Ice and Fire

Chapter Twenty-One

Ryan had fought muties before, all kinds, shapes and sizes. But there was nothing on God's nuked earth to compare to close combat against a stickie.

Part of Ryan's brain told him that the stickies must have been attracted by the powerful roaring of the engines of the two-wheel wags. Another part of his brain wondered how many of them there were in the ambush.

But most of his mind locked instantly into the fundamental problem of staying alive.

The skin of a stickie always seemed slippery, like moist rubber, but sand was clinging to this one, enabling Ryan to grip its arm and prevent the hand with its greedy suckers from fastening on his face. Years ago he'd seen one of the drivers off Warwag Two, Harpo, go down in a skirmish against stickies.

The screeching creature had slapped its hand over Harpo's forehead and eyes. The grip was unbelievably powerful. As the mutie pulled its hand away, half of the man's face came with it, including both eyes, ripped from their sockets by the appalling suction of the fingers and palm. All of Harpo's skin and much of the flesh beneath also came away at the same time.

It hadn't been a good ending.

Ryan could hear shouts and screams all around him, as well as the engines revving and choking, wheels spinning and thickening the whirling bank of sullen sand.

The face of the stickie was only inches away from Ryan's as he struggled against its great muscular power and almost reptilian agility. The creature was breathing hard, hissing between a triple row of pointed, edged teeth, spewing foul, rancid breath — a soughing eructation from a rotting, age-old swamp. Its tiny eyes, with pupils that divided vertically, gazed straight into Ryan's eye, blankly hostile. The mutie wore only a pair of torn shorts, and like all stickies it was weaponless. Even the skillful use of a knife was beyond its mental powers.

With a great effort Ryan managed to raise a foot between the creature's legs and push it away from him, sending it staggering backward, until it completely disappeared into the dust storm. As it went, its fingers brushed against Ryan's arm and he felt and heard his shirt tear as the suckers dragged at the material.

He could still hear yelling and squeals of pain, and the snuffling, grunting sound that a stickie makes when it has its jaws clamped on flesh and is gnawing inexorably through to the delicious marrow of the bone.

One by one the engines faltered and died, choked in the dirt. As they stopped, the veil of orange sand began to clear and Ryan was able to see what was going on.

Without even realizing he'd made the move, Ryan found that the SIG-Sauer filled his left hand, the warm hilt of the panga in his right. Seven stickies.

Dick the Hat down and dead, his neck ripped apart. Suckers had peeled skin and flesh away, showing the whiteness of bone beneath the welter of blood. One of the stickies was on its knees, face buried in the pulsing wreckage of the biker's throat.

Jak was standing, half-crouched, a small knife in his right hand, facing two gibbering stickies that danced and capered in front of him.

Ruin had lost his sunglasses and was wrestling with another of the muties, screaming as the suckers tore strips of bloodied skin off his right arm.

Priest ran up a steep slope, pursued by one of the stickies. It chased him in an odd, skipping, shambling run, like a child. He tried to draw his .32 as he ran, but the fall from his bike had dislodged his holster.

Riddler was the only one who looked like he was making any progress. He'd felled his opponent with a roundhouse swing of his huge fist. As the stickie scrabbled in the dirt, shaking its bald head, thick blood oozing from the corner of its lipless mouth, the Angel was drawing a short-hafted ax from the back of his belt. It looked to Ryan as if Riddler might be doing all right.

Ryan's own stickie was crouched behind the fallen Triumph, clenching its fingers and chattering in a tiny, high-pitched voice. Gas was leaking from the tank of the chopper, close by its feet, and the creature put its round head on one side and sniffed the air, dipping a hand into the liquid and licking it.

"Know what that is, you double-chilled bastard?" Ryan said conversationally. "That's gas. One pyro-tab and you'd be dead meat."

But the gas soaked instantly into the dry sand.

The mutie stood only fifteen feet from Ryan, who took careful aim with the powerful pistol then pressed the trigger once. With the integral silencer the explosion was muffled and soft, no louder than the snap of fingers.

The 9 mm bullet smacked home right between the little eyes, drilling a neat, blackened hole that immediately began to drip dark blood. The exit hole wasn't much bigger than the one going in, and didn't take out a fist-size chunk of bone — as it would have done with a normie — due to the gristly, cartilaginous skull of the stickie.

But it was still a killing shot that punched the mutated monstrosity back, away from the tumbled two-wheel wag. Its hands went up, as though exploring its own wound. The suckers were activated in its death throes, tearing out one of its own eyes as it toppled down in the dirt, dead.

Meanwhile, Riddler had successfully defended himself, swinging the ax in a short, brutally effective blow to the side of the stickie's neck, very nearly severing its head from its repulsive body.

"Two down and five to go," Ryan muttered to himself.

But all the successes weren't on the side of the humans.

Finding that Jak's speed and aggression were too much for them, the two stickies that had been threatening him decided to go for easier game.

One went after Priest, the other joining the creature that was rolling around in the dry earth with Ruin. The mutie that had butchered Dick the Hat was still busily occupied with its feasting. Ryan thought for a moment about putting a bullet through the top of its soft skull, but there were more important things to take care of.

Ruin was screaming and cursing, a stream of noise pouring from his open mouth. He'd managed to break one of the stickie's arms. A jagged end of bone protruded through the creature's torn flesh. But his own injuries were severe. Blood gushed from his gashed arm, and the stickie had succeeded in getting a grip with its good hand on the inside of the bikers left thigh, near the groin. The suckers shredded the denim of his jeans and began to strip skin and flesh from the long femur.

Priest had finally managed to draw his rebuilt .32 and leveled it at the nearest of his attackers, pulling the trigger. Ryan actually saw the bullet pass clear through the body of the stickie, in a gout of blood, just above the waistband of the tattered pants. The mutie staggered but didn't go down. Priest fired again and again. Each round found its mark in the body of the advancing stickie, but the creature wasn't even knocked off its feet.

"In the head!" Ryan yelled. "Only way to chill them!"

Priest was too locked into his own panic to register Ryan's advice, and repeatedly fired his weapon, riddling the chest and stomach of the stickie. By now it was only a few paces away from him, hands reaching out to draw him into its lethal embrace.

Jak tried to help, throwing two of his elegant knives. Each found its target with pinpoint accuracy, thudding into the neck of the mutie, making it falter for a moment.

"Why not fucking down?" the albino yelled turning to look at Ryan.

"Told you. Stickies aren't like anything else. You can rip their guts open and it hardly slows them. Gotta hit their fireblasted heads."

Ruin had kicked his way clear of the one stickie, but it clutched a dripping haunch of meat in its hand. Blood was pouring from a gaping wound in the leg of the Last Hero. Ryan had seen enough fatal wounds in his time to know that the odds were effectively down to five against four. Three if you counted Priest as doomed.

At last Ryan could get in some clean shooting.

Standing with his feet a few inches apart, blaster firmly held in his hand, he fired three carefully placed shots.

One stickie had already closed on Priest, who'd turned at the last second to try to run from his slobbering, gnawing nemesis.

But the other mutie was halfway up the slope and the 9 mm bullet smashed into its head, exiting close to its left eye, sending it crashing down the face of the slope, legs and arms thrashing and twitching.

The second bullet hit the stickie that was chewing at the hunk of Ruin's upper leg — precisely where Ryan had aimed, near the mucous-rimmed pits of its pig-like nostrils. Angling sideways and splintering teeth, the round exploded through the side of the head, above the residual knobs of gristle that were the creature's ears.

The third round struck the stickie that had been moving toward the dying Ruin, chattering excitedly to itself in its own guttural tongue.

It was half turned toward Riddler, who'd screamed at it to try to distract it. The stickie had raised a hand when it had seen Ryan's raised blaster, and the bullet smashed through the nest of suckers in the middle of its palm, carrying on, entering the right cheek. The slug tore out the inside of the face, leaving the palate in tatters of mangled skin and flesh.

"Two of them and three of us," Ryan said.

"Five." Jak pointed to the kneeling figure of Ruin and to where the small, bearded Priest had vanished over the top of the rise.

"Three," Ryan repeated.

Ruin made a last desperate effort to get up, half falling, clawing his way toward his beloved chopper. But the blood loss from the torn femoral artery closed him down and he finally lay still in the dirt, his outstretched fingers inches from the dusty metal of the BMW.

"Come on," Ryan ordered, leading the way up the slope, followed by Jak. Riddler, clutching his blood-slick ax, waddled along at their heels.

The three of them paused at the top of the ridge, looking down into a shallow dip on the far side.

"Yeah," Jak finally agreed. "Three."

Priest hadn't made it far. He lay facedown in the sand, naked, the ragged remains of his clothes scattered around him. The stickie was crouched over the corpse, dabbing its hand at the bare flesh, each time bringing away a dozen tiny circles of crimson, raggedy skin. A maze of red rivulets trickled down its chin, testifying it was already relishing the feast. The creature became aware that it was being watched and looked up, snarling its venom.

"Me," Riddler demanded, hefting his sawed-off scattergun. "Me."

"Not at that range," Ryan replied. He'd been reloading his blaster as they stood there. Trader had always drummed into anyone who rode with him that a man had to keep his blasters fully charged whenever he could. Because you might not get another chance.

"Me," Jak said, pulling out his .357 Magnum.

"Head," Ryan reminded him.

The stickie was up and moving, leaving the ragged body of Priest behind. Its eyes were blinking, hands reaching out.

Only minutes had slipped by since Ryan had ridden into the ambush.

The noise of the handgun was deafening. After the mild popping of the .32 and the muffled sound of Ryan's silenced blaster, the air sang with the violence of its explosion.

The Magnum was so much bigger than Jak that the boy had to clutch it in both hands to fire it.

The white-haired boy was quite brilliant at close combat and knife fighting, but Ryan didn't rate him very highly when it came to blasters.

Jak was aware of his own limitations and cautiously aimed to score a hit, not taking the chance of missing with a more risky head shot. He put the bullet smack through the middle of the stickie's naked chest. The power of the Magnum made the advancing mutie totter on its heels, mouth dropping open in a squeak of shock and pain.

"Again," Ryan shouted. "Come on, Jak, hit it again. Now!"

The boy fired two more rounds, one going clean through the left shoulder, spinning the stickie around. The third one, better aimed, caught it at the angle of the jaw, destroying teeth into splintered fragments of razored bone, shredding the creature's tongue, almost removing the lower jaw. The distorted bullet exited in the center of the right cheek, flaying a hole the size of a baseball.

And it still didn't go down.

It lurched and stumbled, waving its hands with the tiny sucking disks. Blood sprayed down its body, coursing over the rubbery flesh, pattering into the thirsty earth.

"Let me chill the fucker with me ax," Riddler roared. "Or the ten-gauge."

"No. Mine," Jak insisted, steadying the gun and squeezing the trigger a fourth time, the sound booming out across the desert.

The bullet smashed into the side of the head of the staggering, blood-sodden monster, an inch from the corner of its left eye. The slug pulped its diminutive, malevolent brain, turning its lights out forever.

"Ace on the line," Ryan said. "Noise like that could attract every stickie from the Sierras to the Lantic. Let's go."

Something nagged at his memory, something that he'd forgotten in the rush and the excitement of the fight and the chilling.

He turned on his heel to lead the way down the slope to where the four choppers lay abandoned in the sand — and walked straight into the seventh and last of the attacking stickies, the one that had been cowering behind the spilled corpse of Dick the Hat, its mouth crusted with congealing human blood. Overlooked and forgotten.

Ryan's needle reflexes saved his life. Instinctively he punched out at the creature, feeling the impact jar clear to his shoulder. He brushed aside the lunging, clawing hands, hitting the stickie twice more with short stabbing punches to its maniac face and soft belly.

"Roll away!" someone bellowed behind him. Riddler, he realized.

Unhesitatingly Ryan pulled away, hearing the other sleeve of his shirt tear beneath the questing suckers. He rolled on his shoulder and came up in a fighting crouch, wincing at the nearness of the heat and blast from the Last Hero's shotgun.

"Fuck a dead armadillo!" Jak gasped.

It was an amazing sight.

The nervous system of a stickie was sometimes rudimentary. The burst of shot from the shotgun had torn the thing's head clear away from its narrow shoulders, leaving its skull to dangle, held only by frayed strands of ligament and ragged muscle. But it still walked!

The impact sent the creature several drunken steps down the flank of the hill, but it miraculously maintained its balance, wobbling several more uneven strides before it finally tripped and fell, rolling to the bottom of the slope. During the fall its head had become detached and bounced off, coming to a stop against the rear wheel of Priest's Triumph.

"Owe you one, Riddler." Ryan examined himself to make sure none of the suckers had actually broken his skin. Sometimes they carried a virulent infection that could possibly kill.

"Yeah, man. You said something about these ugly mothers liking fire and noise. Seems we've been doing enough blasting to bring 'em running for fucking miles around."

"Right. Don't forget to collect your throwing knives, Jak, and reload that little Magnum of yours."

Riddler's bike was the only machine in working order. It spluttered and protested at having to carry three on the road back to Snakefish. They left the other two-wheel wags and the bodies where they'd fallen.

As they pulled out onto the highway, Ryan glanced behind him and was sure that he saw signs of movement toward Death Valley, as if other had been attracted by the noise and were coming to investigate.

A lot of .