James Axler - Sunspot

“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.”

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.