of dry, gray leaves.
He stepped quickly to one side. A doorway was a bad place to linger. It was set flush to the back wall of what had obviously been a store or restaurant, as if it gave onto a utility closet. There was no front door. The light was that of morning by color alone. He saw surprisingly lush trees across the street. Through the leaves he glimpsed yellow stone and a hint of some kind of tracery of stone or metal. It reminded him of the leading used to hold stained glass in predark churches.
J.B. had taken a position on the other side of the door to the hidden stair. Finding the room empty, he had switched to his Uzi. Jak slipped cautiously toward the window.
“No time!” Mildred yelled as she came bursting out the door on Doc’s heels. “They’re right behind us!”
Ryan heard the boom of Ricky’s Webley handblaster echo out of the stairwell and started moving toward the window.
“Looks clear,” Jak said, peering around the edge of the empty window. He promptly slipped around and onto the street.
Deciding that securing escape was more important than helping discourage the long-armed muties from following too fast, he went for the front door. The others came hot behind, starting with J.B.
Ryan burst out onto the street. The first thing he noticed was the humidity that hit him in the face like a wool blanket soaked in hot water. The second was how profuse the vegetation was—grass and flowers were pushing up through big cracks heaved in the pavement, and there were trees all down the block that extended to his left.
The third thing he noticed was a tall, skeletally thin woman with an electric-green Mohawk casually strolling around the corner of the building across the street to his right.
But there was nothing casual about the way she whipped up the M16 she’d been carrying in patrol position and aimed it at Ryan.
“Get down!” Ryan shouted to his companions. He snapped off a shot and threw himself back toward the door to the redoubt.
He bumped into Doc. That had been half his intention—to keep those behind from blundering out into the unexpected enemy’s field of fire. The other half was to try to back out of it himself.
The black longblaster snarled out a burst of full-auto fire. Ryan didn’t know where the bullets hit. He only knew they didn’t hit him.
Then J.B., who had come out right behind Ryan and taken a reflex step to his right, ripped off a short burst of his own. The woman dropped onto her buttocks. The front of her grimy gray T-shirt was already showing darker, redder stains overwhelming the old ones.
“More!” Jak yelled from his position crouched before the window to Ryan’s right.
Ryan had caught himself on one knee in the doorway. Now he saw more men and women fanning out diagonally across the street. They sported variations of partially shaved heads and spiked, outlandishly colored hair. And a nasty assortment of weapons.
“Pull back!” he yelled. He turned and scrambled into the cool dimness of the derelict room.
“But, Ryan—” Mildred began.
“Shut it! Get back in the corner.” He gestured toward the far rear corner where they’d come out. “Now!”
Shots were crackling outside with a sound like a big, dry tumbleweed going up in flames. By sheer bad luck the companions had come up against a sizable local faction. One with itchy trigger fingers—and the blasters and bullets to give them a hearty scratching. Bullets clattered off the stone exterior and whizzed through the vacant windows or snapped with tiny sonic booms. They ricocheted off the back wall and tumbled, whining, in random directions.
J.B. hunkered just inside the doorway, leaning out—randomly varying high, middle and low—to rip off quick rounds, two-shot bursts and singletons. It took a good blaster man to make the Uzi do that. J.B. was the best—a master. Ryan snapped a shot from his own 9 mm handblaster at a figure with a black leather vest open to show a fish-belly-white washboard torso, aiming a sawed-off double-barreled scattergun. Fortunately it was clear across the street and unlikely to hit much at that range. Or not with many pellets, anyway. Though as Ryan knew well, they all hurt.
He never saw whether he hit the dude or not. He was already turning away to follow his advice and sprint to the rear corner of the dimly lit room, well back in the shadows. He heard Jak’s big Python crack. The albino had simply jumped back in through the window and was crouching to shoot out over the sill.
“Tables!” Ryan yelled. He sheathed his panga. “J.B., come on! Give me a hand.”
J.B. loosed a lengthy burst out the door as he wheeled away to obey. Then he and Ryan were each manhandling a pair of tables with tops a yard or so square toward their friends, who were already hunkered down in the corner. Jak joined them dragging a detached tabletop. Ryan decided the place had to have been an eatery of some sort.
“Hoist them up!” Ryan yelled. “Barricade yourselves behind them!”
He hurried into the corner with the others, right next to Krysty. She helped him shift the table so that one edge rested on the floor, whose covering had long since eroded to bare concrete, with the legs pointing into the room. His other friends did likewise.
Not an eyeblink too soon. The door to the secret stair puked muties. They gushed out in a blue-gray, squalling, whistling horde, waving their long-taloned arms in the air. At once they made for the open front door.
It took a moment before any even noticed the norms, huddled off in the shadows as they were. A pair turned toward them menacingly. Since that had been expected— he’d wanted the improvised tabletop barricades for cover—Ryan wasn’t too worried. He fired a couple shots from his SIG into one mutie. Krysty and Mildred blasted the other. One fell on its face. The other staggered back into the violent flow of its companions.
They flung it ruthlessly aside. Whether they were especially squeamish about getting soaked in the sewage, or just concerned with not drowning, Ryan couldn’t know and couldn’t care less.
The rest of the stream of oddly rubbery-fleshed muties shot straight out into the street. And into the faces of the gang of locals, who had deployed into a skirmish line and were advancing on the diner to mop up the intruders.
Through a window Ryan saw their jaws drop and their eyes widen in shock. “Fuck us,” somebody yelled. “It’s clayboys!”
The muties ran right into them and commenced to rip at them with their claws. Blood and bits of flesh and guts flew. Blasters roared. Men, women and muties screamed and flailed at one another. The locals who weren’t instantly overrun or caught up in the wild melee pulled back to fire into the geyser of panicked muties. Ryan saw a couple turn tail and run.
Though muties were still coming out of the stairwell, Ryan stood up from behind the table. None of the muties so much as glanced his way. Clearly they had something more urgent on their minds. The sulfurous stench that suddenly filled the room gave him a good clue as to what that was.
“Let’s power out of here,” he ordered. “Out the window and left down the street.”
Krysty jumped up. The table fell with a slam.
Ryan let her go out first. She was his woman after all—though as capable as a man in a fight and better than most. He followed, darting a few steps to the left as soon as he cleared the opening, then turning back to cover his friends’ escape.
They came popping out in surprisingly good order. Beyond them a pitched battle between locals and muties filled the street and claimed everybody else’s attention.
“You’d better move, Ryan!” Mildred called as she raced past.
Ricky was last out the window. He stumbled and almost fell on his face getting out. The youth caught himself, picked himself up and started running