from the sandy street. High overhead, the dark clouds roiled in mounting fury and a strong breeze blew along the street, kicking up a stinging cloud of loose sand.
The catapult peppered the front of the building with another firestorm, setting the bottom level ablaze. Spears came out of the front door and a sec man fell, most of his face removed by the barbed point.
Suddenly the glass windows on the second floor shattered and a score of armed muties popped into view. But expecting that tactic, the furious sec men forced them back inside with crossbows and hot lead.
“Don’t let anything get out!” Ryan shouted, clumsily trying to load the SIG-Sauer. But his hands were slick with blood, and he dropped the clip.
“Burn it to the ground!” Baron O’Connor added loudly. “Use everything we have. It’s now or never!”
Rallying to the cry, the sec men began shooting at anything that moved inside the writhing flames. A window shattered on the third story and a stickie jumped out to land sprawling on a dead sec man. Waving a club, the mutie weakly tried to rise in spite of the fact that both of its legs were clearly broken. Caught reloading, Jak dropped the rapidfire and put two .357 Magnum rounds into its head, blowing out the back of its skull. Something moved in the sky, and a sprinkling of spears came flashing down from the roof. The wooden shafts hit the Metro, and another norm screamed into death.
Red light flickered into life from behind the infested building, and there could be heard the steady crashing of glass from the thrown Molotovs of the sec men. The ring of fire was expanding, slowly forming an impassable barrier around the nest.
Carrying two spears, a huge stickie tried to run through, and came out sheathed in red flames. Totally blind, the hooting creature raced across the street and smashed into the brick wall of a predark movie theater. The mutie stopped making noise and went still, but didn’t fall, the burning corpse stuck in place to the rough brickwork by its array of oozing suckers.
Covered with sweat and soot, Krysty and J.B. peppered the open windows to drive back a stickie trying to reach the side of the building. Then another window was smashed open and a stickie jumped onto the sill, then slapped a hand onto the outside wall. Swinging around, it pressed flat against the surface and began to scuttle around the corner of the building just as Krysty sent a long burst of 9 mm rounds at the thing, and missed. Then two arrows from the sec men on top of the war wag caught it in the back, and the mutie went limp, nailed in place by the wooden shafts.
Gouts of orange flame were licking out of the windows by now, and the ring of fire was completed on the ground. Charred bodies dotted the landscape, a mix of norms and stickies.
More spears came arching down from the roof. Easily avoiding those, the ville sec men continued their assault, shooting and reloading their blasters as if this were the end of the world. Changing angles, the catapult thumped again, and the roof exploded in flames. A stickie tried to jump to the next building, but only made it to a tilting telephone pole jutting from the sand. As the thing braced for another jump, Ryan finished reloading the Steyr and fired from the hip. Hit in midair, the stickie was thrown sideways and tumbled lifeless to land in the vacant lot.
Thunder rumbled ever louder from above, and the sec men’s horses were nickering in fear at the mounting fire. Spears and blasterfire peppered the night, the increasing wind carrying away the horrible reek of the cooking corpses.
“Let’s end this!” Ryan snarled, firing into the blaze.
“Bet your ass!” J.B. answered grimly, throwing a gren.
Flying through the smoke, the mil sphere went in through the smashed remains of a second-floor window. A heartbeat later, the implo gren activated. With a dull thump, a huge chunk of the predark building vanished, contracting to the size of a lump of coal. The ville sec men paused in their shooting at the sight of a thousand more stickies exposed along the bisected flooring. The hundred on the second floor had to have only been the guards. The third and fourth floors were a solid honeycomb of the weird cocoons. It was a mutie army!
“Hit ’em again!” the baron ordered as he advanced closer, firing his handcannon nonstop. His features were illuminated by the crimson light, making the one-armed giant appear to be a war god from predark mythology. Madness filled his eyes, but the blaster boomed in deadly accuracy.
Heartened by the sight of the baron taking the lead, the sec men rallied and double their assault on the burning structure. But then a low groan came from the building as the interior beams started to bend, stretching like warm taffy. The walls cracked, floors broke apart, and the upper levels of the office building collapsed onto the lower stories in a prolonged avalanche of crumbling masonry.
Anguished hooting could be heard from within, but nothing tried to escape, and as the blaze spread throughout the shuddering ruins, the cries slowed until there was only the loud crackling of the rising flames.
BY DAWN, the structure was reduced to a smoldering skeleton of twisted steel beams with a few sections of broken masonry at the cornerstone.
“Well, that should do it,” J.B. declared, sipping a cup of cold coffee sub. With his hat pushed back, a pale streak of clean skin was visible on the Armorer’s forehead. The rest of his face was almost black from the windblown soot.
“Yeah, they’re all chilled,” Ryan said, clumsily holstering the SIG-Sauer with his left hand.
Sitting on the curb across the street from the building, the one-eyed man had stayed through the night to watch the structure burn to the ground, then he and the baron had lead a recce into the cellar to make sure none of the stickies had escaped into the warren of sewers below the predark city. But the manhole covers had been undisturbed. Perhaps the stickies had been afraid to use the sewers because of the gators. Mebbe they didn’t know what the metal disks covered. It didn’t really make a difference. The new breed of stickies was gone, burned out of existence.
“Will you please stop moving?” Mildred ordered irritably, digging her fingers into his arm.
Snorting in reply, Ryan did as requested, coolly watching as the physician finished stitching shut the gash in his right forearm. As Mildred bit off the fishing line, Ryan tried not to grunt from the tug on his raw flesh. Pain was part of life; only the dead didn’t bitch.
“You were lucky,” Mildred said, tucking the supplies into her canvas med kit. “No tendons were damaged and no nerves cut. Rest for a couple of weeks, and you’ll be good as ever.”
“Wish we could say the same for everybody else,” Ryan said, trying to make a fist. His hand was weak, and the sown gash in his arm throbbed painfully at the attempt.
“Lots of folks dead,” Mildred said, forcing herself to stand. “But a lot more saved. Try to remember that.”
Gingerly flexing his fingers, Ryan only grunted in reply.
Without further comment, Mildred turned to walk away, looking for anybody else whose wounds she could mend. A couple of healers from the ville had arrived during the night. But there were a lot more bodies to bury than patients to fix. A lone sec man with a canvas bag was already moving among the corpses, gathering boots and blasters. The grisly work of staying alive.
“Nuke storm of a night, eh, lover?” Krysty asked, squatting on the nearby sidewalk. The MP-5 subgun hung at her side, the weapon dotted with ooze and dried blood. Her clothing was ripped in numerous locations, and her skin showed a lot of bruises, but the gentle waving of her hair told him that the woman was undamaged and healthy.
“Had better,” Ryan stated, placing the aching arm across his lap.
“I guess we took some losses,” Baron O’Connor said, walking closer. The big man was chewing a piece of jerky, the motion making the tattoo on his throat seem to fly. A scattergun was slung across his back to replace the Winchester. “I guess your healer was right. A lot more survived.”
“Depends on whether stickie, or not,” Jak drawled, casually stropping a knife on a piece of whetstone. Satisfied with the result, he tucked the blade up a sleeve of his jacket and pocketed the stone. “Better for us than them.”
“Yeah, don’t think we’ll be troubled much by muties anymore,” Stirling added, his left arm in a sling, the shirt caked with dried blood and crystalline ooze. “Even if some got away, we aced the bulk of them, and there’ll never be another nest like this rad pit again. We know what to look for now.”
“To do is to learn,” Doc agreed in his stentorian voice, watching the clouds move by overhead. The storm hadn’t broken the previous night, but the sky was still overcast. The rain, acid or not, had held off just long enough for the fire to do its job. Every now and then, the scholar almost believed in luck.
There came the sound of hoofbeats, and everybody jerked up their heads, hands going for weps. Then Taylor came into view, riding a chestnut mare. Everybody relaxed and several sec men waved in greeting as the man reined in his mount and walked her over to the baron.
“Trouble?” O’Connor asked, squinting hard. “Is my family safe?”
“Mount up!” Stirling bellowed, pulling a blaster.
Stopping whatever they were doing, the battered sec men grabbed blasters and raced for the Metro.
“No, no! Everything is fine, my lord!” Taylor hastily corrected. “Your kin and the ville are perfectly safe.”
“Then what the frag… At ease!” Stirling shouted. “False alarm!”
Grinding to a ragged halt, the exhausted sec men allowed themselves to slump, and most just sat on the sandy street wherever they stood.
“Then why are you here?” the baron demanded, scrutinizing his troops. The sec men were exhausted, but still willing to charge into battle. That was what came from ruling a ville by laws and not from whim.
“Saw the fighting was over and decided to come over. I was watching the fight through binocs,” Taylor explained, hitching up his gunbelt. “Thought you’d like to know that the ville was hit last night by a dozen stickies armed with torches. Four bunches of three.”
“They came in waves?” Ryan demanded suspiciously.
“Shit yeah. Damnedest thing. One had a torch, and the others carried spears, almost as if they were guards for the first.”
“Combat formation,” Stirling muttered, casting a backward glance at the destroyed nest. Shitfire, the ville was lucky they had managed to nightcreep the muties. This could have been a lot worse.
“Did they try for the armory again?” the baron asked, scratching at the end of his missing arm.
“Yes, they tried. But after the first attack, I had all of the black powder and predark brass moved to the safe room with the baroness. The next three times the nuke-suckers only found barrels of dirt—and us waiting in the shadows.” The scout grinned.
“Excellent news!” the baron boomed, slapping the sec man on the back. “Well done, indeed!”
The man grinned at the pounding. “Thank you, my lord. The way I figure, if they stopped after four tries, that should mean you got them all and can come home again.”
“We were coming back anyway,” Stirling replied gruffly, hawking and turning to spit into the sand. “We’re out of lead, powder, arrows and Molotovs. We’d have to start kicking the muties if we found any more.”
“Got you covered there,” Ryan said, patting the SIG-Sauer at his side.
“Well, you certainly have earned my personal thanks after the fight in the nest,” the baron said. “And what the frag was that thing your man threw? The gren that blew up half the building?”
“Just something I found in a wrecked APC,” the Armorer lied, forcing his hand away from the munitions bag at his side. “Sorry, that was the last one.”
“Is that what happened?” Taylor asked, sounding impressed. “Some predark mil bomb? Well, shit…” Turning to face the smoky ruins, the scout gave a low whistle. “Blind norad, I’m glad you’re on our side. And triple glad those mercies up north of the Zone didn’t get you.”
“Mercies?” the baron asked.
Just then, the corner of the burned-out building collapsed in a deafening crash, sending out a billowing cloud of soot and burning embers. Armed sec men rushed to the spot to check for stickies, but they found nothing.
“What mercies are you talking about?” Ryan demanded, massaging his forearm.
“Bunch of wild-ass coldhearts running just north of here,” Taylor replied, rubbing his unshaved face to the sound of sandpaper. “That’s what I was starting to say at the Citadel last night. When I was talking to the other villes about the muties, I heard about some cold-hearts going around chilling everybody with one eye.”
Wrapping a bandage around the head of a wounded sec man, Mildred jerked about at the remark. “Everybody?” she demanded, deliberately repeating the word. A feel of cold dread started to fill her stomach.
“Anybody and everybody,” Taylor agreed. “Men, women, children. It’s the damnedest thing.”
Slowly, the baron turned to look at the companions.
Saying nothing, Ryan fumbled with his gunbelt, attempting to buckle it on backward and put the SIG-Sauer on the left side where his undamaged hand could draw the wep.
“Those coldhearts are sending out a message, a blood warning to somebody,” Stirling stated, running stiff fingers through his dirty hair. “Keep out of the Zone, or die.”
A warning? No, it was an invitation, Ryan mentally corrected, tightening the gunbelt into place. And an unmistakable one at that. The only question was, who had sent it? The whitecoats from Operation Chronos? Some old enemy returned for vengeance?
“Tell us more about these strange deaths,” Doc urged. “Tell us everything.”
Just then, a blinding burst of sheet lightning crashed overhead, thunder rumbled and the dark clouds broke, pelting the predark ruins with a cold, hard rain.
The storm had finally arrived.