As much as Lester wanted to, he didn’t shoot the 90 mm weapon. Ammo for it was not to be wasted on sport-baron’s orders. He set the bipod-mounted weapon back on the truck cab’s roof and stretched his shoulders. He was standing halfway out of the top of the cab, in a crude hole hacked in the sheet steel. The day had been a hot one, and he was looking forward to the end of his shift, to a hard-earned tankard of tipple. Brewed in the kitchen of the Liberty Bell restaurant to Willie Elijah’s own specifications, the harsh, powerfully alcoholic barley wine was part of every sec man’s daily wage. The brew’s cloying kick disappeared after the first few sips, followed in short order by the onset of a most satisfying, warm and fuzzy stupefaction.
If Lester stopped to think about it, most days in the booth were pretty dull. The sec men weren’t allowed to shake down travelers for more than the baron’s toll, which was ten percent of whatever they were carrying. Unofficial, additional extortion by sec men tended to divert wayfarers from the toll route, which reduced the baron’s profits. Elijah, suspicious bastard that he was, kept watch on his toll-takers with a pair of binocs from
his penthouse suite in the Freedom City Motor Hotel and Casino.
The only time Lester and his crew had any real fun was when travelers couldn’t pay. Then the sec men could get a bit creative. They indentured the men as unpaid, unfed field slaves for up to a week, in exchange for the toll. They put the women, if they weren’t too old, and the girls to work on their knees right there in the toll booth. The sec men always let on, after they had finished and buttoned up their flies, that the females were done paying for passage, that their trials were over. It was a kind of a private joke between toll-takers. They never mentioned that the travelers had to clear another barricade on the other side of Wlllie ville, and that once again the women would have to open wide if they wanted to pass on.
If the sec men came across a real interesting mutie among the migrants, say a baby with leathery vestigial wings and a spiky tail, they’d clobber the mother over the head and take it from her. The baron had a longstanding bounty on unique specimens of the mutie races, which was how he populated his private zoo these days. Old Elijah could be generous, too. A sec man could spend a week drunk in the Willie ville gaudy on the reward. If the mutie parents put up too much of a fuss over losing their deformed brat, or if Lester’s boys had had an otherwise slow day at the booth, they would chill both father and mother on the spot. The sec men would then drag the carcasses over to the Liberty Bell, where the cooks would chop them up, boil
them down with spent grain from the brewery and feed die stinking mess to the mutie field hands in slop buckets. The slaves, who were kept in hovels outside the berm, were always glad to get their grub. They never asked where-or whom-it came from.
The baron’s slaves provided much-needed diversions for the one hundred sec men who guarded Willie ville. And not just in the gaudy. Sometimes the sec men staged mutie fights to the death over in the Independence Park Amusement Zone. They’d throw a couple of big mean ones into the mesh hopper of the Spin V Whip ride and let them tear each other’s guts out, with nigh-stakes wagers on the outcome. Elijah also allowed them to bait the inmates of the mutie zoo, during certain hours and within certain limits. They weren’t permitted to hurt the specimens physically. Yelling and spitting, and occasionally pissing on them, were okay, although the latter bad to be done with speed and care since the muties tended to piss back.
Baron Elijah was real touchy about keeping muties and norms separated. Before he had hired Lester as a mercie in the Mutie War, he had made him prove that he didn’t have any bad blood in him. Lester was required to drag in his mother, father, sisters and brothers-and their kids-for a complete exam. The baron was big on physical exams. He would sit there in his predark lounger with a huge magnifying glass and a lit candle and look over the outside and as much of the inside of a prospect as he could get at without using a knife. He was an expert at finding a mutie sign.