The overseer stared in disbelief at the plumes of smoke and debris spiraling up from the center of the ville. Behind him the staves in the pit jumped up and down. The overseer didn’t know what to do, where to run. He should have done something; he shouldn’t have just stood there flat-footed, with his back to his prisoners.
The raghead slave gripped the end of his shovel’s handle and swung the side of the blade at his oppressor’s head. The steel edge sliced into the flesh, shearing off a great bloody chunk.
Screaming, clutching at the back of his head with one hand, the overseer unlimbered his whip with the other. Before he could strike, another of the slaves brought its shovel’s blade hard across the boss man’s shins. The overseer crumpled into the pit, and the slaves closed in on him, raising and swinging down their shovels.
It was payback time, and they repaid him with interest, using the edges of their shovels to chop and hack his body to ribbons of flesh.
The slaves in the surrounding fields saw what the pit crew was doing and seized the opportunity to attack
their overseers, as well. Using garden tools, sticks, hands and feet, they overpowered them and beat them to die ground. In a matter of minutes there were no more living slave masters outside the walls of Willie ville.
When the muties in die pit saw a group of stickies coming toward them from the shantytown, they whooped and cheered and waved their gory shovels in the air. Then they rushed across the river valley to meet their liberators.
As the two bands of mutants came together at the edge of the cultivated area, other slaves in distant fields moved to join them, hobbling with their young strapped on their backs.
Raghead stepped forward to greet the leader of the stickies. “Thank you, brother. We come to join Kaa in the war against the norms.”
No sooner were the words out of Raghead’s mouth than the muffled mutant realized something was wrong. Very wrong. Backing up as the stickie advanced. Rag-head bumped into fellow shovelers.
The stickie captain sniffed the air around him, then its dead eyes caught the glint of red on the edges of their shovels. Whimpering, it smelled the fresh blood on their tools, and its tongue traced over the points of needle teeth. It started to shake, and strands of clear goo began to weep from its fingertips.
The same thing was happening to the other stickies.
The pit crew had nowhere to go. They were surrounded and outnumbered.
Rogero, captain of the stickies, paladin and peer of Kaa, leaned down and grabbed hold of the chain that connected Raghead’s ankles, jerking it so the mutie crashed to its back on the ground. The stickies swarmed in a flash. As they tore off the headgear, exposing the hideous, tumor-ravaged face, other stickies tripped and jumped the remaining slaves. Their agonized death screams rotted over the river plain.
The other staves coming in from the fields stopped where they were. They stared at the mad scrambling in the dirt, the clouds of rising dust. Then they turned and ran for their lives.
Chapter Twenty
In the flickering torchlight of the bank vault, Krysty watched the huge mutant called Kaa thrash and quiver on the floor. His jaws snapped together. His norm eyelids, which were shut, fluttered and twitched. And he wasn’t die only one having a fit. The quartet of stickles in the vault was shaking uncontrollably and moaning. They, too, appeared to be unconscious. The suddenness and violence of the attacks had made Krysty, Jak and the other muties stop what they were doing, which was stuffing the baron’s Apocalypticon into plastic trash bags.
Of the twenty fully conscious muties in the vault, only Krysty dared to go near the piebald man. She leaned in for a closer look at the blind white eye in his forehead. Under the milky surface, she could see a tracery of fine capillaries. The lids that protected it were flabby, puckery things; they were made of the kind of skin usually associated with a scrotum, not a face. Bloody tears welled up in die sagging cup of the lower lid, then overflowed, spilling down his brows and cheeks.
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