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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.
Not that Jak needed any help.
He turned and attacked the swampies, splitting the pack in two. His feet and fists found their targets over and over again, smashing into already bruised and bloodied faces. Mildred had never seen him fight with such savage frenzy. She doubted that Jak even heard the crowd cheering him on.
The systematic beating and the victims’ inability to return any punishment took its toll. The sword and club strikes began to miss Jak not by inches but by feet; that’s how slowly they came. As the muties weakened, Jak isolated one of their number for special treatment. Pivoting as the swampie swung his hatchet, Jak slipped behind the bastard and clapped a forearm across his throat, seizing hold of his left shoulder. He yanked off the swampie’s red stocking cap, snatched a handful of coarse brown hair and, straining hard, bent back his head until his scraggly chin beard pointed skyward.
“No, Jak!” Ryan shouted from Mildred’s side. “You’ll never break that neck!”
But that wasn’t what Jak had in mind.
He shook a leaf-bladed knife from the sleeve of the arm that pinned the mutie’s chest, then jabbed one of the razor-sharp edges against the base of the hairy throat.
The swampie growled and curled back his lips, showing bloody fractured teeth as he struggled in vain to free himself.
“Time to die,” Jak said.
Over the cries of approval someone bellowed, “Korb!”
A tumor-head mutie in a bill cap stepped behind Jak and shouldered a pump shotgun, taking aim at the back of his skull.
The crowd parted on the far side of the square and Baron Malosh stormed over to Jak. “If you chill that swampie,” he said, “Korb will blow your head off. This is my army. You follow my orders. You fight who I tell you to and when I tell you to. Until then you stand down, mutie!”
“Not mutie!”
The edge of the knife drew a fine red line across the exposed throat. It was a shallow wound and only a couple of inches long, but it made blood spill over the swampie’s madly bobbing Adam’s apple. Jak pressed the blade below the hinge of the swampie’s jaw, poised to cut much, much deeper and from ear to ear.
“Nukin’ hell!” J.B. groaned.
At that moment the expression on the swampie’s face changed from incoherent fury to abject terror. He was certain he was going to die in the next few seconds. Then terror suddenly turned to horror as something fell out of his baggy pant leg and draped across his boot.
He had dropped a turd on his own left foot.
“Let go of the swampie,” the masked baron said.
When Jak didn’t immediately comply, Malosh moved out of the line of fire and the arc of splatter. “I’m going to count to three,” he said. “One…two…”
With a snarl of contempt, Jak shoved the befouled swampie away from him.
“Thank God,” Mildred said, allowing herself to breathe again.
“That was close,” J.B. added.
“Too damned close,” Ryan said.
The baron whirled on the tumor head holding the shotgun. “If you let trouble like this break out again, Korb,” he said, “you’re the one who’s gonna suffer.”
Mildred, J.B. and Ryan watched Krysty step from the crowd and hand Jak his Colt Python. Then the two companions were ushered back down the alley at blasterpoint. Jak walked with his back straight and his head high, having defended the purity of his genetics.
It was unclear from Mildred’s conversations with Jak whether he had ever actually seen another albino, but she knew it was highly unlikely that he had. Before Armageddon, the U.S. had a population of only about eighteen thousand albinos. Back in the glory days of civilization, their life expectancy was normal. In a cruel and brutal new world, however, the physical deficits that accompanied their condition greatly lessened the chances of survival.
If Jak Lauren had no idea how much he differed from a prenukecaust albino, a late twentieth-century medical doctor and whitecoat like Mildred Wyeth knew exactly. The research of her peers had shown that albinism in humans was the result of defective genes on one or more of the six chromosomes that controlled production of the pigment melanin, which was key to normal development of eyes, skin and eye-brain nerve pathways. Aside from pale skin and hair, the genetic condition caused very poor eyesight and extreme skin sensitivity to sun. Human albino eyes were either blue-gray or light brown in color. Any reddish or pinkish cast was temporary, caused by light striking the iris at a certain angle, like the “red eye” effect in a flash photograph.
Mildred had never seen Jak wear corrective lenses; his vision was perfect near and far. He had never worn a hat or special clothing to protect his white skin from sunburn, which he never seemed to get. His eyes were ruby-red all the time, like a lab rat.
Jak could proclaim himself “Not mutie!” until the hellscape froze over, but he didn’t know anything about genetics, or metabolic pathways, or conventional albinism. In point of fact, Mildred was confident that no creature like him had existed before nukeday.
In a world where albinos were virtually unknown, where any sort of physical oddity was ascribed to the curse of mutated genes, it wasn’t surprising that Jak was saddled with the mutie label at almost every turn.
She had never told him—or any of the others—how well the label fit. Passing on that information served no good purpose in her view. Besides, Mildred found the whole concept of “pure norm genes” ridiculous. Science and reason told her that post-apocalypse, everyone and everything was a little bit mutie, thanks to cumulative exposure to the increased background radiation. Her own DNA had undoubtedly suffered permanent damage during the companions’ imprisonment at ground zero on the Slake City nukeglass massif. That didn’t worry her much, either. A century ago, when she was still a medical student, she’d read the statistics on the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A-bomb victims with far higher radiation doses than hers lived for many decades before fatal cancers finally appeared. Based on the level of violence and hardship in the hellscape, the chances were good that she wasn’t going to live long enough to die of cancer, anyway.
After all the wags were loaded, Malosh had his troops line up the Redbone conscripts. The masked baron then walked down the row and quickly selected three healthy young men and three healthy young women, apparently at random.
“You six will stay behind,” he informed them. “I have left you and the others enough food and water to survive. As you rebuild your ville, remember my mercy.”
While the lucky half dozen hurried to join the very old and very young at the doorways of the empty huts, the baron mounted his horse and led the mass exit from Redbone.
Only Malosh’s officers rode, either on horseback or in the carts. Everyone else walked down the zigzag path to the fields below. The column of nearly three hundred was a large force by Deathlands standards, and it was segregated by genetics and military function.
“Where the rad blazes are we headed?” J.B. asked the gaunt fighter walking beside him.
“Sunspot ville,” the man said. “It’s a long march due south. At least two, mebbe three days.”
“What happens when we get there?” Mildred asked, hoping against hope for some good news.
There was none.
