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asses long enough .
    He walked forward briskly. Jak was still where he was, looking around. He clearly wasn’t happy, which meant J.B. wasn’t happy. He wasn’t ready to charge ahead until he knew what was eating the albino.
    “Not like,” Jak said. “Smell...something.”
    J.B. had already smelled something disquieting: death. A dead creature was rotting somewhere not too far off.
    That didn’t mean a bent cartridge case. At any given moment, tons of dead things were rotting away around the Deathlands. Some of them once had names. No doubt plenty of various sorts of chills were decomposing away right here in the Detroit rubble.
    Jak knew that as well as J.B. did. It could be a bad sign, sure. But it wasn’t bad enough news to hold Jak back.
    “What?” J.B. asked.
    Jak shook his head. “Not tell. Something.”
    The death stink, somehow sweet, pervasive, infinitely horrible no matter how often you smelled it—which in all their cases had been often—could mask a host of other odors. Bad luck. But the potential dangers that smell hid were that—potential.
    The pissed-off people chasing them were real. And immediate.
    “Gotta go,” J.B. told him. “Double fast.”
    Without an instant’s hesitation Jak took off. He decided to run full-out, secure their way out. Speed was needed here more than caution.
    J.B. followed him, less rapidly, and not just because his legs could never keep him up with Jak’s even though J.B. was taller than he was. He held his shotgun across his belly, ready to blast whatever made the mistake of jumping out to challenge the intruders. He heard the footfalls of his friends pounding close behind.
    When he was just past the midway point to the brightness of the far exit, a voice shouted out from behind, “There the bastards are!”
    And Jak wheeled around, his face a white mask of alarm.
    “Stickies!”

Chapter Five
    J.B. spotted them right away, off toward a broad ramp descended from the level above.
    The muties looked like tiny humans, not much smaller than Jak. They were as vicious as any creature in the Deathlands, human coldhearts included. Their noses were vertical slits, and their mouths were filled with needle teeth. They also had tough, rubbery skin, which contributed to making them double-hard to chill. Many needed a shot to the head to chill, but the companions had run across plenty who could be taken out by any kind of mortal wound.
    J.B. now understood what had been tickling Jak’s sensitive nostrils, despite the overlying smell of death. It was the distinctive reek of stickies. The death stink that hid theirs probably came from victims, human or animal, the muties had either not finished eating yet or got tired of and just left to rot where they lay.
    He gave the muties a couple blasts of #4 buckshot without even slowing them. Unless a lucky lead ball happened to punch through one of those big, staring eyes into the malevolent inhuman brain beyond, it had little chance of killing one of them. But one stickie fell down, shrieking and slapping at its body with its sucker-tipped fingers, and the other staggered back a pace or two.
    “Full speed!” Ryan yelled.
    Jak stopped long enough to hold his Python out the full length of his arm and trigger a shot. The blaster’s roar bouncing between the concrete floor and roof made its usually unpleasant noise seem to clap the sides of J.B.’s head like planks of wood. But that beat what happened to the stickie’s head. The 125-grain jacketed hollow-point round imploded its right eye and blew the brains out the back of its round skull in a black fountain.
    Shooting broke out from behind J.B., more than his friends alone could account for....
    * * *
    R YAN LOOKED BACK . People stood in the street behind his companions. After just a handful of seconds inside the darkened parking structure, they seemed to swim against a sea of dazzle. A couple opened up with handblasters.
    Ricky leaned out from around a stout concrete pillar painted