“What did the head she-he want from you?” Krysty asked Ryan.
“She wanted me to join them. To act as a guide and strategy maker. And she wanted me to be the father of all their babies.”
The redhead’s eyes flashed. “She wanted you to fuck them all?”
Ryan almost laughed, despite himself. “No, it was nothing that personal, lover. Dredda Otis Trask wanted to collect my sperm to fertilize their extracted eggs. Seems to believe I have some kind of special genetic qualities they need in their she-he offspring. Makes me think the ex-CEO has swallowed her own line of Shadow Man advertising bullshit. She wanted you and Mildred to carry some of the babies.”
“Forced motherhood?” Mildred asked.
“It’s either that or die,” Ryan said.
“Die,” Krysty said without hesitation.
Mildred nodded. “Die is good.”
“They’re gonna send us to the same place they sent those bastard stickies, aren’t they?” J.B. said, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose with a callused thumb.
“Yeah, old friend,” Ryan replied, “that’s where they re going to send us.”
Chapter Nine
The companions had been sitting in the sun for more than an hour, listening to the moaning, crackling sounds of the nukeglass, when the ground began to shake under them. The first tremor was short and sweet, no more than a second or two, and it was followed by a long pause. Then came a fifteen-second skull-rattling quake that sent the guards to their knees, raised clouds of beige dust and turned the domes and the wags into black blurs. As the quake growled on and on, the earth beneath them became plastic, if not liquid. Ryan and the others were lifted, twisted and dropped by the waves passing through it.
Somewhere deep in the bowels of the earth a great switch flicked off, and the shaking was over as suddenly as it had begun. The guards stood, brushed off their weapons and life in the Slake City encampment resumed as if nothing unusual had happened.
“Whew!” Dean said. “That was some ride.”
The moaning sounds had turned into a low roar, punctuated by sporadic, dull crashes as distant, damaged sections of the vast glacier collapsed under their own weight.
“It’s a lucky thing we weren’t out there on the glass when it hit.” Krysty said.
“As if we didn’t have enough to worry about.” Mildred added.
Ryan didn’t say anything, but at that moment he was thinking that if a person had to take the last train West, getting swallowed up by an earthquake was a whole lot better than taking a week or two to die of rad poisoning.
Shortly after the quake, a gaudily painted, gas-powered bus pulled into the camp. It stopped beside the churned-up dirt rectangle and began disgorging its passengers to the primal beat of a boom box. Dazed, the new arrivals staggered and fell down the steps, only to find themselves ringed by battlesuited troopers and pulse rifles. They watched in shock and disbelief as manacles were clapped on their wrists and ankles.
As the new slaves were bound, the bus driver, a giant of a man in a squashed canvas fedora, counted them off on the fingers of his false hand, this while three particularly scabrous-looking sluts danced and cavorted obscenely on the roof of the bus.
Downwind, the smell of grain alcohol coming off the wag was overpowering. From that and the state of the passengers, it was obvious what had happened.
“Big bastard got the poor bastards stoned and tricked them into coming here,” J.B. observed.
“Those prancing scum have sold their fellow human beings to the invaders as if they were domestic animals,” Doc said. “For that heinous act they should be flayed alive.”
“Look closer, Doc,” Mildred admonished him. “The driver and the sluts are slaves, too. They’re wearing the silver bracelets, just like us. They’re just trying to survive.”
“Helplessness is a state of mind, madam,” the ancient academic countered testily. “That is a lesson I learned a long, long time ago, under conditions of hardship and privation too painful to relate. Mildred, even in the most dire circumstances, we human beings have the power to make our own choices, to either live by our own rules or to embrace the rules of others. Look again at the slave catchers and tell me they are not enjoying themselves tremendously.”