There was no blasterfire.
“Why aren’t they shooting?” Skeen said.
Elijah didn’t know. He whirled on Murchisson. “Are your men asleep? The stickies are going to breach the wall!”
The head sec man looked dumbfounded. His mouth opened and closed, but no sounds came out.
“Fix it, damn you!” Elijah snarled.
“I’m on it, sir.”
“Take the stairs,” the baron shouted at his back. “We’ll all be dead before you get down to the lobby in the elevator.”
“Right, sir”
As the sec man vanished through the open slider, blasterfire crackled close to the base of the hotel tower. The crowd of norms in the parking lot started screaming and running in a panic for the lobby doors.
“This is fun,” Roonie-Two said. She held Roonie-Three up over the railing so she could see the silly people fleeing for their lives and crushing one another in the process.
Only when the army of mutants rounded the end of the amusement zone and came charging up the golf course did Willie Elijah realize what he was up against.
A sea of dead-eye faces boiled up his avenue.
The sec men holding Ryan at the eighteenth floor let go of the rope, and once more he dropped to the end. Autofire raged from the brewery’s roof. He could see the smoke and the flash.
“At least somebody’s shooting at them!” Elijah said, reaching for his telescope. He was watching his sec men spray the stickies when the machine gun opened up on them from the ground. He saw his soldiers shot to pieces. Lowering the telescope, the baron scanned the throng and located the mutie shooter. “Zit!” he cried. “It’s that goddamn Zit!”
Meeting no serious opposition, the first wave of stickies closed the distance to the hotel.
“Come on, Murch!” Elijah shouted. “Do it! Do it!”
As if on cue, the ville’s defensive plan kicked in. Autofire rattled from the front of the lobby and chattered from the amusement zone across the way. The stickie force was channeled between walls of lead, forced to close ranks in a long, narrow line.
Elijah could see the mutants dropping on the edges of the mass. They soaked up full-metal-jacketed slugs like frogs absorbing BBs. They were damn hard to chill.
A flash of light, followed by a thunderclap, bloomed in the middle of the former golf course, right at the head of the stickie army. A huge ball of smoke and dirt rolled away from the heart of the explosion.
It was spectacle.
It was mass slaughter.
It was glorious.
Elijah whooped so wildly that he spilled tipple all over his pants.
“Yay!” the norm girls cheered.
The toadies cheered, too, and pounded their fists on the railing.
The celebration quickly died when stickles kept on coming, tramping over the broken bodies of their comrades.
Another explosion, this one under the parking lot, closer to the hotel, sent mutants and mutant parts flying across the compound. The pall of smoke drifted away, and the penthouse spectators saw stickies blown down in a circle like trees felled by a windstorm. There was movement at the outer edges of the destruction. Stickies were getting up and continuing the attack.
“Hit them again, Murch!” Elijah shouted over the
rail.
Then the balcony started coming apart.
Heavy-caliber slugs sparked as they clipped the steel rail, cutting three of the sec men almost in two, splattering their guts in a wide swathe across the exterior wall. The spray of bullets went through babies and moms and shattered the patio’s sliding doors behind them. The patio furniture was jumping and shuddering from impacts as the survivors dived for the doorway to the penthouse.
From the floor inside, Elijah could see Poonie-Two, Poonie-Three and Toonie-Two and Toonie-Three- dead in pools of red on the deck. The moms were still twitching, the infants weren’t.
Two-thirds of his pure-norm gene bank was gone in the blink of an eye.
“Roonie-Two! Where are you?” Elijah cried. When she didn’t answer at once, he thought he’d lost her, as well. “Roonie-Two!”
Then a faint voice said, “Over here, Poppadaddy.”
It took a moment for him to locate her in the clutter of the overfurnished suite. She was belly down on the rug in front of a sofa, covering her baby with her body.