The Armorer nodded. “Sure will. Nothing attracts a stickie more than a big bang. Unless it’s two big bangs.”
The air was filled with the cloying, metallic stench of spilled blood.
Ryan leveled the automatic at the single unharmed mutie, hesitating with his finger taut on the trigger, shaking his head as the stunned creature slowly turned his face and stared blankly at him.
“Do it,” J.B. urged. “One more or less doesn’t make a difference.”
“Does to me.” Ryan sighed, easing down on the hammer and holstering the blaster again. “No, compadre. If the gods want this one to live, then we’ll go with that.”
J.B. coughed, slapping dust from his clothes with his fedora. “If that’s the way you want it”
Ryan turned and picked his way delicately among the raggled corpses, stepping past the dead and the dying and the critically wounded stickies, pausing to knock away a suckered hand that reached up toward him.
He brushed against the shocked, seminaked figure that stood motionless in the center of the carnage, wary as the lidless, watery pink eyes moved to follow him. But the mutie made no attempt to stop Ryan and the Armorer from leaving the blood-sodden, cratered patch of forest.
Ryan’s ears were still ringing from the force of the twin explosions, and he pressed his hands against them. He was also dappled with mutie blood, the smell of it strong.
J.B. followed him, taking care not to walk anywhere near the edge of the trail. They headed north, almost side by side, Ryan slightly in the lead.
“Can’t help wondering whether there’s a bigger gang of muties roaming around the woods,” Ryan said. “They have to be runners from the fortress of Wolfram and the Magus.”
“Guess so. They’ll” J.B. stopped in midsentence, swinging around with the Uzi at his hip, opening up with a short burst of about a dozen rounds.
Ryan dropped into the gunfighter’s crouch, sideways on, the SIG-Sauer springing into his hand, seeing immediately that it wasn’t needed.
The last of the stickies had broken free from his trance and come after them, the faint padding sound of his bare, suckered feet in the damp earth drowned out by the moaning and crying from behind them.
He had run at them, hands held high, as though he were surrendering, but the voracious teeth glistened amid the circles of suckers. His mouth was wide open, baring the pointed, filed-down teeth.
He was so pale that he was like a living creature carved from a wind-washed bone, twisted and ugly, his scabbed face, distorted with insensate rage at the two norms.
J.B. had spotted him from the corner of his eye and swung around, firing the burst of 9 mm full-metal-jacket rounds from the Uzi at his hip. The stream of lead cut the mutie almost in two, all the bullets hitting below the ribs, tumbling and rending through the soft intestines of the stomach, smashing the spine, exiting into the forest behind the creature.
He spun and fell, suckered hands pressed to torn flesh, going down and lying still in the trail.
“Nice,” Ryan said.
They walked together north, toward the fortress of Wolfram and the Magus, leaving behind the place of massive death and still, bloody corpses.
KRYSTY AND THE OTHERS were escorted back to their cells after breakfast, with the bright dawn promising a fresh day, the sun climbing cheerfully from the eastern sky. The Magus accompanied them, leaving his fat companion to pick alone at the remains of the meal.
He watched as Jak and Doc were locked away first, standing a little distance from the sec men as Krysty and Mildred walked into their barred room.
“Enjoy your time,” he said. “Soon Ryan and John Dix will be making their attempt to rescue you.”
“Thought you reckoned the stickies might have gotten them,” Mildred said, pausing in the doorway. “You changed your mind already?”
The slitted mouth opened in a parody of a smile. “Never underestimate your enemy.”
“Specially when it’s Ryan Cawdor and J. B. Dix, coming after you,” Krysty added.
Doc’s face appeared at the slatted window of his hut. “Getting a chill around the heart, Magus?”