s [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

stairwell, but he knew the shrapnel spray would take out many of his men. He
glared at the clot of norms on the stairs above him.
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What was holding things up?
Using the butt of his Uzi, Murchisson battered his way through the crowd.
"Move! You worthless sacks of shit," he told them.
When he reached the next landing, he found it blocked by a mass of people.
They were pounding on
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s%20(12/55)/035%20-%20Skydark.txt the steel fire door, which was closed and
evidently locked.
"Let us in!" the toadies cried.
"No. You've got to go higher. Keep moving up the stairs!"
He pushed back the blockage and looked around the corner of the landing.
People packed the stairs all the way up as far as he could see.
"Damn!" the sec man said. Turning back, he shouted for a squad of the rearmost
sec men. They
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came crashing, kicking up the steps. The toadies and their families crushed to
the sides of the well to get out of their way.
"AH right," Murchisson said, "I want a path opened all the way to the top. Get
going."
The sec men were only too glad to oblige, because it put distance and bodies
between them and the raging stickies. Tramping up the staircase, they used
fists and feet to drive a wedge between the norms. The stubborn ones were
knocked over the railing.
Murchisson stepped into the wake his troops made. "Up!" he said to the
toadies. "Follow us up!"
Above the seventeenth floor the stairwell was clear. Murchisson and his men
took the steps three at a time. When the head sec man reached the open fire
door to the twenty-fourth floor, he immediately started herding the norms
behind him inside.
"Move to the end, dammit!" he shouted, waving them past the elevators. "To the
end!"
The cream of Willie ville funneled, dazed and shaking, down the hallway lined
with looted couches and chairs.
RYAN SWUNG HIMSELF over the rail of the fourth-floor balcony. Hobbled by ankle
chains, he made an ungainly landing on a patio table. He tied off the end of
the rope on the rail. Finding the slider locked, he picked up a metal chair
and smashed in the glass.
The dark hotel room consisted of a bathroom, bedroom, open closet and a
built-in dresser. The wall mir-
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ror was long gone, as was every other bit of furnishing not nailed or screwed
down. He checked the bath, which was empty. When he stepped out into the dim
hall, he came face-to-face with the crowned muzzle of a hogleg,
stainless-steel blaster a Ruger Redhawk .44 Magnum with a seven-and-a-
half-inch barrel.
The toadie norm on the other end of the Redhawk was shaking up a storm. He
could hardly miss at this range, though.
"K-k-kill you," the man said. Ryan swept the Ruger's long barrel aside and
clamped his hand over the blaster's cylinder. The toadie tried to discharge
the weapon into Ryan's leg, but with the cylinder trapped, the hammer wouldn't
rise on double action.
Ryan hit him once in the stomach with his left hand. The blow doubled the man
over and dropped him to his knees. He let go of the .44-caliber blaster.
The one-eyed warrior turned the handcannon around and cocked it.
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"Don't shoot me," the toadie begged between gasps for air.
Ryan ignored him. He put the pistol's muzzle against the first link of the
ankle chain and fired.
Flame belched from the barrel, and the hallway rocked from the blast. His
ankles were no longer connected. He swung out the cylinder and saw he had
three live rounds left.
"You shouldn't be down here," Ryan told the man as he snapped the action
closed. "Nobody should be
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this close to the ground. The stickles can climb up the outside of the
building. Is anybody else on this floor?"
"Uh-huh."
"Well, get them the hell out. And quick. Before the stairwell is cut off."
When the toadie just stood there, Ryan realized he was going to have to do it
himself. He shoved the man ahead of him as he stormed down the hall, kicking
and pounding on the doors. "Everybody out!" he yelled. "Stickies are coming!
You can't stay here. You're not safe!"
Behind him the doors opened a crack, and the hiding norms started filing out.
Ryan had just one immediate goal, which was to recover their weapons. The last
time he'd seen them, they were twenty-one floors up. He headed for the
stairwell door. He didn't have to put his ear to it to hear gunshots and
screams.
It was already too late. The sec men had retreated to a higher floor. There
was nothing but stickles in the stairwell.
Ryan didn't say anything to the norms. He couldn't help them. He abruptly
turned and pushed past
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s%20(12/55)/035%20-%20Skydark.txt them, moving back the way he had come.
"What do we do?" one of the toadies cried. "What do we do?"
Die, Ryan thought You die.
When the one-eyed warrior reentered tjhe balcony room where he had tied off
the rope, stickies were already scrambling over the rail onto the patio. Three
of
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them rushed at him through the broken slider. He raised the Redhawk and tired
once.
A foot of flame leaped from the muzzle as the weapon roared. The single
240-grain slug smashed through the first mutant's head, then the second and
finally the third. They toppled like dominoes. He walked over their shuddering
hulks and out onto the balcony. As he did, another stickie popped up over the
railing. The massive handblaster bucked as Ryan shot it in the face,
point-blank. The stickie's bald head blurred into a red mist. Its body
dropped, then stopped. The sucker hands were still stuck to the steel railing.
They held the headless corpse dangling there while blood bubbled from the
stump of its neck.
Tucking the Ruger into his waistband, Ryan untied the rope, jumped up on the
railing and launched himself into space. As he swung out, he could see
stickies climbing from patio to patio on the outside of the hotel. In seconds
they would be swarming over the fourth floor.
Ryan started to pull himself up the rope. It was much easier going with his
ankles free, but still a long, dangerous climb to the penthouse. As he inched
past the floors, he could see figures running about and he heard almost
constant blasterfire.
As he reached the nineteenth floor, a sec man rushed out onto the balcony. The
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man paid him only a quick glance. He leaned over the rail and, seeing the tiny
forms scaling the side of the building, he let out a ferocious curse. Though
he had a rifle, he didn't take a
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shot. He turned and ran back inside the hotel. Ryan heard him yelling a
warning to his comrades as he raced down the hall.
The rope under Ryan twitched, tensed and stretched. He looked past his boots
and saw that he was no longer the rope's only passenger. Many stories down a
stickie had grabbed the end of it and was shinnying up after him, light and
quick, like a spider on a web. Even as Ryan watched, five more of the mutants
caught the end of the rope and started up.
With the suckers on their lingers and the adhesive glands, he knew there was
no way he could shake them off the line, so he didn't even try. Instead, he
redoubled his efforts to climb the rope, moving toward the penthouse as fast
as he could. His concern wasn't just that the mutants would overtake him. He
knew the stickies were so stupid that more and more of them would keep jumping
on the rope until their combined weight finally snapped it. He didn't want
that to happen while he was still climbing.
When he reached the top-floor balcony, he caught hold of the rail and pulled [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]