Part 23 (1/2)

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 makes.h.i.+ft 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 cras.h.i.+ng down like a runaway freight elevator, leaving behind a wet trail of destruction inside the mutie's thras.h.i.+ng body.