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she could see the silly people fleeing for their lives and crushing one
another in the process.
Only when the army of mutants rounded the end of the amusement zone and came
charging up the golf course did Willie Elijah realize what he was up against.
A sea of dead-eye faces boiled up his avenue.
The sec men holding Ryan at the eighteenth floor let go of the rope, and once
more he dropped to the end. Autofire raged from the brewery's roof. He could
see the smoke and the flash.
"At least somebody's shooting at them!" Elijah said, reaching for his
telescope. He was watching his sec men spray the stickies when the machine gun
opened up on them from the ground. He saw his soldiers shot to pieces.
Lowering the telescope, the baron scanned the throng and located the mutie
shooter. "Zit!" he cried. "It's that goddamn Zit!"
Meeting no serious opposition, the first wave of stickies closed the distance
to the hotel.
"Come on, Murch!" Elijah shouted. "Do it! Do it!"
As if on cue, the ville's defensive plan kicked in. Autofire rattled from the
front of the lobby and chattered from the amusement zone across the way. The
stickie force was channeled between walls of lead, forced to close ranks in a
long, narrow line.
Elijah could see the mutants dropping on the edges of the mass. They soaked up
full-metal-jacketed slugs like frogs absorbing BBs. They were damn hard to
chill.
A flash of light, followed by a thunderclap, bloomed in the middle of the
former golf course, right at the head of the stickie army. A huge ball of
smoke and dirt rolled away from the heart of the explosion.
It was spectacle.
It was mass slaughter.
It was glorious.
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Elijah whooped so wildly that he spilled tipple all over his pants.
"Yay!" the norm girls cheered.
The toadies cheered, too, and pounded their fists on the railing.
The celebration quickly died when stickles kept on coming, tramping over the
broken bodies of their comrades.
Another explosion, this one under the parking lot, closer to the hotel, sent
mutants and mutant parts flying across the compound. The pall of smoke drifted
away, and the penthouse spectators saw
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s%20(12/55)/035%20-%20Skydark.txt stickies blown down in a circle like trees
felled by a windstorm. There was movement at the outer edges of the
destruction. Stickies were getting up and continuing the attack.
"Hit them again, Murch!" Elijah shouted over the rail.
Then the balcony started coming apart.
Heavy-caliber slugs sparked as they clipped the steel rail, cutting three of
the sec men almost in two, splattering their guts in a wide swathe across the
exterior wall. The spray of bullets went through babies and moms and shattered
the patio's sliding doors behind them. The patio furniture was jumping and
shuddering from impacts as the survivors dived for the doorway to the
penthouse.
From the floor inside, Elijah could see Poonie-Two, Poonie-Three and
Toonie-Two and Toonie-Three
dead in pools of red on the deck. The moms were still twitching, the infants
weren't.
Two-thirds of his pure-norm gene bank was gone in the blink of an eye.
"Roonie-Two! Where are you?" Elijah cried. When she didn't answer at once, he
thought he'd lost her, as well. "Roonie-Two!"
Then a faint voice said, "Over here, Poppadaddy."
It took a moment for him to locate her in the clutter of the overfurnished
suite. She was belly down on the rug in front of a sofa, covering her baby
with her body.
Skeen was trying to hide under the lamp table beside her. All he'd managed to
conceal was his bald head and narrow shoulders.
As J.B. APPROACHED the roller coaster on a dead run, he saw movement in the
scaffolding to his right. Several figures were struggling wildly. One fell,
bouncing off the struts, and landed on the ground. The Armorer held up his
hand, signaling his comrades for a quick stop. He, Doc and
Mildred closed ranks behind the ticket kiosk.
At the bottom of the scaffolding, not sixty feet from where they knelt, ten
stickies huddled in a tight circle over the fallen sec man, their arms
flailing as they ripped and tore at him. The mutants in the scaffolding
dropped beside them and joined in the fun.
Mildred raised her AK, but J.B. caught hold of the barrel before she could
fire. He shook his head. They had only the two mags between them. If they used
up all their ammo to kill these few stickies, they'd never make it to the
hotel.
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Not that their chances looked good, anyway.
It was clear that the first stickies into Willie ville, the ones who'd come in
under the berm, were already ahead of them, thereby cutting off the most
direct line of access. They watched the stickies pull the sec man apart and
scatter the bits of flesh like confetti. As the mutants moved back toward the
asphalt path, J.B., Doc and Mildred retreated out of sight around the kiosk.
The stickies didn't go far. They stopped at a manhole set in the middle of the
path and lifted the cover. One by one the stickies disappeared down the hole.
When they were gone, Mildred covered Doc and J.B. while they stepped up to
have a look.
"It's a power-line conduit," the Armorer said. "It's heading in the direction
of the hotel. It might be our only way in."
"What about the stickies?"
"At least we know how many are ahead of us, Doc," he said.
J.B. climbed down the metal ladder, and Mildred and Doc quickly followed. The
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conduit was six feet in diameter. Most of its width was packed with cables and
plastic pipes, leaving a narrow slit down the middle for them to pass through.
There was a channel cut in the floor for water runoff.
The only light was coming down through the opening above them.
"Shh," J.B. said. "Listen."
They could hear scuffling sounds ahead. The stickies were moving away, and
fast. With J.B. on point, the trio went after them. They had gone only a few
hundred feet when the earth began to nimble behind them. Dust from the ceiling
fluttered down like gray snow.
"It's the stickies," J.B. said. "The whole damn army's up there. We've got to
beat them to the hotel. Run!"
Running wasn't easy inside the pipe because the space was so narrow and the
water-filled channel in the floor tended to snag the sides of their boots. But
they made good time, maintaining their distance from the hordes behind them
and rapidly gaining on the stickies in front of them.
It came as a complete surprise when everything went white.
Hard light of impossible brilliance filled the inside of their skulls. The
whiteness billowed out,
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only black. J.B., Doc and Mildred were unconscious before they hit the ground,
stunned by the concussive pressure of the explosion above and behind them.
Debris rained on them, but they didn't feel it
RYAN HAD HIS HAND clamped over his face, trying to staunch bis nosebleed when
cries from the crowd of norms below caught his attention not cries of pleasure
at his pain and suffering, but cries of terror.
From a height of twelve stories, he looked down to see the mob rushing for the
lobby. And he saw the reason why, too.
Stickies leaped and hurled themselves into the edge of the audience. There
couldn't have been more than
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fifteen of the mutants, and the crowd numbered better than two hundred, but
the norm spectators were toadies, women and children. Instead of cornering the
few attackers and stomping them to death, the crowd turned its back on the
threat, allowing the stickles to pluck people out of the mass at will and tear
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