"We never catch 'em. I seen some, in the distance like. But they all fucked off when they heard us coming. Got no balls for a mix with the Last Heroes."

"They giving you trouble?"

Priest didn't reply immediately, concentrating on swerving the heavy chopper around a massive hole in the road. It looked like a landie had gone off, by the size of the crater.

"Yeah," he finally grunted. "You know we got a lotta gas. Ground's full of it out near where we have our base. By the old park. But there's some outlying wells. That's where we're going now, the one toward Death Valley."

The knowledge that none of his companions had ever actually faced gave Ryan pause for thought. Of all the muties that roamed the Deathlands, stickies were among the worst — ferocious and inexorable in their desire to attack normies. He wished that he could have warned Jak about what they might be riding into. But the noise of the hogs and the speed at which they were traveling made that impossible. A glance at the speedo told Ryan they were racing along the shifting surface of the old highway at something close to seventy miles an hour, which was about as fast as he'd ever been. Because of the poor quality of processed gas, few wags could manage much more than forty. A tuned-up war wag with all its armor was lucky to reach fifty.

Jak was leaning perilously on the BMW, hands locked in the small of his back, his keen-edged reflexes allowing him to roll with every movement of the powerful two-wheeler. His long hair blew behind him like a streamlined helmet of purest white and his eyes, as he turned to grin across at Ryan, flamed like living embers.

The boy gave a piercing banshee scream of unbridled pleasure, punching the air with his right fist, making the rider wobble and yell a curse over his shoulder at the teenager.

The land was a monotonous reddish orange, with occasional relieving areas of gray or pale yellow. The road unrolled itself, mainly straight, with an occasional dip and swoop. On one side the ruins of an old post-and-wire fence leaned drunkenly toward the distant hills. They saw no signs of life. Twice they passed abandoned drilling rigs, twisted and rusting.

"Any snakes around here?" Ryan shouted.

"Not this way. All in the brush between the ville and the mountains. Nobody goes far that way. Azrael and his brothers and sisters see to that."

The sky was a rich pink, streaked with blue, stippled with fragments of high, scudding chem clouds. Once Ryan spotted a circling hawk, riding a thermal far above them. It was so high that he couldn't judge its size, but the wingspan seemed unusually wide.

They stopped after a half hour for Riddler to relieve himself, standing by the side of the highway, legs spread, whistling loudly to himself.

Dick the Hat was waiting, close by Ryan. "When you get to join the Last Heroes, you get your colors initiated like that."

"Like what?"

"Put on the denims and lie down and all the brothers stand around and piss all over you."

"Fireblast!" Ryan said. "Sounds a whole wag of laughs."

The Angel looked at him suspiciously, but said nothing.

"Much farther?"

"Five miles. Road gets worse. Gotta slow some. Beyond that bunch of hills."

Eye watering from the dusty wind, Ryan squinted around the bikers back and saw that the highway was rising slowly, leading toward a group of mesas. As they drew nearer he could make out that there had been some major earth movements and rocks had slipped down across the blacktop.

Ruin was in the lead, and he held up a hand as a warning to the others that they were swinging off the pavement onto a dirt trail with deep ruts that coiled to the left. Speed dropped to a little more than walking pace; dust billowed around them, choking and blinding. The three other Last Heroes dropped back, spacing themselves to avoid the orange clouds.

"Nearly there!" the biker shrieked, his face a mask of sand-covered sweat.

The rocking and bouncing was almost unbearable as the bike jolted over the bumps, its century-old suspension creaking and rattling. Ryan had to hang on to Priest's back to keep himself on the bike, trying to breathe through his mouth to avoid choking.

Dimly, on either side of the Triumph, Ryan could make out walls of tumbled, frost-riven boulders, rising forty feet or more above them.

Concentrating hard on breathing and staying in the saddle, Ryan had neglected his fighting senses. The hair at his nape had begun to prickle, warning him that this was a dangerous place to be.

He was taken completely by surprise when a semi-naked, mewing creature launched itself at him from out of nowhere, hurling him from the bike. He landed flat on his back in the dirt, with needle-sharp teeth questing toward his neck and a suckered hand reaching for his good eye.

Chapter Twenty-One

Ryan had fought muties before, all kinds, shapes and sizes. But there was nothing on God's nuked earth to compare to close combat against a stickie.

Part of Ryan's brain told him that the stickies must have been attracted by the powerful roaring of the engines of the two-wheel wags. Another part of his brain wondered how many of them there were in the ambush.

But most of his mind locked instantly into the fundamental problem of staying alive.

The skin of a stickie always seemed slippery, like moist rubber, but sand was clinging to this one, enabling Ryan to grip its arm and prevent the hand with its greedy suckers from fastening on his face. Years ago he'd seen one of the drivers off Warwag Two, Harpo, go down in a skirmish against stickies.

The screeching creature had slapped its hand over Harpo's forehead and eyes. The grip was unbelievably powerful. As the mutie pulled its hand away, half of the man's face came with it, including both eyes, ripped from their sockets by the appalling suction of the fingers and palm. All of Harpo's skin and much of the flesh beneath also came away at the same time.

It hadn't been a good ending.

Ryan could hear shouts and screams all around him, as well as the engines revving and choking, wheels spinning and thickening the whirling bank of sullen sand.

The face of the stickie was only inches away from Ryan's as he struggled against its great muscular power and almost reptilian agility. The creature was breathing hard, hissing between a triple row of pointed, edged teeth, spewing foul, rancid breath — a soughing eructation from a rotting, age-old swamp. Its tiny eyes, with pupils that divided vertically, gazed straight into Ryan's eye, blankly hostile. The mutie wore only a pair of torn shorts, and like all stickies it was weaponless. Even the skillful use of a knife was beyond its mental powers.

With a great effort Ryan managed to raise a foot between the creature's legs and push it away from him, sending it staggering backward, until it completely disappeared into the dust storm. As it went, its fingers brushed against Ryan's arm and he felt and heard his shirt tear as the suckers dragged at the material.

He could still hear yelling and squeals of pain, and the snuffling, grunting sound that a stickie makes when it has its jaws clamped on flesh and is gnawing inexorably through to the delicious marrow of the bone.

One by one the engines faltered and died, choked in the dirt. As they stopped, the veil of orange sand began to clear and Ryan was able to see what was going on.

Without even realizing he'd made the move, Ryan found that the SIG-Sauer filled his left hand, the warm hilt of the panga in his right. Seven stickies.

Dick the Hat down and dead, his neck ripped apart. Suckers had peeled skin and flesh away, showing the whiteness of bone beneath the welter of blood. One of the stickies was on its knees, face buried in the pulsing wreckage of the biker's throat.