Chapter Two

      Ryan realized that the muties seemed to be using Ricky as a flotation device rather than trying to drag him to his doom.

      “I have had enough of this shit,” Mildred declared. She drew her ZKR 551 handblaster, which she’d holstered to try to help Ricky. Aiming quickly, she shot both muties through their round heads. One uttered a croak of dismay as it let go and floundered back into the eddying sewage. The other threw up its arms and sank without a sound.

      Ryan turned back and started moving again as the women got Ricky onto the steps. The water was following more rapidly now.

      As Ryan turned on the landing to head up the next flight, Jak eeled past J.B., who halted, holding his shotgun muzzle up.

      “More muties,” said the albino, who’d obviously slipped ahead to scout the next floor when Ryan paused.

      “Waiting for us?” Ryan asked.

      Jak shook his head.

      “Most sleeping,” he said. “Some awake. Starting move this way.”

      “Push on, J.B.,” Ryan said. “We can’t stay here.”

      “On my way.”

      He headed up, shotgun at the ready. Ryan bulled past Jak, intent on being right on J.B.’s heels when the little man hit the next level. Jak faded back against the wall to let Ryan pass, then followed close behind.

      The next level was open space. The ceiling lighting had malfunctioned, leaving alternating areas of light and dark, interspersed with a few patches of flashing illumination. The stairwell itself was unenclosed. The open space was wide enough that its actual size was indeterminate in the shadows. It suggested a parking garage, though Ryan registered quickly that that was mainly because the sturdy structural columns were exposed to view.

      The air was thick, barely stirred by the redoubt’s ventilation system. It smelled heavily of stale urine, feces, mildew and not-quite-human sweat.

      Around him muties were stirring from what he could only think of as nests: little rough enclosures improvised of broken furniture and random scavenged material, with moldering cushions and bits of cloth for padding from the hard, bare concrete floor. Some muties began to shamble toward them, waving their arms menacingly, from a nest not twenty feet away.

      J.B. raked them with two quick bursts from his Uzi, the copper-jacketed 9 mm slugs slamming the muties to the floor, where they lay clutching their guts and squalling piteously.

      The noise roused the others, who came out of the well as J.B. headed up the exposed stairs.

      Ryan followed J.B. tightly. He heard shots from behind.

      “We’re fine!” Krysty shouted as the cracking concrete echoed through the vast empty space. “Keep moving! Water’s rising fast!”

      Ryan moved. They hit the next landing and kept on going. A mutie turned onto the stairs from the floor above, silhouetting itself against a flickering glow from more malfunctioning overheads. It started down before registering norms were charging up.

      J.B. slashed the creature with the butt of his M4000. It released an ear-splitting squeal and fell against the steel railing to the Armorer’s right. J.B. raced past.

      Ryan split its teardrop-shaped head with an overhand stroke of his panga in passing and never even slowed. The creature toppled backward over the railing and plummeted to the floor.

      The distinctive boom of the shotgun mounted on Doc’s LeMat echoed up the stairs at a volume that seemed to make the wall ripple. Ryan didn’t glance back.

      “No more stairs!” J.B. called out as he reached the top of the flight.

      “Find us a way out, J.B.,” Ryan said.

      The Armorer let the M4000 fall to hang by its sling over one shoulder and scooped up the Uzi on the sling on the other. He hastily fired a short burst over the handrail. Ryan joined him.

      This level was divided into rooms. A corridor ran along the near wall, while another stretched away from them at a T junction. As on the floor below, the lighting here was patchy.

      By the flickering light and alternating patches of shine and shadow J.B. had just blasted a trio of muties coming at them along the corridor running away from the wall. One of them went down thrashing at the half-rotted rubber floor runners, spraying thick green blood everywhere. The others ran off twittering.

      The bad news was they ducked into one of the doors standing open to both sides of the corridor.

      Ryan took quick stock of their situation. They had three choices of which way to go from here—other than back down, which wasn’t happening. The corridor looked to move on to more lateral passages at either end. It was clear both ways for the moment.

      “Gotta move!” Mildred’s voice boomed up from the stairs beneath Ryan. “Crap’s still coming. As well as a whole boatload of more muties!”

      “Where is all this pressure coming from?” asked J.B. He swiveled his head constantly to make sure no new threats caught them unawares.

      “Clearly, the sewage floats on water coming from a substantial body of it, whether lake, river or even ocean,” Doc called up.

      He punctuated his statement with two quick, echoing blasts of his .44 blaster. Then he continued unperturbedly. “Quite nearby. Possibly above us.”

      “Above us?” Mildred repeated. “That’s great. So what if there’s no way out?”

      “They didn’t build this place with no exit other than the mat-trans,” Ryan said. “There’s a way out.”

      “Also a way in,” J.B. added. “Unless they bred those muties here. And unless they don’t have to eat.”

      “Got too many pointy teeth for that,” Ryan growled.

      “Look!” Jak pointed along the corridor where the death throes of the mutie J.B. had shot were subsiding to chirps and twitches. An overhead light had come on at the far end, revealing a door with a grated window that looked suspiciously as if it led to another set of stairs.

      “Go,” Ryan said as another pair of shots boomed out from just below. He recognized the sound of his lover’s Smith & Wesson 640. Its short barrel produced more noise than muzzle energy. If Krysty was blasting, it meant the muties were getting close.

      Jak was usually a master of stealth, but he set off running at full speed. His long white hair streamed out behind his head like the neck cloth of a cap.

      J.B. took off after him at a trot. He’d already swapped the Uzi for the M4000.

      Ryan followed, panga and SIG Sauer at the ready. Jak was clearly bent on reaching the possible exit—at least from this level—as fast as possible. His companions had to keep the muties from the side rooms off his back and away from themselves. And above all, they had to keep moving.

      There would be no room-by-room sweep, despite the fact it was safer, to say nothing of the possible scavvy awaiting them. Right then the only thing that gave them a chance at surviving another ten minutes was speed, speed and more speed.

      For a moment, Ryan thought Jak was going to run the gauntlet of open doors unscathed. Then a mutie popped out of a room to the right, just at the end.

      Jak punched it across the face