As the stickies turned to run, he followed them through the gap, his boots slipping on the slick flesh and spilled guts. The stickies traction was even worse than his. They were used to relying on their suckers, and the suckers did them no good on the wet floor. They squealed as their feet and hands slid on the edges of the broken glass and were cut to pieces.
Ryan gained on them easily. Running right up their backs, he chopped their legs out from under them. He dropped three more like that before he stopped, panting. On his way back to Krysty, he finished off the badly wounded stickies with single blows to the neck.
It was only after he had crawled through the gap that he realized he was covered with blood. It dripped down his arms and face and from the tips of his hair.
“How many did you chill?” Krysty asked.
“Don’t know for sure,” he said. He looked down the tunnel, heaped with pale bodies and body parts, with tangled, twitching wrecks. Ryan sagged against the wall, breathing hard. “Never saw so many of the bastards in such a small space.”
After a moment or two, he straightened and said, “Dump the ore out of your bag.”
“Why?”
“Just do it.”
Ryan set aside the Unistrut sword and tipped his bag full of ore onto the floor. Then he picked up one of the bald, severed heads by its eye sockets and stuffed it in the bag.
“Ryan?” Krysty said. “Are you all right?”
“Put them in the bag,” Ryan told her. “Get as many in as you can and put them in the bag.”
Because the stickie heads were lighter than the ore, and because the bags stretched somewhat, they could pack a lot inside and still carry it. Ryan’s sack topped out at ten.
“Okay, now what?” Krysty said.
“Take them back to the cart.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You will.”
Ryan was already moving, dragging the bag behind him, his glass sword in his other hand.
When he exited the crevice and started toward J.B. and Dean, the boy jumped up and shouted, “Dad, are you all right?”
“Fine,” Ryan said. “Don’t worry. It’s not my blood. It’s theirs.”
With that he poured the heads into the sledge.
The other slaves standing cart guard heard the series of hollow thuds and ventured close enough for a look. Their jaws dropped.
“I’ll be nuked!” the Armorer exclaimed.
Then Krysty stepped up and did the same thing, tipping her overstuffed bag into the cart.
Thunk-a-thunk-a-thunk.
Blood smeared faces, gaping needle toothed jaws, blank eyes looked up from the bottom of the box.
“Ryan, what’s going on?” J.B. asked. He stared at the bloody and flesh fouled nukeglass blade. “And what the hell is that?”
“We’ll be back in a minute,” Ryan said. “Come on, Krysty.”
They made two more trips to the kill site. Ryan used the Unistrut sword to chop the heads off the stickies who had died of other wounds. They loaded their bags with grisly trophies. When they reappeared the second time, the slaves left their own sledges and gathered around to watch the dumping. The third time, they cheered as heads rolled.
And they kept on cheering. The noise they made in the tunnel was tremendous.
“I counted fifty-four, Dad,” Dean said.
“That’s a shitload of heads,” J.B. commented. “What are you gonna do with them, Ryan?”
“Cash them in, of course.”
Ryan looked over at Gabhart, who lay curled on his side on the floor, unconscious and barely breathing. “Help me get the colonel in the cart, then let’s push it into the fresh air.”
The other slaves deserted their posts to follow.
Ryan, J.B., Krysty and Dean shoved the sledge back to the main tunnel’s fork, past the pair of troopers, who didn’t notice anything was wrong until they saw the mob following. Then it was too late to intervene.
As they pulled the sledge out of the mine and onto the flat, the mob spilled out, as well, and spread out over the dimpled ground, passing the word that something exciting was about to happen.
Ryan and the others pushed their cart past the others waiting to be unloaded, right up to the head of the line. No one complained. They glanced at the cargo, grinned and waved them on.