below dwindled to nothing. The only noises were shrill, individual cries of pain.
They, too, soon stopped.
“Watch the rad-blasted windows!” Ryan shouted to the still-stunned sec men. Then he snatched up a G-12 autorifle and sprinted down the hallway to the open elevator shaft. As he had expected, the stickles were coming that way. Like pale cockroaches, they crawled up the inside of the empty shaft Some scampered up the swaying cables, while others used their suckered fingers to gain impossible handholds on the concrete
walls.
Switching the G-12 to single shot, he sighted down the shaft and picked off the stickies, one by one. The mushrooming rounds didn’t kill them, but the brutal slap of impact broke their grips on cable and walls, and they dropped down the shaft, twenty-five stories to their deaths.
To Ryan’s surprise the cables in the left side of the shaft suddenly began to move. One set slid down and another rose up. Someone was operating the elevator. As the cables moved, they brought more stickies into Ryan’s chill zone. Four of the mutants clung to the cables, riding them up from twenty-four.
Ryan flicked the fire-selector switch to full-auto. He aimed at the bottom stickle and pressed the trigger. The recoil of automatic tire raised the aim point for him, and in the process, hosed the tightly bunched stickies from bottom to top. The spray of bullets blew them off
the cables and they vanished, cartwheeling, down the shaft.
A crash behind him made Ryan whirl. The duct vent in the ceiling had dropped to the floor, and a stickie was already falling through the opening.
Where there was one of the bastards, there were many.
He raked the hallway ceiling with autofire, drawing a line in lead down the center, from just above his head to the duct vent, then down to the face of the oncoming stickie. Multiple hits shattered the mutant’s skull. Its legs whipped out from under it, and it flopped, kicking furiously, onto its back.
Ryan didn’t really think a few slugs would keep the stickies crawling in the ceiling at bay. From his experience with the subspecies, flesh wounds only made mem crazier. He knew he had to get past the opening or risk having his avenue of retreat cut off. As he ran under the duct vent, he fired the G-12 straight up, without looking. There was a shriek above and behind him, then a heavy thud as a dead mutant dropped to the floor.
He turned and knelt at the corner of the hallway. Dead and wounded stickies were failing out of the ceiling, pushed out by the live ones corning up the duct from behind. They crashed to the floor or onto the tightly packed furniture along the walls. Some struggled to get up, despite grievous injuries, throwing off the bodies of others who would never move again. A check of his round counter told Ryan he still had
thirty bullets in the magazine. He switched the fire selector to triburst to conserve ammo. He knew it was hopeless, of course. Even if he had a case of reloading units for the G-12, even if he could keep refilling the mag as it came up empty, even if the action didn’t get so hot that the entire fifty rounds cooked off every time he slapped a fresh unit home, even if he made every shot count, he was going to lose. Knowing that made the one-eyed warrior very angry. So mad, in fact, that it drove him past the fury to the ice-cold realm of chilling machine. As he hunkered mere, his mental focus was as sharp and as deadly as a razor. Though he wasn’t back in the mayhem of his jump dream, he touched on his memory of it to find a place inside himself where there was no fear, no regret, no second thoughts, where there was only the ravening will to destroy. Just like the enemies he now faced.
Though he had them in his sights, and it was an easy 150-foot shot, he let the stickies drop from the ceiling without firing a round. They poured through the vent, landing one after another, and as soon as their feet hit the floor, they started running straight at him, screaming. That was just what Ryan wanted. He wanted as many of them as possible, as close as possible to the muzzle of the G-12.
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