"In the head!" Ryan yelled. "Only way to chill them!"
Priest was too locked into his own panic to register Ryan's advice, and repeatedly fired his weapon, riddling the chest and stomach of the stickie. By now it was only a few paces away from him, hands reaching out to draw him into its lethal embrace.
Jak tried to help, throwing two of his elegant knives. Each found its target with pinpoint accuracy, thudding into the neck of the mutie, making it falter for a moment.
"Why not fucking down?" the albino yelled turning to look at Ryan.
"Told you. Stickies aren't like anything else. You can rip their guts open and it hardly slows them. Gotta hit their fireblasted heads."
Ruin had kicked his way clear of the one stickie, but it clutched a dripping haunch of meat in its hand. Blood was pouring from a gaping wound in the leg of the Last Hero. Ryan had seen enough fatal wounds in his time to know that the odds were effectively down to five against four. Three if you counted Priest as doomed.
At last Ryan could get in some clean shooting.
Standing with his feet a few inches apart, blaster firmly held in his hand, he fired three carefully placed shots.
One stickie had already closed on Priest, who'd turned at the last second to try to run from his slobbering, gnawing nemesis.
But the other mutie was halfway up the slope and the 9 mm bullet smashed into its head, exiting close to its left eye, sending it crashing down the face of the slope, legs and arms thrashing and twitching.
The second bullet hit the stickie that was chewing at the hunk of Ruin's upper leg — precisely where Ryan had aimed, near the mucous-rimmed pits of its pig-like nostrils. Angling sideways and splintering teeth, the round exploded through the side of the head, above the residual knobs of gristle that were the creature's ears.
The third round struck the stickie that had been moving toward the dying Ruin, chattering excitedly to itself in its own guttural tongue.
It was half turned toward Riddler, who'd screamed at it to try to distract it. The stickie had raised a hand when it had seen Ryan's raised blaster, and the bullet smashed through the nest of suckers in the middle of its palm, carrying on, entering the right cheek. The slug tore out the inside of the face, leaving the palate in tatters of mangled skin and flesh.
"Two of them and three of us," Ryan said.
"Five." Jak pointed to the kneeling figure of Ruin and to where the small, bearded Priest had vanished over the top of the rise.
"Three," Ryan repeated.
Ruin made a last desperate effort to get up, half falling, clawing his way toward his beloved chopper. But the blood loss from the torn femoral artery closed him down and he finally lay still in the dirt, his outstretched fingers inches from the dusty metal of the BMW.
"Come on," Ryan ordered, leading the way up the slope, followed by Jak. Riddler, clutching his blood-slick ax, waddled along at their heels.
The three of them paused at the top of the ridge, looking down into a shallow dip on the far side.
"Yeah," Jak finally agreed. "Three."
Priest hadn't made it far. He lay facedown in the sand, naked, the ragged remains of his clothes scattered around him. The stickie was crouched over the corpse, dabbing its hand at the bare flesh, each time bringing away a dozen tiny circles of crimson, raggedy skin. A maze of red rivulets trickled down its chin, testifying it was already relishing the feast. The creature became aware that it was being watched and looked up, snarling its venom.
"Me," Riddler demanded, hefting his sawed-off scattergun. "Me."
"Not at that range," Ryan replied. He'd been reloading his blaster as they stood there. Trader had always drummed into anyone who rode with him that a man had to keep his blasters fully charged whenever he could. Because you might not get another chance.
"Me," Jak said, pulling out his .357 Magnum.
"Head," Ryan reminded him.
The stickie was up and moving, leaving the ragged body of Priest behind. Its eyes were blinking, hands reaching out.
Only minutes had slipped by since Ryan had ridden into the ambush.
The noise of the handgun was deafening. After the mild popping of the .32 and the muffled sound of Ryan's silenced blaster, the air sang with the violence of its explosion.
The Magnum was so much bigger than Jak that the boy had to clutch it in both hands to fire it.
The white-haired boy was quite brilliant at close combat and knife fighting, but Ryan didn't rate him very highly when it came to blasters.
Jak was aware of his own limitations and cautiously aimed to score a hit, not taking the chance of missing with a more risky head shot. He put the bullet smack through the middle of the stickie's naked chest. The power of the Magnum made the advancing mutie totter on its heels, mouth dropping open in a squeak of shock and pain.
"Again," Ryan shouted. "Come on, Jak, hit it again. Now!"
The boy fired two more rounds, one going clean through the left shoulder, spinning the stickie around. The third one, better aimed, caught it at the angle of the jaw, destroying teeth into splintered fragments of razored bone, shredding the creature's tongue, almost removing the lower jaw. The distorted bullet exited in the center of the right cheek, flaying a hole the size of a baseball.
And it still didn't go down.
It lurched and stumbled, waving its hands with the tiny sucking disks. Blood sprayed down its body, coursing over the rubbery flesh, pattering into the thirsty earth.
"Let me chill the fucker with me ax," Riddler roared. "Or the ten-gauge."
"No. Mine," Jak insisted, steadying the gun and squeezing the trigger a fourth time, the sound booming out across the desert.
The bullet smashed into the side of the head of the staggering, blood-sodden monster, an inch from the corner of its left eye. The slug pulped its diminutive, malevolent brain, turning its lights out forever.
"Ace on the line," Ryan said. "Noise like that could attract every stickie from the Sierras to the Lantic. Let's go."
Something nagged at his memory, something that he'd forgotten in the rush and the excitement of the fight and the chilling.
He turned on his heel to lead the way down the slope to where the four choppers lay abandoned in the sand — and walked straight into the seventh and last of the attacking stickies, the one that had been cowering behind the spilled corpse of Dick the Hat, its mouth crusted with congealing human blood. Overlooked and forgotten.
Ryan's needle reflexes saved his life. Instinctively he punched out at the creature, feeling the impact jar clear to his shoulder. He brushed aside the lunging, clawing hands, hitting the stickie twice more with short stabbing punches to its maniac face and soft belly.
"Roll away!" someone bellowed behind him. Riddler, he realized.
Unhesitatingly Ryan pulled away, hearing the other sleeve of his shirt tear beneath the questing suckers. He rolled on his shoulder and came up in a fighting crouch, wincing at the nearness of the heat and blast from the Last Hero's shotgun.
"Fuck a dead armadillo!" Jak gasped.
It was an amazing sight.
The nervous system of a stickie was sometimes rudimentary. The burst of shot from the shotgun had torn the thing's head clear away from its narrow shoulders, leaving its skull to dangle, held only by frayed strands of ligament and ragged muscle. But it still walked!
The impact sent the creature several drunken steps down the flank of the hill, but it miraculously maintained its balance, wobbling several more uneven strides before it finally tripped and fell, rolling to the bottom of the slope. During the fall its head had become detached and bounced off, coming to a stop against the rear wheel of Priest's Triumph.