“Chillin” each other.,.like always,” Hylander stated.
“Naw, it’s different,” Lester told them. “I don’t know how, but it is. It’s like they know something’s about to happen.”
“Mebbe it’s all the lights,” Gill suggested. “Some muties get strange around fire. Makes them go animal.”
The baron had ordered every torch in Willie ville lit. The ruined highway rest stop glowed orange and golden from thousands upon thousands of points of firelight.
Lester and his men were stationed at the edge of the open ground between the zoo and the berm wall. On the other side of the berm were the slave quarters. Their mission was to observe, then pull back and report if the stickies broke through.
As precarious as their position was, Lester found it hard to keep his attention focused on the top of the berm. Ryan Cawdor’s words kept running through his head. They raised questions he didn’t want to face but couldn’t stop thinking about. How many norms actually survived a turn at the wheel, especially sec men? Offhand he couldn’t remember any. After all, unless there was an accident, it wasn’t the wheel that killed you; it was your fellow workers. The muties slaving in the subbasement were condemned to death, sentenced by the baron to labor until they dropped in their chains. They had nothing to lose by chilling a sec man; they looked at the opportunity as a kind of bonus. Even though the muties were manacled to their posts as they pushed the wheel around, Lester knew they had their own ways of doing the deed, none of them pleasant. If he wanted to live through the baron’s punishment, he
had to bribe the overseers into keeping the mutie slaves off his back.
His good buddies, Gill and Hylander, hadn’t once mentioned his impending ordeal. Maybe they figured they already had enough to worry about tonight. Maybe they didn’t want to have to lend him any jack in case he came up short with the overseers. In either case, Lester was too bone tired to take offense.
None of it probably mattered, anyway.
If there really were five thousand stickies coming, the odds of a hundred or so sec men holding them off until dawn were slim. There was just too much ville to defend. Realizing this, the baron had ordered explosive charges planted along the most likely attack routes. The battle plan was to retreat, then detonate the explosives under the stickies, retreat and detonate, all the way back to the hotel, and in the process, reduce the enemy numbers as much as possible. Once the sec men had pulled back to the hotel, they’d defend it from the ground up, room by room.
If the stickie force turned out to be smaller than what Ryan Cawdor had described-and this was what every sec man in Willie ville was fervently praying for-the initial retreat of the baron’s defenders would mask a massing of their forces. It would let groups of stickies break through the berm barrier in specific places, fun-neling them into prearranged killzones.
Lester, Hylander and Gill had drawn the unenviable task of leading the stickies to slaughter.
In the grand scheme of things, they were live bait.
Chapter Nine
It could be worse, Krysty kept telling herself.
But that was hard to believe.
Stripped naked, she was stretched out on her belly across the baron’s dining table. At Elijah’s command, his sec men held her wrists and ankles, and pinned her hipbones against the edge of the tabletop. She couldn’t see what was going on behind her, but she could feel it. Fingers lightly brushed the red shock of her pubic hair, then cold glass pressed against her upturned buttocks.
“Hmm,” the baron said, with his free hand tipping the bank of candles closer.
Molten wax dripped and splattered onto the sensitive skin at the base of Krysty’s spine, making her flinch and jerk against the grip of the sec men.
“Got lo check them for pustules right off,” the baron said as he raised his face from between her splayed thighs. “Can’t be putting the new ones in the zoo and doing it later. Never know what kind of sickness these muties might be carrying. Before you know it, whatever they’ve got, it spreads through the rest of them like wildfire. Learned that the hard way, years ago. This little scalie bitch I bought off a trader from the