“Let me come in with”
“Full up, Wolfram. Have to take your chance with your ex-slaves,” Ryan called.
The balloon was now ready to go, tugging at the single tethering line that held it to the ground. Wolfram dropped his large knife and gripped the plaited rope in his pudgy fingers, making a desperate effort to climb it. His huge weight and the pressure of the heated canopy was now pulling hard, and the buried, hooked grapnel suddenly popped free from the dirt, releasing the balloon.
The stickies were within fifty paces as the basket started to rise majestically into the air, and they began to yell out in sudden, crazed rage, seeing that it was carrying Gert Wolfram away with it. They broke into a stumbling, clumsy run, attempting to follow.
“Cut it,” Krysty said. “Cut him free, lover. Or the muties’ll grab hold and pull us back down. Butcher us.”
They were lifting with agonizing slowness, the grapnel trailing only a yard from the ground. Wolfram was screaming as he fought to climb the rope, his feet kicking for purchase. The scream had become an endless, high, thin sound, stretching on and on. His head was strained back, blood-filled eyes popping as he stared directly up into Ryan’s face.
The stickies were thirty paces away from him, all reaching up toward the dangling man as though they were worshiping a god from the sky.
“Goodbye,” Ryan said, reaching over and slicing the rope through with the honed edge of his panga.
Wolfram dropped like a vast sack of sand, hitting the ground, both ankles snapping with an audible crack, his knees popping a moment later.
Freed from his dragging weight, the balloon shot upward, rising quickly above the level of the highest surrounding branches. The basket was fifty feet up, the way clear of any threat from the stickies.
But they no longer had any sort of interest in Ryan and the others.
All of their attention was centered on the weeping, crawling creature that lay in the dirt, surrounded by them. As Ryan and the others watched in fascinated horror, the circle of stickies closed in over Wolfram.
The wind carried the balloon gently away toward the east, rising higher in the stillness.
Oddly the screaming didn’t stop until they were several miles away.
THE TORTURING AND KILLING of Gert Wolfram and the total destruction of the camp with the skillful use of fire took most of the rest of the day, and it was evening before the stickies, sated with their funning, finally drifted away in small groups into the surrounding woods.
It wasn’t until the next dawn that some dried bracken stirred across a tumbled bear’s den, about a bow shot from the main gates of the devastated fortress, and a pair of steel-sheathed eyes peered out from the shadows at the morning, judging that it was probably safe to move on once again.
To move away into the rest of Deathlands.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
The trip was uneventful.
The wind was light and brisk, and the hunting birds flew by with their beaks sheathed. Only once was there any threat, and that came around noon, from a raggedy man with a Kentucky musket who fired a single shot at the soaring balloon.
He was a fair shot at extreme range, and the spent ball pinged off the protective steel sec netting that covered the entire canopy. Nobody bothered to return the fire.
“COULDN’T BE BETTER,” the Armorer said, checking his tiny sextant and wrist compass. “Carrying us on a true reckoning toward the redoubt. This rate we should be there some time in late afternoon.”
THE LANDING WAS SOFT and gentle on a patch of verdant meadow, scaring away a herd of browsing deer.
Half an hour later they were all gathered in the control room, ready to go into the gateway chamber.
“Think the Magus got away?” Jak asked.
J.B. nodded. “Man like that, you’d have to see his corpse staring up at the sky before you believe he’s chilled. And even then”
Krysty linked her arm through Ryan’s, smiling up at him. “We came through again. Won. Wonder where we’ll all end up next.”