Well, they’d had worse odds before now, although perhaps not with an enemy that refused so stubbornly to lie down and die.
The hand-to-hand battle began in earnest as the first wave of muties reached the advancing Amazons, who moved forward to meet their foe, gaining momentum in their movement for the first strike.
First blood went to Tammy. A stickie that had somehow made it through the onslaught without even picking up a clotting scratch was upon her, waving a sharpened tree limb that formed a pointed stake in one fist, the suckered fingers of its free hand reaching for her throat. She could feel its hot, fetid breath as it came within arm’s length of her.
The young warrior gave the boiling fear in the pit of her stomach no thought, but merely sidestepped the charge and brought her blade across the stomach of the mutie as it lay open to attack. She knew from observation that a mere wound would be little use, so she drove the blade as deep as it would go and sliced across, splitting the stickie’s abdomen in twain and spilling its intestines onto the plain. They hit the grass in a steaming, twirling mass. Tammy pulled her hand, hot and red with the stickie’s viscera, from out of its stomach and followed her initial thrust with a slash across the throat The blood slick blade sliced through the soft, soapy flesh, splintering the soft bone, mashing the bone, flesh and tendon into a pulp that caught on the razor honed blade, tangling as it reached the spinal column.
The young warrior knew the only safe way to insure the chill was to sever the head or sever an internal organ. With a rebel yell that rang through the air, she exerted all the power of her young muscles, the tendons standing out on her knife arm as she held the stickie back by the shoulder with her free hand.
The mutie’s spinal column was made of bone as pliable and soft as the rest of its neck and throat, and with one mighty heave the knife scored through it, severing the nervous system and taking its head off— if not cleanly, at least completely.
With a whoop, Tammy flashed the blade toward the next attacker, stickie blood showering off the end, while the corpse of her first chill slid harmlessly to the ground.
All around, there were similar scenes. Doc hacked and slashed with the swordstick, eschewing its usual function as a rapier-like blade in order to inflict the maximum damage. Unlike the pangas and machetes used by those around him, Doc’s blade was of the finest tempered Toledo steel, and hadn’t been manufactured to hack and slash. Rather, it was a weapon of accuracy.
But not here. A simple wound that would disable or cause enough blood loss to kill a normal human being or stickie wouldn’t be effective on these genetically altered muties. So Doc had to forego his instincts and use the blade in a bludgeoning manner quite unlike that for which it had been designed.
And he was doing pretty well. His eyes glazed over as the blood of his enemies splashed on him, his white hair flying in the momentum of his movement, the tails of his frock coat whirling behind him. In reality he was in the Deathlands, with altered muties falling before him. But in the mind ravaged by time trawling and torture, unbalanced by the unimaginable experience of having existed across a period of three centuries, Doc was fighting battles that would take place after he should have died, and yet had taken place years before he was alive. The stickies in front of his eyes became Native Americans falling before the U.S. cavalry, became British soldiers falling beneath the pioneers, became the Vietcong falling beneath the Green Berets, became the Japanese falling beneath the U.S. Marine in the second of the three world wars, became Saxons falling before Vikings in the faraway lands that had birthed his ancestors, became the first Bronze and Iron Age tribes falling beneath each other’s blows in the quest for better land, in the quest for survival.
In the ravages of his mind, Doc became all men, in all history, fighting for survival. There was no here and now anymore, only the instant where one man faced another knowing that it was kill or be killed.