The soles of his boots crashed into the top stickie’s head, and for a second the mutant’s body resisted, then its suckered grip failed, and the first stickie plus Ryan-about 350 pounds of total weight-fell on top of the stickie hanging on to the rope below. Again there was a split second of resistance, then everything started sliding.
Ryan clamped his hands tightly around the rope and dug in the sides of his boot heels. He kept on sliding. He knew there was a critical speed, and once he passed it, nothing he could do would keep him from falling. He squeezed tighter, feeling the skin of his palms and the insides of his fingers rip off. And he was still sliding.
He dropped down seven stories before he got himself slowed and under control. Meanwhile the stickies beneath him had tumbled to the parking lot below. He
lowered himself to the end of the rope, then dropped the ten feet to the ground.
The last pair of stickies wasn’t dead. Jaws snapping, heads bloodied, limbs broken, they tried to crawl over to get him.
“Fireblast!” he said, reaching behind his back for the walnut grips of the Redhawk.
“Wait, Ryan,” a familiar voice said behind him. “Let me.”
J.B., Doc and Mildred were running toward him from the hotel lobby. The Armorer held an Armalite between his hands. He stepped up and fired at extreme close range, putting a round in each stickie’s head.
“Look out!” Mildred cried, pushing Ryan back.
Twenty-four stories of rope dropped from the sky and landed in loose coils on top of the dead stickies. The last thirty feet of it were still burning.
They looked up at the top of the hotel, which was now engulfed in flames. Black, greasy smoke was floating east, on the hot afternoon wind.
“Nice job, J.B.,” Ryan said.
“It was inspired,” Doc agreed. “The work of a pyrotechnic genius, if not a pyromaniac.”
Ryan extricated himself from the makeshift sling, set it on the ground and untied it. The first thing he took out was J.B.’s fedora, which he handed to his old friend. “Thought you might want that back,” he said.
“Dark night, I never thought I’d see it again!” J.B. donned the hat and adjusted the rake of the brim.
Ryan looked with concern at Mildred. She was
staring up at the burning hotel, as if mesmerized. He put bis hand on her shoulder. “Mildred, are you okay?*’
“Uh, yes. Yes, I’m okay,” she said, coining out of her trance. “I was having another flashback from the jump.” She closed her eyes and shuddered. When she opened them, she noticed his injuries for the first time. “Ryan, your hands!” she said. “They need immediate attention. They look like ground chuck.”
“There’s no time for that,” he said, passing out the rest of the weapons. He tucked Krysty’s Smith and Wesson pistol in his back trouser pocket “We’ve got to find Krysty and Jak. They could still be alive.”
“Let’s go check out the zoo,” J.B. suggested
“Watch your step,” Ryan told them. “These stickies might look dead, but they can fool you. Blast anything that moves.”
The four companions retraced the route the stickie army had taken to the hotel. They walked along the edge of the golf course, past its still-smoking blast craters. The path was Uttered with broken bodies. Some of them weren’t stickies. Some were muties wearing ankle chains.
Mildred knelt and looked at the lethal wounds with the trained eye of a medical doctor. “Some of these slaves were chilled by stickies,” she said. “I think Kaa had some trouble making his dream of a noble brotherhood of mutants into a reality.”
“Like the tower of Babel,” Doc said. He didn’t bother to explain the reference, and no one asked him
to. They had much more important things on their minds.
“Do you think Kaa was in the top of the hotel when it went up?” J.B. asked.
“I didn’t see him.” Ryan said. “But then I wasn’t looking real hard, either. If he was up there, he’s chilled-unless he grew wings.”
When they passed the bank where Elijah kept his Apocalypticon, they found the front doors open and paper litter blowing through the foyer. Doc picked up a single, torn sheet of paper that wrapped itself around his shin. He cleared his throat and read die page title aloud. ‘”Reserve Component 071-315-2304. Zero AN/ PVS-2 to an M-16 A-l Rifle.'” Then he said, “I think our mutant commander has made off with the baron’s prized collection of predark documents.”