James Axler – Deathlands 35 – Skydark

“You dirty, rad-tainted fuckers!” one of the other sec men cried. “You lousy, stinking mutie bastards!”

The immature stickies dumped a good pound of black powder into their prisoner’s mouth and down his throat before releasing him. While he sputtered and choked on the load of explosive, a young mutie capered

up and touched a firebrand to his black-dusted chin. A fountain of sparks and flame erupted from the sec man’s face. With a whoosh his features melted like wax, and his eyes dripped off his chin.

The army of stickies screamed in jubilation and triumph as the ruined but still-living norm toppled to his side in the dirt and fell into a shuddering, shivering fit.

The young muties repeated the procedure with two of the three remaining sec men. They saved the norm who had used Kaa’s slave name for last They had something special in mind for him. After filling his mouth with gunpowder, they used strips of his clothing to bind his jaws shut. The sec man’s eyes bulged enormously as one of the little stickies wedged a crude twist of fuse deep into his right nostril.

As one, the army moved back, making room for the big finale. Another young stickie hopped up and set the fuse alight. With fire sputtering, creeping up the front of his face, the norm captive shook his head violently, trying to dislodge the fuse. Flame entered his nostril, making it glow red. He clamped his eyes shut, then his head exploded with a solid whack, leaving nothing between his shoulders but a smoking stump of neck.

The little stickies rushed forward en masse, picked up the corpse and threw it into the bonfire. While their fathers-mothers cheered, they stomped the mortally wounded sec men to death. And when they had reduced the luckless norms to ragged heaps of bone and muscle, they tossed the remains into the fire, too.

The earth trembled from the impacts of thousands of dancing feet.

Kaa raised his arms to the sky, tipped back his head and roared his approval.

His baby soldiers had been well and truly blooded.

Chapter Twelve

Baron Willie Elijah gave up trying to sleep. Scowling, he opened his eyes and took in the glitter-flecked, rough-textured, white plaster ceiling of the penthouse master bedroom. On his left on the king-size bed, in a tangled mass of untucked covers, lay Poonie-Two and Toonie-Two. The sisters were snoozing in each other’s arms. On his right, stretched out on top of the rumpled sheets, was Roonie-Two. His pure-norm gals were producing a rhythmic chorus of snorts, pops and nasal whistlings. Poonie-Two’s legs kept twitching, kicking him in the shin.

This, the baron decided, was what it must be like to try to doze off in an overcrowded pigsty, like one of his mutie slaves.

In the normal course of events, Elijah was the first one asleep and missed the snore chorus of his three wives. The night past had been different, however. Not only hadn’t he gotten to sleep first, but he hadn’t dozed off at all. He had left orders with his sec men to be roused at the first sign of an attack. Then he had lain wide-awake, waiting for the crackle of blasterfire.

Elijah gazed across the snowy expanse of Roonie-Two’s bare behind, to the sunrise spilling through the

curtainless floor-to-ceiling windows of the baronial penthouse.

Evidently there had been no attack.

No one had tried to wake him.

So much for One-eye Cawdor’s stickie army.

What had the traitorous coward been thinking? He had to have known that his pack of lies would be uncovered and his fate sealed by dawn. Maybe he was hoping that the chaos of a full nighttime mobilization would allow him and his friends to escape. Now there was a dumbfuck move.

Feeling the pressure of a full bladder, the baron climbed over his granddaughter-wives and padded naked and barefoot across the bedroom suite. He threw back the sliding glass door to the patio. The day looked promising, not too hot, not too wet. A good day for business. Stepping up onto the seat of a metal chair, he sent a yellow stream arching over the balcony’s rail and down twenty-five stories onto the unprotected heads of his subjects.