Inches away two huge eyes looked back at him from a pale, hairless face, black eyes, alive but dead to feeling, to sympathy, to mercy. Below the eyes were tiny nostrils centered in moist flab, and its mouth was lined with rows of pointed, vulpine teeth.
Before Ryan could make his body react, the stickle lashed out. A cold, sucker-lined hand slapped against his face, covering mouth, nose and cheek. But the suckers failed to attach themselves to the man’s flesh.
As he bounced the back of the stickie’s head onto the floor, Ryan glimpsed other muties sprawled and tangled in the hexagonal-shaped chamber. His companions were outnumbered two to one.
He started to reach for die handblaster on his hip, a 9 mm SIG-Sauer semiautomatic, but thought better of it. At point-blank range, in the close confines of the chamber, the high-velocity, full-metal-jacket slugs would undoubtedly drill through the stickles and hit either his companions or the armaglass walls. Hopping into a low crouch, Ryan drew his panga from its sheath. The stickie screamed up in his face as it, too, started
to rise.
Instead of using the razor edge of the eighteen-inch knife to behead the mutie-there wasn’t enough clearance behind him for a sideways swing-Ryan brought
the knurled steel pommel of the handle down on the hairless head in a full-power arc. The top of the skull crunched under the impact and caved in, punching bone shards deep into the brain cavity. The stickie’s screaming stopped as if cut off by a switch; the huge black pupils of its shark eyes floated on seas of bright red. Blood jetted from the tiny nostrils as it slumped, twitching feebly, back to the gateway floor.
Even as it fell, the other stickies began to rouse themselves, sitting up and blinking in the harsh, artificial light.
Ryan gripped the shoulder of Doc’s frock coat and gave him a hard shake. “Rad-blast it, Doc, get up!” he shouted. Jak and J.B., though obviously still dazed, pushed themselves to their knees. Ryan stepped to Mildred’s side and shook her, too. “Get up and fight!” he told her. “Fight now or we all die!”
Krysty was the only one who didn’t respond to his war cry. She lay curled in a fetal position, her back against the violet armaglass, separated from Ryan and the others by a knot of stickies.
The band of killer muties screamed in unison and hurled themselves across the slippery floor, charging their enemies.
Discarding the ebony sheath of his swordstick, Doc set to work in a frenzy that more than matched his inhuman opposition. Fearless in the face of the stickies* fury, his narrow, straight, double-edged blade flicked like a steel serpent’s tongue, driving in and out of the pale bodies in a red-tinged blur. Doc avoided the
bladeseizing trap of the bony sternums, and sought out the soft and tender parts, piercing bowels, stomachs, hearts.
Ryan pivoted around the stickle charge, skating on the nasty, slick floor to get between Krysty and the pair of muties who had turned to attack her. Bracing himself, he made a mighty, two-handed slash with his panga. The keen blade clipped through both of them at waist height, cutting off their arms at the elbows, dropping their coiled guts to the floor.
As Mildred tried to stand to meet the attack, she, too, slipped in the slimy mess underfoot. Her faltering step made the onrushing stickle lose its target. The suckered hand missed her head by less than an inch and slapped against the armaglass wall. It stuck there, trapped by its own suckers for a second-long enough for Mildred to unholster her ZKR 551 pistol. The Czech-made blaster was a precision target weapon and chambered for the relatively light.38-caliber Smith & Wesson round.
Light was just what the doctor ordered.
Without worrying about the possibility of a through-and-through, Mildred pressed the muzzle of the blaster against her attacker’s breastbone and fired. The tiny gateway chamber rocked with the boom and flash. The stickie’s arms flew back, opening wide as if to better display the blackened, starburst hole burned into the center of its chest. As the creature hurtled like a rag doll toward the far wall, it knocked down four of its comrades.
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