THE FIRE WAS BRIGHT, indicating that the muties had brought some dry wood with them. Ryan counted fourteen of them, mostly sitting around the blaze, two of them holding a struggling naked male norm between them. All of the stickies were also male, which meant a hunting or a killing party.
A corpse lay in the shadows close by the black hole of the front entrance. It wasn’t possible in the gloom to see what precisely had caused its death, but the screams had told their own story.
Ryan held up two fingers to the others. But Krysty shook her head, showing three fingers, then cutting one in half with her other hand.
That meant she saw two living and one dead.
Where was the other living prisoner? Then he spotted him. The movement of the stickies near the fire had hidden him for a moment. He was a tall man with a full beard, wrists tied behind him. The flickering of the firelight showed the livid marks on his skin, left by the hundreds of tiny voracious suckers that lined the hands and fingers of stickies, the bizarre mutation that had given them their feared name.
Ryan glanced at his chron, angling it toward the light, seeing that there was still thirty-five seconds to go before their synchronized attack.
In that moment of inattention he missed the brutal slaughter of the second of the norms.
He was thrown to the ground, and a burning branch thrust into his mouth. A piece of stick had been forced between his jaws to hold them apart.
There was a soft, muffled explosion and a burst of yellow-white fire from his parted lips. The whole body writhed as though possessed of demons, while the stickies all whooped and clapped their suckered hands together.
“Holy fuck!” Dean breathed, clutching the Uzi tighter, as if it were a lucky totem against the unholy evil that he’d just witnessed.
“Oh, the horror, the horror,” Doc said, his voice trembling with disgust and anger.
“Black powder poured down his throat.” Ryan’s finger tightened on the trigger of the SIG-Sauer. “Time to go and make Deathlands a little bit cleaner.”
“I’m for that,” Krysty whispered. The hand on the chron ticked to the three-minute mark.
“Now,” Ryan said.
“A MASSACRE OF THE MOST satisfactory kind,” Doc boomed, his smoking Le Mat in one hand, the unsheathed rapier in the other. The ancient Civil War blaster had taken out three of the stickies with its single shotgun round. And another had gone down to the needled point of the sword.
Dean had jumped in, the automatic Uzi machine-pistol braced at his hip, scattering all twenty rounds on full-auto, the 9 mm bullets toppling over the unsuspecting muties like fish in a barrel.
Ryan and Krysty had shot five between them, while J.B. and his assault party had taken out any survivors and the wounded.
Everyone had played their part-everyone except for Emma.
Now she stood shaking, Jak’s arm around her shoulders, her borrowed Browning Hi-Power still tucked into the belt around the black skirt, not just unfired-undrawn.
She was trembling like an aspen in a hurricane, eyes brimming with unshed tears, fingers knotting in front of her. If Jak hadn’t stepped in and put his arm around her, it seemed likely that the young woman would have fallen to the bloodied dirt.
“So much killing since we first met,” she stammered. “All my fault.”
“That’s crap,” Ryan said briskly, knowing there was little point in offering softness and sympathy to someone so close to the edge of a breakdown.
J.B. had quickly moved, light-footed, from stickie to stickie, checking that all were dead, using one of his pair of stilettos to slit open the throat of the only mutie that still showed any sign of life.
He went to kneel by the semiconscious prisoner, carefully slicing through the whipcord that bound his wrists and ankles together.
Ryan moved to join him, while the others gathered around Emma, whose golden eyes had rolled back in their sockets as she subsided into Jak’s arms.
The Armorer glanced back, seeing the tableau in the bright light of the stickies’ fire. “Passed out,” he said. “Never fired the blaster. Can’t walk without stopping all the time. What kind of a useless life did the girl have before we ran into her? Answer me that, Ryan. She’s a total liability. Like riding with a hoof-split burrow.”