"Yeah," he breathed slowly. "I know you, ya bitch." Triumph suddenly flooded into his voice. "I knowyou!" He unclasped his fingers, shoved her back against the bed, his body shaking as the huge storehouse echoed to the harsh, jarring, malevolent noise of his cackling.
He flicked open his belt, kicked off his boots. He unzipped his pants, thrust them down. Still laughing, he exposed himself, his penis thick and erect. He stroked it, held it firmly, his eyes suddenly narrowing as he stared at her, a crafty expression sliding across his face.
"Yeah. I know you. I got who you are. Hell of a thing, huh? You know..." his tone had become bizarrely conversational, "...I was gonna kill ya. But not now. Oh, flo, not now. Gonna keep ya all for myself!"
He stepped forward, his tongue dragging across his thick lips.
Krysty thought, I was just on the point of it; I was nearly there, so nearly there. Then she thought, I can still do it. All I need is just a little more time. Once he's inside me, thenI can do it. It's the only way. It's the only blasted way...
Then she saw his attention had been caught by something else, something above her. He was staring upward at the ceiling, at the gloom high in the rafters, his mouth gaping ludicrously, his features frozen into an expression of stunned shock.
She wrenched her head back, her eyes penetrating the shadows, felt horror and loathing flood through her as she glimpsed what he was looking at. A glimpse was all she needed, all she wanted. Clinging to a beam by one suckered hand, its twin free, the suckers writhing as they groped for the wall, was something she had never seen before, only heard about.
A sticky.
Scale jumped back frantically, his face livid, his arms swinging wildly. He shrieked curses as he turned and dashed for the door.
And howled with frenzied fury as another sticky dropped from the shadows above.
At any other time the sight of this half-naked man in a state of near terminal panic, with his rapidly softening erection, would have been comical. Hilarious. But Scale was throwing off psychic waves of unadulterated terror. Krysty could feel it as though it was something physical. He saw death and agony clawing at him and he wanted neither.
Scale sprang toward the crates, grabbed the nearest weapon to hand, a .45 automatic. The gun stabbed flame, the thunder of the shots filling the barn. He emptied the mag into the sticky by the door and the sticky took every round, was thumped back against the wall with their jarring impact.
Krysty saw, with fright-flecked eyes, the slugs slam into greasy flesh around stomach and thighs. Then saw the creature stagger to its feet, red stuff oozing from wounds that were not gaping holes but mere liplike slits, already closing as though sucking the bullets in. The sticky squealed with rage, snorting its fury down its half-formed nostrils, and lunged at Scale, its sucker hands outstretched.
Scale tore a box from one of the piles and heaved it at the thing. The creature's fingers caught the heavy object and held it, almost as though the box had suddenly become a part of it, a clublike extension of its arms. It swung the box and smashed it into Scale, slamming him over into a stack of crates, which swayed, teetered, crashed to the ground.
That saved Scale. The crates rolled and tumbled, some splitting open and sending cans of food spraying out. The sticky blundered into the avalanche and was hammered off balance, going down under what for a normal being would have been a bone-crushing weight of tins. Scale scrambled up and darted to one side, then disappeared down the long storehouse toward the far end.
Krysty, her mouth dry with fear, risked another glance upward. Another sticky was bounding along the wall, high up, like a crazed spider, hand over hand, its long arms supporting its weight with only an occasional kick with its suckered toes to keep balance. Both creatures were naked save for tattered pants. The sticky made it to the upper chamber and vanished into the gloom.
Breathing a prayer, the red-haired young woman closed her eyes again. Concentrating, she let her mind do the work, let it dive into itself so that the light within increased even as her focus became smaller and smaller. Her ankles were now free from her outstanding new strength, her magic, and she could run for it, but her wrists were still tied and without the use of these she might just as well be hobbled again. All she wanted were a few seconds, just a few. She felt the familiar lightness in her head, a feeling like that of bare electric wires of almost no voltage brushing her wrists.
This was power. Woman power in earth: the mind as place. This was strength over material things, a power so strong and so centered in one place that it commanded all it touched. But she wanted desperately to open her eyes, to check for new threats, new horrors that might even now be looming over her. It seemed to her, in the power state, that she had been in a totally vulnerable position for literally minutes on end.
Then she got up, her hands free though her wrists throbbed, the torn cords falling away, her eyes darting to the pyramid of cans so very close to her.
Nothing stirred. She could hear no sounds from the other side of the barn. She put her legs over the side of the bed and sat on the edge for a few seconds breathing in deeply, oblivious of the general stench of the place. She got to her feet, shakily. She was still wearing her boots but her jump suit was in shreds, ripped and torn from breasts to knees. It looked like an animal had been at it, which was pretty much the truth. Glancing down, she saw streaks of blood staining the insides of her thighs and was aware of the dull ache in her womb. She gathered up what remained of her panties flimsy shreds of cotton and screwed up one strip. Squatting, she inserted it deftly into herself as a makeshift tampon. Then, still breathing quickly and managing to control the shivering fit that threatened, she hurried across the room to the open box of grenades.
She grabbed four, stuffing three of them into various untorn pockets, keeping the fourth in one hand. She backtracked to where five automatic rifles leaned against the outer wall, and selected one. No mag. She cursed, picked up another. Same again. Desperately she picked up the remaining three. None had mags. She stared around. This was insane. There was an MG lying on the floor, but she wasn't sure she'd be able to control the kickback on that. There were many more rifles but she could see now that all were empty. Then she noticed that one of the crates had burst open, revealing mags aplenty. They didn't seem to be greased and factory fresh, but had been piled in willy-nilly, all kinds, all types, straight, banana, long curve, short curve. More loot from a land wag train. Her eyes flicked at the leaning row of rifles and SMGs and she picked out a Heckler & Koch 9 mm. Good weight, short, a nice death-dealing compactness. She took it up, checked it, went back to the box and tensely fingered through the jumbled mass of sticks, clattering them aside until she found two 30-slug curved mags. One she stuffed into a back pocket, the other she held against the gun while she began cramming the fourth grenade into an already overstuffed pocket over her right breast.
The pile of cans burst apart in a wild spray of tin. The sticky, squealing viciously, had erupted from the ground.
Krysty gasped. Her heart felt as if someone had just kicked it.
She sprang back, dropping the grenade. She also dropped the second mag. The sticky came at her like a flying fury, and she had to dance away and flee back to the living area of the barn, her right hand fumbling at the remaining mag jammed into her back pocket. It wouldn't come out, had somehow gotten entangled with the pocket lip. She felt as if she could scream, but didn't. Instead she turned for the door, but the creature was already there, its eyes almost popping with rage and blood lust.