James Axler – Cold Asylum

Then another.

And another.

Soon it became a roar of inarticulate hatred of this intruder into their world.

Doc knew that this was the end.

There was no Ryan or John Barrymore Dix to come to his rescue with blasters blazing.

He threw the ebony stick behind him and fumbled with his left hand, ignoring the ring of brutish loathing that was beginning, surprisingly slowly, to close in around him. The Le Mat seemed stuck, but he eventually freed it, cocking the hammer over the single, central .63-caliber shotgun round, aware that there would be no time to shift it to utilize the nine .36s the gun also fired.

One roaring explosion that would take out several of the pressing muties, then his dancing blade for a few more seconds. Then they would overwhelm him.

“I pray for a swift passing, Lord,” he whispered.

He stepped carefully over the body, back into the elevator. If only there had been a moment’s warning; he could have pressed the button to close the doors and been safe.

Now it was too late. They filled the doorway, grunting and jostling one another, waving their knives at him.

“Watch the manner of a gentleman’s passing,” he shouted.

And pulled the trigger.

Chapter Twelve

Ryan had never met any muties quite like those that infested the redoubt.

He’d come across forms of cannibalism before. Hell, everyone in Deathlands knew someone who knew about it. Krysty had once told him stories about something called the Donner Party, way back in the old 1800s. Somewhere up in the high Sierras, trapped in winter. Nothing at all to eat except each other.

There were tales of stickies that ate human flesh, roasting it over open barbecues.

Occasional whispers of a group of inbred “cannies,” way up in the Shens or hidden deep in the festering depths of the bayou country.

But nothing nothing on this kind of scale.

The threatening gang of thirty or forty muties that were confronting J.B. and Mildred all seemed to have bits of drained corpses about them.

Krysty, Dean and Michael had barely walked out of the elevator to greet Ryan when they heard a shout from the Armorer, sounding like he was only about fifty or so yards away, up one of the shadowed tunnels.

“Got us a lot of company, Ryan!”

The other odd thing about this particular tribe of grossly mutated creatures was their slowness.

Ryan had seen stickies, crazies, duties and swampies, most of them with a feral hatred of norms that was made manifest by vicious and often cunning attacks.

Trader’s rule of thumb on dealing with muties had been implacably ruthless, and based on a lifetime of frontier experiences with the breed.

“Chill them. Chill them today and tomorrow. Chill them fast and chill them good.”

But there was something about these brutish, ponderous entities that was thoroughly disgusting and malevolent. Yet somehow too stupid to be a heart-stopping menace.

The six friends stood together in a narrow line of resistance, facing the mob.

All with blasters drawn.

At first Ryan couldn’t catch what was being shouted at them, the words blurred and overlapping. It was a string of what had to be threats or insults, but there was no attempt to unite the bedlam of cries into a chorus.

He glanced down at his son. “You got sharper ears than me, Dean.”

“Calling us fucking outlanders, I think.” A moment’s pause. “Why don’t we chill them all, Dad?”

“Don’t see a blaster among them.”

He’d checked them out with a single, raking glancefar more men than women; usual ragged clothes, mainly barefoot; cleavers, axes, homemade spears and knives with crude wooden hilts, bound with strips of sinew.

And the extraordinary amount of human flesh. Most had laid down their burdens, and Ryan could see flayed skulls and hunks of ribs with splintered ends of bone protruding from white flesh. One of the muties had shaped up to throw the spear he held in his right hand, but his coordination was exceedingly fallible and he finished by chucking a pair of feet, joined by a cord inserted through the ankle bones.

Apart from the animallike bellowing and the waving of their blades, the line of muties was notably reluctant to advance toward the blasters.