When he tapped into the same vid system Ryan had seen earlier in Morgan's administrative office, two screens lit up, and what they revealed was smoke and flame.

"Roofs on fire," Ryan said. "Think the stickies are using another catapult?"

"Don't see how. There has been nothing on the group level outside within the sec circle."

"Muties must be behind this somehow," Ryan murmured, standing behind the techie and gazing at the scene.

"Probably so. Both ends of the mall roof are showing movement," the techie said. "How they got on the roof is anybody's guess. We've only got cameras for this side. I don't know if the other section has been lit up or not."

"What's with the alarm?" Rollins said as he clomped into the room.

"We've got company," Ryan replied tightly, gesturing toward the screens. "Look for yourself."

"s.h.i.t. Fire. I hate fires," the sec man said.

"Has to be stickies."

Rollins nodded in agreement. "Let's take a look. You get the two of yours, and I'll alert two of mine. We'll go up and recce on this side. I'll alert a team on the other side of Freedom to check their end, as well."

"Got it."

Rollins's men were already waiting when he and Ryan exited the monitor room. The four men raced down the access hallway, picking up Krysty and Jak on the way. Like Ryan, both of his friends already had their hardware in hand, with Krysty holding her .38-caliber Smith amp; Wesson and Jak his huge .357 Colt Python with the six-inch barrel.

"What's with the parade, lover?" Krysty asked.

"Visitors. Set off the motion sensors on the roof. If we're lucky, it's just a flying squirrel or a bunch of birds or something," Ryan told her.

"In the middle of the night?" Rollins said. "I doubt it's birds. Squirrels, either, unless you've ever seen one that weighs a hundred pounds."

Ryan laughed. "Brother, I've seen things in Deathlands that make a hundred-pound squirrel look like a stuffed cuddly toy."

Rollins c.o.c.ked his blaster. "Don't matter to me none. A hundred pounds or a thousand, a few rounds to the head will take care of the son of a b.i.t.c.h. I just don't want to be the one stuck with the shovel having to bury his big fuzzy a.s.s."

The narrow workmen's stairwell to the roof was dimly lit with red bulbs, giving the group the sensation of walking up through the intestines of a volcano. There were no sounds here. The alarms that had been tripped on the rooftop were silent this close to the scene.

When they came out of the elevated trapdoor entrance onto the rooftop, the group of six split into two parties. Ryan kept Krysty and Jak. Rollins took his own pair of trained men. This decision was made wordlessly and without conscious thought. Each man wanted his own crew backing him up. Ryan could respect that.

Rollins swung open the door and carefully leaned his head out, letting his eyes adjust to the scene.

As far as the eye could see from the protection of the small freestanding doorway of the roof level stairs access, fires were burning in patches.

"Smell it?" Ryan asked.

"Some fuel." Jak replied.

"Flammable liquids. They've sprayed the roof and lit it up somehow," Rollins said. "How in the h.e.l.l did they do that?"

"Must have a really long hose."

"Well, the fires I can see. Let's try finding them. Maxwell, you got the hardware?" Rollins asked.

"Yes, sir," one of the two sec men who had accompanied Rollins replied.

Ryan looked at the device the younger man was holding. "It's an image intensifier," Maxwell explained.

"Thought we could use it to see what was on the ground," Rollins said.

"I'm getting some ground movement," Maxwell replied. "They look too d.a.m.n far away to have done this, though."

Those were the last words the young sec man ever said before a loud shot rang out above the soft crackling of the flames. The oversize image intensifier he was holding to his eyes disintegrated into a cloud of plastic shards, and his face immediately followed, the upper half of his head breaking open from the slug that killed him.

"From above!" Jak cried, raising the big Colt and firing into the darkness overhead.

"How?" Krysty asked, and then she saw what Jak was aiming at. A stickie was indeed overhead, hanging from the tubing of a makeshift glider like an evil, diseased bat. She could see the mutie's pale face as the craft swooped around, diving again for another pa.s.s. More of the flammable liquid was dropped, sprayed from an oversize plastic-bag apparatus to cause a new burst of flame to shoot into the air.

A side effect of this action was to bring the glider and the mutie into fully lit focus.

A series of shots rang out, and the stickie went limp in the harness of the flying machine. Without the creature's guidance, the glider began to swoop and spiral, finally landing in the midst of an already burning patch of roof in a more explosive show of vigorous flame.

"Never thought I'd see a stickie smart enough to try that," Krysty remarked. Her words reminded Ryan of the comment Morgan had made about the stickies seeming to act smarter in their more recent forays against Freedom.

"Not that much to gliding, as I understand it," Rollins said. "And the crafts are certainly portable enough. They break downnothing but plastic, canvas and some metal tubing. Fold them up and put them in a bag after you're done."

Jak wasn't so admiring of the tactics. "Dead. Stupe."

"Mebbe not," Ryan said. "Whoever sent that mutie up there hovering around knew his card would get slotted quick enough. Those gliders have some maneuverability, but they're not very fast. The mutie was able to get some good fires going while up there, but that could've been handled in a number of different ways."

"You saying we were supposed to see that stickie?"

"Diversion," Jak said.

"Need to get around the fires, closer to the edge of the roof. If I was planning on attacking from the top, I'd try and come up where the visibility was poorest. Like way over there behind those old air con units," Ryan said.

"So?"

"So hold on while I check it out."

Ryan moved quickly, running as quietly as possible along the back of the front line of the rooftop's ma.s.sive array of ancient and rusted air-conditioning circulation pods, using their bulk to hide and protect his progress. The stickies near the edge of the rooftop were waving flaming torches and yelling and whooping, and already more of the small fires were starting to burn.

They also had weapons. The stickies were now armed with high-powered blasters, such as the one that had chilled Maxwell. Ryan heard the occasional crack of blaster, and once or twice stray rounds had whined past and ricocheted off the thick metal units protecting him, causing them to boom hollowly and flaking the thick rusty covering. The stickies weren't aiming at him. They didn't even know Ryan was there. They were wasting rounds, showing off and enjoying the fires.

Ryan knew his friends would also have heard the shots. His SIG-Sauer was c.o.c.ked in his right hand, and he ran in a crouch, stopping only to peer between individual units to make certain he wasn't seen.

He crawled on top of the last unit, keeping himself as flat as a sheet of paper as he wiggled across silently, inch by inch.

"Hey, you. You're trespa.s.sing," Ryan called out, pausing a second to line and sight before shooting the stickie through the top of the head. The baffle-silenced slug drove through the mutie's lopsided cranium, pureeing the rotten brain inside and causing a twin jet of blood to spurt like a backwash out of the stickie's nose. Ryan's shot had landed neatly dead center, and the bullet kept crashing down like a runaway freight elevator, leaving behind a wet trail of destruction inside the mutie's thrashing body.

The stickie's corpse collapsed onto the roof, into a burning pyre. The smell of burning flesh was instantly recognizable in the night air.

Ryan, however, wasn't waiting around to admire his handiwork. He was already rolling, firing his blaster as he moved. The element of surprise was still with him. When the first stickie died, all eyes fell upon its death throes, but no one thought to look up.

Gripping his right wrist with his left hand, Ryan braced himself against the kick of the powerful pistol as it spit death again and again. His aim no longer needed to be as precise as the first kill, so he took chest shots, the safest option against his now moving targets.

A chest shot was never as elegant, clean or final as a head shot, but it had the advantage of not mattering much whether you were a couple of inches high or low or to either side. If your aim was high, you still took out the throat or heart or one of the lungs. Shoot a maneven a stickiein the rib cage and watch him fall down gasping for air.

Go low, and you had an old-fashioned, hurt-like-h.e.l.l gut shot, which was more than likely going to end up being a killing hit when delivered with a 9 mm round from a P-226 blaster. As J.B. had said more than once, "You hit when you miss with a chest shot. Nothing fancy about a shooting like that, but it gets the job done."

Ryan's backup was close behind him, closer still when the first shot exploded in the burning night.

The big sec man slowed as he approached the scene. "Christ, Cawdor, you chilled them all," he said.

"Don't fall all over yourself thanking me, Rollins."

"I've never seen anything like it," the younger man in the mall sec colors said. "Five stickies downed by a single man."

"Friend of mine once told me a running man with a sharp knife can slit a thousand throats in a single night," Ryan said. "As long as he's quiet about it."

The lead sec man waved over his single living follower. "Use the tank extinguisher. It should have a full charge. Put those fires out as fast as you can."

"Yes, sir!"

"Still wish you would have left one alive for questioning," Rollins griped. "Dead muties can't talk."

"Since when have you ever known a stickie to volunteer any information? Even if they knew anything, half the time the stupe" Ryan's voice trailed off, the sight of Krysty's face tight with pain taking his earlier thought away.

"I'm okay, lover," she said softly, catching his eye peering intently at her. "But we got major trouble."

"What?"

"Bad. Very bad. I've got a mental picture of the roof of this mall, and it's bright red, all red."

"What the f.u.c.k is she talking about?" the sec leader said angrily. Ryan could see confusion and fear in the big man's face. He'd gone about his life expecting stickies to perform and act a certain way. Now that the patterns had changed, he was losing his grip. Ryan wasn't surprised. Most men would have done likewise when confronted with the abnormal, and there was nothing normal about the ways these stickies were behaving.

"Told you before, Rollins, she's a seer," Ryan said. "Senses danger. Bad things to come."

"As red as blood, as red as fire," Krysty whispered, every hair on her head moving gently back and forth like wheat in a strong breeze.

"Shut her up, Cawdor," Rollins ordered, his eyes wide.

"Why? She scaring you? Good."

Rollins shook his head. "We don't have time for crazy mutie talk."

"We'd better make time," Ryan insisted. "s.h.i.t's about to hit the fan."

The small radio on Rollins's gun belt squawked, the shrill tone adding to the mounting tension between the two men.

"Go ahead, answer," Ryan said. "I don't think either one of us is going to like what we hear."

Rollins s.n.a.t.c.hed the black-and-silver portable comm radio off his belt and thumbed the Send b.u.t.ton. "What?" he half yelled into the tiny voice grid.

"This is Jameson, sir. From the west wing," an excited voice said.

"I've got problems of my own, Jameson. Make it quick."

"The stickies, sir. They're over here. The b.a.s.t.a.r.ds are coming in from all sides. We shot down one in a hang glider, but not before he dropped a s.h.i.tload of rope ladders and some kind of flaming napalm. We're boxed in, and more of them are crawling up the sides. What are we going to do?"

Chapter Twenty-Three.

The interior of Freedom Mall was a scene of ma.s.s chaos. Word about the mutie attack from all quarters had spread effortlessly through the storefronts and common areas of the mall, creating a panic where panic was the only foe to fight. And as the word spread and the fear grew, a planning flaw in the reconfiguration of the mall's sec setup was becoming painfully evident.

The main entrance into the ma.s.sive two-story construction was also the site of the primary exit, since all fire doors, loading docks and the nearly forty other former exit-entrances into Freedom had been long since barricaded shut with concrete and stone, and chain and metal.

As the ma.s.ses tried to flee from terrors both real and imagined, the greed in men's hearts came bubbling up to the surface. Realizing that all of the available members of the Freedom Mall sec staff were busy with the stickie onslaught, looters appeared in all of the stores and shops. Some of the establishments were closed for the night, others abandoned by their owners, who had fled into the mob attempting to escape. These were loudly ransacked.

However, other store owners had no interest in leaving their staked territory. Any thieves entering these stores with stealing on their minds found proprietors hidden inside armed and waiting for whatever threat might come bursting through their doors. Crazed human or crazier mutie, they didn't care. Try to infringe on what was theirs, and a person would be cut down in a hail of blasterfire.

At the multiplex, Doc, J.B. and Mildred had learned of the crisis when the movie had been stopped in midreel. Mildred hadn't minded the interruption in the least. The humor of Dawn of the Dead was being totally lost on her, as well as on Doc, although J.B. seemed to be greatly enjoying himself.

The angry audience had taken offense and was ready to lynch the projectionist until Boston from the box office came out with news of what was happening outside.

Now the three friends were struggling to make their way through the teeming, panicked ma.s.ses. The looting of the many mall business establishments had already begun, an unstoppable wave of shrieking l.u.s.t for food, clothing and, best of all, material possessions.

"By the Three Kennedys!" Doc bellowed, raising his voice to be heard over of the cacophony of the mob. "These ignorant fools are raiding their own henhouses! Can they not see they are a.s.sisting in the destruction of their own sanctuary?"

"They don't give a d.a.m.n, Doc," Mildred replied sadly. "They just don't care. I haven't seen the likes of this since the 1992 L.A. riots. Tomorrow there might be some remorse mixed in with twinges of guilt, but tonight is wilding time. The time of the unleashed collective id."

"Don't quote Freud to me, Doctor. Sometimes a cigar is a cigar, and sometimes a pack of wolves is a pack of wolves," Doc retorted, using his sheathed swordstick to beat and jab a clear path through the milling ma.s.s of people.

"Watch it," one unruly ma.s.s of muscle and leather spun and bellowed at Doc. "Poke me again, and I'll jam that toothpick up your skinny a.s.s."

"Better men than you have tried, sir," Doc bellowed back.

J.B raised his M-4000 scattergun. "Keep moving, friend, or I'll clear a path the old-fashioned way," the Armorer intoned. "Right though your gut."

The talking ma.s.s of muscle looked at the twin barrels, snorted and continued on, allowing the trio to pa.s.s unmolested down the annex area to the entrance of the satellite mall-sec headquarters. As official members of the sec team, each knew the entry code. Doc took the honors, beeping in the series of numbers to command the door to unlock.

No sliding pneumatic doorways here. After the door popped open and swung inward on the hinges, it remained that way until pulled tightly closed and left sealed for the next visitor who needed access to the sec area.

What the friends found inside were two faces belonging to their fellow sec men, two men armed with M-16 autoblasters leveled right at them as they entered.

"Come on in," Ike said, a turbanlike white bandage wound around his head.