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  With an overhead chop, he cleaved a charging stickie’s shoulder, separating white bone socket from red flesh. It wasn’t a lethal blow by any means. After a split second pause, the attacker lunged at him with its good arm. J.B.’s second strike clipped the front of the mutie’s throat, sending it staggering to one side, trying in vain to keep its life blood from spurting out between its fingers.

  Jak snap-kicked the gasping stickie in the side of the head, driving it to the ground, unconscious. Blood poured onto the rock in a sheet of red, the porous stone soaking it up like a sponge.

  At that moment, the thundering music stopped.

  And the scuffling, groaning, ringing, shrieking sounds of the battle that surrounded them became horribly clear.

  J.B. knew what was coming. They all knew.

  The grinding clamor, the brutal hand-to-hand stretched on and on, and still the dreaded noise they were waiting for, the signal for the beginning of the end, didn’t come. Magus was having his fun, making his victims wait.

  When the double doors slammed back, the companions were nowhere near them.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  In order to restrain himself from delivering a running commentary on the battle, Silam dug his fingernails into the palms of his hands and bit the tip of his tongue. Although the urge to point this out, and to jump up and down while doing it, was powerful, he knew better than to intrude on Magus’s enjoyment.

  As always, when his fantasies unfolded in the flesh, Silam saw new connections and profound depths heretofore hidden. In his own savage choreography was the poetry of the spheres. The beauty of what he had wrought made him want to shout for joy. He saw the mindless hacking and hewing on the islet below as nothing less than the inescapable drama of all humankind, its hopes, its potential, its Achilles’ heel. Tragedy. Comedy. Futile strivings. Glorious aspirations. Heroism. Cowardice. It was pitifully, shabbily mundane, and at the same time noble, even spiritually uplifting.

  Who else in Deathlands could have dreamed a nightmare so gravid with meaning? What other genius, artist, prophet of his caliber existed? Compared to him, they were all grubby parasites and posers, the sorry, self-poisoned Uncle Lesters of the world.

  This time Silam had surely skinned back the fibrous husk, peeled away the scales of ignorance, revealing the squirt and squeal of life’s underlying mechanism. He looked upon that raw red truth as a father looking upon his newborn child.

  With exaltation.

  His eyes brimmed with tears at the wondrous potency of his talent.

  At moments like this it didn’t matter to him whether Magus was amused or not, although from his tie-rod-throwing laughter, he clearly was.

  As the opening act of the staged battle progressed, the horrid clanking noises became less frequent. The growing weight of his master’s silence smothered Silam’s understandable exuberance. And as he began to fret over the dire consequences of a failure to amuse, all the mystery and pageant of his creation seemed to slip away.

  Because he hadn’t carefully read the program he’d signed, he had trouble remembering the precise order of battle. He couldn’t be expected to have every tiny detail at his fingertips. Of course he had a vague idea, but he had devised so many of these dance macabres that they had started to blur a bit in his memory. He relied on his ever-loyal Rish to keep the continuity straight and to remind him when he was treading familiar ground.

  Silam’s heart began to pound as he took in the scope of the unfolding problem. Two of the Wazls, almost half of his air power, his command of the sky, had been hauled down in short order and promptly slaughtered on the edges of the fray. The stickie column was well on its way to dividing the recruit force until the wedge of norms crashed into them, spearpoint against spearpoint, with that one-eyed bastard Cawdor leading the charge. Silam watched in disbelief as the stickie formation melted into disarray.

  Those damned islanders! he thought. Whose idea had it been to recruit them? Not his, surely. Had Rish or the fumbling Jaswinder somehow planted that bad seed in his head? For the life of him, he couldn’t recall. It was true that his sublime flights of fancy sometimes required serious revision. Silam knew he was not a practical thinker; no true artist was. His mind was a churning mass of ambition, jealousy, frustration, rage and fear, an engine constantly revving to redline.

  A new noise echoed off the walls of the skybox, distracting him from the spectacle below.

  If he hadn’t known better, he would have thought someone was sharpening a hoe with a rattail file. Silam recognized the sound, of course. Magus was grinding his teeth.

  Steel Eyes had never shown impatience with a performance so early on.

  It was natural in a life-and-death military drama for control of one side or the other to wax and wane. For a seemingly inevitable defeat—or victory—to suddenly reverse itself. Magus’s enjoyment depended in large part upon giving the intended victims the illusion that they had a chance, right up to the big finale when all hope was crushed. So why was Magus concerned already?

  The answer was simple.

  Ryan Cawdor.

  The one-eyed man wasn’t just in charge of his own crew, he was leading the islanders into battle and in the process, wreaking devastation upon the stickies.

  Because Silam hadn’t realized Cawdor was among the new recruits, he had failed to take his influence on the outcome into account. Generally speaking, the spin doctor tended to ignore past history if he hadn’t invented it. Now it was too late to work the back story into the drama, to devise something extra awful for Cawdor to endure. Something that would give his master the ultimate in payback, and put an end to lingering frustration and fury.

  Ryan Cawdor was a fly in the ointment, a pebble in the boot.

  He was significant because he was a spoiler.

  Silam had never seen Magus frightened, and he didn’t appear frightened now. Safe in his high tower, protected by enforcers and uniforms, he had no reason to be concerned for his safety. Steel Eyes could have easily ordered the uniforms to land on the islet and slaughter the recruits. All he had to do was to turn off the music and give the command through the speakers for it to happen. But he didn’t want to cut his afternoon’s entertainment short unless it was absolutely necessary.

  Silam had never before staged two bad performances in a single day. The consequences of such a lapse in quality made his blood run cold. This morning’s fiasco wasn’t his fault by any means, but he knew better than to make excuses to Magus.

  Already the stickie losses were starting to mount up. From his high vantage point, Silam guessed about forty or fifty had been chilled. Losses on the norm side amounted to half that. Just the opposite of the morning’s disappointing show, Silam thought. Although he wanted to point that out to his master, he dug his nails deeper into his palms and kept silent. Magus screwed the world, his foreplay terrible to behold, but there was such a thing as putting up too good a fight.

  Silam tried to remain calm. After all, the tide of battle wasn’t turning, he assured himself. It hadn’t even really begun, yet. The stickies and Wazls’ only purpose, he recalled, was to reduce the recruits’ numbers and break them into small, vulnerable groups. That done, the less mobile scalies and swampies would be released to take advantage of the surrounded and stationary norms. They would be followed by the smaller creatures that were triple-fast and triple-hard to chill, with the screamies doing the final mop-up.

  Long before the first act had reached its scheduled climax, Magus did something he had never done before. He called down the curtain.

  In a gear-box grinding growl he said, “Send in the clowns.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Jak would have followed Ryan Cawdor into the jaws of hell, so he didn’t even blink at driving headlong into the middle of the stickie column. At last they were moving, and about to make solid contact with their main opposition. Long shadows and hard gusts of wind swept over them as they ran down the slope and into the volcanic bowl. The shadows and gusts seemed to sin
gle out Jak in particular. Again and again, the cruel black talons snatched out, trying to rip off the top of his head. Perhaps the lizard birds knew which one of the companions had taken out their kin.

  The albino ignored them. The Wazls’ swoops were furious but nothing close to all-out attacks. The birds had small brains, for sure, but they weren’t triple stupes. They had seen what he was capable of and kept well out of his range.

  Something the stickies could not do.

  Using his fists, his feet and his AK-47 bayonet, Jak laid into the muties like a white-maned whirlwind. Though sharpened and resharpened so many times that its true edge almost met the blood gutter, the dagger-pointed Soviet steel had many more deaths left in it.

  He lashed out with the predark bayonet, plunging it four inches deep below an oncoming stickie’s sternum, then he ripped the blade down and out. The blindingly fast strike left the gutted monster on its knees, mewling.

  Holding back on his foot speed, Jak loped along behind Krysty’s right shoulder. The ground underfoot was slick with gore and cluttered with dropped weapons and broken bodies. He was actually skating on the gore in places. Painful death was just a slip of the boot away. To go down was to be set upon and torn apart.

  Jack could feel the momentum of their charge building. He let himself be sucked into the maelstrom of close combat. Reacting, blocking, thrusting. But always moving forward, always advancing. The chilling wasn’t the most important thing. What was important was the capture of territory, breaking the back of stickie control. It was his kind of fight. He shifted his hands and feet into overdrive.

  He was so quick with that sliver of ComBloc steel he didn’t have to slash his opponents like Krysty or Mildred. In a blur of white, silver and red, the AK bayonet flicked over the top of the stickies’ guards, stabbing, twisting, darting in and out.

  Jak wasn’t counting kills. He was hard focused on keeping his position in the formation and on taking out the muties that entered his range. The ones he missed were targets for the islanders.

  Captain Eng ran on his right flank, wielding the replica cavalry saber. Along with his crew, Eng was bellowing some islander gibberish. Jak liked the sound of it—rhythmic, deep, resonant and menacing. He found himself chanting along with the islanders, even though he didn’t know what the words meant or exactly how to pronounce them.

  “Pah-two! Pah-two! Wha-kan-garo!”

  To the beat of the war chant, Jak slapped aside an outthrust sucker hand and rammed the bayonet into an undefended windpipe. The blade darted in and out, the point just grazing the interior spine. In cross section, the Soviet steel had a diamond shape. When the bayonet stabbed, it opened a wound that would never close.

  The lids blinked shut over the stickie’s black shark eyes. Dark blood squirted out the corners of its mouth and jetted between the gaps in its clenched teeth.

  Ryan’s spearpoint pushed into the heart of the stickie column. Ahead lay a field of the fallen. When Jak saw the muties crouched over their victims, his fist tightened on the bayonet’s cross-hatched grip. As the companions bore down on them, the stickies straightened, reluctant to leave the feast. Some of the fallen men were still alive, helpless, already horribly mutilated. Thrashing, moaning, howling, they begged for death. But there was no time for mercy chilling. At the last moment, the stickies scattered to either side of Ryan’s blade, moving low and quick, giving up ground.

  Jak saw J.B. crack open the skull of the stickie that Krysty had deflected, but missed the second mutie paying J.B. back by yanking off his fedora. At the Armorer’s shouted warning, he glanced over his shoulder and caught Captain Eng slicing off half the stickie’s head in a single blow.

  From the way the islander was grinning at J.B. with those sharpened teeth of his, Jak figured he was going to try to put on the recaptured hat. an act that would have stretched it beyond any use, except maybe as a chamber pot.

  After a couple of strides Eng relented, returning the hat to its rightful owner with a flip of the wrist.

  J.B. caught the fedora, and jammed it back on his sweat-matted head, his lips moving in an unbroken string of curses.

  As the stickies shuffled out the companions’ path, they blundered into the blades and bludgeons of the recruits. Jak and the others spread the wedge wider, trapping the muties between hammer and anvil. What was left of the cohesion of their column disintegrated as individual stickies were ruthlessly chopped down.

  The survivors had no exit, and no time to regroup.

  Jak waded in, kicking and stabbing, his frenzy forcing the muties to sidestep under the falling hammers.

  The collapse of recruits came even faster. One minute they were holding their own, the next they were down, buried under heaps of pale bodies and frantically ripping hands.

  As Jak began to pull back, a lunging stickie managed to grab him by the arm. The sucker hand felt like a tourniquet around his bicep. It shut off the flow of blood and made his fingers go numb. Jak’s skin burned under the rows of squirming suckers.

  The albino plunged his knife through the middle of one dead black eye. The eight-inch dagger came to a sudden stop as its point rammed into the back of the stickie’s skull. The mutie tried to twist and get at him, snapping its needle teeth. The ooze of adhesive was starting to take hold. Savagely, Jak worked ComBloc steel back and forth in the mutie’s eye socket, giving its brains a good brisk stir.

  The sucker fingers dropped away without attaching, and the stickie slumped dead to the ground.

  Continuing to retreat, Jak bumped backs with Mildred. The good doctor looked like holy hell. The beads of stickie blood on her face, arms and plaited hair had mixed with sweat and dripped down the front of her OD T-shirt. Her BDU pants were likewise striped and spattered with gore. Her eyes were wide, and she was panting hard through her mouth.

  Jak fought beside his friends, protecting their flanks with his feet and blade, as they protected his.

  The music suddenly stopped, but the battle raged on.

  Forty feet away, the islanders were stomping and chanting, circling around in a wheel of death.

  Under his breath, Jak was chanting, too.

  Then the cone doors banged back and the grim music started up again.

  Whatever was coming next, it was on its way.

  A Wazl dive-bombed the islander circle, catching one of the sailors across the forehead with a claw. As blood gushed out, the lizard bird smelled it and immediately reversed course for another pass. As it flapped and turned, it hung stationary for a split second.

  That was all the time Jak needed. In a move too fast to follow, he shook another throwing blade out of his sleeve and launched it at a slight up angle. The knife slammed the Wazl in the side of the head, right behind its earhole. It wasn’t a killing strike, but it brought the bird down hard.

  For a moment or two the wounded Wazl struggled to stay in the air, violently shaking its head and frantically threshing its long wings. In the process it drifted from the dead center of the battlefield, clearing the waving islander swords, crashlanding on the stickies who were attacking them.

  The lizard bird’s wings batted down the muties. Its legs churned, talons clawing as it tried to jump back into the air. Whatever was beneath it as it thrashed about, it tore to ribbons. Unable to fly off, the Wazl took out its insane fury on everything in range of its jaws. The serrated teeth made short work of the stunned muties. And when there were no more stickies within reach, it turned upon itself, bending its long neck, ripping into its own breast, biting out its own heart.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Ryan had come across plenty of suicides in his time, most so long gone that he’d located them by the perfume and circling buzzards: gun eaters, vein slashers, neck stretchers, cliff jumpers. The hellscape had a bottomless appetite for human souls. For some the only escape from hopeless lives of hardship, toil and tragedy was death by their own hand. Ryan had happened onto some triple-bad botched jobs that the scavengers large and small had finished, but he�
��d never seen a creature eat its own heart before.

  After the grounded Wazl twisted its long neck into a U, it tore through the leathery skin on its chest in a couple of snaps, and kept right on biting, through layers of muscle, through bone. It bit until its head was buried past the eyes in its own chest. That’s how it died, looking inward.

  Was the lizard bird able to separate its lust for blood from the pain it was causing itself? Was inflicting pain so pleasurable that it could ignore the pain it was suffering?

  Interesting questions. Ryan would have studied the spectacle more closely if the situation had been less grave.

  Having taken out about half of the norm recruits in their counterattack, the stickies swarmed closer to the survivors, stopping just out of blade reach. They cocked their bald heads this way and that. The kissing and cooing sounds they made couldn’t be heard over the loud music. Four and five deep, they ringed the companions, waving their arms.

  The other surviving recruits had quickly circled up like the islanders and the companions. It was the only way to successfully fend off stickie attacks. The norms that tried to go it alone or in pairs were immediately overwhelmed and pulled apart by sucker hands.

  Ryan guessed the number of norms still able to put up at fight was close to thirty-five. There were at least three times that many stickies jumping around the bowl.

  Over the tops of the bobbing bald heads, Ryan saw Magus’s second wave making its exit from the cone. Swampies marched to the gloomy fanfare, four abreast and maybe ten deep. He could smell them coming, even over all the spilled blood and guts. The stumpy little men waved wooden clubs studded with long steel spikes, short-handled battle-axes and half-size broadswords. The ankle biters’ favorite tactic was to cut for the legs, bringing their foes down to size, revenge on a too tall world.

  Following the swampies out the doors, and towering over them, were fifteen or twenty scalies. They waddled forward in a ragged single-file line, males and females naked to the waist. They carried no weapons. Scalies were not a particularly courageous species, except when hungry.