But stickies have no use for blasters. They love fires and loud explosions, but haven’t mastered even the basics of pulling a trigger.
The mutie snarled in delight and threw the blaster away. Ryan heard it strike the ceiling and fall among the catacomb of predark literature. He knew not where.
“Norm bastard!” The voice was harsh, the words slurred.
The way Ryan was lying, on his back, his feet scrabbling for purchase, he couldn’t get at the hilt of the panga on his other hip. For a moment the mutie grinned at him, crouched and ready to lunge, sensing how helpless he was, exulting in the bloody power it held over him.
Ryan’s right hand fumbled in the rubbish, desperately hoping he might find a sliver of glass or a hunk of stone. But there was nothing. Just paper and more paper, and books and mags, and books and comix, and even more books.
A big book.
The book by Ackroyd about Charles Dickens.
The suckered hands were spread, like the obscenely flattened tentacles of a powerful octopus, the teeth behind the smile glinting in the last rays of the evening light.
Ryan gripped the book in his right fist, feeling the solid weight, and slammed it with all of his power, square into the middle of the mutie’s face. It struck home just above the watery, bloodless lips, roughly where a norm’s nose would be. Most stickies simply had a gaping buccal orifice, fringed with ragged porcine hairs, that dribbled wetly.
The force of the impact was not unlike being struck by a block of masonry and the stickie squealed in shock and pain, rolling backward, hands covering its face from a further, threatened blow. Blood trickled thinly over its mouth and down its scrawny neck.
Ryan dropped the heavy tome and slid sideways, reaching for the taped hilt of the panga, drawing it smoothly from its long sheath in a breath of murderous steel.
Out of the corner of his eye he caught a flicker of movement in the doorway of the bookstore, as a second stickie stuck its head inside.
But that was for then and this was for now.
The crouched mutie took its hands from its face, spitting a spray of blood at the norm. “Fucker” it said, lips peeled back off its lethal teeth.
“Fucker yourself,” Ryan growled.
The panga had a honed point and Ryan used it like a sword, thrusting it straight at the stickie’s chest. The creature recoiled, saving itself from the worst of the lunge, though the blade penetrated a full inch, drawing more blood.
It cried out for help, seeing its fellow stickie standing hesitantly by the door.
But it was far too late.
The crushing blow with the book had bought Ryan that most valuable of combat commodities.
Time.
Trader used to say that having time in a fight was better than having a hatful of bullets.
Ryan switched the attack, leaning forward, battling for balance on the shifting slopes of torn paper, swinging the eighteen-inch panga at the side of the mutie’s head. It raised a hand to try to fend off the blow, which was like trying to check a runaway war wag with a butterfly’s wing.
The steel cut clean through the wrist, blood spurting ceiling-high, the severed hand dropping to the floor like a shellless crab. The fingers flexed and grasped, the tiny mouths of the suckers opening and closing.
The ending was inevitable.
As the wailing stickie fell back on a mound of old National Geographics , the yellow covers splashed with crimson, Ryan swung again, backhanded, opening a huge gash, eight inches long and four inches deep, across the front of the mutie’s throat. The blade sliced through the windpipe and larynx, nicking the cervical vertebrae.
Ryan was blinded for a moment by the pulsing gusher of warm blood that jetted into his eye and face, with its peculiar bitter, fishy, oily smell, making him gag with revulsion. But he was aware that the second mutie was also inside the store, only feet away from him, menacing.
He quickly rubbed his sleeve over his face, clearing his vision, seeing the nearer stickie falling away, dying in the midst of a rotting pile of withered pulp Westerns.