Chapter Twenty-One

As the van skidded through the slime, Nara threw an arm around Ryan's neck and pulled him to the floor.
Then everything flashed green.
Though Ryan shut his eyelid, the blaze inside his head was brighter than any sun. Brighter and closer. For a terrible, interminable instant, the doors of a nuclear blast furnace gaped wide, and Ryan stood naked upon its hearth. The heat, like a head-to-foot body blow, hammered Ryan into the floorboards. Then it was gone. He lay beside Nara, every muscle in his body quivering and jerking from the shock.
He lifted his head and saw they were still sliding sideways, but they were no longer riding in an enclosed van. In the space of a heartbeat the roof above them had vanished, along with the upper third of the side walls, rear doors and windshield. The tops of all the seats were likewise cut through. Ryan pulled himself up to his knees, then onto the edge of the bench seat.
Five heads popped up in front of him, three mercie men and a woman, and Damm behind the steering wheel, fighting to regain control. On the seat directly in front of him, the guy stuck to the wall no longer had a head to pop up. Like the roof and walls, it had been vaporized. Scorched black from shoulder to shoulder, he spit and crackled like a smoldering log.
Ryan swiveled and looked behind him. The torsos and legs of two mercies sat rigidly on what was left of the rear seat. More headless wonders. Their clothing and flesh were fused to the smoking pillow of black slag at the new, lowered top of the seat.
He squinted as a battery of floodlights from the APCs in pursuit swept over the van's interior. Whoever they were, they weren't interested in taking or recovering prisoners.
Get them off us!" Damm shouted over his shoulder as he steered out of the skid.
"Tribarrels won't stop them," Nara shouted back. "Just slow them down!"
As Nara struggled to regain her balance and pick up her weapon, Ryan grabbed a pulse rifle from the floor. How well had he learned his lesson? It was final exam time. He thumbed off the safety and squashed the rear trigger. It locked back with a tangible click. Instantly, the weapon throbbed in his hands and burst after green burst shot through the middle of the rear door. Trigger still pinned, Ryan reached over the receiver and twisted the other control switch all the way to the right. The laser weapon screamed. A solid line of green connected the tribarrel's muzzle and the van door. With a single, backhanded swipe, he chopped away what remained of the van's rear doors, clearing them to the floor. Then he fanned the gallery ceiling behind, slicing free fifty feet of slime drape.
As it crashed to the ground, the headlights of the lead pursuer abruptly winked out.
The other two APCs veered wildly to avoid piling into the buried vehicle. It slowed them only for a second or two, then they were back on course. And closing ground.
"Do something, Damm!" Nara cried as she shouldered her weapon. "Before their weapons systems lock us in."
Over the blinding glare of headlights, an even brighter light flared. When he saw the green flash, Ryan averted his eye and shielded his face.
The van lurched forward and up, suddenly weightless, suddenly airborne. The laser cannon had hit low this time, taking out all the wheels. The van dropped hard onto its bare suspension, and its momentum sent it spinning across the beds of slime.
There was nothing Ryan could do but hang on and hope. Between his boots, the floorboards looked like lace. Melted lace. Bacterial slime, scraped free of the ground by the van's undercarriage, was forced up through the holes, sieved into a mass of thrashing green worms.
With a crash, they slammed sideways into a building wall, the impact cushioned by a pad of bacterial growth twenty feet deep. As Ryan bounced off the inside of the van, the slime curtain above broke loose from the ceiling and slopped down onto the roofless van. He was buried under a terrible wet weight. Choked by the stench of ammonia, he struggled to get free.
As Ryan pushed out from under the slunk, Damm was pulling Nara to her feet. He had a satchel slung over one shoulder. "This way!" the mercie leader said, vaulting the van's ruined side wall.
On Nara's heels, Ryan hopped down into the green slop. Already he thought he could feel something strange going on inside his lungs, a kind of chill, deep down, and a heaviness that made it hard for him to draw breath. He hoped it was just the power of suggestion. But he felt a noticeable strain in his chest and an accompanying weakness in his legs as he fought through the piles of slime to catch up with the blonde.
In the glare of the oncoming APCs' headlights the bleak, softly shrouded landscape before him stretched on and on, as far as he could see. If those lights went out, he knew he would be instantly, irretrievably lost.
And shortly thereafter, very dead.
Unseen, gauzy curtains of slime slicked over Ryan's face, his nose, his lips. An acrid, evil taste filled his mouth. He spit as he ran, and as he spit, he fought to keep from puking. Sticky moisture, from the humid air, from the mounds of slunk he stomped through, had seeped through his clothes and onto his skin.
At least he wasn't the last in line. Perhaps because their infections were more advanced, the other mercies were struggling to keep up. Leading the ragged file of seven, Damm headed for the only source of light other than the fast-closing APCsa dim, greenish rectangle at ground level.
Floodlights from behind swept over them, and almost in the same instant they were hit by another cannon pulse. Ryan felt the wave of heat above his head and to the rear. He heard a sizzling sound, then a scream cut off short.
When he glanced back he saw the man behind him was gone, turned to vapor along with tons of bacteria. Another cannon pulse slammed the wall ahead of them. Though momentarily blinded, he kept on running; there was no stopping now. As he sprinted through the billowing steam cloud, the stench of frying slime enveloped him.
Ahead of him, Damm vanished into the rectangle of paler green, then Nara. He hit the foot of the ramp and skidded on the thin layer of water that was sheeting off the concrete.
Above was more light.
Above was hope.
Gasping for air, Ryan charged up the incline. There was no mere chill in his lungs now. There was burning cold and a tangible, sloshing weight with every step.
He was drowning.
He wanted to cough, but he couldn't let himself. Once he started, he knew he'd never stop.
Behind them, he could hear the roar of the APCs' engines. No way could he outrun the pursuit. Certainly not uphill, on foot, with lungs half-full of bacteria.
Forty feet up the ramp from Ryan, Damm slowed long enough to unsling the satchel from his shoulder, pull a lanyard inside and drop the bag on the ground.
As Ryan dodged around the obstacle, he could hear the hissing of the fuse inside.
Damm cried back at him, "Run! Run!"
Run was all he could do.
There were no turns to hide behind, just an uptilting expanse of straight and narrow.
Though it felt as if he were dying, Ryan drove himself onward. The resounding clank of metal tracks on concrete filled the tunnel, as did the light from a bank of headlights. The APC driver gunned his engine and shifted into low gear.
Ryan had gone no more than twenty steps farther when he was slammed by a giant hand, flattened on the streaming pavement by a single blow while above him, chunks of hot metal sang off the walls. Shaking his head to clear it, Ryan scrambled to his feet.
The lead APC lay on its side, blocking the middle of the tunnel. The track on its left side had been blown apart. Fire boiled up from inside the passenger compartment. A pair of undamaged headlights cut tunnels through the spreading smoke.
Nara was already moving, if stiffly. Blood leaked in a trickle from her nose and ears.
Damm grabbed Ryan by the arm and pushed him up the ramp after her. "We've got a little bit of space," he said. "We've got to make the most of it."
He said nothing about the other three mercies, the ones who had been bringing up the rear, the ones his satchel of high-ex had blown all to hell. Damm gave Ryan another shove. "Go!" he said. The one-eyed man headed for the wall of fog that lay across the tunnel, fifty yards ahead. Behind and below them, powerful engines roared and there was a grating sound as one of the intact APCs tried to push the overturned vehicle out of its way.
Ryan felt as if he had a couple of bags of wet concrete in his chest, dragging him down. He could barely lift his feet, and he wasn't the only one who was slowing down. With the fog still a good distance away, Damm and Nara were fading fast, too. None of them was going to make it, he could see that. Before they reached cover, before the APCs even got close, they were going to collapse and die.
Unable to go another step, Ryan put a hand against the wall, bent over and vomited green slime. Nara was right there, by his side, helping him back up. As he straightened, Damm gave him a hard shove, pinning his back against the wall.
Ryan opened his eye and saw that the mercie had something gripped in his fist. Protruding from the heel of Damm's hand was a bright needle, as thin as a hair, and three inches long. He wielded it like a killing dirk, in a downward stab.
There was no way Ryan could deflect the blow.
He gasped as the full length of the hypodermic pierced his chest, driving in to the hilt. He gasped again as Damm thumbed the plunger home, as fingers of fire squeezed his wildly beating heart.

THE LIGHTS WENT OUT for Major Oswaldo Lujan, and as they did, a stunning impact hurled him against his shoulder harness. Plunged into darkness inside his APC, all of his external sensors blacked out, the major unleashed a ferocious string of profanity. He'd been buried under a mountain of slime by a sweep of laser fire from the kidnappers' van. Still cursing, he rocked the APC back and forth, shifting from forward to reverse, grinding a little more breathing room, and a little more, until he could finally reverse his way out from under the smothering heap.

With his optics cleared he saw two of his APCs already diving into the darkness ahead. The other vehicles had been caught in the trailer's explosion. Overturned and buried by slime fall, they were out of the picture. How much explosive had gone off, he could only guess. The blast had collapsed the ceiling on top of the crater where the trailer had once sat. There was no sign of it or the tractor that had pulled it.
He should have guessed the bastard would pull something like that, Lujan told himself as he roared after the others. The mercie had a history of desperate escapes that bordered on the suicidal.
Laser-cannon fire lit up the terrain ahead, and as Lujan approached the mouth of the tunnel ramp, he saw that there was still plenty of opportunity for him to make amends. The ruined van sat empty, covered in drapes of slime. The man from Shadow World and his surviving kidnappers were on foot.
Lujan checked the elapsed time since the trailer explosion. Three minutes. Inside the black helmet, a fierce smile lit up his face. Add three minutes to the time the mercs had already spent in Slime Zone and what you got was torpor, fading rapidly into death.
One way or another, the story was going to end real soon.
Throttle pinned, Lujan fought to catch up with the other two APCs before they reached the tunnel. It was impossible; they had too big a lead. He had just entered the foot of the ramp when somewhere above the bomb blew.
The tunnel was lit by hard white light and rocked by an awesome thunder crack. A fireball devoured the lead APC, rolled over the second vehicle and kept on rolling down the ramp. The major met it head-on, and it passed right over him.
More surprises from Damm.
Lujan's route was now blocked. He waited until the second APC shoved the burning hulk far enough to one side for him to scrape past, then he drove around the wreck. He stopped when he saw all the bodies strewed facedown on the ramp. The mercs had been killed by their own explosive. Between the bodies and the condensation layer there was only wet concrete.
"Out!" he ordered four of the APC's six-man crew. "I want to know if Shadow Man is among them. Double time!"
From the driver's seat, he watched as his men hurriedly turned over the corpses.
"Not here, Major," the report came back. "He must be up ahead. Damm's not here, either."
Lujan gunned the APC's engine, and, without waiting for the men to climb back inside, started clanking up the tunnel. When he accelerated away from them, toward the condensation layer, his crew realized he wasn't going to stop. The other APC pulled around the wreck and followed the major's lead, rushing for the wall of mist. Lujan's crew had to jump on the outside of the trailing vehicle or get left behind.