The others clawed over them to get to Ryan.
It was all eyes and bared teeth for as far as he could see.
Ryan looped the jagged sword back and forth, driving with his legs and hips, grunting with the effort of each blow. They were coming too fast, from too many angles, so there wasn’t time to aim for their necks. He just hit them wherever he could, across faces, across chests.
Contact was all he was after.
The nukeglass sword did the rest.
Its splayed teeth opened gaping trenches in flesh and bone. Wherever they touched, devastating wounds appeared. Bowels spilled in slimy coils from half split torsos. Jaws were torn off whole along with tongues and teeth.
And still they came.
The ceiling, walls and the floor of the tunnel ran slick with stickie blood. Ryan’s boots began to slip and slide in the viscous stuff. It had the same effect on the stickies—their suckers couldn’t get firm holds on walls and ceiling.
The more blood that was spilled, the wilder they got. Though they could no longer run along the ceiling and walls, they threw themselves at him from the floor, leaping over the corpses of their brethren.
Ryan shut out the fatigue in his arms and shoulders, and kept the nukeglass sword windmilling, making his lower body do most of the work, driving all of his two hundred pounds into each strike.
Though he clobbered them, they wouldn’t stop.
Their bodies piled up, clogging the crevice, forcing Ryan to retreat to clear his swing. The heap of dead stickies worked in his favor, by effectively narrowing the corridor. Only by clawing over the remains of their fellows could they come at him through the gap, one at a time. They fought one another to clear the opening, to meet death upon the edge of his gruesome sword.
“Ryan!” Krysty cried desperately.
He glanced over his shoulder and saw a hairless mutie perched on her back, its sucker fist caught in her hair, its needle teeth bared to bite the side of her lovely throat. Spinning, Ryan angled the glass blade across the stickie’s neck. The body jolted, and the head tumbled off the ragged stump, which spewed gore to the ceiling.
The dead hand was still caught in her hair. The corpse’s body weight pulled her backward.
Ryan couldn’t bear the sight of it touching her. Growling a curse, he rolled his forearms, whipping the sword over, slashing its hacksaw teeth against the wrist joint. Arm and hand separated with a snick. The spasmodically clutching ringers released.
When he whirled back, he faced a pair of onrushing stickies who had cleared the gap in the corpses. They were already too close for him to swing the ax. He sidestepped their frantic, arm waving charge and used the tip of the business end of the Unistrut like a lance, jamming it through the needle teeth and into the mouth of the creature on the right. In the same motion, he ripped the sword down and out, splitting tongue, jawbone and throat down to the collarbone. The other stickie’s outstretched fingers brushed his face, but either it was going too fast, or his face was too bloody for the suckers to attach.
As it moved past him, sliding on the floor, Krysty stepped up and nailed it with a full-power whack of her pickax. The combination of her speed and its momentum made for deep penetration. The stickie’s forehead dimpled in around the point of the ax, and Krysty jerked it off its feet and onto its back. She stomped the ax handle, freeing the point by popping up a divot of the stickie’s skull.
Because the flow of stickies had slowed to a trickle, Ryan was able to take his time. He measured his sword strokes, timing them so necks and sawblade made contact at the maximum power point of his swing. Detached heads careened off the walls, bouncing into the dark.
Then the rush stopped altogether.
From atop the high pile of bodies, dolls’ eyes in bald heads and flabby faces stared at him. As if suddenly it had dawned on them that he was royally kicking their asses.