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  Dim light streamed into the structure through uncountable cracks in the walls. There was no fire laid on the floor, nor candles lit for fear of igniting the dizzyingly sweet, flammable vapors concentrated therein. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, over the wind sighing through holes in the masonry, the baron heard a gurgling sound. It was from the spring that welled up from a deep fissure in the bedrock.

  On a tripod chair positioned directly over the stone vent, enveloped in lighter-than-air petrochemical perfume, sat the oracle. The eighty-five-pound doomie’s sole garment was a diaper made of a once-white T-shirt. He sat with eyes tightly closed, a halo of wispy white hair crowned his knobby skull. Pale skin like parchment hung in folds from under chin and arms. Drooped down his belly were flapjack mammalia, circlets of white hair sprouted around the wrinkled aureolas. The doomie’s chest heaved as he sucked in and held lungfuls of the strange gases, dosing himself for the foretelling.

  There was no seat for visitors in the close confines of the hut. Haldane stood slightly bent over to keep the top of his head from bumping into the crust of chemical deposits on the wooden rafters.

  “You know why I have come?” the baron asked.

  The doomie stifled a giggle by clamping a hand hard over his mouth. He snorted and honked as he tried to control himself. The battle lasted only a second or two. Unable to maintain his composure, he fell into a fit of laughter that set his pendulous dugs flip-flopping.

  When the soothsayer opened his eyes, they were alarmingly bloodshot. “A dark deed looms,” he said merrily.

  “Yes, it does,” Haldane said.

  “The darkest of dark-dark deeds,” the oracle stated. “The noble baron’s hands will drip with the blood of slaughtered innocents.”

  Haldane nodded at the grinning doomie.

  “You want to know if there’s a less brutal way to accomplish the end you desire,” the soothsayer said. “Some other possible strategy, some sequence of events you may have overlooked.”

  “That’s what I want you to tell me,” Haldane said. “Do I have to use the terrible weapon I’ve been offered?”

  The doomie shut his eyes and screwed up his face, huffing in and out to force down more of the fumes.

  Though all members of the doomie race had the power to see into the future, the rock spring’s sweet gas greatly stimulated and focused their mutie supersense. It also made them very, very happy. Too much perfume and they swallowed their own tongues and strangled to death.

  Most of Haldane’s norm subjects believed that the Creator spoke to them through the oracles of the hut. They believed that true future sight, unknown before nukeday, was a kind of compensatory gift, God’s way of saying “I’m sorry for rogering your world so soundly.” Ironically, these chosen vessels of the Supreme Being were judged unfit to reside in Nuevaville proper. When not engaged in unraveling the mysteries of the future, they were seen as filthy, moronic creatures of unspeakable habits. They were kept apart from those they served so tirelessly, in what amounted to a mountaintop doomie zoo.

  The soothsayer huffed until his scrunched-up face turned dark and his limbs began to jerk spasmodically. After many minutes passed he opened his eyes and said, “I have looked into your future, Baron. I have seen the struggles ahead. For you there is no other path.”

  It was not the answer Haldane wanted to hear.

  No baron of the hellscape could be shy about chilling, about ordering others to do it, or doing the deed personally, if it came to that. In Haldane’s case, chilling had always been in the service of freedom or the dispensation of justice. The bands of coldhearts and muties that threatened his people and their livelihood deserved and received the ultimate punishment. Haldane had always seen himself—and had been seen by his subjects—as a defender and a shepherd, both wise and fair.

  The course of action that lay before him was wise, but hardly fair.

  In target, in scale and scope, in moral consequences, this chilling was different. Even by Deathlands’s standards it was the act of a depraved, unfeeling butcher.

  “There will be so much death,” he said.

  “You alone have the power to put an end to the cycle of terror,” the oracle countered. “You can prevent the deaths of those you hold dear, for decades to come.”

  “I am not a mass chiller,” Haldane said. “I am not a monster. I am a protector. I fight monsters.”

  “I have been shown what will be, Baron. You have no choice in the matter. You will put your beliefs aside to advance the greater good. You will become what you hate to achieve lasting peace and security for your people. And after you do this vile deed, I guarantee that history will understand, and forgive you for the excess. History is written by the survivors, and rewritten by their offspring. They will call you a military genius and hail you as the glorious saviour of your lands. A leader with the courage and the vision to decisively act, and thereby change the fate of this barony forever.”

  When the baron said nothing in reply, the oracle twisted the metaphysical dagger he held, the dagger of premonition. “If you do not act, Baron Haldane, be assured that Malosh will,” he said. “What you so dread doing to others will be done to you and yours. Nuevaville will become a graveyard. This barony will be turned to dust and scattered to the winds.”

  With those awful words ringing in his ears, Haldane staggered out of the hut. Though fumble-fingered from the fumes he’d inhaled, he managed to scoop up the Remington 1100. He caught himself as he reached out to push aside the holed-out blanket. At that moment he wanted nothing more than to blow the oracle apart with high-brass buckshot. But in his heart he knew that chilling the messenger wouldn’t do any good.

  An oracle had predicted the fall of his predecessor, Baron Clagg, who had responded to the bad news by dragging the helpless doomie to the nearest cliff and throwing him off, headfirst. Clagg had then tried to change his fate by all means possible, but everything he had done only served to speed the grisly end that had been described to him. Old Clagg had been a typical Deathlands baron: shortsighted, cruel, despotic. His insatiable greed had started the conflict with Malosh, setting the stage for this most regrettable day.

  Haldane slung the Remington sawed-off and, bracing himself against the wind, started to retrace his steps down the mountain. Knowing that the evil he was about to unleash was preordained and couldn’t be avoided did nothing to lighten the weight that lay upon his heart.

  Chapter Three

  While Ryan stood dripping on the edge of the riverbank, Malosh the Impaler leaned over in the saddle to give his prisoner a closer inspection. On either side of the masked baron, a dozen swampies dug in their heels, fighting to restrain more of the massive, growling dogs by their choke chains. Fanned out behind the stumpy muties were normal-size sec men carrying lanterns and predark Combloc autorifles. Pristine predark weapons were often unearthed from stockpiles and were traded across the Deathlands. Usually the wealthiest barons bought them.

  Ryan knew just how quickly he could clear his SIG P226 from shoulder leather. If its action and barrel weren’t clogged with muck, he knew he could get off a shot or two before the swampies released the dog pack and the men opened fire. But the one-eyed man wasn’t a big fan of suicide, even if there was a bit of justifiable homicide thrown in the mix. His thought, first and foremost, was getting his companions and himself out of this predicament alive. To have any hope of success against such long odds, they had to wait for their chance and work as a team.

  At that moment it was unclear whether Malosh was going to let the companions live long enough to do that; after all, they had taken out a number of his valuable fighters. Slaughtering the guilty parties where they stood would have certainly evened the score. Ryan decided to play a hunch. He figured the baron wasn’t just looking for cannon fodder. To win battles he needed hard-nosed, seasoned warriors. Courage in the face of death was the only hole card Ryan held.

  “Didn’t your mama teach you it’s rude to stare?” he demanded of the baron.
r />   Malosh glared down at him and said nothing.

  For a second Ryan thought he had made the big mistake that was going to get them all chilled. He prepared himself to quick draw the SIG, determined to angle the first two rounds up through the baron’s chin and out the top of his head. Sensing the sudden increase in tension, the dogs’ hackles bristled, and they started snapping and snarling, scrabbling in the mud with all fours, dragging their struggling handlers forward.

  “My mama was a gaudy house slut,” Malosh told Ryan, his black eyes glittering above the leather mask. “To my knowledge she never refused service to man or woman, norm or mutie. She took on her customers three at a time and gave every one his or her money’s worth. The only thing my sainted whore of a mother ever taught me was to get the jack up front.”

  “Sound advice,” Ryan said.

  Malosh leaned over in the saddle again, gloved hands resting on the pommel. “You know, I was just about to let my hunting dogs tear you limb from limb,” he said, “but now I see they’d choke on those brass balls of yours. A man like you will serve me much better in one piece.”

  The baron waved his sec men forward. “Take them all back to the ville,” he said, then he wheeled his horse and spurred it in the direction of Redbone.

  As the lanterns closed in, Ryan got a better look at the fighters’ faces. They were an odd collection of humanity and near-humanity. The norm men and women were wolf-lean, mostly in their late teens to late twenties. The swampies weren’t the only nuke-spawned horrors in the crowd, but the other muties weren’t from distinct subhuman species. Some carried prominent, angry tumorous growths on their heads and necks. Some had withered and clawlike extra appendages sprouting from their shoulders. Ryan saw no stickies among the ranks, but that was no surprise. Stickies didn’t do well in a military setting. Unlike swampies, they were creatures of uncontrollable urges. They had their own hardwired, homicidal agenda.

  Sandwiched between norms, muties and dogs, the companions and the pair of swineherds trudged back along the high bank. It was soggy going; at times they struggled through knee-deep mud. By the time they crossed the farm fields and started back up the zigzag trail, the rain had stopped and the sky had lightened considerably. The sec men put out their lanterns and hung them from their belts.

  As the companions reentered the ville, shafts of warm sunlight speared through gaps in the churning gray clouds overhead. They were marched down the same narrow alley they had exited, past the dead pig, past the human corpse in the doorway. There was no sign of the trio they had left at the barricade. The makeshift barrier had been breached in the middle, its rocks and tree limbs dragged aside, and there were scorch marks from gren blasts on the bracketing mud walls.

  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 nig
ht, 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.”