It was the eyes that drew his attention first.
The first impression was that they were melting in their watery sockets, that they’d been removed and boiled, then carelessly replaced. The pupils were almost invisible, and the whites were a muddy pink. And there seemed to be no spark of life within them.
Ryan had once stared at the closest range into the dead eyes of a great white shark, but they had teemed with turbulent energy compared to these dull, blank orbs.
The skin of the face was puckered and soft, like a peach kept in a bowl of water. It was pitted with open sores like one of the worst rad-sick cases. The mouth was half-open in surprise, showing only the stumps of a few crooked teeth, set among gums so rotten they were almost black.
Ryan took all of this in, also absorbing the fact that the mutie had a drooping mustache but was wearing a woman’s flowered dress. There was no sign of a blaster, just a thin-bladed, bone-hilted knife stuck into the belt.
There was one other thing that slowed Ryan’s usual lightning reactions.
The mutie was holding a human leg, severed neatly below the knee, the flesh snow-white. In the center of the calf a ragged half-moon had been bitten out.
“Hey” The voice was deep, like a lowing steer. The hands, with filthy, jagged nails, dropped the leg and began to fumble for the knife.
But it was all done in ultraslow motion, as if the mutie were trapped underwater. Ryan was aware, out of the corner of his eye, that the other two muties had begun to react to the bewildered cry. As they started to turn, he realized that one was actually in the act of biting a chunk from a woman’s severed breast, while the other was hugging an armful of unidentifiable meat, the glint of bone showing amid the bloodless flesh.
Ryan had once seen a vid that showed trick photographyfilms speeded up, with blowers blooming and dying in half a minute and a bullet bursting a water-filled balloon; an elephant dying and then being devoured by millions of maggots. A huge jigsaw puzzle completed in a flash.
The pieces of this puzzle all came together at once in his mind.
The smell.
The drained human flesh.
Not a hospital.
“A morgue,” he whispered, putting a 9 mm round through the throat of the nearest of the ghouls. Switching his aim, he chilled the other two. One of the bullets burst the severed breast apart, splattering skin and gristle into the mutie’s face. Another hit it in the chest, sending it into a clumsy, staggering dance along the corridor, slapping the wall with its bloodied hand, leaving crimson smears on the concrete.
Two more rounds kicked the last of the ghouls into an untidy heap on the opposite side of the passage, rolling on its ruined face, bare feet kicking in the last spasms of death.
The handblaster’s boom would carry for miles through the vaulted sections of the redoubt.
Ryan shook his head and sighed. “Shit!” He quickly reloaded the SIG-Sauer, listening to try to hear if there were any more muties coming his way.
He could hear feet moving, combat boots clattering on stone, heading toward him.
But it didn’t sound like an army of muties. More like a single sec man. Ryan eased back into the side corridor, stepping carefully over the corpse, his own boots slipping in the sticky lake of spilled blood from the torn throat.
Whoever came along would see the bodies, but they might figure the killer had moved on. And then Ryan could backshoot him from cover. Best and safest way of doing the job.
J.B. RAN AS QUIETLY as he could toward the shooting, though he was aware of the steel tips on heel and toe of his boots clattering and echoing ahead and around him. Part of him knew that he was going to be too late.
One way or another.
Ryan would have won the brief firefightand the Armorer hadn’t caught the sound of any other blasteror he would already be chilled.
He saw the bodies, one of them still scraping his bare feet on the stone in the insensate residual movements of the nearly dead, lying bloodily about thirty yards ahead of him.