James Axler – Deathlands 35 – Skydark

He had carefully planned his escape from Willie ville. He had left only when he was ready, after a full year of winnowing through the stacks of predark material. When he went over the wall, Kaa carried one treasure under his arm. Stamped in red ink across the front of the slim, paper-bound document was the warning, Top Secret. For Your Eyes Only. Below the security clearance was the title: “Operation Cerberus: Sys Design and Config.” The document wasn’t all he took with him. Inside his mind he carried a framework of ancient stories memorized, of lessons learned, the

bare scaffolding for his military campaign against the slave masters.

A high-pitched mewling at his feet brought Lord Kaa back to the here and now. At his feet a stickie was making the birthing sound, its stomach muscles corded and rippling with contractions, flaccid face flushed with strain. It was Rogero, one of Kaa’s paladins. The piebald lord knelt down and thrust his hand into the stickie’s gaping womb. With his fingertips he found the top of the unborn infant’s head. Careful to avoid the teeth, he took a firm hold under the jaw and pulled the creature out into the world. For a moment he dangled the blood-bathed infant stickie by its umbilical cord. As it slowly spun, it snapped its jaws.

Kaa pressed the baby to one of the sucker-ringed purple teats on Rogero’s hairless chest It began to nurse at once. After a few hours of steady feeding, the baby stickie would be too big to carry; its own weight would uncouple it from the nipple. The little mutant would be able to run and hunt as soon as its feet touched earth, and at that moment it would be as dangerous as a full-grown adult-the only difference being, it took smaller bites.

By the time they reached Willie ville, many hundreds more would have been birthed and nursed, fattened and readied for war. Kaa’s stickie army would number closer to six thousand than five. Under his command they would sweep over the baron’s defenses as if they were nothing, lay waste to the great ville, to its norms, scourge the earth and leave only cinders in

their wake. The baron’s liberated mutie slaves would rise up and join the battle.

It was only the beginning.

Lord Kaa planned to march over the eastern baronies, one after another, burning the estates to the ground, at each stop adding many thousands of mutie fighters to his ranks. By the time he was done, he would head an army the likes of which the world hadn’t seen in many generations, an army that could conquer all of Death lands and unite it under a single banner.

Chapter Six

Johnson Lester squinted through the telescopic sight of the toll booth’s 90 mm recoilless rifle and considered touching off a round or two, just to break the eerie silence.

It had been a particularly boring day for the baron’s sec man. Although it was nearly sunset, Lester and his crew had collected no tolls.

For the twelve hours of their watch, the road had been free of traffic moving toward Willie ville from the south. The booth in which they sat was a partially buried, wheelless, axleless, windowless, doorless semi truck and trailer. Like a rusty red pimple, the cab of the junked truck stuck out of the base of the twenty-flve-foot-high berm wall, facing the highway south. The berm formed a defensive perimeter around the Willie ville complex. Under the dirt barrier, fortifying it, were piles of trashed motor vehicles.

The berm had been constructed by hand by mutie slaves, at blasterpoint. Slaves had likewise hacksawed off the back of the semitractor’s cab and cut an opening in the front of the trailer, turning the buried rig into a tunnel, a pedestrian passage through the earthen wall. Wheeled carts using the baron’s highway were directed

to a different entrance, a narrow break in the berm that was blocked by the side of a semitrailer which, because it still had wheels, could be rolled back and forth. The trailer gate opened onto a tight sec area-a killzone, really-where the human- and animal-drawn vehicles could be searched while under heavy guard.