James Axler - Ice and Fire

The sky was a rich pink, streaked with blue, stippled with fragments of high, scudding chem clouds. Once Ryan spotted a circling hawk, riding a thermal far above them. It was so high that he couldn't judge its size, but the wingspan seemed unusually wide.

They stopped after a half hour for Riddler to relieve himself, standing by the side of the highway, legs spread, whistling loudly to himself.

Dick the Hat was waiting, close by Ryan. "When you get to join the Last Heroes, you get your colors initiated like that."

"Like what?"

"Put on the denims and lie down and all the brothers stand around and piss all over you."

"Fireblast!" Ryan said. "Sounds a whole wag of laughs."

The Angel looked at him suspiciously, but said nothing.

"Much farther?"

"Five miles. Road gets worse. Gotta slow some. Beyond that bunch of hills."

Eye watering from the dusty wind, Ryan squinted around the bikers back and saw that the highway was rising slowly, leading toward a group of mesas. As they drew nearer he could make out that there had been some major earth movements and rocks had slipped down across the blacktop.

Ruin was in the lead, and he held up a hand as a warning to the others that they were swinging off the pavement onto a dirt trail with deep ruts that coiled to the left. Speed dropped to a little more than walking pace; dust billowed around them, choking and blinding. The three other Last Heroes dropped back, spacing themselves to avoid the orange clouds.

"Nearly there!" the biker shrieked, his face a mask of sand-covered sweat.

The rocking and bouncing was almost unbearable as the bike jolted over the bumps, its century-old suspension creaking and rattling. Ryan had to hang on to Priest's back to keep himself on the bike, trying to breathe through his mouth to avoid choking.

Dimly, on either side of the Triumph, Ryan could make out walls of tumbled, frost-riven boulders, rising forty feet or more above them.

Concentrating hard on breathing and staying in the saddle, Ryan had neglected his fighting senses. The hair at his nape had begun to prickle, warning him that this was a dangerous place to be.

He was taken completely by surprise when a semi-naked, mewing creature launched itself at him from out of nowhere, hurling him from the bike. He landed flat on his back in the dirt, with needle-sharp teeth questing toward his neck and a suckered hand reaching for his good eye.

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.