Mildred moved across swiftly and placed her ZKR on the side of the creature’s head, firing and blowing its skull open, splattering the terrified sec man with brain and bone. The chilled stickie fell from him, but where the skull had been cracked like an eggshell, the teeth from the bottom jaw stayed imbedded in his face.
Another scream from behind made Mildred whirl, cursing herself for leaving Sineta’s side. A stickie had made it as far as the baron and had jumped her, dragging her to the ground. They were rolling wildly in the dust, the baron vainly fighting to throw the mutie off her, just holding its head away from her face by keeping the heel of her hand firmly under the creature’s chin, pushing it up. But the stickie’s strong arms—a deceptive strength given the seemingly pale flabbiness of the creature’s flesh—were pulling her arms down, the suckers biting into the skin through her clothes, deadening the muscles as the iron grip cut off the blood supply.
Mildred tried to take aim, but they were moving too much. She stood too much risk of hitting Sineta if she fired.
Jak saw what was happening and before Mildred even had a chance to register what he was doing, the albino hunter had sped past her toward the struggling couple. Holstering his .357 Magnum Colt Python and panning one of his razor sharp, leaf-bladed knives, he took the stickie at a run, a swift arm movement slicing across the front of the creature’s head, opening up its face from the top lip to the forehead, slicing through the nose and puncturing one eyeball along the way. As the creature’s fetid breath mixed with the blood and eyeball mucus that dripped onto her face, Sineta found herself gagging, fighting to hold down the bile that rose in her throat and would choke her if she gave in to the urge to vomit while she was still pinned down.
The stickie screamed in a high, keening voice, loosening its grip as it registered pain. Sineta responded immediately, throwing the mutie off her. Even before it had landed, Jak followed up to finish the job, pinning it down and slicing across its throat with one swift, efficient motion, cutting through the neck to the spinal column at the rear.
Sineta didn’t have a chance to thank him. Instead, she showed her appreciation by blasting the stickie that was making for Jak’s exposed back.
Gradually, as the firepower of the caravan decimated the stickie horde and thinned it out, the stunned Pilatans began to gain the upper hand, forcing the remaining stickies to run in fear and terror. When the retreating muties were out of range, and the Pilatans were safe, Markos turned to Ryan, having assessed that the caravan had sustained only minimal casualties.
“Now are you going to tell me all about those creatures, and any other hazards we may need warning about?” He grinned, flushed from the success of battle.
Ryan returned the smile. “When we’ve cleaned up.”
WITH REPLENISHED STOCKS, the caravan once more went on its way. Ryan and the other companions had outlined some of the dangers that the Pilatans may face from the likes of stickies, but despite the increased vigilance of the sec patrols, there was nothing more to report as they made their way out of the rad infected section of country.
As the land became more verdant once more, they found themselves climbing an incline. The land around was rolling plains and they seemed to be taking one of these on the ascent as they followed the blacktop. It was a shallow incline, but a long one—at least a day’s march—and it would finally take them away from the old predark route they had been following for the blacktop curved away from the incline and came to a sudden halt where a chasm had been cut into the land by an earth movement. A sec party including Ryan and Markos had made its way along the remnants of the road until it came to the sudden dip of the chasm. It was about sixty feet wide and stretched like a scar on the land as far as they could see in either direction. Looking down, the chasm seemed to be at least a hundred feet deep, with trees and shrubs growing down sides that were too steep to countenance a descent.