Nothing much seemed to be happening, and he readied himself to sleep again, trying to push back the prickling unease that had raised the short hairs at his nape.
He looked out of the windshield, wiping the driver’s window, clearing away the cold condensation. The wag jerked a little, almost floating, with a recurrence of the same odd, insecure feeling of the wheels losing grip. And one side tilted slightly. Ryan peered out again, seeing that the 4×4 had definitely moved a good yard or more toward the drop on the right, away from the water-streaked face of the cliff on his side.
Even the worst wind and rain wouldn’t do that to a massive six-seater like the 4x4unless the whole highway was actually crumbling under them.
He was leaning to the right, trying to puzzle out what was going on, when there was a particularly savage flash of lightning that burned into his retina, the thunder pounding simultaneously at his hearing.
And he glimpsed something from the corner of his good eye, something low down, barely showing above the roll bar, something so hideous and grotesque that he knew that it had to have been a trick of the storm.
It was a face, tiny and distorted, like a rubber carnival mask, with every feature stretched, warped and scarred. The tiny eyes burned toward him, red in the chem lightning. The mutie had matted, straggling hair like coils of steel wire, a snuffling hole where the nose should have been and a slit of a mouth with a triple row of serrated teeth showing over the curved lips.
It was holding the roll bar with its long horned claws curling over, actually scratching away the paint as Ryan watched, peeling it away in strips that revealed the brightness of bare metal.
He blinked in a moment of blackness, seeing the ghastly afterimage seared into his vision, waiting for another flash of lightning, which came a couple of seconds later.
The road in front of the wag was empty, and the strange movement had ceased.
“Fireblast! Hey, wake up, friends. Looks like we got some company.”
Simultaneously a jagged rock the size of a man’s fist flew from the blackness and starred the middle window on the left side of the wag. But Elmore and Albert hadn’t stinted on their pride and joy, and had used good-quality sec glass. So the window crazed, but held firm, unbroken.
“What?” J.B. said, holding the Uzi, peering into the teeming darkness, unable to see any kind of target.
“Muties,” Ryan ducked as another rock thudded into the side door panel. “Spotted one. Not like anything I ever saw before. Kind of a bit like swampies but smaller.”
“Could be what they call muddies. Heard of them. Tiny, with faces like living evil. Never saw them, but I recall Trader said he’d come across them a couple of times in bayou regions.”
The 4×4 was ringing as the attack intensified, and it suddenly lifted on one side and shifted sideways toward the invisible drop.
“Underneath us,” Jak yelled.
There was a certain security in the partly armored wag, but it was a false safety. It wouldn’t take long to tip the whole vehicle over the side. And the six occupants could easily be trapped and helpless.
Ryan made the decision. “Out and chill them,” he shouted, flicking the sec lock and diving through the open door into the deafening, blinding storm. He landed awkwardly in the soft torrent of slippery mud, rolling over on his hip and shoulder, coming up into a crouch about a dozen feet from the wag, close to the steep cliff.
The lightning gave plenty of illumination to one of the most macabre sights that Ryan had ever seen.
The sodden earth all around the wag was a mass of scurrying figures, just like the one he’d glimpsed hanging on the roll bar at the front of the 4×4.
They were less than four feet tall, most of them naked, covered in dank, thick hair, with the most hideous faces, gibbering and gesticulating toward him with their clawed hands.
One of them was wearing a strange silver disk around its thick little neck, which caught the multicolored flashes of lightning in a bizarre way.