Sunspot

Ryan had carefully measured their escorts over the course of the return trip. Malosh’s sec men were professionals. He saw no evidence of wandering attention despite the long slog, and the fact that they outnumbered their captives a comfortable ten-to-one. Even though they could have, no one slacked off. Their weapons came up at the right moments, without the need of shouted commands. They anticipated the potential for trouble well in advance, and efficiently closed the door on it.

That didn’t bode well for a future escape.

The sec men led them to the ville’s puddled central square where the air hung heavy with the sour smell of drowned woodsmoke and the sweet scent of burned flesh.

All of Redbone’s shell-shocked survivors had been assembled there at blasterpoint. About sixty men and women and twenty children stood before three, fifteen-foot-high posts that had been raised in front of the ville’s stone-rimmed well. Threaded onto the tops of each of the debarked, peckerpole tree trunks were two naked men and a naked woman.

All dead.

Ryan recognized them as the defenders of the fallen barricade. They were slumped over at the waist, with chins resting on their chests, their legs and feet smeared with blood. The sharpened stakes had been rammed up their backsides, then they had been hoisted into a vertical position. The weight of their own bodies and their desperate struggles had driven the shaved poles deep into their torsos.

“Dark night!” J.B. exclaimed, tipping back his fedora. “That’s a nasty way to go.”

“Barbarous,” Doc agreed, his long, seamed face twisting into a scowl of disgust. “It would appear that we have been tossed back into the Dark Ages.”

“What makes you think we ever left them?” Mildred said.

Baron Malosh paced his chestnut horse back and forth in front of the displayed corpses. When the last of his men had entered the square, he reined in the stallion. Reaching down behind his knee, he unscabbarded a Kalashnikov assault rifle, aimed it at the sky and fired off a full-auto burst. A handful of Redbone’s survivors looked up at the baron with desperate dread, the rest looked only at their boot tops.

“I’m offering you Redbone folk a choice,” Malosh shouted. “Join my army and fight beside me. It’s a hard and dangerous life, but it’s profitable, too. There’s booty to be had and plenty of food to eat.” He pointed the autorifle at a heap of skinny, sharpened poles on the ground behind him. “Join me willingly and share in the spoils of war, or I will keep stretching buttholes until I run out of stakes.”

An easy decision for the defeated, a bullet or a saber thrust at some future date being preferable to imminent skewering.

“Form a line, then!” the baron cried. “Do it now!” As his mercies jabbed and shoved the outnumbered captives into a ragged column, he dismounted, handing the reins to a swampie.

The companions closed ranks with Krysty and Jak in front, the swineherds next, then Doc, J.B., Mildred and Ryan. The one-eyed man stepped to the side so he could watch what was going on at the head of the line. Malosh took only a moment to size up the first person before impatiently waving him to the right, where soldiers waited. The fit-looking young man moved off, presumably to join the fighters.

Zombielike, the line of volunteers advanced. Malosh made quick selections, sending the able-bodied young to the right, the middle-aged but still mobile to the left along with the older children. The elderly and the children under the age of seven he waved back to the doorways of the ramshackle huts. Thus mothers and their breastfeeding babies were separated, the former bound for war, the latter to starve.

This way and that the gloved hand motioned, dividing warriors from cannon fodder, and cannon fodder from those he deemed unfit to even serve as human shields.

As the companions approached Malosh, it became clear that he had yet another pigeonhole. A genetic one. The baron started to wave Krysty to the right, toward the norm warriors, but caught himself. He bent closer and examined the springy coils of her red hair. When he reached out, the prehensile tendrils wriggled away from his touch.

“You hide your rad-tainted blood well,” Malosh said. “You almost passed for norm. Of course, almost doesn’t count.” He hooked a thumb over his shoulder at the swampies clustered behind the well. “Join your fellow muties,” he told her.

Krysty didn’t argue with the baron. She wasn’t ashamed of her heritage. She walked by him with her head held high.

Malosh took one look at Jak’s dead-white skin and ruby-red eyes and said, “You, too, mutie.”

“Not mutie!” Jak snarled at the man in the leather mask.

“And my mother wasn’t a two-bit whore,” Malosh said amiably.

“I purebred albino!”

Jak’s explosive protest cracked up the sec men of Malosh, both norm and mutie. Even some of the Redbone folk managed to grin.

The baron wasn’t interested in a genealogical debate; he was the sole arbiter of genetic purity. He gestured with his thumb again. “That way, mutie boy, or you croak on the spike.”

Jak didn’t budge a millimeter. In the Deathlands, being branded a “mutie” was the worst insult imaginable.

“Pride goeth before a fall,” Doc quoted.

“Misplaced pride in this case,” Mildred said cryptically.

“Dark night, what’s Jak doing?” J.B. said. “He’s not careful, he’s gonna get himself chilled.”

“Come on, Jak,” Krysty urged from beside the well. “Come over here. Don’t do this. Don’t die for nothing.”

“Better listen to your long-legged friend there,” Malosh said. “She’s trying to save you a big pain in the ass.”

It wasn’t the first time a dire strategic situation had demanded personal sacrifice from Jak Lauren. As distasteful as this particular sacrifice was, he turned without another word and started walking toward Krysty and the squad of genetic misfits.

The norm fighters didn’t let him off that easy. They laughed, catcalled and mimicked the albino in a whining, singsong chant.

“Not mutie!”

“Not mutie!”

“Not mutie!”

Why Malosh was isolating the mutie element was obvious to any resident of the hellscape over the age of three. Norms wouldn’t fight alongside muties because they distrusted and feared them. For the same reasons, muties didn’t like taking their marching orders from norms. Based on past bloodbaths, both sides were justified in these beliefs.

As it turned out, Young Crad and Bezoar didn’t pass Malosh’s muster, either. They were too slow of brain and foot, respectively. The baron ordered the pair over with the cannon fodder.

When Doc stepped up next, ebony walking stick in hand, Malosh immediately pointed him in the opposite direction. “Go back to the huts,” he said.

“The huts?” Tanner said incredulously. “You have made a grave error, sir.”

“No mistake, old man. You belong with the other diaper-wearers, the doddering geezers and the babies.”

Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner was a courageous man and totally devoted to his friends. No way would he stay behind while they faced death.

“I assure you, sir, I am not ready for a rocking chair,” Doc said, unsheathing the rapier blade of his swordstick and with its razor point cutting a wicked S in the air an inch from the baron’s face.

Before he could retract it, in a blur almost too fast to follow, Malosh grabbed hold of the blade, trapping it in his fist.

Doc threw his full weight against the baron’s grip but couldn’t pull the rapier free or make its edge slice through the man’s hand.

“Kevlar glove,” Mildred said to Ryan over her shoulder.

When Malosh suddenly let go, Doc fell off balance and landed hard on his bony backside.

“Follow the dimmie and the gimp,” the baron said, motioning him toward the ranks of the human shields. “You just signed your own death warrant, old man.”

Ryan watched stoically as the baron consigned Mildred and J.B. to the norm fighters, but deep down his guts were churning. With the companions split up among the three separate units, their chances of success looked even more bleak.

As Ryan stepped forward, Malosh looked him straight in the eye, then said, “From the way you stare back at me with that blue peeper of yours, I’d say you’re a coldheart, chill-for-pay man. A mercie by trade. If you serve me well, mercie, I guarantee you will prosper. If you betray me, I will hunt you down and chill you triple ugly.”

Ryan shrugged.

“I’m wasting my breath,” the baron said. “Dying hard doesn’t scare a man like you, does it?”

“Fear only moves folks so far,” Ryan replied. “And it can push from more than one direction. Once you get this kidnapped crew into battle, you lose your monopoly on death threats. What makes you think you can count on me or any of the others when the lead starts flying?”

“The joy of doing unto others as was done to you,” Malosh said. “It’s what makes the world go around.”

Chapter Four

Under the gruesome banner of its hoisted dead, Redbone ville was sacked to the bare walls. Malosh’s army mainly supervised the work. Under its blasters, the ville folk were forced to loot their own homes. Some sobbed brokenly as they sorted and piled their worldly goods in the square—ammunition, blasters, cookware and trade items—but most moved in a trance of disbelief. The hilltop town’s food caches were also plundered, yielding up bags of grain, beans, potatoes; smoked joints of meat and barrels of sweet water. This booty was packed onto carts drawn by liberated horses and mules.

As always, the mutie contingent got the brown end of the stick.

Krysty, Jak, the betumored, the extra-limbed and the swampies were given the task of searching the knot of still-smoldering huts where Redbone fighters had made their last stand and removing anything of value that remained. The swampies attacked the job with great enthusiasm. Like a pack of tailless rats, the swampies rooted through the collapsed structures, pulling aside charred rafters, crawling on hands and knees into small, extremely hot spaces. For them, it was a treasure hunt.

As the tall redhead watched, the crew of stumpy little bastards, dusted head to toe with wet black ash, uncovered another half-cooked norm body in the rubble. After rolling it onto its back and robbing it of anything that would fit into their pockets, the leader of the swampies stood and shouted at Krysty and Jak, “Over here!”

As the swampies moved on to the next hut, Krysty and Jak carefully climbed through the burned-out ruin to where the body lay. She knelt and started to pull off the man’s boots. There were no laces. They came off easily. There were no socks underneath.

Jak pulled up the hem of the rough shirt, exposing a pasty, flabby belly. He whispered urgently to Krysty, “Still alive.”

Indeed, before her eyes the pale chest rose and fell ever so slightly.

Then the man opened his eyelids. His eyes bulged from a face blackened by soot, the whites by contrast shockingly brilliant. The burn victim wheezed softly, then broke into fit of coughing and choking. He spewed pink foam and bits of ash through blistered lips. The inside of his mouth and his tongue were bloodred.

“Don’t get up,” Krysty warned him. “Lie still. For Gaia’s sake, play dead.”

But breathing with scorched lungs was so difficult that he couldn’t oblige her. He convulsed, arching up from the ground. The swampies in the neighboring ruin turned at the commotion.

Jak leaned on the man’s shoulders with both hands, trying to pin him down and hold him still.

“Look out!” Krysty cried.

As a short, heavy blade flashed down, the albino reacted, twisting out of the way.

With a meaty thunk the predark hatchet smashed the burned man in the middle of the forehead; the wedge-shaped tool split his skull wide open. Krysty just managed to get a hand up in front of her face to block the flying brains and blood. When she looked down, the man’s limbs were quivering violently.

And for the last time.

“He don’t have to play at nothing now,” said the hatchet-wielding chief swampie, who sported an ash-stained, red-knit stocking cap. He put a boot on the man’s lifeless face, and wrenching the short handle back and forth, levered the ax head free from the bone. Gore welled up from the inch-wide fissure, crimson rivulets oozed through the coating of soot on his cheeks and ears.

The boss swampie called himself Meconium. Like other members of his kind, he had masses of tiny wrinkles around his eyes and a broad, flat nose. His coarse hands and feet were huge relative to his height. Even though he was only about four-foot-six, he weighed close to 175 pounds. Meconium looked like he was built from a short stack of cinder blocks.

He grinned at Jak as he hefted the bloody hatchet. “Nearly whacked your doodle, Not Mutie,” he said.

Sensing some big fun in the offing, the other swampies stopped raking through the debris and circled around. None of them carried blasters. The baron didn’t trust them with anything more lethal than edged weapons, nail-studded wooden clubs, and of course, the hellhounds, which were now chained in the square.

With Jak standing just out of reach of his hatchet, and a rapt audience gathered, Meconium prodded, “You ever take a look in a mirror, Snowball? Only a blind man could think you were norm.”

The albino stiffened, but he didn’t respond.

“Tell the truth,” Meconium urged him. “How did you come to be so white all over with those nasty red eyes? Did some scab-assed mutie plow your ma’s honeypot? Or did she come naturally with six teats and a chin beard?”

“Not mutie,” Jak repeated firmly.

Acting like he had purer blood than the swampies was a very bad move, in Krysty’s opinion. But that was Jak all over. He was hardheaded. And she could understand why he was so damned adamant about his genetics. The mutie brand had ugly consequences. Mutated species were at the bottom of hellscape’s pecking order, hunted down and chilled for sport by norms, or turned into slaves by them and routinely worked to death.

As a rule, Deathlands’s norms were shit-poor and butt-ignorant. Oppressing the visibly different and vulnerable made them feel in command of something. Since they no longer had a great nation or a historic flag to rally round, the only thing norms had to be proud of was their supposedly untainted DNA. Krysty had always felt that, deep down, norms believed that the muties had earned their malformities. They believed that for its own inscrutable reasons, the nukecaust had selected its victims, and had cast plagues upon their houses for generations to come. Muties were tangible evidence of that catastrophe, of the most hated and feared thing that had ever happened to the human race. They were evidence that the disaster wasn’t over. That perhaps it would never be over.

Jak hawked and spit a stringy green gob on the mutie’s lapel.

Meconium immediately flicked away the boutonniere of mucus. Advancing with the hatchet raised, he said, “You’re dead meat, Snowball.”

Jak braced himself for a fight.

“Step back,” Krysty told the swampie, her hand dropping to the grip of her Smith & Wesson.

From the lane behind them a voice growled, “Enough squabbling, get back to work.”

Unlike the swampies, this normal-size mutie carried firearms. A long-barreled, center-fire revolver hung in a pancake holster on his hip and he held a battle-worn 12-gauge pump braced at waist height, the barrel squarely leveled at Meconium’s bristling chin. Below his sweat-stained Bud Light ball cap was a tumorous growth the color and size of a ripe eggplant. It stretched the skin on the right side of his face balloon-tight and balloon-shiny. The growth completely hid his right ear. Korb was Malosh’s appointed captain of the entire mutie crew—no one in their right mind would turn that authority over to a swampie. Unlike the swampies, this tumor-head captain seemed to take no delight in the job at hand, and he regarded the stumpy bastards he commanded with grave suspicion.

The swampies followed his orders and sullenly retreated. They resumed rummaging through the ash pit next door.

“Better steer clear of them ball biters, boy,” Korb told Jak. “They pack fight, like dogs. They’ll gang up on you first chance they get.”

From previous experience, Krysty and Jak had learned a good deal about the nature of the swampie race. They were sour, vicious, greedy, vindictive. And above all, cunning.

Apparently, Korb didn’t hold a grudge against Jak for three times denying a mutie birthright. He pointed at the distorted side of his face and said, “You know I cut this blasted thing off me once with a red-hot knife blade. After it was gone I figured it’d leave a triple-mean scar, but mebbe I could pass for a wounded norm. Well, I almost bled to death from sawing it off, and then the rad bastard grew back twice as big in a month.”

If the tumor head was trying to get Jak to fess up and admit he had rad-tainted blood, he quickly realized he was wasting his time. As Korb walked away, Krysty and Jak began stripping the dead man. After making a pile of the recyclable clothes, they carried his naked corpse by hands and feet to the cliff and tossed him over the edge like a sack of garbage.

When they returned to the section of burned-out huts, the swampies started making fun of Jak again, speculating further on his origins and the bizarre sexual preferences of his mother.

“They’re just trying to draw you out,” Krysty said. “To get you to do something stupe.”

“Yeah,” Jak replied.

“Don’t let them.”

“Yeah.”

They advanced deeper into the jumble of collapsed structures where the swampies rooted about.

“Over here, Snowball,” Meconium called. “We got another prize for you.”

As the swampies moved to the adjoining hut, Krysty and Jak climbed over a tumbled-down wall. The dwelling’s opposite wall stood more or less intact; it supported a shaky latticework of burned and broken roof beams that jutted overhead. They couldn’t miss the still form in the middle of the hut floor. It was surrounded by a doughnut of displaced ash and debris. The pockets of the dead fighter’s coat and pants were turned inside out.

Jak walked to the far side of the body. As Krysty followed, with a crack and crash, a long, dark shadow dropped from above. There was no avoiding it, no time for Krysty to even look up. The section of scorched beam caught her full across the shoulders, driving her to the ground. Even as the beam’s weight slammed her face-first into the ash, a swampie jumped down on top of it. Her arms pinned under her body, Krysty couldn’t reach her blaster. She could barely draw breath with 175 pounds of mutie sitting on the rafter on her back. He held a machete to the side of her throat; its edge bit into her skin. Trapped there, Krysty realized the sneaky swampie bastards had set up the deadfall while she and Jak were disposing of the last corpse. In a matter of seconds, she had been taken out of the fight.

As Jak came to her aid, drawing his .357 Magnum from its holster, Meconium hit him from behind with a charred piece of wood that shattered against the back of his head. If the makeshift club hadn’t been burned through, the blow would have killed him stone-dead. But Meconium didn’t want him to die quickly; he wanted his crew to get in their licks first. Even though the blunt instrument failed, the force of the blow drove Jak to his knees and sent the Colt Python flying out of his hand and into the mound of wet ash beside the body.

Jak sprang up and faced his attackers

The five swampies, three males and two females, had their clubs and blades out. Even the women outweighed Jak by eighty or ninety pounds; he towered over all of them.

“We’re gonna bust you up good,” one of the swampie females promised, taking a practice swing with her knobby cudgel.

“Then we’re gonna hack you into bite-size pieces,” said one of the males, waving a predark, made-in-India Bowie knife.

“Don’t yell for help, Snowball,” Meconium advised.

“You, neither,” Jak said.

Krysty expected leaf-bladed knives to start dropping out of his sleeves and fly through the air. At close range, Jak was a dead chilling shot with blades. But no razor-sharp steel appeared in his palms. The albino had unconditionally accepted the terms of the fight. As much as the swampies wanted to hurt him, Jak wanted to hurt them. Like the swampies, he intended to teach a final, agonizing lesson before he dispatched his enemies to the last train west.

Jak feinted right, then darted left, punctuating a 360-spin move with a blur of a back fist. The full power strike caught the nearest swampie in the middle of the face. He could feel cartilage crunch under his knuckles, but even though blood gushed from the broken nose and the eyelids momentarily fluttered shut, the blocklike head didn’t move.

That’s how strong her neck was.

As the others closed in for the chill, Jak scampered, as light as a spider, over a jumble of scorched and overturned wooden furniture, to the back of a fallen beam. The rafter lay at a thirty-degree angle, with one end on the dirt floor, the other resting atop the far wall. Like an Olympic gymnast, Jak balanced effortlessly on the six-inch-wide beam.

Hopping to avoid the sideways slash of a short sword, he snap-kicked the stumpy swordsman under the chin. It had as much effect as kicking a boulder. Jak reached up with both hands, caught the end of a loose overhead beam and hauled on it with his entire weight, making it pivot and swing down. As the swordsman lunged with his point, the crossmember landed with a solid thunk between his eyes, driving him backward onto his ass.

Determined to help her companion, Krysty tried to push up from the floor. As she did, the edge of the machete scraped deeper into her neck. The swampie put his boot sole on top of her head and firmly shoved her face back into the ash. At that moment Krysty could have closed her eyes and summoned her Gaia power, the mutie connection with the Earth spirit that gave her superhuman strength for brief periods of time. She could have used the Gaia energy to throw off both the beam and the swampie, but the aftermath of that psychic connection would have left her too drained to be of any use in a fight.

When she looked up again, Jak was running full-tilt along the top of the tumbledown wall. This while the swampies threw themselves at him, lunging with their weapons, trying to cut his legs out from under him. The higher Jak climbed along the wall, the less effective the swampies were. They couldn’t jump for beans.

Jak could have easily gotten away by dashing across the tops of the exposed rafters, but escape wasn’t on his agenda. Instead, he leaped from the wall, over the swampies’ heads, landing behind them. A development that astonished them. Before they could recover, Jak lashed out with a sidekick. It caught the swampie in front of him below the left ear, bouncing his forehead off the mud wall. Then the others attacked all at once.

While Jak danced and dervished, a white whirlwind in their midst, the swampies seemed to be moving in slow motion. He ducked and dodged their rain of blows, they absorbed his like stumpy punching bags. With fists and feet Jak pulped their faces, splitting their brows, closing their eyes, breaking out their yellow teeth. His knuckles and boots were smeared with blood and ash, but they kept on coming.

“Help us get the bastard!” Meconium shouted at the seated swampie.

The crushing weight on Krysty’s back suddenly eased as the mutie jumped up and threw himself and his machete into the melee.

Krysty crawled out from under the beam with difficulty, but without using her Gaia power. As she drew her blaster, the battle spilled out of the hut and rolled down the alley in the direction of the square.

When the skirmish burst into view, Mildred was helping J.B. and Ryan strap water barrels onto a wooden wheeled mule cart. Five swampies chased Jak out of the alley, screaming and waving their blades and clubs. The sec men raised their autorifles, aiming not at the newcomers but at the edges of the crowd, this to keep a wider battle from breaking out. With an AK pointed at her chest Mildred couldn’t draw and fire her ZKR 551. Likewise, Ryan and J.B. were forced to stand and watch.