Ryan had to squirm around to keep the scene in view. He was still being pulled up toward the penthouse, and the motion caused him to twist at the end of the rope.
The upward movement stopped at the eighteenth floor, at about the same instant that autofire broke out from the brewery.
Ryan arched his back to get a better look and saw the horde of stickles running toward the hotel. Then the rope slipped, his stomach lurched and he dropped almost two hundred feet to the end of his tether.
Close blaster fire roused him from momentary unconsciousness. Sec men had stepped around the civilians fighting to get into the lobby and formed a firing squad. Their barrage of autofire sailed downrange, driving the on rushing stickles closer together.
A powerful explosion scattered the mutants into the wind.
Ryan twisted around to get a better look.
There was another explosion, and a wall of autofire erupted from the lobby.
Ryan groaned and clapped his hand over his nose as blood started gushing again. As he struggled, the autofire behind him ceased. When the one-eyed man looked
back, he saw the sec men retreating through the lobby doors, leaving him hanging there ten feet above the ground. Like a party favor
THE SOUNDS of sustained blasterfire and the tremors of the explosions reached even the dim recesses of the holers subbasement In the elevator’s power plant, the condemned slaves leaned on the great wheel, resting while they could. Faint screams filtered down through the layers of concrete and steel. The slaves looked at one another and at the overseers. They said nothing, but their eyes betrayed their anxiety.
Johnson Lester knew what it all meant.
“Stickles are inside the compound,” Lester confided to the slave chained to the spoke beside him. “The sec men are blowing the mines to stop them.”
The mutie slave was a dual breather, with sets of vestigial gills below and behind the ears, feathery pink frills that peeked out of crimson-tipped slits. Its neck and cheeks were smeared with the black grease that had dripped from the gears above. “Who cares?” the mutie said. “Don’t change nothin* down here.”
A shrill whistling sound sent one of the overseers hustling over to a plastic tube that hung from the ceiling. He unblocked the funnel at the end, removed the whistle and bellowed into it “What floor?”
A voice shrilled back through the communication tube. “Up! Take us up, quick!”
The overseer glanced at the dial on the wall over his
head. The elevator’s floor indicator said the car was at the lobby.
“You heard them,” the overseer said, “crank it up.” When the slaves didn’t obey quickly enough to suit him, he unlimbered his bullwhip. The twelve-foot, braided leather lash sizzled across the radius of the wheel, the man’s aim surgically precise. He flicked the lobe of the gill mutie’s ear with the whip’s leather tip, cutting the lobe in two.
“I said move!”
The other two overseers cracked their whips just over the heads of the frantically scrambling slaves. The condemned threw themselves at their spokes, trying to lift the car far enough for the overseer to unlock the gears. Groaning, their feet braced against the floor treads, they couldn’t raise the car so much as an inch.
“Work!” the overseer shouted.
Whips cracked. Backs arched, and leg muscles began to quiver from the strain.
The overseer had both hands on the gear lever and was pulling with all his might. Still, he couldn’t free the dog.
“Too many people in the car,” one of the other slave drivers told him. “These stupes can’t lift it. And if they do, they’ll never hold it.”
Letting go of the lever, the overseer picked up the end of the communication tube. “You’re overloaded!” he shouted into the funnel. “Half the passengers have to get out!”
“Help us!” the disembodied voice called back. The
words were hard to make it out over the yelling in the background. “Help us! The stickies are almost at the door!”
“Lighten the load!” was the overseer’s only advice.
Lester smirked. The panic-stricken toadies were going nowhere. They, their wives and brats would have to take the stairs. Before this, the former sec man had never considered die number of trips he made up and down the tower’s elevator every day, never considered the pain and suffering each trip caused some invisible, doomed lackey.