“I don’t know,” she replied. “Maybe I’m completely wrong and there’s nothing to worry about. I sure hope so. But I think we should be aware of the possibility that some or all of us might have been changed by the jump.”
“I just lost my appetite,” J.B. said, glaring at his food. “Anybody want this?” When no one claimed the half-eaten MRE, he cocked back an arm and sailed it off the overpass.
“It’s time for us to move on,” Ryan said, breaking the stony silence. “Stay alert. Stay alive.”
Chapter Five
Five thousand stickies opened their throats and howled for his pleasure. It was a hurricane of homage, of duty, of self-sacrifice.
“Kaaa!”
It wasn’t his birth name. If he had been given one by his mother, he didn’t know it. As he had no memories of the female who gave him life, he felt free to invent her. It had always pleased him to think that she had died trying to protect her baby, on the day he was stolen by the baron’s mercies.
“Kaaa!”
Over the years he had been called many things by the norms-Blotch, Zit, Three Eyes-but this was the name he had chosen for himself. He hadn’t taken it from some long-dead hero he admired. It had no literal or translational meaning, yet its symbolic power was undeniable. It was the one sound that all Deathlands’ diversely mutated humanoid creatures could make, the only sound they could all chant in unison-a fact he had learned growing up as a specimen in Baron Willie Elijah’s elaborate and extensive mutie zoo.
“Kaaa!”
It was a name and a call to battle combined.
The piebald lord raised his arms for silence. He was naked but for a knotted loincloth and jungle boots. He closed the wide-set, yellow-brown eyes socketed above his heavy cheekbones, and with his fingertips pried open the single eye set in the center of his forehead. Blood-encrusted, lashless lids peeled back, exposing a moist white orb, like the newly laid egg of a small bird.
It had no pupil.
No iris.
Yet it could see.
And seeing was the least of what the rad-mutated organ could do.
As he parted the protective flaps of skin, a tremor, like five thousand rattraps snapping shut, passed through the army of stickies. And when it was over, they were one with their leader, one with each other. What each individual soldier felt, they all felt. What each knew, they all knew. The stickies accessed every neuron in their leader’s mind, saw what he saw and understood what he understood.
Lord Kaa addressed his troops, not in the inexact spoken words of the norms, but in the stickies’ own language, in an oration of image and sensation. He showed them that they weren’t debased and despicable, not degenerate subhumans as their oppressors claimed. They were, in fact, demonstrably advanced beings, beautiful to behold, superior in strength and adaptation, in procreative ability. Therefore, they were a terrifying threat to the last dregs of the old genetic order, which sought through force of predark arms to maintain its
control over the much larger and rapidly expanding mutie population.
He showed them that their struggle against the injustice and domination of the norms was glorious and that their ultimate victory was assured. Deathlands was their world. They had been touched by it, changed by it in secret ways, and they, not the slave masters, were its true offspring – and rightful rulers.
Summoning all the power of his mind, Lord Kaa spilled forth a torrent of images that proved an even higher case, that there was no division between stickle and scalie, cannie and zombie, doomie and swampie, save what the norms had invented to keep them all apart. He told them that the mutie peoples of Death-lands were, in fact, the scattered tribes of the nuke wind, destined one day to unite and rebuild the world in their image.
With his glistening white eye, the piebald man showed his army of maniacs what they couldn’t otherwise see: their delicate and precious communal soul. And as he did this, his mutant pineal eye wept tears of watery blood that rolled down the sides of his nose and onto his lips.