Mildred smiled. “Right on, boy. I reckon you’d find just about every disease ever invented in this place, and quite a few others beside.”
“Wind is rising, my friends.” Doc’s mane of silvery hair was blowing around his face.
“Tornado,” Emma stated, her black skirt tugging at her ankles. “Getting close. No way of avoiding it now. We’re in way too deep.”
“Could be.” Ryan blinked as dust peppered them from the wind swirling around the ravaged buildings.
“Shelter.” The Armorer took Mildred by the hand. “Come on, now.”
The street ahead of them looked like it had been a mix of stores and apartment houses. Many of the buildings lacked roofs, and there wasn’t a single pane of glass for miles around. But walls still stood firm against the elements.
Ryan led them quickly along, avoiding pits of thick mud that looked like they could easily have been fifty feet deep. Rats, as big as dogs, scattered at their coming, some of the bolder ones stopping and going up on their back paws as if they were prepared to do battle.
Dean drew his big handblaster and started to level it at a particularly large, verminous brute with scarred flanks. But Ryan warned him to put the weapon away.
“You don’t know what’s living in this place,” he said.
“Ghoulies?” Dean looked around in the deepening gloom. “Good place for them.”
Krysty held up a hand. “Got a strong feeing about this place,” she said. “Some things walking here, and they aren’t walking alone. You feel them, Emma?”
The young woman shook her head. “Sorry, but I’m not getting anything right now.”
Jak suddenly pointed to their left. A tall, skinny body lay sprawled, half in and half out of a doorway. It didn’t look like it had been there very long. It was barefoot and shirtless, but still had on ragged pants.
They moved a little closer, everyone now with blasters drawn and ready. The chest had been ripped open, and all of the organs had been torn out. The face had been stripped of flesh, leaving only the smeared white of the skull. Something had sliced the throat open from ear to ear.
“Look at the poor bastard’s hair,” J.B. said. “Remember the Lincoln Inn?”
The corpse had dyed hair-half blue and half green.
“I told him,” Emma said in a small sad voice. “Told him what would happen.” Her words were almost drowned out by the wind that was surging to a full gale.
The roaring sounds also covered the noise of the approach of a party of a dozen ghoulies, hiding them from Ryan and the others until they were almost on top of them.
Jak was quickest, spinning and tossing one of his throwing knives straight to the throat of the nearest mutie, sending it staggering back with a gurgling cry of shock and pain.
Ryan squeezed the trigger on the 9 mm SIG-Sauer as he turned, but his foot slipped in the slimy dirt, and the bullet went wide. Next moment he was fighting for his life against two of the ghoulies. He was vaguely aware of shooting and screams and shouts, bodies jostling against one another.
But the wind had become a hurricane, and it had started to rain, pounding down like steel rods, blanking out visibility and isolating every fighter in a howling world of his or her own.
Ryan shook his head, dashing water from his good eye. The action was so close that he could only use the pound and a half of steel as a clumsy club, swinging it to try to buy himself a little space in the soaking, deafening maelstrom.
The ghoulies were both male, with the characteristic pallid skin of their type, displaying the strange bluish sheen that was said to glow in total darkness. They had enlarged eyes, looking like someone was trying to push them out from inside the sockets. Their mouths were open, showing the filed teeth and reptilian tongue that typified the ghoulie, creatures who dwelled in the darkest corners of city ruins, waiting to rend and chill.
Once they’d made their kill, they would stash the corpse somewhere until it had reached the right degree of stinking decay that they so loved.