The horde advanced, leaving chilled stickies scattered around, but not enough to make much of a dent in their number.
The Amazons were discovering how handblasters could be excellent close fighting weapons, but relatively ineffective at longer distances. The lack of accuracy over the greater distance was telling now. As the stickies got closer, more of the women’s shots were hitting home fatally, but the fact that the stickies had been able to get so close in the first instance meant that there were too many to chill with blasters alone.
Jak, Dean, Mildred and Krysty also had that problem. The albino’s .357 Magnum Colt Python was an exceptionally powerful handblaster, but even he couldn’t reload and fire quickly enough to chill all the advancing enemy. Dean’s Browning Hi-Power, Mildred’s ZKR and Krysty’s .38-caliber Smith & Wesson were good blasters, and highly accurate, but couldn’t cope with the sheer bulk of the enemy—especially an enemy that couldn’t easily be stopped except by a chill shot.
Ryan and J.B. were faring better. The Armorer had pushed his Uzi to one side and hauled out the M-4000, letting fly with several charges of the viciously barbed metal flechettes that he used in his shot. The hot metal had spread over a relatively wide area, aimed at head height, and had taken out several stickies in one shot by spreading some splattered brain around the plain. Ryan had reverted to his SIG-Sauer, having realized that he needed to create a little more damage in the mutie ranks than the Steyr would allow him. The rifle was extremely accurate, and he had a good chill rate with it, but he felt compelled to try to make more of a dent in the vast numbers of the opposition.
Margia tried to wipe out a section of the horde on her side of the battlefield with a gren. A shrapnel gren of a vintage long predark, she pitched it into an area where there seemed to be a high concentration of the muties. It exploded with a muffled whomp, spreading earth from the large gouge it created in the otherwise flat plain. It took out a couple of stickies, and the blond armorer felt pleased to see so many go down…not so pleased a few seconds later, when she saw them start to drag themselves to their feet and continue—or, in the case of those whose legs were useless, just drag themselves onward.
Gloria and Jak stood back to back, picking off the stickies with single shots that inflicted maximum damage while still preserving as much ammo as was possible.
“Hand-to-hand soon,” Jak murmured. “Too close to blast all.”
Gloria cast him a glance over her shoulder. She smiled lopsidedly, her strong white teeth almost feral. Her piercing blue eyes shone wildly with the heat of battle.
“Suits me, babe,” she answered him. “They’ll have to go a long, long fucking way to get the best of us, right?”
Jak spared himself a grin, cold against the white of his skin. “Chill them before get that far.”
The warrior queen holstered her blaster and unsheathed her panga in one smooth motion, left hand replacing the blaster while the right pulled the blade from her thigh. Stepping away from the albino, she raised her head high and let out a series of piercing whistles that formed a signal, before screaming loudly, tossing her fiery mane back in the heat and wind of battle.
For a moment, it was almost as if that scream had created an oasis of silence and calm around it. To Jak, holstering the Python and palming a knife for each hand, it seemed for just a fraction of a second that the whole world had been stopped by that scream. There was a frozen moment that heralded a turning point, and the next stage of the battle.
And then it passed. The silence—if it had ever been there—was broken by the yells and screams of the Amazons as they all followed their queen, holstering their blasters and drawing their blades.
“Dark night, this is going to be bloody,” J.B. murmured to himself, safely storing his blasters before unsheathing his Tekna knife. The Armorer ran a practiced eye over the encroaching horde of stickies as the words escaped his lips. If their numbers were consistent on all sides, then there were three or four of them for each member of the tribe and the companions.