She woke and tried to scream, but a hand had been clamped across her mouth.
Lori was held down, and the last thing she heard be-fore a crashing blow delivered to the side of her head plunged her into darkness was a soft, bubbling laughter.
Ryan had agreed they could build a small fire to hold the night’s chill at bay, and it had been its ruby glow that had attracted the stickies, bringing nearly a dozen of them slinking from the darkness under the looming pine trees. They moved with a sinuous quiet, their bare, suckered feet making onl y the faintest slithering sound on the old stones.
It was Krysty Wroth’s special part-mutie senses that saved the friends from a swift and evil ending. Krysty
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didn’t have the true power of doom-seeing, but she had highly developed sight and hearing. In her sleep she caught the noise, like tiny lips kissing, of the advancing stickies.
Her green eyes flickered open, glancing beyond the glowing remains of their fire. She saw the skulking fig-ures of the stickies, their eyes blinking, reflecting the flat color of the fire.
“Stickies! Wake up!” she yelled, reaching for her blaster and ripping off a couple of shots at the nearest of the muties, who were barely twenty paces from where she’d been sleeping.
Ryan, J.B. and Jak all came awake, guns magically in their hands. Doc Tanner took a while longer to reach the surface.
Like many such firefights, it lasted less than fifteen seconds.
Many muties had different body structures from norms, more primitive and brutish. They were, consequently, more difficult to put down-and keep down. Stickies were among the hardest of all to chill.
Krysty took out the first two, her 9 mm bullets punch-ing holes clean through flesh and muscle at such close range. The stickies kicked over in a scrabbling, scream-ing tangle, their fall obstructing their following compan-ions. Her next two rounds missed, then she hit a third mutie with two bullets, both in the belly, folding him over, vomiting blood.
Jak took out two more stickies with his Magnum, the huge handblaster coughing in the darkness, spitting fire and death. One of the two was up immediately, even though its left arm had been nearly severed at the shoul-der by the big .357 round. The creature lurched on, screeching, eyes wide, its blood crimsoning its chest and
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legs. Jak took careful aim and put another bullet in the middle of its face, the skull disintegrating like a peach beneath a war wag.
J.B. held the mini-Uzi, chattering death, smearing the five stickies on the left of the attacking bunch, raking the barrel of the mean little gun backward and forward, us-ing up the whole mag to make double-sure they were well chilled.
Ryan Cawdor was left with three of the stickies for himself.
Awakened by Krysty’s yell of warning, his hands went by automatic reflex to the rectangular shape of the Heck-ler & Koch G-12. He rolled on one side, kicking away the single blanket that had been his only protection against the night.
Because of the high cross-sectional density of the round, there was very little transverse drift. At such close range, set on triple burst, there was no sideways drift at all. Ryan squeezed the trigger, not needing the laser-enhanced night sight, able to pick his target with ease. The G-12 fired triple bursts at better than thirty rounds per second, the recoil feeling like a single round, barely reg-istering.
The bullets from the blaster didn’t tumble at all, re-ducing their effect on human flesh, but the extreme ve-locity caused massive trauma in the area of the body surrounding the actual point of impact. Ryan gave each of his targets a single burst of three shots.
The tallest of them, suckered hands stretched out to grasp at the human prey, was hit in the groin, the three 4.7 mil rounds ripping the mutie apart, slicing into its pelvis, exploding the bones, angling upward and destroying the lower stomach. The stickie toppled sideways, fingers
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reaching for the wound, fumbling among the loops of greasy intestines that cascaded out of its body.
The next mutie had its hands in front of it, and the bullets pulped the fingers, chunks of flesh and bone flying into the homicidal creature’s face, blinding it. As it stum-bled, the bullets stitched across its chest, driving splinters of torn ribs tumbling through the body, slicing the pumping heart into ribbons. Blood gouted and the stickie fell, dying, stumps of fingers opening and closing con-vulsively in its murderous death throes.