except from above. Another idea of Dix’s: it enabled a war wag commander under
ground attack to slide men up unseen into sniping positions. On each side of the
roof, maybe less than a meter in from the edge, were clamped two long metal rods
running the length of the vehicle—on the face of it a stupid piece of
construction since it allowed attackers climbing up the sides an easy handhold
to enable them to pull themselves on to the roof, where a surprise awaited them.
Ryan crawled to the rear, hearing Hooley follow him. Lint would stay in the
ladder well, rifle ready.
He reached the end of the roof and stared down at Truck One below him.
Truck One was a big trailer rig, its rear end converted in a very special, but
unobtrusive, way. Truck One always followed the Trader’s war wag in convoy:
Strict Rule A. Strict Rule B was that it closed up tight to the war wag whenever
the convoy stopped anywhere. Real tight. Strict Rule C was that Truck Two always
pulled well back from One, giving it plenty of space at the rear.
Just in case…
Ryan grinned a feral grin. The jump from here was an easy one, no more than a
couple of steps. And once he’d landed it would not take two seconds before he’d
be sliding through the instantly opened hatch above the rig’s cab to drop into
the interior.
Still smiling, Ryan edged himself over the lip of the gully and began to crawl
across the flat roof toward the port side of the vehicle. He wanted to get a
better look at the roadside, see if there was much congregating going on below.
He had an idea there probably was. He half turned his head to check back on
Hooley, but the guy was still in the gully.
He looked back front again—and the smile froze on his face as a head popped into
view only meters away.
A head out of a nightmare.
Huge eyes, two tiny nostrils in a moist, flabby flesh, no mouth, no ears.
Hairless.
Four fleshy suckers slapped suddenly onto the roof edge, squishing tight. A
squealing snort of rage erupted from the nostrils. Another suckered hand whipped
up and around, shot toward Ryan’s face with the velocity of a striking snake.
A sticky.
A severely mutated being with sucker pads for fingers and toes with which it
could cling to any surface like a leech so tenaciously that it required main
force to pull them off; even in death there was little relaxation. Once those
fingers smacked onto flesh and exuded their glutinous ooze there was little
chance of being able to tear them off.
Ryan had once seen a man attacked by a sticky. The guy hadn’t known what hit
him. The creature had kneed him, clutched him around the throat left-handed,
grabbed his face with the right. The finger pads had slapped home, then
retracted, taking the man’s face with them, the flesh literally suctioned off
the bone in bloody, doughy strips as though the sticky was tugging his hand out
of red molasses. Eyeballs had popped. Faceless, the man had collapsed shrieking
to the ground.
Bullets hurt them, a heart or head shot could finish them, a razor-keen blade
could sure mess them around more than somewhat, but otherwise their wet, rubbery
flesh seemed able to absorb the heaviest punishment. And in a battle situation
they were like beings possessed.
No one seemed to know where the hell they came from, how they’d mutated. No one
could even figure out quite what bizarre combination of genetic malfunctions had
created them in the first place. The first sticky that Ryan had seen, a couple
of years back, had been in a traveling carny, a weird and horrifying collection
of freaks and savagely mutated beings that rode around the Deathlands ramrodded
by a fat ringmaster called Gert Wolfram, something of a freak himself as he
weighed well over one hundred and fifty kilos and had to be carried everywhere
in a special construction chair born by six giants. The sticky’s act had
consisted of walking up and down high walls, no hands, and pulling the heads off