He nodded. It was doing something to his mind, too.
Jak was waiting for them on the far side of the ring of devastation. He seemed unusually agitated and impatient to move on.
“How many do you figure we’re tracking?” Ryan asked him.
“Thousands,” Jak replied, brushing strands of the lank, shoulder-length, white hair from his face.
“Thousands?”
“Yeah.”
“Dark night, a hundred is the biggest colony I’ve ever come across,” J.B. said. “And that was deep in the heavily nuked zone.”
“This isn’t a colony, IB.,** Ryan said “This is an army.”
There was no denying the truth of his words. In the depopulated, largely disarmed, postnukecaust world, it didn’t take many troops to make a formidable force. Wars had been fought-and won-with a few dozen mercies or sec men carrying blasters; with much less, an enterprising baron could take slaves and extort tribute from a wide area.
“Fielding an army takes organization,” Ryan went on, “and planning. Something stickies haven’t shown us before. Every other time we’ve run into a large group of them outside the nuke zones, they’ve always been working under a coldheart human or a nonstickie mutant, someone intelligent enough to plan battle strategy.”
“So you think that’s what’s happening here?” Krysty said.
“Mebbe.”
“Some say stickies are norms. Genes just rad melted,” Jak said.
“Another popular hypothesis,” Doc added, “is that their perverse physiology is the result of prolonged exposure to nitrate-contaminated water.”
“You’re all just guessing,” J.B. argued. “Face it, we don’t know shit about stickies, except that they’re crazy mean and hard to kill.”
Krysty uttered a soft, startled gasp.
When Ryan turned and looked at her, a pang of concern shot through him. Her face had gone deathly pale, and her sentient hair was retracting, coiling tight to the sides and back of her head. Before he could ask her if
she was all right, a rustling sound came to him through the smoke.
Multiple footsteps were moving quickly away.
With a quick hand signal, Ryan split and spread his force. Then they all slipped into the haze. As they followed the footfalls away from the ruined villc, up a slight incline, the layer of smoke thinned a little. Not thirty feet away they could see a raggedy man and woman moving low and fast along a shallow cleft in the earth. The man was carrying a small bundle in his arms.
Ryan caught Jak’s wrist as he prepared to throw a leaf-bladed knife.
“No,” the one-eyed warrior said. “They’re not stick-ies and they’re not armed.”
At the sound of Ryan’s voice, the refugees stopped running and huddled together in the ditch.
As the companions ringed their position, the man put the bundle on the ground. It turned out to be a small, dirty child wrapped in rags. He and the woman took up a back-to-back defensive stance, and from the scabbard at his waist he drew a long, curving saber tinged with rust. The woman wielded a cudgel made of gnarled wood and spiked with sharpened prongs of re-bar.
“Come on, you stickie bastards!” the man shouted up at them. “We’ll show you how chillings done!”
“Take a closer look, you stupe,” Ryan told him. “We’re not stickies. We’re not going to hurt you.”
“Keep your distance!” the woman shrilled back.
“Husband, be careful. Don’t let your guard down. They’re not stickies, but they could be cannies wanting to eat our little girl.”
“We’re not cannies, either,” Ryan said, waving for die others to move in closer. “We’re travelers, from a long way off.
“Everybody sit,” Ryan told his friends, “and lower your weapons.”
When they had done what he’d asked, he addressed the refugee couple. “Are you from the ville?”
“Nothing left of it now but smoke,” the man said bitterly.
“What happened?”
“We were overrun by stickies. They attacked in waves. One after another. It wasn’t long before we used up all the ammo for the few blasters we had between us. The stickies kept on coming. Like there was no end to them. When they finally broke through the barricade, me and Margee took the babe and ducked down a hidey-hole I made for us. Stayed there until the stickies started tearing down the huts and burning them. Then there was so much smoke blowing around we sneaked away without getting caught.”