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J.B. sighted up at the center of the shaft and let the AK rip. The hard
chatter of the autofire in the enclosed concrete space obliterated the sounds
of the hits one hundred yards above.
But he knew right away that he'd scored.
High above him the shaft blossomed with flame, and the whole building rattled
with the power of the explosion.
Chapter Twenty-Two
"Now, Poppadaddy, do it now!" Roonie-Two cried.
The baron took his fingertip out of the G-12's trigger guard. Tears streamed
down his craggy face.
"I can't do it, gal," he told her. "I can't chill ya. You're all I have left
in the world."
"Bastard!" she shrieked at him. "You're not thinking about us. You're just
thinking about yourself. Listen to what you're saying. You're still trying to
keep what you got. Me and the babe, we aren't things. We hurt. Do you want us
to suffer? Don't we mean anything to you? You've got to have mercy,
Poppadaddy, you've got to give us up!"
Elijah shook his head.
"Coward!" Roonie-Two yelled at him. "Think of us, you miserable coward!"
"I won't do it, gal," the baron said. "I don't have it in me to harm you or
that child."
Roonie-Two's face went livid. "You think we're some kind of pets, Poppadaddy?
So it doesn't matter if you lock us away and starve us or leave us for the
stickies? Well, I'll show you! I'll show you what we are!"
Moving with amazing speed, she darted over and
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picked up the Redhawk from the floor. Without another word she poked the
muzzle at the middle of
Elijah's sternum and pulled the trigger. The big blaster boomed and jumped out
of her hand, flying over her shoulder. As Elijah's body leaped back, flames
licked up through his mass of white chest hair. He crashed into the wall, then
fell forward onto his face. He was so dead he didn't even quiver. The smoking
exit wound in his back was big enough to put a boot through.
Before Ryan could stop her, Roonie-Two dashed out onto the patio with her baby
in her arms. She scrambled onto a tabletop, and from there to the railing.
From the railing she jumped off into space, all without a pause. As she
dropped, the tips of her long, corn-silk blond hair lifted straight up by the
wind. Then she was gone.
"What are we going to do now?" Skeen wailed. The man was groveling on his
knees, hiding behind
Ryan's legs.
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The one-eyed man snatched a blanket from the couch and, into the middle of it,
threw an armful of the gear Elijah had confiscated. He grabbed stuff at random
and when he had as much as he figured he could safely carry, he tied all four
corners together in a double knot
"What now?" Skeen repeated, rising shakily to his feet
The world rocked without warning. The floor under their feet lifted so
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violently that both men crashed to the carpet. Ryan winced at the heat of the
explosion; he could feel the scorching pulse right through the
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floor. He instinctively raised a hand to protect his sole surviving eye.
Through the floor he could hear the whoosh of fire spreading through the
corridors below, the squeal and sizzle of the stickies caught in the
blistering shock wave.
Ryan jumped up from the carpet at once. Tongues of orange light were flicking
up through the bullet holes in the floor around him, and the foam backing of
the carpet was already starting to smoke and flare. He recognized the
handiwork. His first thought was that maybe the Armorer wasn't dead, after
all.
"Oh, no," Skeen shrilled. "They're coming again!"
Over the escalating roar of the fire, Ryan could hear the tramp of bare feet
running down the hall. The stickies on their floor had recovered from the
blast. As they rounded the corner, Ryan was already on the patio and he had
slipped the knotted blanket over his head and under one arm, carrying the load
in a sling over his back, which left both hands free for fighting and for
climbing.
"Don't leave me here!" Skeen bawled.
As Ryan took hold of the rope and hopped over the railing, he looked back and
saw the man kneeling in a spreading puddle of his own piss, while dozens of
stickies closed in and sheets of flames swept up the walls.
As THE ELEVATOR CAR crept up to the twenty-fourth floor, stickies jammed the
long hallway on either side of the shaft. They had already ripped all the
norms
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within reach to tiny shreds and were eager for the fresh meat they thought the
car was bringing them. They stood not only on the floor, but on the couches,
the chairs, on the sprawled dead bodies of their kin. After they had opened
the twenty-fourth floor's fire door, stickies from the stairwell had rushed in
and filled every room to the corners. There wasn't enough space between the
mutants for them to move more than a few inches in any direction. Such close
confinement didn't bother the stickies. They liked to bump into one another as
they danced.
And they were dancing as the top of the elevator car rose up above floor
level.
Almost instantly the stickies closest to the opening caught the sharp scent of
spilled accelerant.
Realizing that disaster was close at hand, they signaled a warning to their
assembled kin.
The problem was, there wasn't room to move, no matter how pressing the danger.
The elevator continued to rise, and stickies all around the shaft opening
could see the rows of bright metal cans inside and smell the volatile fumes.
The ones that could see tried to take a step back and were stopped by the wall
of bodies behind them.
Linked by the psychic network of Lord Kaa, all the stickies on the top two
floors realized what was about to happen and froze, holding their breath as
they awaited orders from the piebald general. Kaa, far from the center of the
action, at the base of the hotel, scoured
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his book knowledge of tactics and maneuver for some way out of the
predicament. In vain.
It was a checkmate. There were no possible countermoves.
All Kaa could think of was for them to duck and cover. Because his psychic
command to do so was so powerful, the stickies on both floors did just that,
all at once. As it turned out, neither their ducking nor their covering did
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much good.
Autofire crackled from the bottom of the shaft, and heavy slugs rattled the
floor of the elevator, piercing the cans, scoring the stainless-steel walls
and in the process sending plumes of bright sparks shooting across the
interior of the vapor-filled car.
The ignition of the fuel bomb was muUiple stage, thanks to the way J.B. had
stacked his cans, but it happened so quickly that it sounded like a single,
horrendous blast First the trapped fumes exploded. They blew out with such
force that the stickies standing closest to the car never felt the heat; they
were vaporized by the shock wave. The elevator car acted like a crude cannon,
focusing die blast out its open doorway. The initial explosion sent the
lidless cans of solvent
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tumbled, trailing flammable liquid and even-more-flammable vapor. Some cans
ricocheted off the walls of the hall before exploding. None escaped the
ignition temperature of the primary blast
Fireballs swept down the hallway in both directions.
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The heat was so intense that everything in its path exploded, living bodies,
couches, chairs, walls.
The stickies at the ends of the hall were far enough away so they weren't
instantly incinerated.
They had their arms melted to the tops of their heads. The fortunate ones
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