James Axler - Desolation Angels

“Find us a way out, J.B.,” Ryan said.

The Armorer let the M4000 fall to hang by its sling over one shoulder and scooped up the Uzi on the sling on the other. He hastily fired a short burst over the handrail. Ryan joined him.

This level was divided into rooms. A corridor ran along the near wall, while another stretched away from them at a T junction. As on the floor below, the lighting here was patchy.

By the flickering light and alternating patches of shine and shadow J.B. had just blasted a trio of muties coming at them along the corridor running away from the wall. One of them went down thrashing at the half-rotted rubber floor runners, spraying thick green blood everywhere. The others ran off twittering.

The bad news was they ducked into one of the doors standing open to both sides of the corridor.

Ryan took quick stock of their situation. They had three choices of which way to go from here—other than back down, which wasn’t happening. The corridor looked to move on to more lateral passages at either end. It was clear both ways for the moment.

“Gotta move!” Mildred’s voice boomed up from the stairs beneath Ryan. “Crap’s still coming. As well as a whole boatload of more muties!”

“Where is all this pressure coming from?” asked J.B. He swiveled his head constantly to make sure no new threats caught them unawares.

“Clearly, the sewage floats on water coming from a substantial body of it, whether lake, river or even ocean,” Doc called up.

He punctuated his statement with two quick, echoing blasts of his .44 blaster. Then he continued unperturbedly. “Quite nearby. Possibly above us.”

“Above us?” Mildred repeated. “That’s great. So what if there’s no way out?”

“They didn’t build this place with no exit other than the mat-trans,” Ryan said. “There’s a way out.”

“Also a way in,” J.B. added. “Unless they bred those muties here. And unless they don’t have to eat.”

“Got too many pointy teeth for that,” Ryan growled.

“Look!” Jak pointed along the corridor where the death throes of the mutie J.B. had shot were subsiding to chirps and twitches. An overhead light had come on at the far end, revealing a door with a grated window that looked suspiciously as if it led to another set of stairs.

“Go,” Ryan said as another pair of shots boomed out from just below. He recognized the sound of his lover’s Smith & Wesson 640. Its short barrel produced more noise than muzzle energy. If Krysty was blasting, it meant the muties were getting close.

Jak was usually a master of stealth, but he set off running at full speed. His long white hair streamed out behind his head like the neck cloth of a cap.

J.B. took off after him at a trot. He’d already swapped the Uzi for the M4000.

Ryan followed, panga and SIG Sauer at the ready. Jak was clearly bent on reaching the possible exit—at least from this level—as fast as possible. His companions had to keep the muties from the side rooms off his back and away from themselves. And above all, they had to keep moving.

There would be no room-by-room sweep, despite the fact it was safer, to say nothing of the possible scavvy awaiting them. Right then the only thing that gave them a chance at surviving another ten minutes was speed, speed and more speed.

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.