van. He had a bullwhip coiled on his hip. “Only when the baron wants to make a special example of somebody. That’s something I know how to do.”
The sec men walked J.B., Doc and Mildred just as far as the van’s cab. They let them head into the squalor of the slave quarters in the custody of the overseer. The Willie ville slave quarters were built right up against the berm wall. They spilled down from the high dirt barrier in an avalanche of wood, metal and plastic scraps. Some of the structures weren’t much more than lean-tos, and barely tall enough for one person to crawl under to get out of the acid rain. Other hovels were more elaborate, connected by shared walls, doors and roofs. The whole shantytown looked as if it would collapse on itself in the next chem storm. The air was thick with the caustic odor of burned garbage and the buzz of carrion insects.
There were no slaves in any of the huts, but there were quite a few animals. Pigs, goats and the odd cow were tethered inside the rickety doorways. The slave population was in the fields, working. Mildred could see them in the distance. She assumed that the bundles strapped to the adults’ backs were babies.
The dirt path that wound between the huts was deeply rilled and fairly steep. It sloped down to the green fields in the river valley. Mildred found it hard to keep up with the others because the length of chain between her ankles was so short. It forced her to take little, mincing steps. The sun blazed on her head and back. Her clothes were already drying from its heat.
The overseer steered them along a path that bordered the cultivated fields. Stooped-over field hands tended the rows of green, leafy plants. Only the slaves a good distance away stopped working to look at them. The ones closest to the path, and the overseer, kept their backs bent and their arms moving. Mildred grimaced as she was hit by a familiar smelt. In a shallow, water-filled ditch alongside the field was a pair of swollen corpses. They were still in their shackles, but all their clothes had been either stripped or cut off.
The overseer took a path to the left, away from the crop rows and the fouled ditch, and toward Willie ville. Mildred could see a group of people ahead. They were digging in a wide, shallow pit Over the clank of her ankle chain she could hear the scrape of shovels.
“Looks like a quarry,” J.B. said softly.
“Looks like where we’re headed,” Mildred stated.
“What, pray tell, are they digging, sir?” Doc asked the overseer.
The mutie answered with a cut of his whip. The lash sizzled and cracked, and Doc cried out and spun away.
“Digging your rad-blasted graves,” the overseer told him. “No more talk.”
Mildred saw the tear in the thigh of Doc’s breeches, and blood trickled through it. Though Doc’s face was pale, he got up and got moving. He was a game old bird.
The slaves working in the pit paused as the overseer approached. They were mostly young, and all males. Their ankles were chained, and they were sweaty and
covered with grime. They stood in a depression four feet deep and roughly fifty feet in diameter. What exactly they were “quarrying” wasn’t immediately apparent. Nothing was piled up, except the dirt that had already been excavated.
“Pick up the shovels,” the overseer ordered, “and get to work.”
J.B., Doc and Mildred got their tools from a stack on the ground.
“Start over there,” he told them.
Then he turned to Mildred. “And you, bitch, keep your pants on. I won’t have my Slavics wasting the whole day screwing in the dirt”
Mildred didn’t bother to tell him that she had no intention of doing anything of the kind, not as long as she could swing a shovel. As the overseer walked away, she, Doc and J.B. started to work. If walking in chains was hard, digging in chains was triple-tough. The earth was baked clay, and it had to be chipped away, like marble.