“It’s a loon,” Doc said doubtfully. “I think”
Jak’s right hand was on the butt of his blaster, his head turned to look behind them in the direction taken by the three hunters. His eyes seemed to glow with a buried fire in the shadows of the trees. “Not bird,” he said.
Krysty agreed with him, shaking her head slowly. “No. Reckon you’re right, Jak. Not birds. It sounds more”
The noise was repeated, clearer, surging and then fading away like a whisper.
“There’s smoke,” Mildred said, pointing back to a patch of smudged gray above the topmost peaks of the forest.
“Bad news.” J.B. pushed back the brim of his fedora. “We going to take a look?”
Krysty had slipped into the role of second-in-command of the friends, and she nodded slowly. “I guess so. Got a bad gut feeling about what we’ll find.”
IT WAS OVER by the time they worked their way back and tracked down the source of the fire.
There had been no more noise, though they had disturbed a raucous flock of mutie birds, like large crows but with yellow-and-white plumage, who rose screaming into the smoky air, giving a warning that their territory was being invaded.
The small clearing was only a couple of hundred yards to the east of where they had eaten the haunch of boar. The ragged bones of the animal lay stripped in the center of a pile of glowing white ash, the wind brightening an occasional ruby ember.
The bodies of Harve, Gus and Jake were raggled together among the silent trees.
J.B. held up his hand, and everyone stopped, looking at the grim scene. “Think they’ve all gone.”
“One of them has remained behind,” Doc said, pointing at the corpse of a stickie that was hunched over by a frost-shattered boulder, a dark powder burn in its chest showing where it had been shot at close quarters by one of the hunters.
Before they’d been overwhelmed.
“Mutie’s got a neck collar on,” Mildred said. “Another of them escaped slaves?”
Nobody answered her.
J.B. walked over and looked down at the trio of corpses. “Sure took them quick,” he said. “Must’ve been a lot of stickies to do this so fast.”
The bodies had been stripped, and their muskets taken. All of them showed the undeniable mutilations so typical of stickies’ work.
Strips and patches of skin had been torn away from living flesh by the voracious suckers, eyes sucked from sockets, faces reduced to weeping masks of raw meat and white bones. Teeth gleamed like small pink pearls among the ruin of the men’s features.
All three had been emasculated, but not neatly with keen flensing knives. The genitals had been brutally ripped and torn from their bodies, the thighs and groins showing the marks of the toothed suckers. The extremities had also been burned in the fire, fingers and toes blackened and charred like the stumps of small branches. A sharp spear, its point flame hardened, had been thrust through Harve’s humped back, as though he were a hooked whale.
Krysty sighed. “Sick, sick bastards.”
“All they know,” Mildred countered. “Didn’t ask to be nuke-altered mutations. Blame the warmongers and whitecoats back in the 1980s and ’90s. It’s their long-dead hands that marked what happened here.”
“Guess so. Hadn’t thought about We going to stay and bury them?”
“No, Krysty,” J.B. replied. “Tracks show as many as twenty stickies in the gang. Must still be within a quarter mile or so of us. We leave now and carry on west. Fast and quiet. What’s happened here’s over.”
As they left the clearing, they were watched from the undergrowth by a host of bloodshot, watery eyes.
It was beginning to rain heavily from the leaden sky.
Chapter Five
The storm forced them to seek shelter.
It was a triple-chem tempest, whirling in with roiling clouds that changed shape every second, tumble topped, filled with the stench of ozone and leaking the purple lace of lightning. The thunder was constant, buffeting the senses, making Doc cover his ears, his face showing his anguish.
“I am stricken like Lear himself,” he raged, shaking his head back and forth, the streaming rain pasting his silver hair against his lined cheeks. “Can we not seek a place for us, somewhere, a place for us ?”