“Dark night, look at his face!”
That was exactly what Ryan was doing. He couldn’t help himself.
The trooper’s face was covered with a hideous, weeping red patch. His nostrils were crusted over with scabs, and his left eye was cemented shut. On his cheeks, striated flesh was exposed; it looked like naked muscle.
The guy’s hand shot up to his throat mike. His mouth opened.
“Stop him,” Ryan said.
J.B. pulled the trigger. The pulse rifle hummed, and a fraction of an instant later a smoking slot appeared in the middle of the man’s forehead. His jaws slammed shut and he grimaced, showing all his teeth. Then the trooper’s hand slowly fell away from his throat and his eyes glazed over. The wound was through and through. Through the backside of his skull and into the floor. The smell of flash-cooked brains and melted plastic filled the room.
“Damn, that’s nasty!” J.B. said as he stepped back.
Ryan knelt down and checked the cube. Whatever it was, it wasn’t a comp. “Come on, we’re wasting time here,” he said.
Taking the laser rifle with them, they exited the room and moved down the tubular hallway, following the directions of the first trooper.
After taking the left-hand fork, they heard the tramping of many pairs of boots. A squad of troopers appeared around a turn ahead. Ryan and J.B. ducked into an open room to avoid them.
They surprised four men who were working over a long table. They were dressed in charcoal-gray fatigues, splattered with blood and bodily fluids. One of them was cramming what looked like a deer haunch into a monstrous pulverizing or liquefying machine. The whirring blades turned the red meat into red paste. The blades stopped whirring. The other men held cleavers and long knives. They stopped what they were doing, too.
Ryan and J.B. had stumbled into the invaders’ kitchen. It was impossible to tell from the butchers’ faces if they realized the intruders were impostors. With armed men bearing down on them, there was no room for error.
J.B. shot one of them immediately, pinning the trigger and slashing the light beam across the man’s head. Due to the steeply angled cut, the top of the man’s skull slid off, along with most of his right ear. The butcher fell to the floor behind the table with a loud thud.
“Don’t move!” Ryan told the others as the tramp of boot falls in the hall grew louder. “Don’t make a sound!”
The butchers obeyed and the squad of troopers passed the doorway without looking in or stopping.
“Dark night, what’s that stink?” J.B. asked.
Ryan could smell it, too, right through his helmet.
Because they had come from a world stripped of its native species, protein on the hoof was a new territory for them. The table in front of the butchers was heaped with animal carcasses and offal. All of them had been killed with lasers; most were missing one or more essential parts. Plucked songbirds sat pink and naked in a big pile of feathers. A pair of buzzards lay likewise stripped and gutted. There were lizards of all sizes, some in their skins and some without.
Ryan recognized the jumbled parts of gophers, prairie dogs, jackrabbits and antelope.
There were bugs, too. Honking big Deathlands bugs. Eight-inch-long cockroaches. Scorpions as big as Chihuahuas. Spiders the size of basketballs. One of the butchers had been feeding shovelfuls of these insects into a huge pulverizing unit, along with leaves and branches of shrubs and bushes.
The contents of the pulverizers went directly into a row of twenty-gallon pots that sat on propane burners.
It wasn’t the animal carcasses that stank so badly. It was the beige, glutinous slop simmering in the pots.
“What we had to eat at Ground Zero suddenly doesn’t seem quite so bad,” J.B. commented.
“Looks to me like these guys are packing themselves a big picnic lunch,” Ryan said. He pointed at the ten-gallon plastic jugs lined up along the wall. Some were already sealed with lids; others had funnels poked down their mouths. There was beige slop inside all of them, and it was spilled down their sides and onto the floor.