The stickie didn’t answer as it continued concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other. Norm was allowed to straggle along under his own steam now. Despite what some said, muties did possess rudimentary emotions, and Budd was both hurt and angered by his companion’s caustic comments about Lord Kaa. The mutant could have broken the smaller human into pieces, if it had chosen to. Instead, Budd had accepted the responsibility of companionship.
“What happened to Lord Kaa, anyway?” Norm asked after a few moments, growing bored with the sound of his own labored breathing.
“Budd doesn’t know. Lord Kaa was there, then he wasn’t. He disappeared.”
“Chilled, most likely. Yeah, he’s probably back there in Wille ville under a ton of burned brick and dead muties.”
“Budd doesn’t agree. Kaa lives.”
“Budd can kiss my ass. I don’t give a shit what you think.”
“Then, leave me.”
“You wish. Of course, we both know that’s the problem here,” Norm said, his voice trailing off. “The fact is thisyou stickies couldn’t find your dicks with both hands in a stiff wind.”
“Norm helping Budd.”
The man took off the sunglasses for a moment and rubbed his injured eyes. “I guess so. Somebody has to. Navigation isn’t your strong suit, and I’ve heard about this stickie hive where we’re going. Some of the other sec men I worked with back at Willie’s before the ville got toasted had pulled duty time at the human outpost near our new home. Muties have the entire city to themselves, and the norms live farther out from it, safe and snug in their own pocket of protection.”
Norm took another breath. “Yeah, I guess we’re in this together, mutie, like it or not.”
“Why?”
“Like I told youI’m mutie now. I’m Norm the half-melted mutie. Way I look, your kind is the only ones left in the Deathlands that can accept me without gagging.”
“You are a strange norm, Lester,” Budd said.
The shorter figure’s one good eye flashed with anger. “For the last time don’t call me that. Call me Norm. Lester’s dead. Buried back in Willie ville. If we make it to where I’m planning, I’ve got some plans, Budd. Big plans. Your Lord Kaa? He was a friggin’ piker compared to what I’m planning to take over and rebuild. All you stickies need to take over your lives is some guidanceand me and you, we’re going to give them all the lessons they need.”
Silence. More steps.
“Norm?”
“What?”
“Are we there yet?”
Chapter One
The third planet from the sun seemed to explode in the old calendar year of 2001. In some parts of the now-hemorrhaging world, the continual explosions were of such terrible force, they could be seen by orbiting spacecraft. Whole pieces of continents ceased to exist as they were obliterated in expanding mushroom clouds of radioactive dust and debris.
Satellite cameras on high recorded the horrific images for the unbelieving observers below, and for their eventual descendants to view one day via decaying videotape.
The exact date of destruction has been recorded as occurring precisely at noon on the twentieth day of January, early in the new year. In Washington, D.C., where the power elite chose to live and work and plan and play, the first blast of the countless more to follow fell on a bitter cold dayperfect weather to welcome in the end of the world.
All within a five-mile radius were instantly vaporized.
The actual battle was over in minutes. However, the ramifications of what had happened took longer. In mere hours, chaos reigned in the rapidly shrinking pockets of survival in every country of the worldand as the verbal accusations and the barrages of hellfire and destruction flew back and forth, the doomsayers with their predictions in tabloids and the self-appointed prophets with their poster boards of admonitions were proven right at last.
The world was endingwelcome to the new millennium.
That one black day when the fighting began and ended in less than twenty-four hours was forever known by those who lived through it as skydarkthe time when the very sun appeared to have fallen from the sky to be reborn in a conflagration that enveloped the Earth. The firestorm that burned the green away, and replaced it with the blackness.