James Axler - Perception Fault

The moonless night had been replaced by an eerie, lambent green as the night-vision scope amplified the invisible infrared light it was projecting more than twenty thousand times, turning the darkness into neon-green day. Ryan scanned the high points first, adjusting the 4x zoom to try to pick out any sign of movement.

At first, he didn’t see anything. The guy might have left when night fell, he thought, but kept looking anyway, staring at the ruined hulks of buildings as if he could bring out anyone inside by sheer force of will. Long minutes passed without any sign of life. About to give up, Ryan decided to give it thirty more seconds before turning off the device to preserve the battery. He kept as still as possible, examining every aspect of the building he had chosen, from its empty windows, which looked like gaping, glowing eyesockets in the night-vision scope’s lens, to the pole sticking off the roof, attached to the side of the building by a length of wood.

Ryan blinked and refocused on the “pole,” pushing the magnifier to its maximum limit. He took one last long look. The man with the longblaster had camouflaged his position to look like part of the building, indistinguishable from the rest of the crumbling rubble. Ryan frowned. Whoever these guys were, they were well-trained, much better than the everyday, ragged bands of coldhearts.

He was still peering at the sniper’s position when a dark shadow obscured the scope’s vision. Thinking the unit had malfunctioned, he started to remove it from his eye, only to have it torn out of his hand to crash into the floor beneath him, the tinkle of broken glass telling him it was now just another piece of junk like everything else around him.

Instinctively, Ryan scooted down, hunching back into the tunnel. The action saved his life. A dirty, greasy hand slapped down on the tunnel floor right in front of him. The fingers wriggled on the dusty surface, then pulled free with a wet, sucking sound.

Stickie! Ryan looked up in time to see a hulking form block out the dim starlight. Hoarse breathing echoed in the small corridor, and Ryan caught the fetid scent of rotting meat wafting from the mutie’s gaping maw. With a bestial grunt, the mutie grabbed both sides of the tunnel and began crawling inside, intent on destroying its prey.

Ryan was about to shove himself down to the other end when the entire tunnel rocked at the bottom. With a sinking feeling, the one-eyed man knew what was at the other end.

Forcing his right hand down to his hip, Ryan drew the P-226 Sig Sauer and aimed between his spread legs, all too aware of the slavering death only a yard or two away from his head. He fired blindly five times, the muzzle-flash illuminating the face of the stickie at the bottom of the tunnel, each burst of light revealing the destruction wrought upon its face as the 9 mm hollowpoint bullets slammed into it. Only when the last one punched through its eye did it whine shrilly and, expelling a fist-size wad of blood and phlegm, crumple to the floor, effectively blocking his retreat.

Ryan tried to bring the blaster back up, but found himself wedged in the tunnel, and couldn’t straighten before the top stickie was almost upon him, its gluey hand slapping at his shirt and starting to pull him toward it. Above the pressure of being dragged to his death, the Deathlands warrior felt the sheath of the thin-bladed knife pressing against his neck.

He pushed at the stickie’s rubbery arm with his left arm as hard as he could, trying to pin it against the tunnel wall, while he dropped his blaster and went for the blade at his neck with his right. As he brought his free hand around, the one-eyed smacked into something wet and slobbering, and he didn’t hesitate. He curled his fingers into a fist and smashed them three times into what could only be the mutie’s face, causing a howl of pain to reverberate through the passageway.

The mutie pulled back enough for Ryan to free his blade from its sheath and slash up with it. He met resistance and struck again and again, not giving the stickie a chance to recover or launch its own offensive. At one point, he felt the tip of the blade scrape bone, and felt warm, thin fluid run down his hand. The stickie screamed in pain and thrashed around in the passageway, bucking back and forth against the walls. Squealing in pain and surprise, the mutie retreated back up the tunnel.

When it was halfway out, it jerked in surprise, then slumped limply in the opening as the boom of the sniper’s longblaster echoed off the walls. The stickie flailed feebly, then stiffened as its head seemed to explode, showering Ryan with gore from its shattered skull. The mutie’s corpse sagged toward the floor of the tunnel, held up by the sucker pads of one of its fingers, still adhered to the wall.

Ryan wiped foul-smelling gore from his face and eyes and considered his current predicament. The big question now was, why didn’t the sniper shoot the stickie when it was trying to climb in and tear Ryan’s face off? But there was no time to ponder an answer. The stench of dead mutie, combined with burned cordite, was overpowering, and Ryan began to cough and choke as he slid to the bottom of the tunnel to retrieve his blaster—after first making sure the bottom stickie was dead by kicking it in the head several times. Only when he was sure did he crouch to feel for his Sig Sauer, finally retrieving it from the mush that had been the mutie’s head and wiping off the gunk as best as he could. Then he tried shifting the body out of the tunnel, but even heaving at it with all his strength didn’t budge it—the corpse was wedged fast.

Breathing through his mouth, Ryan knew there was only one way out. Panting with each movement, he began the laborious climb back up, the tunnel floor now slick with the stinking liquid dripping on him from the corpse above. At last he reached the sodden form and wedged his legs up into the tunnel to give himself a bit of a rest while he figured out the best way to escape the trap he found himself in.

Over, under, around or through, he thought, remembering one of the Trader’s favorite axioms. With the other three options unavailable to him, there was only straight through, up and out, hoping the distraction of the stickie’s suddenly animated body would be enough to cover his scramble to shelter.

The preparation for his escape attempt was almost overwhelming by itself. Ryan forced himself to get as close to the dead body as he could stand, after first confirming its deceased state by the simple expedient of putting a bullet in its brain. While there, he noticed something that made him pause. Stickies usually didn’t wear much clothing, maybe a tattered pair of pants, if anything, but this one had a black nylon collar with a small box around its neck. He reminded himself to check it out if possible once he was out of this stifling, would-be tomb.

When he was wedged uncomfortably close, he heaved at the sticky, flabby body with all his strength, shoving it up and back until gravity took over, and the dead stickie slithered out of the opening to the ground below. Gagging on the stink, Ryan scrambled out as quickly as he could, diving to the ground and landing on the corpse, which expelled a loud, rank blast of stale air. He heard a crack over his head, followed immediately by the sting of concrete chips flying at his head, then the boom of the longblaster’s report all around him.

Ryan was already moving, crawling over the debris to the nearest cover, a pile of concrete pieces that might have been a sidewalk a century ago. He’d just reached cover when the ground near his left arm puffed up dust, and the crack of the large-bore rifle exploded in the distance again.

“This is gettin’ bastard old,” Ryan muttered. Going back wasn’t an option. As long that that keen-eyed coldheart held the high ground, they couldn’t leave the area without someone taking a bullet or two.