James Axler – Deathlands 35 – Skydark

Murchisson shoved the muzzle of his Uzi through the crack and opened fire. The clattering action spewed a cascade of spent brass as he blasted the stickies away from the door. He fired until the mag came up empty.

Before he could get the blaster back in, a stickie grabbed the barrel. For a second they played tug-of-war with the carbine, a game Murchisson realized he couldn’t win. With a curse he let go of the weapon, and the sec men crashed the steel door closed.

The situation was bad.

Murchisson avoided looking into the expectant, terrified faces of the norms huddled on the couches and chairs of the hallway. They wanted to hear some words of encouragement from him. He had nothing good to tell them. The defensive plan for Willie ville was a bust. There was no way they could have foreseen having to face an army of that size. And now they had retreated as far as they could go. They had ammo stockpiled on this floor, they were committed to making their stand here.

Except for the crying of the children and women, it was eerily quiet. For the first time in many minutes, there was no shooting.

The lull seemed ominous.

Murchisson did a quick count of his men. There were fewer than he’d hoped had survived. Not fifty, but twenty. It wasn’t enough to put a blaster on each of die possible entry sites for the stickies. There were so many ways they could get in: through the balconies, windows, air ducts, elevator shaft For all he knew, they could chew through the rad-blasted walls.

The head sec man walked over to the double pair of open doors of the elevator shaft. He stuck his head in and shouted up to the penthouse. “Sir? We could use some more shooters down here. Could you send down the sec team you’ve got up there?”

There was no answer.

“Sir?”

“Hold out the mutie bastards,” came the voice of

the baron, echoing down the shaft. “I’m counting on you.”

End of conversation.

“Damn,” Murchisson said. He gestured for three of his men to give him a hand. They broke into the long wooden crates stacked along the wall opposite the elevators. The boxes were full of stamped-steel, cheapo blasters. He rearmed himself with a KG-99, a giant step down from the Uzi he’d just lost.

He started going up and down the rows of chairs and couches, passing out loaded handblasters and machine pistols to the male toadies. He had no choice. He put them in position to defend the women and children from various possible angles of attack.

“Don’t use them blasters unless the stickies break onto the floor,” he warned them.

Which, he thought, was going to be any minute.

“MuRCH is RIGHT,” Ryan said. “You’re going to need every shooter you can get. How about giving me back my blaster?”

Elijah looked over at the pile of confiscated weapons. He seemed to vacillate, then his expression hardened. “Just sit there and shut up. I need to think.”

The one-eyed man used the moment to survey the others trapped in the penthouse. The handful of very important toadies cowered on the couch, and nervous sec men were pacing with their blasters at the ready. Roonie-Two sat in a comer with her babe on her lap, hugging her. The eyes of the baron’s

granddaughterwife were huge with fear. Across the portal of the shattered slider lay the bodies of her sisters and their children.

Ryan found it hard to feel sorry for any of them, except the girl child. The others had brought all this on themselves, especially the baron. It just went to prove that you reaped what you sowed, eventually. A few thousand stickies had reduced the baron’s sphere of influence-which had, only hours before, extorted tribute from hundreds of miles of Deathlands-to two floors of a hotel. When the stickies were through with it, there’d be nothing left of Elijah’s enterprise but ashes and bone chips.

It was all over for Willie ville.

He wondered if it was all over for his friends. If so, he knew that Krysty, J.B., Doc, Jak and Mildred probably suffered terribly before they died. It’s what the stickies did best Hurt people. He knew that from experience.