If he hadn’t held his arms folded tightly to his chest, they would have grabbed them for sure. In their eagerness to rip him, they fought and jostled one another for the best position. He could see they were getting more and more frantic with frustration. They hissed and spit as they leaped. Then they started to climb on top of one another, which made them instantly taller.
The sec men kneeling inside front doors of the lobby were still shooting, but not in his direction. He didn’t expect covering fire from them anyway.
Ryan curled at the waist in a vertical sit-up. As a piggyback stickie clawed for him and missed, he caught hold of his own shins with both hands. Then he snatched hold of the rope on his ankle, first with one hand, then the other. He hauled himself up the line, until he was well out of reach of the hissing, screeching
creatures below, then locked the loose rope around his legs.
Looking out over the golf course from his perch, Ryan saw the stickie formation split in two parts. He knew right away what it meant. He shinnied up the line until he was even with the hotel’s fourth story. Then he started to swing back and forth on the rope.
Chapter Eighteen
Lord Kaa stood frozen in the middle of the battlefield, jostled this way and that by his own troops as they darted away from danger. Though only his white orb was open, all three of his eyes wept. There was no way he could have prepared himself for the profound emotion of this networking. Once he folded back the lids of his mutant eye, once he was connected to his legion, he saw what each of his soldiers saw, felt what they felt through their own nerve endings. Not just the exhilaration of battle, the fever joy of chilling, but the pleasure they took in dying in his service, the pleasure they took in (heir own excruciating pain.
It burned him to the ground. These were warriors the likes of which the world had never seen.
The humility he felt, the honor to be leading such troops in a just and noble war, reduced him to impotence, to catatonic immobility.
Explosions ripped the air again, but over empty ground.
This Kaa saw with borrowed eyes, the eyes of both the living and the dying. He saw the golf course littered with the bodies of those who could no longer see or fight These glorious dead, these heroes, would never
be mourned, he vowed. They would be celebrated always. As the smoke shifted, so did the thousands of troops that remained in the field. Soon the slaves would be free, and he would have even more. He formed a mental picture for his army of what was to come. It described the tightening of the noose, the strangulation of Willie ville.
Bullets screamed overhead as Kaa pinched closed his lids with his fingertips. He brushed away his tears with the back of his hand. Then with Rogero at his side, he followed the right half of the stickie formation. They left the golf course and ran through the arch of the amusement zone.
Blasterfire from the top of the Ferris wheel chopped down a half dozen of the mud-daubed soldiers at the front of the pack.
Kaa swung Joyeuse up and answered fire, raking the little swing-seats with 7.62 mm lead. The strings of slugs tore the chairs apart and dumped out limp, dark forms that dropped, pinwheeling, crashing limply into the Ferris wheel’s hub. He pushed Rogero onward, and they turned down the path for the mutie zoo.
As they approached that shameful prison, they could see the stickies had already broken down the door. And even from a good way off, they could hear the tumult coming from inside. Kaa and Rogero reached the entrance just as a pair of the killer mutants came running out holding a length of fat, pinkish gray hose over their heads.
They were uncoiling someone’s guts.
Kaa followed the grisly streamer into the corridor A knot of stickies hid its source from view.
“Back!” he bellowed.