No way could Ryan estimate their speed over ground. But from the vibration and G-force he felt, he knew he was traveling faster than he ever had before.
After what seemed like about fifteen minutes, the wag slowed to a stop. Their bodies numbed by repeated impacts, the companions found it difficult to stand when they were prodded from the deck by the troopers. The rear door opened and they staggered in a teetering file out into daylight.
J.B. scowled at the panoramic expanse of metamorphic nukewaste before them. “Slake City,” he spit.
“Behold, the cloaca of the universe,” Doc added.
Ryan took in the rest of their surroundings. The old man was right about the nukeglass massif. It was a cosmic butthole. But by Deathlands standards, the otherworlders’ encampment clustered beside it was nothing short of magical. Everything was new and shiny. Nothing was cobbled together with rags and sticks and baling wire. There were towering black tractors and semitrailers, as well as other assorted all-terrain wags, and a fleet of attack gyroplanes. The living and storage quarters consisted of maybe twenty black domed structures, connected by sleek tubular walkways. Ryan’s rough count of the battlesuited troopers was around one hundred. He also noted the tall stacks of fifty-five-gallon steel drums, every one of which had Baron Jolt’s name stenciled on the side.
One of the troopers cut the straps on their ankles and thumbs while two others moved the body bags from the wag’s cargo bay to the ground outside. The four remaining troopers held the freed companions at blasterpoint.
“Pick up the corpses,” the captain ordered Ryan. “You killed them, you carry them.”
One of the troopers poked him hard in the side with his pulse rifle’s flash-hider. “Get a move on,” he said. “And keep going straight ahead until the captain tells you to stop.”
J.B. and Ryan hoisted one of the black plastic bags by the sewn-in handles at either end, and started walking in the direction the trooper had indicated. The other companions did the same.
They were force-marched with their burdens past a chumed-up area of dirt. In one corner of the rectangle, four troopers sprayed carniphage foam from their back tanks onto an already heaping mound of the stuff. Brown goo spread out in a shallow pool beneath the creamy bubbles.
As chewed up as the ground was, it was impossible to miss the litter of severed hands and feet, or the fact that they all had suckers on the palms, fingers and soles. One trooper kicked these grisly relics into a pile for foaming, while another made a neat stack of dull silver bracelets.
“Stickies,” Jak said as they passed by. “Lots stickies.”
Ryan grunted in agreement.
Stickies were a race of degenerate, crazed chillers with incredible strength. They used the suckers and the adhesive secretions in their hands and feet, and their rows of needle teeth to rip their victims apart. Some people believed they were accidental nuke-spawned mutations; others claimed they had been bred on purpose for hunting sport or sideshows. Regardless of their origin, stickies had first appeared in scattered wild bands decades after skydark. It was hard for Ryan to imagine how so many of them had been caught at once, unless the troopers had interrupted one of their breeding orgies.
When they were within fifty feet of the largest of the black domes, the companions were ordered to stop. “Put down the bodies there,” the captain said. “Sit beside them. Do not move.” The officer then walked across the compound and entered the dome through a bulkhead door.
As Ryan and the others sat there, waiting for they knew not what, a huge truck appeared over the rise in the thermoglass and rumbled down the road toward them. Its cargo box was heaped to overflowing with tons of gray-green glass. Before the loaded wag reached the encampment, another identical truck departed, its cargo box empty. On the road in front of the second wag were perhaps a dozen spindly humanoid figures, forced to walk ahead of the massive bumper.
Some of the stickies had survived the foam yard.
“I sure don’t like the looks of that,” Krysty said as they watched the stickies march up the slight grade. “There’s nothing in that direction but a bastard slow death.”