James Axler – Freedom Lost

A side effect of this action was to bring the glider and the mutie into fully lit focus.

A series of shots rang out, and the stickie went limp in the harness of the flying machine. Without the creature’s guidance, the glider began to swoop and spiral, finally landing in the midst of an already burning patch of roof in a more explosive show of vigorous flame.

“Never thought I’d see a stickie smart enough to try that,” Krysty remarked. Her words reminded Ryan of the comment Morgan had made about the stickies seeming to act smarter in their more recent forays against Freedom.

“Not that much to gliding, as I understand it,” Rollins said. “And the crafts are certainly portable enough. They break downnothing but plastic, canvas and some metal tubing. Fold them up and put them in a bag after you’re done.”

Jak wasn’t so admiring of the tactics. “Dead. Stupe.”

“Mebbe not,” Ryan said. “Whoever sent that mutie up there hovering around knew his card would get slotted quick enough. Those gliders have some maneuverability, but they’re not very fast. The mutie was able to get some good fires going while up there, but that could’ve been handled in a number of different ways.”

“You saying we were supposed to see that stickie?”

“Diversion,” Jak said.

“Need to get around the fires, closer to the edge of the roof. If I was planning on attacking from the top, I’d try and come up where the visibility was poorest. Like way over there behind those old air con units,” Ryan said.

“So?”

“So hold on while I check it out.”

Ryan moved quickly, running as quietly as possible along the back of the front line of the rooftop’s massive array of ancient and rusted air-conditioning circulation pods, using their bulk to hide and protect his progress. The stickies near the edge of the rooftop were waving flaming torches and yelling and whooping, and already more of the small fires were starting to burn.

They also had weapons. The stickies were now armed with high-powered blasters, such as the one that had chilled Maxwell. Ryan heard the occasional crack of blaster, and once or twice stray rounds had whined past and ricocheted off the thick metal units protecting him, causing them to boom hollowly and flaking the thick rusty covering. The stickies weren’t aiming at him. They didn’t even know Ryan was there. They were wasting rounds, showing off and enjoying the fires.

Ryan knew his friends would also have heard the shots. His SIG-Sauer was cocked in his right hand, and he ran in a crouch, stopping only to peer between individual units to make certain he wasn’t seen.

He crawled on top of the last unit, keeping himself as flat as a sheet of paper as he wiggled across silently, inch by inch.

“Hey, you. You’re trespassing,” Ryan called out, pausing a second to line and sight before shooting the stickie through the top of the head. The baffle-silenced slug drove through the mutie’s lopsided cranium, pureeing the rotten brain inside and causing a twin jet of blood to spurt like a backwash out of the stickie’s nose. Ryan’s shot had landed neatly dead center, and the bullet kept crashing down like a runaway freight elevator, leaving behind a wet trail of destruction inside the mutie’s thrashing body.

The stickie’s corpse collapsed onto the roof, into a burning pyre. The smell of burning flesh was instantly recognizable in the night air.

Ryan, however, wasn’t waiting around to admire his handiwork. He was already rolling, firing his blaster as he moved. The element of surprise was still with him. When the first stickie died, all eyes fell upon its death throes, but no one thought to look up.

Gripping his right wrist with his left hand, Ryan braced himself against the kick of the powerful pistol as it spit death again and again. His aim no longer needed to be as precise as the first kill, so he took chest shots, the safest option against his now moving targets.

A chest shot was never as elegant, clean or final as a head shot, but it had the advantage of not mattering much whether you were a couple of inches high or low or to either side. If your aim was high, you still took out the throat or heart or one of the lungs. Shoot a maneven a stickiein the rib cage and watch him fall down gasping for air.