STILL IN A CROUCH, Rollins followed Ryan’s lead. Both men stayed low until reaching the outcropping of the built-up skylight area used to provide natural lighting to Freedom during daylight hours. Ryan continued to squat, his knees protesting from being forced to support his full body weight for so long.
Each of them held their breath, waiting, listening for any type of noise to come.
Rollins had attempted another communication with Jameson’s sec team, but had gotten nothing back in the way of an answer but static.
Ryan eased out of the crouched position and turned to look beyond the elevated skylight edge. The air was still. He looked down through the skylight and saw even more fires burning within Freedom, along with looting and destruction from a panicked populace. The unmistakable smell of smoldering embers and burned bodies hung in the dead air.
“No sign of anything out there. Inside is another story,” Ryan whispered.
He turned to Rollins, who was also standing. The man had removed the radio from his belt once more. He turned down the sound of the device before thumbing the Send button.
“This is Rollins. Anyone else on this frequency?”
Silence.
“Dammit, Jameson, answer me!”
“You didn’t say ‘please,’ Mr. Rollins,” a new voice said, distorted by a poor connection linking the two units.
“Who the fuck is this?” Rollins demanded.
“Does it matter? No, wait, stop. Don’t answer that. I’m sure you’ll make a point of yammering on and telling me it does. I’ll make it quick since I’ve got a mall to take over. All of your sec boys on the roof of the south side of Freedom are dead. We used their heads for some extra burning fun. My new friends have been showing me all sorts of clever ways to kill a norm. Hair burns quick if you pour on some black powder or charcoal fluid.”
“Jameson! Where are you?” Rollins demanded, talking over the bragging voice.
“Can’t help you there, buck. I don’t know which one of those crummy excuses for a norm was the late Mr. Jameson.”
Ryan took the radio from Rollins and asked a question of his own. “Like the man said, who is this?”
“I know that voice! How’s it hanging, One-eye?”
“Why don’t you meet me and find out?” Ryan replied, surprised at hearing the old nickname.
“Sorry. Can’t do that. I’m not on the roof anymore. None of my stickies are on the roof. Like me, they’re already down and inside the mall.”
Ryan listened closely. The voice sounded oddly familiar somehow, but he couldn’t place it.
“See you there!”
RYAN HEFTED his SIG-Sauer in a two-handed grip as they came upon the rooftop massacre. The sec squad on this end of Freedom hadn’t been able to repel the invaders nearly as effectively as Ryan’s team. Five men and one woman were effectively scattered around, their corpses ripped into gory pieces or burned beyond recognition.
The killing muties appeared to be long gone, except to Krysty’s advanced means of perception.
Everyone else felt it, too, a feeling of unease.
“Not right,” Jak observed.
“I know,” Ryan replied, and then the stickies were on them, giggling like demented children as they leaped from their hiding places, coming out from the stairwell access or hanging down the walls of the front of the mall and using their fingertips to adhere to the edge of the roof.
Ryan was impressed, and slightly surprised. These were tactics he would have bet a stack of jack with a clip of ammo chaser to be beyond a stickie’s mental capacities.
Muties. Who could predict them, really? He’d met stickies like Charlie back in Colorado who were so intelligent and crafty, they could give Trader a run for the proverbial money. Or mutants with charisma such as Lord Kaa and his hypnotic third eye, or even their most recent tussle with the formidable self-styled Pharaoh Akhnaton in the Barrens. All of them were crazy, dangerous and gifted with mental abilities and insights that made them more of a threat than the traditional human foes he was so frequently thrown up against.
Now here was another batch of stickies showing off, using hide-in-plain-sight tactics of combat. It was as strange as hell, not to mention disturbing, since while their tactics were something to behold, their hand-to-hand combat skills were as poor as ever. A few were holding long blasters, but instead of firing them, the stickies were using them as clubs to swing and bash. Ryan’s internal musing was interrupted when a short stickie slithered out from beneath an air-duct vent’s bottom slat and grabbed him bodily by the legs, the long thin fingers adhering instantly to the leather of his thigh-high combat boots.