Desolation Angels

For a moment, Ryan thought Jak was going to run the gauntlet of open doors unscathed. Then a mutie popped out of a room to the right, just at the end.

Jak punched it across the face with the knuckleduster hilt of the trench knife he carried and never slowed. The creature reeled back out of sight, clutching itself and keening in anguish.

Jak sped to the other end of the corridor, the open doorways to either side spewing claw-waving muties in his wake.

“Fireblast!” Ryan exclaimed. “We can’t shoot or we might hit him!”

He and J.B. kept charging ahead regardless. There was nothing else to do.

But Jak had grown up fighting. He knew he was in his friends’ line of fire as well as they did. Through the crowd of fluting, growling, arm-waving muties blocking their way, Ryan saw the slim white figure slip aside, out of his line of sight. A moment later the boom of his .357 Magnum Colt Python reverberated down the hallway, muted only slightly by the dropped ceiling.

J.B. promptly snagged the grip of his Uzi in his left hand, rotated the muzzle upward and fired a quick blast into the mutie mob. Apparently oblivious to Jak’s passage, or just attracted by the more target-rich environment the other way, they had surged toward him and Ryan.

As before, the front rank of creatures staggered back. One fell backward, flailing its long arms. Others tried to bolt back—into the faces of their fellows.

The Armorer charged into that ball of confusion. He let the Uzi drop to the end of its sling and grabbed the foregrip of his M4000 shotgun.

He fired two quick blasts into the mass. Green ichor flew. Muties bleated and shrilled in pain and fear.

Then J.B. was into them like a buzz saw. His scattergun was designed and built to be used as a riot baton as much as a blaster. There was nothing delicate about the weapon.

J.B. made full use of it. He jabbed the muzzle into the sunken chest of a mutie that was trying to hold in its guts and pushed it out of the way. A high-pitched scream issued from the mutie as the still-hot steel branded its chest.

J.B. flung it to the left, knocking an apparently unwounded mutie into the wall along with it. Then he broke a second’s spindly neck with a backstroke of the butt plate.

These things aren’t so tough, Ryan thought as he followed hard behind J.B. So far things had gone the way of his friends and himself.

The mutie J.B. had forced out of his path with the dying body of its comrade caught Ryan across the cheek with a swipe of its long black talons.

That was his blind side. He yanked his panga free of the mutie he’d just dispatched and, turning his head that way, slashed savagely in reprisal. He caught a look of round-eyed surprise. The eyes were big and blue and altogether human—too human. The monster yelped and flung up its arm protectively.

A pulse of viscous green mutie blood gushed toward Ryan as the claw-tipped arm was slashed below the wrist.

The mutie howled. It grabbed its hosing stump with its remaining hand and slid down the wall.

Ryan turned his face the other way in time to intercept another claw coming for his good eye. Blue-gray fingers flew into the air. Ryan raised the SIG Sauer in his left hand and fired a shot into the open saw-toothed mouth. Brains splattered across the bare wall behind the mutie’s head. Behind him he heard a mutie squeak in alarm, then a wet sound, followed by Doc crowing triumph. “Be gone, brigand!”

Apparently the old man had chosen to wade in close behind Ryan, as Ryan had done with J.B. That put the three with the most effective melee weapons in the lead, leaving the women and Ricky to guard their backs. For all his occasional mental deficiency and frail demeanor, Doc was as seasoned and formidable a fighter as any of them.

Unlike some muties, these weird, long-armed creatures with their rubbery flesh were total berserk diehards who kept attacking regardless of how many were killed. Their wailing and chirping changed pitch, taking on a frantic tone. They began to jostle and fall across one another in their haste to dive back into the rooms they’d just left.

Ryan was fairly sure they ate humans. Those pointed teeth were meant to rip flesh, and the instantaneous eagerness with which the muties attacked them on sight suggested appetite was a strong motivating factor. Although they could simply be outraged homeowners defending their violated castle, he supposed. Cannies usually were norms.

No reason they can’t be both, he thought. Doesn’t matter much. We’ll be done with them in a few minutes, anyway. One way or another.

“Don’t slow down to admire your handiwork!” Mildred yelled from the rear by the door at the last set of stairs. “A whole bunch is coming right after us!”

That warning was punctuated by the characteristic bark of her ZKR 551.

Jak stood with his back to the wall by the handle side of the heavy door with the grated window. He had his trench knife in one hand and his Colt Python in the other. His white hair flew as he swiveled his head sharply left and right to look both ways down the corridor that ran along that wall perpendicular to the one his friends were running down.

A pair of muties lay still at his feet.

“Clear?” J.B. called to him.

“Clear!”

“Secure the stairs,” Ryan commanded.

The corridor had emptied miraculously ahead of them. As Jak yanked on the door and rushed through the opening, J.B. increased his pace to full speed. Such as it was. Ryan had to keep his own steps throttled back to keep from overrunning his friend with his much longer legs.

“Be careful passing the open doors,” he yelled for the benefit of his friends behind him.

“We know that, Ryan!” Krysty called back. She sounded exasperated. “Just go, all right?”

He followed his own advice, cranking his head rapidly left and right to check each yawning door as he passed to make sure none of the muties had become emboldened enough to join the attack. He caught glimpses of knots of the creatures huddled back as far from the door as possible. Clearly they’d had enough of fighting for now.

They’ll be on our heels quick enough when the sewage starts to gurgle up around those black-nailed toes of theirs, Ryan thought.

J.B. reached the end of the corridor. He stopped and turned briskly left to peer that way with the longblaster presented at his shoulder. “Clear,” he called, then looked back over his shoulder.

He repeated his assurance.

“Move!” Ryan yelled to him.

He did. He flashed across the crossing corridor, hauled open the door Jak had disappeared through and followed.

Ryan barely broke stride to check the cross passage was still empty of threats. He caught the heavy door as it closed and threw it wide. A long arm in a black coat sleeve reached out to catch it and hold it.

“Ladies first,” Doc announced as Ryan dashed in to turn to look up the next stairs.

“Your ass, old man!” Mildred shouted. “Just keep moving!”

Ryan pounded up the steps to the landing. Jak was crouched at the next level, which Ryan could see was the top. Of this stairwell, anyway. J.B. stood on the steps right behind him, shotgun ready.

“Way out,” Jak said. “Clear.”

“Go,” Ryan ordered. It was getting repetitive. But it was still needed. Just because the situation they’d been dropped face-first into kept hitting them with simple yes-or-no choices didn’t mean the answer was ever clear. And as lead wolf in the pack, it was Ryan’s call to try to guess which alternative was bad and which was worse, every time, with no time to think.

He smiled, briefly and grimly, as he remembered a predark phrase Mildred sometimes used: “That’s why I get paid the big bucks.”

Jak popped out the door with J.B. right behind him. Ryan hastily followed.

As he did, he heard Krysty shout, “All the muties in the world are coming up after us!”

The first thing Ryan saw when he emerged from the open door to the stairwell was sunlight streaming in from tall, narrow, broken windows onto a concrete floor littered with fragments of tables and chairs and, incongruously, a scattering of dry, gray leaves.

He stepped quickly to one side. A doorway was a bad place to linger. It was set flush to the back wall of what had obviously been a store or restaurant, as if it gave onto a utility closet. There was no front door. The light was that of morning by color alone. He saw surprisingly lush trees across the street. Through the leaves he glimpsed yellow stone and a hint of some kind of tracery of stone or metal. It reminded him of the leading used to hold stained glass in predark churches.