Desolation Angels. James Axler

good could come from standing there silhouetted by the bright daylight. While his eyes adjusted, he covered the interior with his M4000 held almost but not quite at shoulder level, ready to whip the rest of the way up at the first sign of trouble.

      Jak squatted next to a thick pillar that supported the next level. In the daylight that filtered in through the building’s open sides J.B. saw lots of humped shapes—cars stalled by the Big Nuke and left here to rot. Some had been torn open by scavvies. In places he could make out what looked like piles of fiberglass body panels that had been torn off by industrious scavengers looking to reclaim the metal frames.

      J.B. wondered why they hadn’t been far more thoroughly mined out. A colony as populous as the big ruin looked to be could always find uses for that much steel and other metal, either for itself or as valuable trade goods. They could also muster the manpower to cut up even heavy frames by hand into chunks small enough to haul away.

      “Keep moving,” Ryan said. “Out the other side and right.”

      The others were already inside the building. Ryan fired a couple quick blasts out the way they had come, though glancing back J.B. could see no targets. Evidently the one-eyed man was just reminding their pursuers of the possible consequences of sticking their noses around the corner to peer in after their prey.

      J.B. doubted it would discourage them. For long, anyway. But he knew Ryan’s mind and realized the idea was to keep them off everybody’s asses long enough.

      He walked forward briskly. Jak was still where he was, looking around. He clearly wasn’t happy, which meant J.B. wasn’t happy. He wasn’t ready to charge ahead until he knew what was eating the albino.

      “Not like,” Jak said. “Smell...something.”

      J.B. had already smelled something disquieting: death. A dead creature was rotting somewhere not too far off.

      That didn’t mean a bent cartridge case. At any given moment, tons of dead things were rotting away around the Deathlands. Some of them once had names. No doubt plenty of various sorts of chills were decomposing away right here in the Detroit rubble.

      Jak knew that as well as J.B. did. It could be a bad sign, sure. But it wasn’t bad enough news to hold Jak back.

      “What?” J.B. asked.

      Jak shook his head. “Not tell. Something.”

      The death stink, somehow sweet, pervasive, infinitely horrible no matter how often you smelled it—which in all their cases had been often—could mask a host of other odors. Bad luck. But the potential dangers that smell hid were that—potential.

      The pissed-off people chasing them were real. And immediate.

      “Gotta go,” J.B. told him. “Double fast.”

      Without an instant’s hesitation Jak took off. He decided to run full-out, secure their way out. Speed was needed here more than caution.

      J.B. followed him, less rapidly, and not just because his legs could never keep him up with Jak’s even though J.B. was taller than he was. He held his shotgun across his belly, ready to blast whatever made the mistake of jumping out to challenge the intruders. He heard the footfalls of his friends pounding close behind.

      When he was just past the midway point to the brightness of the far exit, a voice shouted out from behind, “There the bastards are!”

      And Jak wheeled around, his face a white mask of alarm.

      “Stickies!”

       Chapter Five

      J.B. spotted them right away, off toward a broad ramp descended from the level above.

      The muties looked like tiny humans, not much smaller than Jak. They were as vicious as any creature in the Deathlands, human coldhearts included. Their noses were vertical slits, and their mouths were filled with needle teeth. They also had tough, rubbery skin, which contributed to making them double-hard to chill. Many needed a shot to the head to chill, but the companions had run across plenty who could be taken out by any kind of mortal wound.

      J.B. now understood what had been tickling Jak’s sensitive nostrils, despite the overlying smell of death. It was the distinctive reek of stickies. The death stink that hid theirs probably came from victims, human or animal, the muties had either not finished eating yet or got tired of and just left to rot where they lay.

      He gave the muties a couple blasts of #4 buckshot without even slowing them. Unless a lucky lead ball happened to punch through one of those big, staring eyes into the malevolent inhuman brain beyond, it had little chance of killing one of them. But one stickie fell down, shrieking and slapping at its body with its sucker-tipped fingers, and the other staggered back a pace or two.

      “Full speed!” Ryan yelled.

      Jak stopped long enough to hold his Python out the full length of his arm and trigger a shot. The blaster’s roar bouncing between the concrete floor and roof made its usually unpleasant noise seem to clap the sides of J.B.’s head like planks of wood. But that beat what happened to the stickie’s head. The 125-grain jacketed hollow-point round imploded its right eye and blew the brains out the back of its round skull in a black fountain.

      Shooting broke out from behind J.B., more than his friends alone could account for....

      * * *

      RYAN LOOKED BACK. People stood in the street behind his companions. After just a handful of seconds inside the darkened parking structure, they seemed to swim against a sea of dazzle. A couple opened up with handblasters.

      Ricky leaned out from around a stout concrete pillar painted in badly flaking yellow and fired a shot from his DeLisle. A figure went down, dropping a semiauto handblaster as it did. The other three or four pursuers continued to pop off shots into the structure.

      Sooner or later, they’d catch a break and hit somebody.

      Ryan rapidly holstered his SIG and unslung the Scout. Turning and dropping to one knee, he raised the longblaster to his shoulder.

      There was no time for the variable-power Leupold scope. And at twenty, twenty-five yards max, no need. As soon as he had a target in his ghost ring he squeezed the trigger, sharp as he could without jerking it and pulling the shot offline.

      A jeans-clad leg buckled under an enemy. The man dropped a lever-action longblaster as he fell flat on his face on the hot asphalt.

      The other pursuers threw themselves down as well, but they kept shooting.

      “Handblaster, Ricky!” Ryan shouted to the kid. “Covering fire, but keep coming.”

      He turned as he straightened.

      A gibbering, chittering horde of stickies was flooding the ramp now. “Run!” Ryan yelled at his companions. “Just run!”

      He fired a snapshot into the mass. A couple of the muties squealed and fell as the 7.62 mm bullet punched through their torsos. It wouldn’t keep them down for long. But following muties tripped over them and fell. With their bloodlust amped all the way up, the creatures began to snarl, slap and snap at each other in crazy rage.

      Others came flowing around them. They fanned out to attack the encroaching norms.

      Jak was already by the far exit. He emptied his blaster at the stickies. Ryan saw another go down with the back of its head blown out.

      He slung his longblaster and moved forward. Krysty, Mildred and Doc had already passed him and were racing for the exit. Doc stuck out his hand and unloaded the shotgun barrel of his LeMat into the face of a charging stickie. It took out its eyes and tore off the upper side of its face. The stickie uttered a human shriek of agony and despair and fell to its knees, clutching the ruin of its face.

      For a moment Ryan thought they’d make it with a few steps to spare. But that was the thing about stickies—they could move bastard fast.