James Axler – Gemini Rising

The woman blanched. “Sullivan? I thought he died after chilling the last baron of this place.”

“And waste a valuable resource like that? Never, my lady! I gave him a small cabin in the woods and let him practice on coldhearts and condemned prisoners. We gave him freedom and food. Sullivan is very loyal to us.”

“To you,” Markham corrected pointedly.

“That’s the same thing, Baron. The man will happily perform any dirty chore we ask of him.”

“Hardly a man,” she snorted.

The former baron of BullRun had enjoyed torturing prisoners and relatives by forcing them to have intercourse with muties captured from the radioactive hell-zone of Washington Hole. Many died in the attempts, a few offspring were born, but those were always deformed and died within minutes. The one exception was Sullivan. He not only survived, but also grew tall and incredibly strong, killing the baron at age ten when the fool tried to drown the mutie child in a river.

Now over six feet tall, Sullivan could physically pass for a norm, his loose clothing hiding any major physical irregularities. His finely chiseled features were almost too perfect to be called handsome, his head smooth and hairless, but whether from shaving or a natural condition was unknown. Sullivan rarely spoke and never seemed to eat. He never laughed, but constantly bore a gentle smile as if greeting an old friend. Small-caliber rounds such as .22s and home-loads would bruise his odd skin, but didn’t penetrate. He had once chilled a man who laughed at him by crushing his skull in one hand, the man’s head busting apart like ripe fruit in the iron grip of the monstrous half-breed.

The former baron tried many times to duplicate the creation of the horrible mutie, but with no success. Even though the humanoid muties were once true norms, something had been altered within them by the radiation, and no matter how often the baron forced prisoners and condemned men to try, Sullivan remained unique.

“Give the thing whatever it wants, then send it off to Front Royal to chill the baron.”

“Nathan Cawdor?”

“Or anybody who is in charge, I don’t care. That should buy us enough days to get prepared for a fight.”

“And afterward?” Charles asked pointedly.

“Kill the mutie freak,” she ordered, and started for the fortress once more.

SMILING AND WAVING to the people in the corridor, Overton closed the door to his rooms in the fortress and spit out a virulent oath. “The one-eyed gimp didn’t fall for it!” he raged. “Ryan is supposed to have this terrible temper. Faced with a bastard usurper, he was supposed to fly into a rage, attack me, and then snipers would kill him and Nathan, wounding me. Our blues kill the snipers, and I become the undisputed ruler of Front Royal.”

“Yes,” said the other man in the room.

Overton kicked a footstool out of his way. “How could such a simple plan go wrong?”

Sitting in a chair near the window, Ki looked down on the courtyard filled with cheering people. The area was dark, lit only by the occasional flash of lightning and the pale moon struggling to show through the boiling orange clouds of toxins.

“Mebbe he’s smarter than we were told,” the sec man ventured. “That would be most inconvenient. Or perhaps he believes you are his son. The story is just crazy enough to be true.”

Overton grunted in reply. His mother had been a gaudy slut, all right, but not down in the south somewhere. He knew who his real father was. The man had taken a week to die, Havila tossing the match herself to set fire to the gasoline-soaked man who had abandoned them.

“What should we do?”

“What can we do is a better question,” he retorted angrily. Crossing the room, he yanked open a cherry-wood cabinet and chose a bottle of wine at random. “At present, I’m throwing a party to welcome home the man I want dead.”

“Poison?”

“Don’t have any.”

“Get him drunk and push him off a balcony?”

“Love to. But when will we ever be alone?”

The sec man stood. “Mebbe we should just shoot and risk open rebellion from the locals. We can beat this bunch of uneducated hicks in a straight fight.”