“More stuff from the Apocalypticon,” she said. “It’s got to be Kaa up ahead.”
“Looks like they’re goin’ back the way they came,” J.B. observed. “Mebbe all the way back to the
redoubt.” He stared at the dots on the horizon again. They were much smaller than they were only a moment ago. “They’re really moving. We’re not going to be able to catch them unless they slow down or take a rest stop.”
“If Krysty and Jak are still alive,” Ryan said, watching the distant figures as they vanished into the mercury lake of the heat mirage, “they’re probably up there with Kaa, if that’s him.”
“One thing, Ryan, mebbe you hadn’t thought about,” J.B. said.
“What’s that?”
“Mebbe they don’t want to be rescued.”
JAK CLIMBED through the hatch in the roof of the redoubt’s only functional elevator. The mutie mountain lion, his inseparable companion, stood in the car on its rear legs. Stretching up against the wall, it was almost tall enough to stick its nose through the hatch.
Almost wasn’t good enough.
It let out a baleful yowl.
When Jak lowered his head upside down, back through the hole, it stopped making the horrible noise and smiled at him.
“Can you fix it?” Lord Kaa asked.
“No problem,” Jak replied. “Have to find thing J.B. disconnected.” He withdrew again. After a moment he yelled down, “This it”
The car jerked as power returned to its motor.
At Kaa’s direction all the plastic bags were loaded
into the back of the car. There wasn’t enough room in the elevator for everyone to ride on the first trip, so he left the stickles to wait on the top floor. The zoo muties and Jak and Krysty got in with him, and they started down. The damaged car screeched and shuddered as it scraped against the shaft’s wall.
Kaa caught Krysty staring at the explosive scorches and bullet holes that marred the inside of the car. He hadn’t asked her or her ruby-eyed young friend about the dead stickies heaped in the elevator when it awaited them on the top level. But he wondered about them.
He also wondered why no more stickies had used the redoubt’s gateway to transfer here. Though he hadn’t considered the possibility of losing 99.9 percent of the army in its first day in the field, he had thought enough about casualties to be continuously breeding replacements. The plan had been for fresh troops to come through the gateway as soon as they were of a size suitable for combat.
No stickle replacements had been present on the first floor. No live ones, at least Even if the first batch or two of new soldiers were the ones they’d found chilled in the car, more of them should have materialized. Of course, it was possible that they were trapped in the lower stories by the decommissioned elevator.
Kaa peeled open his third eye and had an internal look-see.
He quickly confirmed the fact that there were stickies in the redoubt, but no more than twenty. And as he had guessed, they were all down on the bottom
floor. There should have been at least a hundred of them by now. After opening a psychic connection to his lost soldiers, he showed them where to meet him.
Then he squeezed his lids shut.
He had no way of telling whether the white-haired boy and the red-haired female were responsible for the deaths of his troops in the redoubt By their own admission, they had been here only days before; they had admitted to nothing else yet. Under the circumstances, he didn’t hold the slaughter against them. As well as anyone in Death] ands, and perhaps better, Kaa knew that stickies outside his sphere of psychic control, such as the ones who’d transferred in after he’d left, would be incredibly dangerous. The only way to deal with them would be to chill them, and quickly, before they chilled you.
When they reached the fifth floor down, the lowest level of the redoubt, a crowd of stickies was waiting in front of the elevator for them. They were most excited to see Kaa, their mighty general. They wanted to touch his piebald skin and for him to touch them.