The cage was fouled by the smell of urine and excrement; brown mounds of the latter lay clumped along the cage’s rear wall. Clouds of flies buzzed amid the miasma.
“Do you think they like each other?” Leeloo asked Dean.
“You mean the two heads?”
“Uh-huh. They don’t look like they like each other at all.”
When Dean examined the creature more closely, he saw that it was true. The baby head was scowling. The normal head was scowling. And they were glancing sidelong at each other, out of the corners of their nearest eyes, which were separated by no more than eight inches.
“I wonder if they both get hungry at the same time?” he said. “Do you think if one head eats, the other one gets full?”
“If one has to pee, does the other one, too?” Leeloo added, grinning.
The adult head glared at her. “Pipsqueak gets hungry every four hours,” it said, its voice deep and liquidy in the wide chest. “Wakes me up in the middle of the night with his squalling. And then thanks me by pissing and shitting in my pants. A pain in the ass that you wouldn’t believe. I’d have had someone take an ax and chop him off me years ago, but the shock of doing that would chill me, too. Our nervous systems are all grown together.”
Dean and Leeloo stood there, flatfooted, stunned that the thing before them could actually talk and make sense.
“Close your mouths,” it said. “You’re going to catch flies…and you know where they’ve been.”
When neither of the children said anything, the creature continued, ever more irritated. “What are you two looking so surprised for? Just because my captors keep me sitting in my own shit and feed me with a shovel, do you think I’m some kind of wild animal?” Baldoona held up its powerful but flab-encased arms and let the sunlight play and flash on the rows of tiny scales. “My brain isn’t mutated,” it said, “just my skin.”
Dean couldn’t help but glance at the baby head, which was like a huge, purpling mushroom springing from its shoulder.
The scalie noticed what he was looking at. “Of course there’s the other head,” it said, “but that’s something that could have happened to anyone— even you—under the right conditions.”
Dean wondered if Baldoona knew about the mass chilling. The only way it could keep from knowing was if the cage was covered up with a tarp during the murdering and burial.
As one of the roustabouts came down the line of cages toward them, the scalie shut up and slumped into a sullen slouch.
“Keep a good ways back from them bars, you two,” the carny man warned them. “That lizard-skinned piece of nukeshit ripped the arm off a kid in Perdition, sat there and ate it in front of the parents while the poor little critter bled himself to death.”
Dean looked at the scalie, who shrugged sheepishly, as if to say, “Ah, well…there you go…”
After the roustabout had moved on, Leeloo said to the mutie, “You’re a mean thing to have done that to a child. A cruel, mean thing.”
“And your point is…?”
“Dean should put a nine mill in the middle of your big, ugly face. Not the baby’s, though. It’s kind of cute the way it fusses, and it can’t talk.”
The scalie’s double sets of eyes turned on young Cawdor. It gripped the bars in both hands, and the adult head said, “Well, Deanie boy, you gonna do it, or what? Shit or get off the pot.”
The baby head mewled along in high harmony, echoing the other head’s sentiment, even if it didn’t know how to form the words.
The mocking contempt in the mutie duet riled Dean in a big way. He didn’t like the idea of being insulted, and definitely not in front of Leeloo Bunny.
Dean drew himself up to his full height, then brought the Hi-Power out of hip leather in a blue-steel blur. He raked the handblaster’s fixed front sight across the scalie’s exposed knuckles, making him yelp from both mouths and jump back to the rear of his cage, where he raged and hopped in pain, clutching his damaged hand.