James Axler – Deathlands 35 – Skydark

Now he knew how much it hurt

Bringing the car down was the worst. There were no brakes. The slaves had to back around the floor circle, holding the weight with their legs while the overseers feathered the clutch.

With a foot sweep that he only barely saw, the gill mutie knocked Lester on his face on the floor, which brought him into range of the feet of the mutie chained to the spoke ahead. Lester took a glancing blow to the side of the face, making him see stars. But he was already rolling back, out of reach.

As he straightened, the gill mutie was glaring at him. So was the would-be stomper, a hairy-backed troll of a mutie.

It had been a planned attack, somehow hatched between them when he wasn’t looking.

There was no use complaining to the overseers. All that would get him was a cut from their whips. His

meager possessions hadn’t bought him much in the way of protection.

Fusillades of blasterfire echoed down the nearby elevator shaft The racket was much louder, as the sec men were now shooting inside the lobby. The hotel was under all-out attack.

The overseers nodded to one another. They didn’t say anything. They just left the power plant, heading for higher and presumably safer ground while they still could.

“Hey!” Lester shouted at the open doorway. “Hey, don’t just leave us here!”

His words boomed down the corridor.

None of the other prisoners made a sound. Every mutie eye around the wheel was focused on the sec man.

THOUGH HE DIDN’T ALLOW IT to crack his battle face, Murchisson was stunned by the tenacity of the stickles. Two or three of the bastards were bad enough, but when there were more they seemed to spur one another on. Standing under the hotel marquee, he directed fire for the forty-odd sec men lined up in front of him.

The stickle that charged right into the line of muzzles had lost its right foot and ankle to an explosion. The assembled sec men had seen it get up from the ground and watched it hop toward mem, undaunted while blood spurted from its wounds. Behind it, others, equally grievously wounded, were also resuming the assault

Murchisson could tell his men were unnerved. Intact stickles were tough enough to face, let alone these mutilated banshees. “Wait!” he shouted at his men, walking up and down the firing line. “Hold your fire.”

He was vaguely aware of the chaos inside the lobby, the crowds of toadies trying to jam into the elevator, rushing for the staircase. He shut out the sounds of their screams.

The head sec man let the first wave of muties get within thirty feet of the building, until he could see the black centers of their dead eyes, the glint of their needle teeth, until he could hear the tortured rasp of their wounded breathing.

Forty autorifles opened fire.

A meat grinder of lead drilled into stickle flesh, bone and blood, blowing the on rush ing monsters off their feet Gun smoke swirled across the field of view, then it was caught, lifted by the wind, and gone.

Murchisson squinted down the slight incline to the golf course and the tightly packed mass of stickie soldiers, on the verge of being hit by another explosion. What he saw in the next instant made his mouth fall open. All the stickies moved at once. As if choreographed, they split into two forces, which rushed apart, one to the left, the other to the right It reminded him of a colony of foraging ants, suddenly diverting from a threat

The sec men controlling the buried mines detonated them, but too late. They blew up stickies who were already dead.

Hie movement of troops was so massive and so quick that there was no way to counter it The hotel was being flanked.

“Pull back!’* he shouted to his men. “Inside!” The real battle for Freedom City Motor Hotel and Casino had begun.

A STICKIE’S HAND SWEPT past Ryan’s face. It came so close he could feel the breeze it made, so close he could smell the sharp chemical odor of its adhesive glands. There were five more below him, each trying to jump the ten feet or so and clamp their suckers onto his defenseless head.