This pair was armed with blades, old knives honed thin as whipcord, tied to hilts of whittled wood two feet long, making them somewhere between a dagger and a spear.
They were panting with their desire to slaughter the norm that had wandered into their demesne, pushing and jostling each other, giving Ryan a slight edge over them.
But their attack was so frenzied that the one-eyed man had no chance to level the blaster and shoot them down. It was desperate work, dodging and weaving, trying to parry the lethal weapons of the ghoulies with the four-and-a-half-inch barrel of the SIG-Sauer.
The curtain of solid rain parted for a moment and a small bedraggled figure, dressed all in black, stumbled over the edge of the sidewalk and cannoned into the taller of the ghoulies, sending him sliding into his colleague.
It was the heartbeat of space that Ryan needed.
He snapped off a shot at the shorter of the muties, the bullet exploding into the center of the skinny, rag-covered chest, killing him instantly. The second one fought for balance in the wash of mud, like a failing skater, waving his half spear at Ryan, missing by a clear yard.
The SIG-Sauer barked once more and the ghoulie went down with the full-metal jacket reaming the brains from the inside of his angular skull.
Ryan glanced at Emma to thank her for coming to his rescue, but she had vanished.
The air was filled with a deafening roar, like a hundred war wags on full-throttle.
Like a theater curtain being lifted, the rain stopped, and Ryan stood frozen for a moment, unable to believe what he was seeing. The clouds were circling above his head and the noise was staggering. To his right he saw Jak holding Emma by one hand, a short-bladed throwing knife in the other, backing away in front of a stout ghoulie armed with a cleaver tied to a broomstick.
Doc had his Le Mat drawn, his nose bleeding, trying to blink the rain out of his pale blue eyes.
Krysty was to Ryan’s left, a dying ghoulie, shot through the lower abdomen, writhing bloodily at her feet. She had one arm around Dean, protecting the boy from another pair of sword-bearing muties.
J.B. had taken off his glasses, blinded by the rainstorm, and was holding the Uzi at his hip, three dead or dying muties ranged around him. Mildred was standing back-to-back with him, in a classic shootist’s stance, her Czech ZKR 551 in her right hand. There were five or six of the muties still on their feet. Everyone was soaking wet.
But the fight had suddenly taken the back burner to the force of nature that was bearing down on them. Scything along the wide avenue, keeping to its center, was a tornado.
The funneled top looked to be a mile or more wide, circling like a great whirlpool, while the fifty-foot-wide tail was skipping along, sucking up small trees and chunks of debris. As Ryan stared at it, he saw the whole wall of a house sucked into oblivion, hundreds of bricks scattering out of the side of the whirlwind funnel, like mortar shells.
“Get under cover!” he roared at the very top of his voice. But he could barely hear the words echoing inside his own head, and he knew that they would have been inaudible to the others in the group.
The heart of the storm was nearly on top of them, less than a hundred yards and closing like a runaway wag.
Ryan could do nothing for the others.
He had half a dozen beats of the heart to save himself.
Glancing quickly from left to right, he saw the half-open door to a three-story building. He sprinted for it, bolstering the blaster as he moved, shouldering through the door, splintering it off its hinges and crashing inside.
His feet were running on nothing, and he had only a nanosecond to realize that someone had taken out the entire floor for fires, and he was falling into the basement, landing not with a bang but with a whisper.
He slid inaudibly into deep mud, the consistency of molasses, cold and noisome. Even as he began to sink helplessly into the clinging ooze, Ryan heard the pounding thunder of the tornado, raging right on top of him.