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  Instantly there was pain, and a ripped-calico sound flooded his ears, coinciding with a burning sensation on his left wrist.

  Ryan realized that the noise was his skin being shredded by the stickie's fingers. He tried to ram his knee into his opponent's groin, but the creature clamped its thighs together, stopping him.

  With a great effort Ryan succeeded in wrenching his left arm away, throwing several short, stabbing punches into the mutie's midriff, solid, thudding blows that brought gasps of pain. The stickie wriggled a lit­tle away from him, giving Ryan a moment to gather breath.

  The thing's face was close, its open mouth snap­ping toward Ryan's cheek. The fetid sour-sweet stench of rotten meat made Ryan gag. The stickie strained to reach him and for a moment the tip of its reptilian tongue brushed against Ryan's skin, almost making him yell out in revulsion.

  In a violent reflex Ryan slammed his forehead into the stickie's face and felt the satisfying crunch of bro­ken bone and pulverized cartilage. Blood gushed from its smashed nose, into his own mouth, hot, salty and with a slight undertaste of fish.

  The Oregon kiss was enough to make his opponent wrench away, moaning in pain, hands up to its face.

  "Broke it, fucker."

  Ryan was aware of Jak and Krysty dancing anx­iously around the fringes of the fight, both holding blasters, waiting for a chance to take out the stickie. But both were aware of Ryan's warning about keep­ing the noise down in case of other muties.

  A small, thin-bladed knife was in a sheath at the small of Ryan's back, a reserve weapon that he rarely needed to use.

  But he needed it now, and it slipped into his hand like a gift from an old friend.

  As the stickie rolled away, bare feet digging in the sandy dirt for a purchase, Ryan went after it on hands and knees.

  His single eye burned with a ferocious blood lust, and every part of his being was concentrated on kill­ing the stickie. There was nothing on earth that would turn Ryan Cawdor aside from his purpose once his heart was set on death.

  The mutie saw that in his face and tried to escape, blood streaking its mouth and chin, bubbling over its lips.

  It flailed helplessly away from him, holding out both hands in a kind of supplication.

  The knife darted in and out.

  Each coldly struck blow severed tendons in both wrists, so that the stickie's suckered fingers curled helplessly in on the palms.

  "No," it panted.

  "Yes," Ryan snarled through teeth clenched so hard that they seemed on the edge of splintering.

  The mutie made a last effort, trying for the top of the rise.

  But Ryan was on it, the wickedly slim flensing knife slicing through the tendons behind both knees.

  Now the crippled stickie was wriggling helplessly, thrashing like a gaffed salmon, mouth open and pink froth bubbling from its lips. A gasping, mewing noise seeped from deep within it.

  Now the final chilling was easy.

  Ryan stood, conscious of pain from his left arm, blood dripping from the tips of his fingers. He flexed the hand, making sure there was no major damage done.

  The stickie half turned, so that the protruding eyes, watering with agony, drilled into Ryan's face. Beyond the awareness of defeat and imminent death, there was something more, something that Ryan couldn't iden­tify but seemed, bizarrely, like a kind of triumph.

  "Do it."

  Ryan stooped and drew the ice-sharp edge of the tempered blade across the mutie's throat, cutting deep, slow and even. One hand locked into the raggedy hair to hold the head still, letting it fall into the dirt.

  Wiping the dulled steel on the shirt to clean it off, he straightened.

  "Now what?" Krysty asked.

  "Go see J.B. and Mildred. Warn them that there's company in the hills."

  Jak handed him the pistol and he holstered it, then picked up the panga and cleaned off the dirt on his pant leg.

  The two bodies were lying still, the spilled blood al­ready attracting a buzzing horde of speckled flies.

  Ryan slung the rifle across his shoulder and looked around the clearing. The surrounding forest was quiet as a tomb.

  "Let's go see the others," he said, leading the way to the top of the rise where he could look into the hid­den deeps of the box canyon.

  The day was fresh and clear, and he took in a long breath of the bright air as he reached the crest.

  From below, there was no clue that such a large valley lay beyond. It widened out, and he could just see the glint of water through the scattered trees. And there were the dark rectangles of old buildings with shadowed windows.

  A few horses grazed contentedly in a makeshift corral, and he could see a dozen or more cattle on a gently sloping meadow.

  "There they are," he said.

  J.B. was barely a hundred yards away from him, ly­ing on his back, bare to the waist, his fedora covering his eyes. His chest was rising and falling with a steady regularity.

  Mildred was nearer the far end of the canyon, walking away from them toward the ruined buildings of the Anasazi.

  "Good job got before muties," Jak commented.

  "Yeah." Even allowing for the fact that stickies couldn't normally shoot worth shit, with the long-barrel muskets they could probably have picked off the sleeping figure of the Armorer.

  Krysty smiled. "Looks a true rustic idyll down there, doesn't it, lover?"

  Ryan grinned. "Yeah. Son of a bitch'll be real sur­prised when we tell him how close he came to buying the farm."

  The three friends stood close together, staring down into the canyon. Not one of them turned to look back along the trail.

  Which turned out to be a triple-bad mistake.

  Chapter Fourteen

  "DON'T TURN AROUND."

  The voice was pleasant enough, a thin, rather reedy tenor.

  Ryan's right hand moved toward the holster on his hip.

  The voice spoke again. "Got eight blasters aimed at you, people. Range is only a dozen paces. You can all get to be dead real quick. Hand away from the hand­gun, mister."

  Nobody moved. The only sound, apart from the light breeze that was making the top branches of the pines sway gently, was the thin patter of blood from Ryan's injured left arm.

  "Now, you best drop all the weapons you have in the dirt behind you. I see a big cannon with the snow-haired kid."

  "Don't call me 'kid,'" Jak said, not making any effort to obey the command to drop his Magnum.

  "Call you what I like, kid. Put down the .357, you little dipshit."

  There was a sudden crack of anger and command in the voice.

  "Do it," Ryan said.

  He unslung his rifle and laid it behind him without turning, then unholstered the SIG-Sauer and put it beside the bolt-action Steyr.

  "Now the firehead."

  Krysty dropped her .38 beside the other blasters.

  It had briefly crossed Ryan's mind that whoever was there might be bluffing about the number of guns he had at his call. But you didn't survive in Deathlands by making wrong guesses in that kind of situation. The man would be a real stupe if he was bluffing. The voice didn't sound like it belonged to a real stupe.

  But it didn't sound like any stickie Ryan Cawdor had ever encountered.

  "Seems from the look of my brothers' bodies that you got some blades around. Let's see them down. Going to be stripped bare naked in a while, so no point trying to be clever. Just another way of getting to be dead. Drop your knives."

  Ryan let the eighteen-inch panga thunk into the ground behind him. Jak allowed one of his throwing knives to fall from his fingers.

  The voice laughed. "Stickies are stupes. That what you figure? Mebbe, mebbe not. But I tell you some­thing… This one isn't stupe. Men like you won't just carry one throwing blade and one butcher's ax be­tween you. You got a count of five to empty the pockets of the other knives, then I put a round through the lady's knee." He paused. "For starters."

  If they were going to be strip-searched, then ther
e wasn't much point in trying to conceal any of their weapons.

  "Do it, Jak." Ryan pulled out his own thin-bladed knife and watched more of the taped throwing blades appear by magic and join the armory behind them.

  "Real good." The edge of tension was gone from the voice.

  Ryan looked across the open ground toward the ancient Pueblo ruins. Mildred still walked away from them, and J.B. was still fast asleep.

  If any of the group that now held them prisoner were to walk toward the top of the slope, then both the Armorer and Mildred would be seen and quickly butchered.

  Ryan glanced over his shoulder. "Can we turn around now?"

  "Sure. And come on down. Look like targets in a shooting gallery perched up there. What the hell is up there, anyways?"

  "Just a sight more trees. Trail goes along the little stream then looks like it fades away into nothing."

  "What I figured. Come on down, people."

  They all turned and stepped over the blasters and knives, stopping in a line about ten feet from their captors.

  There was a circle of seven stickies, all holding muskets. The eighth was obviously their leader, the one who'd been doing all the talking.

  The others looked like the usual run of stickies— boggling eyes and lank hair, with the suckers visible on palms and fingers, bare feet.

  The leader was something else. He stood way over six feet, topping Ryan's six-two by about eight inches, and was so skinny that he looked like he would have to run around in a rainstorm to get himself wet. He wore a white shirt and an elegant brocade vest, with dark blue jeans. A golden medallion hung around his lean neck.

  He was holding an Uzi machine pistol, identical to the one that was lying on the cropped turf at J.B.'s side.

  The stickie's hair was long and luxuriantly blond, so thick and curling that Ryan immediately suspected that the mutie was wearing a wig.

  His eyes didn't protrude as much as normal stick­ies, and they were almost almond-shaped. He was smiling, showing that he had no teeth at all between the fleshy lips.

  "Name's Charlie."

  "This is Krysty, Jak and I'm—"

  The smile vanished like the last smear of sunlight off a mountaintop.

  "You. Man with the patch who rode shotgun with the Trader. Ryan Cawdor! Never forget a name or a face. You and me'll have some talking."

  Ryan remembered.

  Chapter Fifteen

  THE TIME WOULD be about right. Charlie looked to be in his early twenties, and Ryan's memory put the hap­pening about ten or eleven years ago.

  It had been up near the Darks, near some ragged-ass ville, centered on an old church with a dome of weathered green copper. Name of the place had van­ished, but the incident and the stickie brat with curly yellow hair came flooding back from the past.

  Abe had been involved, tall, skinny Abe, with the lugubrious sense of humor and the drooping mus­tache, hair that he generally used to wear tied back in a ponytail. He'd done mostly jobs around War Wag One. Started off as helper to Loz and the rest of the cooks, then graduated to rear gunner.

  And it had been the time of…

  "Gert Wolfram," Charlie, said, face as bleak as iced marble. "And the one called himself the Magus, Warlock, Sorcerer. Names not even worth the trouble of forgetting."

  Names and men that Ryan himself would never be able to forget.

  The Magus. That was most common of his three names.

  Sometime in the past he'd suffered an appalling in­jury. Half of his face was missing, the spaces filled with aluminum and flesh-colored plastic. His eyes were hidden behind steel shells.

  His reputation was linked with stickies.

  He'd go out into the bleak wildernesses where the muties congregated and bring them back alive, then sell them to the traveling freak master, Gert Wolf­ram, three hundred and fifty pounds of cherubic evil. He was ringmaster in his own macabre circus that toured the filthy frontier villes where the writ of de­cency never ran.

  The stickies were an integral part of Wolfram's tented horror show. They'd be prodded into fighting against each other, or against bears or cougars or mangy wolves. Wolfram would also arrange cheap displays of erratic pyrotechnics whose explosions and multicolored flaring fires would drive the drugged stickies into a frenzy.

  People loved it.

  Ryan was trying to remember what had happened to the Magus and to Gert Wolfram when Charlie, the stickies' leader, interrupted his train of thought.

  "You recall me, don't you, Cawdor?"

  Ryan stood still, left arm lifted across his chest to try to check the bleeding. "Yeah. I recollect the time our paths crossed."

  "Our… paths…crossed." The tall mutie nodded. "Way a blood-eyed norm like you would think about it, Cawdor. Bet you a hatful of jack you don't recol­lect the butchered innocents."

  "I remember we came across one of the hunting parties of the Magus. Chilled them. They had a group of…" He hesitated.

  "Stickies is the word you're struggling to avoid, Cawdor."

  "Yeah. A group of stickies. Trader was ready to set them free."

  Charlie's narrow smile vanished. "A 'group,' Cawdor! It was a family. You think stickies don't have fucking families!" Controlling his anger, he dropped Krysty a mocking half bow. "Forgive my language, Firehead, but that was a family. It was my whole family. My father, my mother, three older brothers. Two aunts and five uncles. And me. I was nine sum­mers and eight winters old, Cawdor."

  The valley had been dark, steep-sided. The war wags had camped a half mile away, near a still lake where fish jumped. The heavily armed guards of the Magus lay where they'd been shot, the blood still trickling into the leaf mold.

  And the stickies huddled together as Abe had struck off their chains.

  "We'd have let you go," Ryan said.

  "But you didn't."

  "No."

  Charlie looked around at his silent group of followers. "No, they didn't let us go. They chilled everyone. Except for the little yellow-haired boy. They left him there, surrounded by corpses, his leg and arm broken."

  Ryan bit his lip. He could remember the scene, remember why the massacre had happened. But he figured there wasn't much point in trying to explain to this unusual stickie how it had been. Charlie obviously had his own embittered, impressed memory and nothing would change that.

  "Why did you and Trader do that, Cawdor?"

  "One of your women had a knife. Several of you backed her when she cut Abe. Started a chilling fight. We lost two good men there."

  "And all I lost was twelve of my family. All my family, Cawdor."

  He remembered the rattle of firearms, the screams and then the silence, broken only by the gasps of the dying and the moans of the wounded.

  And a little boy crying.

  "You didn't give us any choice, Charlie. No fire-blasted choice at all."

  "We'll see. Talk more when we get back to our camp. You say there's nothing over the ridge?" The question was asked with an absence of real interest, as though he were thinking about something else.

  "Nothing."

  "Then we'll go. But first we'll check out you don't have any hideaways. If you have, then you're all dead meat. Now and here."

  Ryan was finding it hard to come to terms with what was going on.

  Stickies were triple stupes.

  Everyone knew that.

  Vengeful and murderous, with about as much sense of organization as a confederation of decapitated roosters.

  Now this one, Charlie, seemed to be a whole lot brighter than the average citizen of Deathlands, and he ran a tight patrol with a facade of quasilegal organization.

  It didn't make any sort of sense.

  Ryan started, slowly and reluctantly, to peel off his clothes.

  "See one of them did you harm, Cawdor." Charlie pointed at the bleeding wound with the stubby muzzle of the Uzi.

  "Tore some skin. Way stickies do, Charlie. You know that."

  There was a snarl of anger from two or three
of the watchful group, but the tall figure silenced them with a look. "You talk big now, Cawdor. Won't last too long."

  They'd moved some little distance from the slope that hid the box canyon from view, but Ryan still had a cold dread that Mildred or J.B. would come stroll­ing into view and get blasted into rags of eternity.

  "Quicker with the stripping. All three of you, quicker."

  Ryan's eye caught Jak's glance.

  The albino was stooped, fiddling with the laces of his combat boots. He'd somehow managed to sidle himself over to the edge of the group, only four or five quick steps away from the dark fringe of the surrounding forest.

  The boy made sure Ryan was watching him, then moved his right thumb a half inch toward the trees and repeated the movement.

  Ryan nodded his head very slightly.

  That was all it took.

  He looked up at Krysty, seeing that she'd also caught the infinitely subtle exchange.

  She immediately pulled off her shirt, revealing a white cotton bra with half cups that seemed to barely contain her splendid breasts. Her nipples were press­ing at the taut material like summer cherries.

  Ryan knew that there wasn't a hope in hades of all three of them making it. Charlie held the Uzi steady on his own belt buckle. Only one had a chance, and that had to be the local boy.

  Jak.

  "All the way," one of the stickies grunted.

  Krysty reached behind her, making the bra even tighter, then loosened the catch, dropping the wisp of cotton to her feet.

  She stooped to pull off the dark blue Western boots with the silver falcons and slipped in the dirt. She fell flat on her back, crying out in shock, her firm breasts filling everyone's eyes.

  Ryan was ready for it, but even he didn't spot the moment that Jak Lauren made his move. One second the slim figure was standing there among them, then he wasn't.

  But there hadn't seemed to be any intervening stage of movement.

  Charlie saw it first. He spun and held down the trigger of the machine pistol, the stream of high ve­locity lead missing Krysty's tumbled figure by eight­een inches.

  "Get him!"

  In his patchwork jacket, the slim teenager was mer­cury in motion, darting between the close-packed trees, disappearing.