Desolation Angels

“Anyway, it seems like a good sign,” she finished.

“People live,” Jak said. He crouched in an area right of the entrance, where a picnic table and some chairs had been set in what might have once been a kiosk. Its enclosure was now just metal uprights to hold long-vanished glass.

“Yep, they do,” Mildred said. “Somewhere. The question is, do any live here?”

“They do,” Krysty said. “I smell food cooking. With onion, garlic and basil.”

Her stomach rumbled as she said it.

“Mebbe they’ll invite us to join them for lunch,” Ricky said.

“Or to be lunch,” J.B. suggested.

Other tables and chairs sat on a tile floor, dark gray on lighter gray down the central strip that ran from the door, mixed shades of blue and gray to the sides. It looked as if the area was used for socializing. A dead escalator rose at the far end to a second story surrounded by a rail.

“Ryan, look,” Krysty said as they advanced. She pointed at a giant square doorway that opened to their right.

Like several others, it spilled yellow daylight onto the floor tiles. Through it they could see what looked to be another farm or garden. A hole in the roof—or a roof that was missing entirely—allowed the life-giving sunlight in.

“Huh,” Ryan said.

“Nobody home,” Ricky stated.

“Waiting and watching to see what we do, likely,” J.B. said.

“So what should we do, lover?” Krysty asked Ryan.

He had reholstered his weapons when they ducked into the building across the intersection. Now he cupped his empty hands around his mouth and hollered, “Hello! Anybody here? We’ve reached this ville and we’re looking for work.”

A blaster shot fired from the railing toward the escalator was his reply.

Chapter Four

“Mebbe they don’t like outlanders,” J.B. said.

“You rad-sucking fool, Tyrone!” a man’s voice shouted from the gallery. “Why’d you give us away?”

“They’re mercies!” another voice yelled back defensively. “We can’t let Hizzoner’s blasters on Angels turf!”

“Back outside!” Ryan yelled, racing toward the doors, which fortuitously were open.

As the companions turned to sprint the few steps back to the outdoors, another shot cracked out. Tile splintered to Ryan’s right. Then another blaster spoke and another.

“More right!” Jak yelped. Meaning other enemies were appearing in the doorway to the odd interior garden plots.

“Hold your breath!” J.B. shouted. “Poison gas!”

Then Ryan heard a clatter and sound of something metal and weighty rolling on tile.

“Gas!” one of the ambusher screamed from the railing.

A female voice cried, “Get back!”

Ryan burst into the sunlight. He took a few steps down the steps to the street, then spun, unlimbering his Steyr and dropping to one knee. He intended to cover his friends’ retreat.

He saw dirty yellow-white smoke billowing up from the middle of the wide floor. Already it rose high enough to obscure the second-story gallery from view, which meant it also obscured them from their enemies’ view, making aimed fire impossible.

Ryan grinned as his friends came flying out of the giant half-gutted building, racing past him. He heard a rip of full-auto fire and recognized J.B.’s Uzi. The Armorer was clearly giving their attackers some additional reason not to be fast about rushing to pursue.

Of course, they would pursue. That was a given. Especially once they figured out that what J.B. had unleashed on them wasn’t poison gas at all, but just one of the black-powder smoke bombs the Armorer and his apprentice, Ricky Morales, had started making in their spare time weeks ago.

Ryan was impressed by just how much smoke a bomb the size of a predark beer can produced—and how quickly.

“Best power right on,” J.B. called as he trotted down the steps, holding his Uzi in his right hand and his fedora pressed to his head with his left. “They’re starting to get organized, and it sounds like we got them hot well past nuke red.”

Jak raced past and took off to Ryan’s right to put himself in front of his companions. Everybody else was clear. Ryan had checked them off mentally as they passed him.

They headed southwest again, away from downtown—where they knew there were hostile blasters who more than likely were still keeping eyes skinned for them, even though they hadn’t pursued. They wouldn’t be any better disposed toward the companions after they had treated them to a faceful of mutie talons and all the accumulated sewage of some unspecified but no doubt vast swath of the great half-overgrown urban ruin-scape.

It was as good a direction as any. Ryan stood and followed.

* * *

WHEN HIS BUDDY Jak sprinted past him to take the lead in the hasty retreat, Ricky found himself half-disappointed and half-relieved. It wasn’t that he was afraid to put his life on the line for his friends—he did that all the time. It was that he was a bit on the near-sighted side and hated leaving his friends’ survival dependent on senses that were far less keen than the albino’s.

He carried his DeLisle carbine in preference to his Webley handblaster. The big top-break, double-action revolver, converted by his uncle Benito to fire the same .45 ACP cartridges the longblaster did, was handier to use in a close-in fight, and faster, too. But he already knew the Detroit ruins hosted muties with bad attitudes toward norms. And the green growth that exploded through the broken pavement here and there, or sprouted in more or less orderly rows in the cultivated plots they sometimes passed, provided enemies with excellent cover. The sturdy, stocky DeLisle made a far better melee weapon than a handgun did.

They were running down the northwestern edge of the great half-ruined building. Even as he looked around for potential enemies, Ricky took in more of the extent of its ruination. He realized quickly why the big space they had glimpsed through the side door was full of crops and the daylight that gave them life. Something had taken off or collapsed the roof of the blocky center from twenty or thirty yards down from the entrance, all the way back to where an elevated track or walkway to a circular parking structure had been taken down by the same catastrophe. Or a similar one. The parking structure itself, mostly open, had survived intact, at least as far as Ricky could see. Open structures always seemed to have survived nuke blasts better than closed ones.

Another cultivated plot grew at the building’s far end, where the elevated track had gone down. From there, several figures in dark vests jogged into the street in front of Jak and Ricky. One of them, with brown hair hanging to his shoulders, knelt and aimed a longblaster at Ricky.

A sharp crack punched at his left ear. He yelped and swerved.

The man with the longblaster dropped the weapon and folded over backward. What Ricky had heard, as his rational mind belatedly informed him, was the miniature sonic boom of a longblaster bullet going by him faster than the speed of sound. But it was fired from behind him. Ricky recognized the boom that reached him as the enemy gunman fell as the sound of Ryan’s 7.62 mm Steyr Scout.

Not that Ricky was accustomed to hearing it from way out in front of its business end.

Jak swerved right into an intersection. Ricky followed, even as he heard Ryan yell, “Covering fire!”

Jak reached a concrete building corner. He hunkered down, leaned around and fired an ear-shattering blast from his Python.

Ricky joined him a few heartbeats later. He pressed his shoulder against the wall. Wishing he were a lefty so he could shoot without exposing almost his entire body, the youth stepped out enough to get a look at the new pack of pursuers. They seemed to be coming out of a gap in the wall of the big building. Long slabs of the fallen track lay behind them, tilted at random angles amid thick, low vegetation.

He laid his iron sights on the bare chest of the man running in the lead and pressed the trigger. His hefty longblaster fired a pistol cartridge, so it didn’t have much of a kick, and the suppressed weapon barely made a sound.

The shot took the man at the upper-right top of his rib cage arch. Ricky could tell because he saw the blood splash red from beneath his target’s right nipple. The man took a header, dropping his long-barreled single-action revolver and rolling over and over on the cracked blacktop.

Jak’s big .357 Magnum Colt Python made more than enough noise for both weapons. When he cranked off another shot, three of the vest wearers hit the pavement. Ricky had no idea if his friend had even hit one of them. There was no way he could’ve nailed all three, even with the Python’s tendency to overpenetrate. At least two people fired back, and Ricky and Jak had to duck hastily as chips of concrete flew from the corner.

Shots were fired from up the street, too close to be the original pursuers—they had to come from Ryan and company. Ricky bent to avoid making his head a ripe target by poking it out where it had been before and risked a quick look at the enemy.

Their pursuers were picking themselves up off the street and racing back for the far side. They left only two of their comrades lying there: the rifleman Ryan had shot and the runner Ricky got.

Their five friends pelted by, turning up the same street they had.

“Better move along,” J.B. called in passing. “The first bunch got themselves sorted out, and they’re not happy!”

Ricky and Jak looked at each other and grinned. Then they headed out after the others as J.B. fired a quick burst back the way he’d come, then pivoted to loose another across the street.

* * *

AS RICKY AND Jak moved on, J.B. took station against the textured gray wall a few steps down the street. He held his Uzi ready. No new targets presented themselves immediately, from either the original pursuers storming out the front entrance after them or the new set from the giant building’s far end. He knew they wouldn’t stay out of play for long.

Ryan ran past him, turned and knelt, bringing up his Steyr.

“Into the garage!” he shouted.

J.B. promptly wheeled right and trotted toward the entrance. It was wide, meant to allow two-lane access for cars going in and out of the parking structure. He slung his Uzi and took up his shotgun.

Jak slipped in first. He still had his Python in one white fist, which looked like a child’s compared to the big blaster. Concern was written all over his pinched features.

Ricky waited beside the open bay, clutching his DeLisle and peering uneasily inside. Krysty, Mildred and Doc stood in the street, out of direct line of the wide door, covering the street and the bluish building across it. They kept their handblasters ready.

Unspoken but obvious—even to J.B., who didn’t take hints—was that they weren’t any more anxious to plunge into the depths of the garage than Ricky was.

“Back me up,” J.B. told his apprentice as he went by. He entered the building without waiting to see if Ricky followed. He would.

The Armorer took a step to his left to clear the fatal funnel of the doorway. Nothing 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.

One darted toward Krysty. She veered and it missed its grab at her. But the suckers on its fingers caught the right sleeve of her shirt.

She yelped; other muties closed in, chittering triumphantly.

Krysty let the mutie turn her hand toward itself. In that hand was her Smith & Wesson 640. She emptied the five shots in its cylinder into the creature’s belly.

The horror barely even flinched. It opened its mouth wide and swept its free hand up to try to rip off her face.

“Krysty!” Mildred yelled. She grabbed the taller woman by her left upper arm and yanked her away.

But it still clung to her despite the blood leaking black through the holes in its abdomen. Other muties converged on what they took for a certain chill.

Ryan waded in. He booted away one that was trying to get around behind Krysty. Then he lunged forward and severed the hand that was stuck to Krysty’s sleeve just above the skinny wrist.

With Mildred’s help Krysty was yanked from the cluster of stickie hands. Ryan had had to overbalance to hack through the mutie’s arm. His right boot slipped on something wet and slick on the concrete beneath him. He dropped to one knee, hard enough to clack his teeth together and send a lance of pain from his kneecap up through his whole body.

But Ryan never lost his presence of mind. That was something he’d always had, that gift of constant, unswerving focus—on survival.

He batted away the grasping, suckered hands, slashing with his panga. And even as he fought desperately the awful screeching muties who swarmed around him, he was roaring, “Go! Get out of here!”

He moved his arms violently to prevent any fingertip suckers from latching on. But the stickies were cunning monsters. They adapted. One wrapped its arms around his right forearm, fouling his panga. It stretched its head out on its neck with jaws gaping wide to take a chunk out of the one-eyed man’s face.

In his peripheral vision Ryan saw something dark and slender, and yellow flame belched forth. It bathed the whole side of the stickie’s head with its yawning, sharp-toothed maw in fire.

The left side of the stickie’s head exploded. Its arms relaxed in death, releasing its hold.

Ryan thrust his panga into another flat stickie face, bursting a staring eyeball. The panga’s blade was much too wide to pierce through to the mutie’s brain, but the creature fell back shrieking.

Ryan saw a stickie head’s transfixed from his left to his right with a slender steel blade. Then hands were hauling him away from the stickies as handblasters spoke shatteringly from either side of him.

He got the rest of the way to his feet on his own. He saw it was Mildred on his left who’d blasted the stickie—and left him with a ringing in his ears that would last for hours. Krysty was to his right.

A quick flurry of face shots dropped three stickies and slowed the others.

Ryan drew his SIG with his left hand and shot a fourth through its open mouth as it vaulted a scrum of writhing bodies.

“Nuke it, the stickies didn’t get them!” a voice called from the street.

“Give the mutie bastards a chance,” somebody else yelled back.

The stickie swarm had split the party in two. J.B. had almost reached Jak, still lurking by the exit, when the mutie caught hold of Krysty. Now the muties were surrounding everybody else, gobbling and squeaking in triumph.

“Stay behind me,” Ryan yelled to Krysty and Mildred. The sickening stench of stickies was so thick now it made his head spin. The spilling of stickie blood, brain and guts didn’t make them smell any sweeter. “Doc, Ricky, right and left outside them.”

The women complied.

Though Ricky was the newest of the group of companions, he’d been with them for months now. He knew how they worked and how to work well with them.

Ryan led the way back for the exit away from the human pursuit, hacking with the big panga, warding off blows and attempted grabs with the SIG. He only fired when there was no other choice.

Doc, outside the two close-together women to Ryan’s right rear, was stabbing mutie faces with his sword and bludgeoning the ones who got close with his massive LeMat. Ricky held his carbine by its fat sound suppresser. He hacked at the muties with the butt to keep them away, alternating baseball-bat style with ax-type overhead action. Because it had been built out of a military weapon that was intended to bust skulls as a last resort, the DeLisle could likely survive the rude treatment with little damage.

But the companions had to survive for that to matter a lick.

The muties wouldn’t run, but they could be forced back. They weren’t big. Ryan had no trouble bulling through them, though not as fast as he liked, by just using his size and strength. And the women, holding on to each other for support, booted any stickies who got through the rough equilateral triangle of the males.

Then a mutie right in front of Ryan had its head smashed from behind by a downward butt stroke of J.B.’s M4000 scattergun. And the one beside it pitched forward with the back of its skull staved in by a punch from the studded brass-knuckle hilt of Jak’s trench knife. Ryan had to lash out with his shin to knock the creature aside and keep it from tripping him—or latching on to his jeans-clad leg with its suckers.