“We must go down to the sea again, and do business in great waters,” the old man chanted. “The wonders of the Lord, my dear Ryan, is what we might all share, one day hence.”
“But are we close to the sea?” J.B. pressed.
Doc shook his head, the light wind disturbing his gray locks. He smiled and showed his peculiarly fine, strong set of teeth. “What is close, John Barrymore Dix? How when is up? How meretricious is now? Riddle me that, my friend.”
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They dropped the question of how close they were to the sea. In fact, it was approximately one hundred and fifty miles from their stopping place to the open ocean beyond Manhattan.
Ryan set guards, giving everyone a two-hour duty dur-ing the time of darkness, and left the last watch for him-self. The rest of the group huddled together in the open, eating from their self-heats, using the water from the Hudson for drinking despite the faint hint of salt it held.
“Be better in the trees for shelter?” J.B. suggested.
“We haven’t seen any sign of life for hours. Not since the crazies on that bridge.”
It was true what Krysty said. The banks of the Hudson seemed deserted. Ryan had been taking regular readings with his rad meter, but it hadn’t gone seriously across the orange and into the red. The land was warm, but no longer hot.
“Because we don’t see ’em, it don’t mean they aren’t there,” he replied.
“Yeah,” the laconic Armorer said.
They stayed where they were.
It was a beautiful night, warmer than it had been far-ther north. The moon was untroubled by clouds, sailing above them, sharpening the edges of all the shadows.
Lori was on watch a little after three in the morning. When the stickies came, they beat the girl to the ground before she could give any warning.
Chapter Five
nobody knew a whole lot about stickles. They were found in small, vicious colonies, generally in parts of the Deathlands that had been particularly heavily nuked. Some said that the missiles that spawned the genetic hor-rors that were stickies also held some secret chromo-somic deviator that accounted for the peculiar nightmare that they had become.
Some blamed grossly contaminated water supplies in a mysterious process that involved nitrates leached from the soil.
All that was truly known about stickies was that they were triple-crazy. They loved killing and ripping things apart. They liked the sight of blood. They also relished fires and explosions, taking some bizarre and perverse pleasure from staring into dancing flames.
Oddly stickies had only been known in the past twenty or so years. A three-hundred-and-fifty-pound showman named Gert Wolfram was credited with discovering stickies and putting a pair into his traveling freak show. Word was that Gert hadn’t lived too long after that.
Stickies had vulpine teeth and staring eyes, eyes that were utterly dead and devoid of emotion, like a basking shark. The main thing about stickies was that they had developed peculiar sucking pads on their webbed fingers, which enabled them to cling easily to smooth surfaces like flies. It was rumored that stickies could come at you
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across the ceiling, but that was generally discounted. But they could surely climb walls and hang on to windows.
In the entire Deathlands stickies were the only breed of muties that everyone would automatically kill on sight. It was possible to speak to them, but you had to shout and talk very slowly, as though they heard you through a strange kind of lip-reading. They had no ears.
Lori never heard them. Never saw them. She was sit-ting down, coat wrapped around her, slipping from an uneasy wakefulness into a half sleep. She was recalling the crazed days with her father. Her husband. Lover. Keeper. Quint. White beard to his stomach, stained amber with nicotine. Jacket spotted with sequins. The hooked nose and narrow, cruel mouth. And the violence.
In her dream, the girl was tied, naked and spread, to the metal frame of a bed, while Quint moved toward her, leering and dribbling, a polished chrome phallus in his hand, its tip studded with shards of broken glass smeared with blood. As Lori tried to scream, a hand clamped it-self across her mouth.