The bearded man remained silent and threw a loop into his floating line that allowed him to sweep the entire length of it back into the air.
Swish-swish.
Suddenly the entire surface of pool shivered before him, the lavender mirror shattering into a billion fragments. Like guttering confetti, the first spores of the evening lifted gracefully into the air. It was just the overture. In seconds, dense clouds of the freed genetic material boiled up from the water. Pale-green fingers of fire crackled and sparked from the pool’s undulating surface, making the clouds glow and shimmer from within.
As the ministorm grew in intensity, the blood-spattered men hurried down the slope with their empty cart, determined to get under cover before spore fall.
Swish-swish.
Swish-swish.
The heat from the electrical discharge made the air temperature jump twenty-five degrees and sent the spore clouds billowing upward. The higher they rose, the more ferocious the strange lightning storm became: blistering, eye-aching bolts fired up from earth to sky, their prodigious thunder rattling the ground.
Baron Jim Kerr quickly wound in his line and headed downhill for cover. He recognized the evening’s ominous signs. The much heavier than normal spore hatch. The absolute frenzy of bioelectric discharge. That told him the food supply was dwindling, even now barely sufficient for survival. Something would have to be done, and soon. He knew better than to frustrate the burning pool. He remembered what had happened the last time.
Chapter One
A little girl in a faded cotton dress sat atop Bullard ville’s dirt-and-concrete defensive berm, watching distant plumes of yellow dust spiral up from the vast, barren flood plain—manmade tornadoes back-lit by the hard glare of the late afternoon sun. She sat with her skinny, sun-browned legs drawn up, her elbows propped on scabbed knees. The hand-me-down garment she wore was way too big for her. Every time she moved, it slipped off one or the other of her thin shoulders.
During the hour that Leeloo Bunny had been keeping vigil, the ville’s other children had joined her at intervals, scrambling up the back side of the berm for a look-see. After less than a minute of quiet reconnoiter, the pushing and pinching started. Squealing, they raced back down to resume an extra frantic, extra shrill game of Chill the Mutie.
Only Leeloo had the patience to stay, to sit in silence and allow the promised miracle to unfold. She wanted to be first to see it, and to be able to remember every second as long as she lived.
Nothing this exciting had ever happened in Bullard ville.
It was without a doubt one of the two most dramatic moments in Leeloo’s eight years of life.
It towered above sneaking peeks through the windows of the gaudy house to see the mostly naked men and women fight on the pallets laid on the floor. Leeloo had sometimes watched her own ma, Tater Bunny, fight men on those mattresses. It was a safe bet that one of Tater’s adversaries was Leeloo’s father; there were a lot of candidates for the distinction, but no one had ever stepped forward to claim the little girl as his own.
Because Leeloo didn’t fully understand the aim of the gaudy house mattress fights, she had yet to figure out how to judge winners and losers. To her it seemed the combatants usually parted on friendly, if not affectionate terms. Some of the women fought ten or twelve men a night, and didn’t seem the worse for wear, at least not any place that showed.
It was a different story for her ma. Tater Bunny had died more than a year ago when a drunken drifter choked her a bit too hard.
That was Leeloo’s life-changing, dramatic event number one.
The man who’d chilled her ma had tried to run away afterward, but the ville’s menfolk caught him and dragged him back. They hung him from an old basketball stanchion with his pants pulled down around his boot tops and his willy sticking out. Leeloo had sometimes gone to look at the man who chilled her ma, to look through the hot, blurry screen of her tears and throw rocks at him as hard as she could. After a while, she had to stand upwind because the smell got so bad. The ville’s men cut down and buried the corpse only when they needed the stanchion to hang someone else.