Fear that man

cartilage, smashed in on brain tissue. Orange blood spouted through Buronto’s fingers. As quickly as he could, he grabbed the falling slug, using him as a shield, and wrenched the rifle from its already limp pseudopod. A blast from another alien’s rifle caught the dead slug instead of Buronto, ripped a deep hole in it. And by that time the giant had the stolen gun under control.
        He fanned the sled party. Blood fountained up in three separate places, drenching the street with a slick film of dull orange. Flesh caught fire and bloomed like gasoline, then subsided to a steady yellow blaze. The slugs either fell instantly or slithered about in circles until the fire had so consumed them that they were not even capable of postmortem muscle spasms.
        A second sled drifted across the roofs, and its aft laser shot a long beam at Buronto, just barely missing him. He fell behind the empty sled, raised his gun, caught the alien marksman in the midsection and blew him in two. Thick alien blood rained down and spattered across the window of the Inferno.
        “He’ll never make it!” Coro shouted over the chaos.
        “It’s horrible,” Lotus said, clutching her lover.
        “He’ll make it,” Sam snapped. He has to, he thought. He’s our only chance. And, dreams of Hope, how low have we gone and how desperate our situation when our only hope is a madman, a masochist, a vicious killer! He stared grimly at the destruction. His stomach was beyond vomiting now. The destruction was too great, the killing too overwhelmingly horrible to affect him. It was a dream, an unreality of ghastly proportions but an unreality just the same. That was the only way his mind could accept what he was seeing.
        Further down the street, a woman burst into flames, her hair a wild torch…
        A child fell, went under trampling feet that bruised, cut, killed unknowingly in blind panic…
        Buronto was holding a beam on the guidance module of the second magno-sled. Suddenly there was a curling of black smoke seeping from the underslung bubble, and the sled began hobbling out of control. The slugs on it wrestled against it, found it was a losing battle. The sled started a climb, then choked off and plunged into the wall of another building, pushing fire and debris ahead of it. There were screams from the men and women inside the building. Fire gushed up through the ten floors of the place, singeing away the screams.
        Mounting the sled, Buronto fiddled, determining the method of operation, raised the vehicle and turned toward the Inferno.
        “Get back!” Sam shouted as the giant guided the sled on a collision course with the doorway.
        There was a pregnant pause while the alien craft accelerated, then a birth of ear-shattering noise as wood disjointed from plastiglued sockets and the wall around the door shattered and fell inward.
        “Get on!” Buronto was shouting. “Get on! Hold fast!”
        They boarded, held tightly to the small railing; Buronto gunned the machine, tore through a plastiglass window at the rear of the building, the front of the sled shattering it before them. The shards, sharp and dangerous, showered into the air just as they passed through, fell back after they had passed and were speeding silently down the alleyway, ten feet above the ground.
        Buronto clutched the rifle in one hand as if it were a tiny pistol-or a toy from some more violent time. With the other hand, he steered the sled. “Where to?” he called over his shoulder.
        “We have the starship hidden,” Sam said. “We figured they would take over the spaceport, so we landed in the Five Mile Park. They shouldn’t bother with that.”
        At the end of the alley, another sled and four slugs appeared. They seemed not to notice, for the moment, that these were humans and not other slugs. They came fluttering down the narrow passage, swiftly closing the blocks between them. Buronto raised the rifle, fired straight-on at the pilot of the other sled. The alien was flung apart like a doll, tossed from the sled in pieces. One of the others went for the controls, but the sled bucked before it could reach them, went out of control. It slammed back and forth from wall to wall, still advancing. One of the slugs-at a moment of extreme tilt-slid over the edge, grabbed the railing with pseudopods to pull itself back aboard. The sled swung into a wall again, crushing it, severing it in half and