Skeen was trying to hide under the lamp table beside her. All he’d managed to conceal was his bald head and narrow shoulders.
As J.B. APPROACHED the roller coaster on a dead run, he saw movement in the scaffolding to his right. Several figures were struggling wildly. One fell, bouncing off the struts, and landed on the ground. The Armorer held up his hand, signaling his comrades for a quick stop. He, Doc and Mildred closed ranks behind the ticket kiosk.
At the bottom of the scaffolding, not sixty feet from where they knelt, ten stickies huddled in a tight circle over the fallen sec man, their arms flailing as they ripped and tore at him. The mutants in the scaffolding dropped beside them and joined in the fun.
Mildred raised her AK, but J.B. caught hold of the barrel before she could fire. He shook his head. They had only the two mags between them. If they used up all their ammo to kill these few stickies, they’d never make it to the hotel.
Not that their chances looked good, anyway.
It was clear that the first stickies into Willie ville, the ones who’d come in under the berm, were already ahead of them, thereby cutting off the most direct line of access. They watched the stickies pull the sec man apart and scatter the bits of flesh like confetti. As the mutants moved back toward the asphalt path, J.B., Doc and Mildred retreated out of sight around the kiosk.
The stickies didn’t go far. They stopped at a manhole set in the middle of the path and lifted the cover. One by one the stickies disappeared down the hole. When they were gone, Mildred covered Doc and J.B. while they stepped up to have a look.
“It’s a power-line conduit,” the Armorer said. “It’s heading in the direction of the hotel. It might be our only way in.”
“What about the stickies?”
“At least we know how many are ahead of us, Doc,” he said.
J.B. climbed down the metal ladder, and Mildred and Doc quickly followed. The conduit was six feet in diameter. Most of its width was packed with cables and plastic pipes, leaving a narrow slit down the middle for them to pass through. There was a channel cut in the floor for water runoff. The only light was coming down through the opening above them.
“Shh,” J.B. said. “Listen.”
They could hear scuffling sounds ahead. The stickies were moving away, and fast. With J.B. on point, the trio went after them. They had gone only a few hundred
feet when the earth began to nimble behind them. Dust from the ceiling fluttered down like gray snow.
“It’s the stickies,” J.B. said. “The whole damn army’s up there. We’ve got to beat them to the hotel. Run!”
Running wasn’t easy inside the pipe because the space was so narrow and the water-filled channel in the floor tended to snag the sides of their boots. But they made good time, maintaining their distance from the hordes behind them and rapidly gaining on the stickies in front of them.
It came as a complete surprise when everything went white.
Hard light of impossible brilliance filled the inside of their skulls. The whiteness billowed out, and when it shrank back, it left in its wake only black. J.B., Doc and Mildred were unconscious before they hit the ground, stunned by the concussive pressure of the explosion above and behind them. Debris rained on them, but they didn’t feel it
RYAN HAD HIS HAND clamped over his face, trying to staunch bis nosebleed when cries from the crowd of norms below caught his attention-not cries of pleasure at his pain and suffering, but cries of terror.
From a height of twelve stories, he looked down to see the mob rushing for the lobby. And he saw the reason why, too.
Stickies leaped and hurled themselves into the edge of the audience. There couldn’t have been more than
fifteen of the mutants, and the crowd numbered better than two hundred, but the norm spectators were toadies, women and children. Instead of cornering the few attackers and stomping them to death, the crowd turned its back on the threat, allowing the stickles to pluck people out of the mass at will and tear them to pieces.