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.
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 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.”