“Who’s the tall, skinny geezer?” Mildred said as the redistribution of wealth began.
“His name is Huth,” Doc said. “He wants to join our efforts to fill the sledge.”
Mildred shrugged. “The more the merrier.”
Chapter Thirteen
“What are you doing!” Krysty cried in disbelief. “We’ve got stickies all around us!”
Ryan stopped hacking at the wall with his hand ax.
“Is it the spores?” she said. “Ryan, are you seeing things?”
“Watch for the stickies,” he told her. “If they rush us before I’m done, I need you to keep them off me.”
With that, he resumed his wild attack on the nukeglass, making dust and splinters fly. He used the pointed end of his ax to chip out a wide, crusty hole around the buried part of the piece of Unistrut. He hadn’t lost his mind. He had a plan. In a close quarters fight against dozens of stickies, he knew that the axes would be next to useless—they had too short a range. Clonking the muties on their bald, flabby heads meant letting them get close. Getting close to a stickie’s suckers meant big trouble.
He needed something longer, something that would allow him to take advantage of his height, weight and strength.
With a last whack he cracked loose the U-channel. All five feet of it tumbled to the floor. At the end he’d just freed was a big, oblong clump of glass. Kneeling, he rested the clump on the floor and used the point of his ax head to clip off the excess material. He cleaned the nukeglass from that end of the Unistrut, scraping it right down to the metal. This gave him an all steel handle, two feet long.
The business end of the new tool was three feet of green glass splayed teeth, some huge, some small— all razor sharp.
Smaller was better.
The weapon’s edge had to be able to deliver a blow without losing its teeth. Ryan knew that the closer the teeth points were to the channel opening, the less likely they would be to snap off.
The kissing sounds from the darkness were a lot louder now.
There was no time for fine work.
Using the flat end of the ax head, he sprawled off the longest points of glass in quick, powerful strokes that left them shorter, but just as wickedly sharp.
“They’re coming!” Krysty cried over her shoulder. “I can see their eyes! Ryan, there are too many of them!”
He snatched some scraps of the dead man’s clothes from the floor and hurriedly wrapped the cloth around the makeshift handle to protect his hands from any spurs of glass he might have missed.
“Get back!” Ryan shouted.
Krysty’s eyes widened at what he held.
A yard of sawtooth horror.
She ducked under his left arm and got behind him.
When Ryan saw all those sets of eyes bouncing down the shaft toward him, he said, “Fireblast!”
Stickies moved at tremendous speeds in short bursts; they also defied the laws of gravity. With the suckers on their hands and feet, they ran upside down along the ceiling and sideways along the walls.
Ryan closed his mind to the impossibility of the task. Deal with them one at a time, he told himself. One stroke at a time.
The narrow walls of the tunnel would only permit a looping, overhead, figure eight slash. That he had freed a terrible weapon was evident when the first stickie launched itself at him.
With a screaming hiss, he brought the blade down at the join of hairless head and scrawny neck. At impact, there was a crunch, then the head leaped free and caromed off the side wall. Blood fountained from the neck stump as the body jittered wildly at his feet.
It wasn’t a clean slice.
Chunks of wet flesh and shards of bone torn out by the sawteeth were flung against the ceiling as Ryan rolled his wrists, swinging the edge over in a tight arc. The backslash caught the next stickie as it leaped from the wall on his left. The rows of nested spikes ripped into the creature’s exposed midsection, gutting it in an eye blink from groin to breastbone. The force of the blow sent the body spinning back into those who ran behind, knocking two of them flat.