The scabbie helped to support its vast stomach by cupping it with its hands.
“What’re you lookin’ at, bitch?” it snarled at
Krysty.
“Mebbe countin’ your sores,” suggested the prisoner in the cage to Krysty’s back.
Krysty turned to face her other neighbor, a scalie. Its rad mutation was a bit more subtle mat the scabbie’s. The striations of its fine scales were visible only when the light hit it a certain way. To the casual observer, it could look like a severe case of dry skin. There was a vague reptilian cast to the slant of its eyes and the tumed-up corners of its lipless mouth. The scalie was also pregnant. It wore a short skirt of pieced rags that looked like a ratty pom-pom, but nothing on top. The scalie’s breasts were pendulous and doughy, and the large nipples were an angry, infected maroon.
“When’s your baby due?” Krysty asked the scabbie. To be heard over the din, she practically had to shout “Another few weeks,” the inmate replied. “Question is,” the scalie said, “what’s it gonna look
like? Elijah bred her with about twenty males, one after another. She didn’t mind, though.” The scalie looked over at the pregnant mutant and said, “Did ya?”
The scabbie screamed something at the scalie through Krysty’s cell. The words were unintelligible.
“The baron did that to you?” Krysty asked the scabbie mother-to-be. “He set that many men on you?”
“Yeah,” the scabbie said, then pointed through the bars, past Krysty, to the scalie. “And her, too. She’s got a bun in the oven. She’s just not showing yet.”
“The baron keeps track of who he’s mated with who. And who he’s gonna mate with who next. Kind of like breeding hogs. Only his idea is to switch around the fathers and mothers to git the most unusual-looking specimens for his zoo.”
“Why so many fathers?” Krysty said.
The scalie answered. “Elijah doesn’t like to waste any of his females’ breeding cycles, so he always makes sure we git well seeded.”
“It’ll happen to you, too, soon enough,” the scabbie assured Krysty. “None of us ever escapes….”
Krysty choked back the fear and revulsion that threatened to overwhelm her. She refused to give in to the urge to go ballistic, to throw herself at the bars of her cell and scream her outrage. She knew she had to stay calm if she was going to have a prayer of getting free of the zoo, calm and clearheaded as she’d need to be to help Ryan and the others.
An eerie quiet settled over the zoo enclosure. The
lull in the uproar was broken by a few scattered cries, but they, too, quickly faded out.
Like Ryan, Krysty was puzzled and worried by the stickle army’s failure to show up during the night Without a battle, or the threat of an assault, they were dead. In the hope that her neighbors might be able to shed some light on the situation, she decided to pump them for information. “I saw someone on the road yesterday,” she said softly. “Mebbe you know him?”
When she described the piebald man for them, the scalie let out a squeal, slumped onto its butt on the floor of the cage and started drumming its heels in the straw.
“Shut up!” the scabbie shrieked. “Don’t say a word! You don’t know who she is.”
“Do you think she’s spy for Elijah?” the scalie countered. “Since when does he give a damn about what his animals are thinkin’?”
“Red-hair looks like she could pass for norm. Mebbe she’s not a mutie at all.”
Krysty made her prehensile hair stand up in full-length spikes, then coil back against her head in tight curls.
“Oh, yeah, she’s one of us.”
“Mebbe so,” the scabbie said. “Still could be work-in* for the baron.”
“This piebald man,” Krysty said, “he had an army with him. Biggest I ever saw. An army of stickles. They were comin* this way.”
“It’s him!” cried the scalie, unable to contain itself.
¯^f* hack! I told you something strange was in “^c***.-.-” -¯?;œn ®) us. Just like he promised!”
The scalie started to turn away to spread the word to the adjoining cage. The scabbie barked a warning. “You wait! Wait!” When the scalie looked back, the scabbie said, “We got to make sure of this before we pass it on.” Then it faced Krysty and demanded, “What else did you see?”