When they came to the first collapsed overpass, Lord Kaa led them around the obstacle. Ahead, on the dirt path, they could see the pit trap, its limbs and branches caved in. He stopped at the edge.
There was movement down there, and as Lord Kaa’s long shadow passed over the hole, a chorus of anguished cries rang out.
He removed the shoulder strap from his M-60 and lowered it down into the pit One by one the mutant general lifted out a dozen naked stickies. As he did, he passed his hand over their bald heads. Their feet and ankles, and their legs up to the shins, were covered with dirt-encrusted gore. When Krysty peeked over the edge of the pit, she saw the muddy bottom and red, raw shards of bone sticking up from the trampled muck.
Kaa’s touch seemed to calm the stickies who pressed around his knees with lowered heads. Because of the psychic network, they knew exactly what had happened to their kin; they knew that they were the only survivors of the once great and glorious army. After a minute of his laying on of hands and their soft whimpering,
they drew back and stood. They stared at the group of zoo muties with their dead, unblinking eyes.
One of the stickies broke off from the pack and circled around to approach Jak and Krysty from behind. When they turned toward the stickie, it moved quickly away and hunkered down, sniffing the air in die direction of the mutie lion’s backside. The stickie was curious about the huge beast, but cautious. However, when the lion didn’t appear to object to being examined in this way, the stickie grew bolder and got right in its face, breathing in the rotten-meat fumes directly from its mouth.
The lion moved taster than any of their eyes could follow, swatting the stickie on the side of the head with its forepaw. The pale mutant cartwheeled across the path, landing finally on its face. It rose up, shaking its head and blinking rapidly, bruised but alive. The mutie cat grinned and licked the pad of its foot It had struck with sheathed claws. If it had used them, the stickie would’ve been dead in a heap in the din instead of scrambling back to its agitated kin.
Kaa made the former zoo inmates put down their burdens. Then he went through the bags, dividing up the Apocalypticon so its weight could be shared among all the muties. A few loose papers blew out and fluttered across the highway. He made no attempt to recover them. Each of his people carried one half-full bag of documents. With their loads lightened, the ragtag force moved off at a faster clip to the south. From the increase in the pace be set it appeared that Kaa
had a particular destination in mind, even if he wasn’t sharing it with them.
It didn’t occur to Jak or Krysty that nothing was stopping them from escaping; they could have slipped to the back of the file, dropped their loads and hidden in the weeds until the others moved off. They were fascinated by Kaa, by what he had tried to do, by the hope he still offered. And by the dignity and grace with which he bore his great tragedy, the loss of his army.
RYAN DEFTLY PICKED his way up the rubble pile on the back side of the fallen overpass. He jumped from block to block until he reached the coils of hurricane wire that blocked its summit. He gripped the wire and stared down the long, straight stretch of six-lane highway. “Something’s moving down the road,” he said over his shoulder.
J.B. joined him at the wire. Tipping down the brim of his fedora to block the sun’s glare off the roadway, he squinted at the tiny moving dots in the distance.
“Could be them,” he said. “I just thought I saw a flash of white. Mebbe Jak’s head in the sun.”
“Ryan, my dear fellow,” Doc said from behind them, “look what Mildred’s found.”
When Ryan looked over at the woman, she waved a couple of sheets of crumpled paper at him.