James Axler – Deathlands 35 – Skydark

“Mebbe not. But I’d feel a lot better if we saw a caravan of travelers humping up from the south.”

“How long you think it’ll take us to make the way stop?”

“Never make it there and back before dark.”

“I wouldn’t mind spending the night, even though

it’s a pesthole. It’d give old Elijah a chance to forget about us.”

“Hadn’t thought of that. Good idea. We’d better get rolling, though, or we won’t even get there by dark. We don’t want to get caught out on the road after sundown.”

The sec men fell into an easy, loping gait. At about two miles out of Willie ville, they paused to look back. They could see the hotel and part of the amusement zone sticking up above the berm line. As they watched, a three-man patrol crossed the highway a half mile behind them. They waved. Gill and Hylander waved back.

Fifteen minutes farther down the road, the two sec men came upon their first obstacle-a downed overpass that blocked the entire highway, one of many between Willie ville and the way stop. They approached the mound of rubble slowly and carefully, watching for any sign of movement on the ends or along the top. When they got closer, they could see coils of wire fencing-part of a ruined antisuicide barrier-blocked the path across the top. They were going to have to go around.

“Looks clear up to the overpass,” Hylander said.

A hot wind, the first of the day, swept down the valley, rattling the wire.

“Could be a thousand of them hiding on the other side,” Gill said, “ready to jump us.”

“That isn’t going to happen. Cover my ass.”

Hylander lowered his head and charged up the

rubble. Leaping from chunk to chunk, he didn’t stop until he reached the crest. With his Beretta out front, he peered through the wire.

Gill knelt in the roadway, braced for full-auto fire, his finger on the machine pistol’s trigger.

“Nothing,” Hylander said to him as he started back down. “Just empty road. I told you it was okay.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Gill said. “Let’s go.”

At the end of the rubble to the right, where the edge of the road ended, a makeshift path began. It had been tramped into the dirt. Everything looked clean. There was no cover for stickies to hide behind. They had gone less than a dozen steps when something cracked and the earth opened up under them.

Gill cried out in alarm, clutching at the collapsing sides of the hole. He couldn’t stop himself from falling and dropped fifteen feet down into the mantrap. Hylander landed beside him in a blinding cloud of dust and leaves.

The hole was ten feet across and full of waiting stickies.

Hylander and Gill didn’t get off a shot before their blasters were ripped from their hands. They yelled then, yelled as they’d never yelled before.

But no one heard.

Chapter Fifteen

The mutie overseer stood waiting for Mildred, J.B., and Doc at the open rear doors of a four-ton panel van buried in the berm. His muscular torso was bare from the waist up. From the front he looked like a norm; from the back it was a different story. The length of his spine, from his tailbone up to the back of his head, was covered with masses of tiny, worm-shaped tumors. The tendrils were long and densely packed over his spinal column, thinning out toward the sides of his rib cage. The mohawk of soft growth was caked with dirt and body oils. There was no way he could clean in and around the fringe-unless he mowed it off first.

Inside the sheet-steel tunnel of the van’s cargo compartment, while their sec-man escort held the companions covered, the mutie overseer clapped ankle shackles on them. “This old one won’t last the day,” he said to the sec men as he sized up Doc. “The other two I might get some work out of before they drop dead.”

Mildred shrugged off his hand as it squeezed her bicep.

“Don’t get too many norms out in the fields,” the overseer said as he led the way out of the cab of the