Plague Lords. James Axler
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downhill, running in easy strides, taking advantage of the long, gradual grade. After another mile, when they were back on the flat but still five or six miles from the riverbed, over the rasp of his own breathing, Ryan heard the sawing throb of insects. Thousands upon thousands of them. Then he hit a wall of stink. A caustic, invisible fog; not excrement, but excrement-like, on a much grander, more symphonic scale. It was the hellscape’s unmistakable signature scent: ruination, the choking, searing, off-gases of biological decay.
At the front of the file, Jak drew his Colt Python and signaled for the column to slow to a walk.
The others pulled their weapons and advanced with caution. The buzzing increased in volume and intensity.
Ryan looked over Jak’s slim shoulder at what lay on the road ahead. Under a haze of flying insects, half-naked bodies, at least twenty of them, were scattered from one side to the other. Some faceup, some facedown. Pale skin was blotched purple and black. The flesh looked semisoft, like it was melting from the bones; the torsos and limbs were grotesquely bloated.
Bipedal corpses.
But not norm. Definitely not norm.
“Stickies,” Jak announced as he led the others into the obstacle course of decomposition and swarming insects.
For noses, this version of the race of muties known as stickies had two holes in their flat faces. Legions of hairy black flies crawled in and out of the holes, and in and out of lipless, gaping maws lined with rows of black-edged needle teeth. Emptied eyesockets were packed with masses of juddering bugs, feeding, fighting, egg-laying.
Holding her kerchief tight to her face, her eyes watering from the stench, Mildred stopped and knelt beside one of the bodies.
Ryan could see the mutie’s mouth and facial bones had partially dissolved; the inward collapse created a caldera effect in the hairless flab. The creature’s bare, distended belly had burst a yawning seam right up the middle.
“No way of telling what chilled them, or when,” Mildred said. “Daytime temperature has got to be over a hundred degrees around here. And they’ve been cooking on the black sand.”
“Rot quick, too,” Jak said.
Even in cold weather, Ryan thought. Dead stickies disintegrated and dissolved like burning candles.
“They could have eaten the fruit and gotten poisoned,” Mildred speculated as she rose from her crouch. “Or they could have died from gunshot.”
“The damned bugs are eating the bodies and they aren’t dead,” Krysty said, fanning flies from her eyes.
“Neither are the wire worms,” J.B. said, gesturing with the muzzle of his Smith & Wesson scattergun.
Between the lips of the gaping fissure that ran from the corpse’s pubis to sternum, a bolus of the blood-washed, hair-fine parasites squirmed weakly.
“It wasn’t blasters that chilled them,” J.B. said, thumbing his spectacles back up the bridge of his nose. “No empty shell casings on the road. No bullet holes in the muties, either.”
“Too many of the abysmal creatures to be a mere ambush party,” Doc pronounced gravely. “This, my dear friends, is a steed of a different hue.”
Doc had put into words what they were all thinking.
During certain times of the year, the friends had encountered an odd mating ritual. Stickies swept across the hellscape in a living wave, gathering numbers to breed. Some, like these perhaps, dropped dead of exertion along the way. The muties mated en masse, indiscriminantly, for days at a time. To be caught in the path of their sexual rampage meant horrible death. Not just from the needle teeth. Stickies had adhesive glands in their palms and their fingers were lined with tiny suckers; they killed by pulling their victims limb from limb.
“You’re right, Doc,” Ryan said. “They’re breeders.”
“Mebbe we’ve missed them?” Krysty said hopefully. “Mebbe they’ve already passed us by.”
“They’re in front of us, then,” Mildred said. “They could be anywhere ahead.”
“Mebbe so,” Ryan said, shifting the sling and the weight of his Steyr SSG 70 sniper rifle from his right arm to his left, “but we’ve got no choice. We’ve got to keep following the road east. We can’t bust that black brush without getting torn to shreds, and we sure as hell can’t go back the way we came.”
J.B. checked his weapon, cracking the combat pump gun’s action just enough to see the rim of a chambered, high brass buckshot round. Snapping the slide forward, he said, “Guess we’d better get on with it, then.”
Chapter Two
They were about a quarter mile from the black to brown color change when a crackle of small-arms fire erupted in the near distance ahead. At the sudden noise, the companions reacted as a well-honed unit. J.B., Doc and Mildred ducked to the left shoulder; Ryan, Krysty and Jak to the right. Crouching, weapons up, in an instant they were ready to pour withering fire down the road.
The initial burst was joined by others, which turned into a frenzy of overlapping gunshots.
But the shooting wasn’t aimed at them.
“Perhaps another band of travelers has been set upon by the stickies,” Doc suggested.
“Or road warriors could be resolving a dispute among themselves,” Mildred countered.
“If they’ve got that many bullets to burn,” Ryan said, “they’ve probably got extra food and water.”
“Can’t tell without a look-see,” J.B. said.
“Scout ahead,” Jak offered, already moving forward.
Ryan reached out a hand and stopped the albino. “No recce,” he said. “There’s no point. We’ve got nowhere to retreat. Whatever’s up ahead, we’ve got to get past it. We need to go in full force.”
As they advanced low and fast along the highway’s shoulder, the melee of shooting was interrupted by two rocking booms, one after another. Too loud to be grens. Way too loud. Down the road, at the horizon line, a huge plume of off-white smoke and beige dust billowed skyward. It was hard for Ryan to imagine Deathlands’ motorbike traders blowing each other up over a few knapsacks of predark spoils. High explosives were far too valuable to waste.
Ryan and the others kept moving. The firing ahead dwindled to feeble, scattered bursts. Apparently the tide of battle had turned, or the combatants had managed to destroy each other. Either way, there would be less argument over who-owned-what when the companions burst onto the scene.
Then, as suddenly as it had started, the gunfire stopped completely.
Another column of smoke slowly snaked up in front of them. This plume was oily black and much skinnier, the source hidden down in the river valley, below their line of sight.
For a moment, over the slap of his own footfalls, Ryan thought he heard the wind in his ears, high and shrill. But there was no wind; the air was dead calm. As they closed on the entrance to the highway bridge that spanned the riverbed, it sounded more like cats fighting, screaming.
The roadway ended abruptly just beyond the start of the bridge deck in a ragged lip of asphalt and concrete. The five-hundred-yard-long structure had collapsed, probably shaken apart by shock waves on nukeday. The tops of the bridge’s massive support pillars stretched off in a straight line to the far side of the gorge. They were crowned by short sections of broken-off highway and guard rail. There were yawning, impassable gaps between them.
The screaming from below continued.
Unslinging the Steyr longblaster and flipping up the lens covers of its scope, Ryan crept forward, past the bike trails that had been worn into the hardpan on either side of the collapsed roadway—travelers had apparently forged an alternate route to the other end of the bridge and the resumption of the highway. Ryan peered