A STROKE OF DUMB LUCK had landed Grub Hinton in the upper floor of Moonboy’s gaudy house that same morning.
A scrounger by trade, Grub eked out his solitary living beneath the thick glaze of nuke-melted sand on the outer edge of Salt Lake City’s crater. He pickaxed holes through the layers of thermoglass, then crawled in headfirst, searching the narrow, jagged air pockets for anything of value. Prospecting the wasteland was largely unrewarding work, as most of the wealth of the city that hadn’t been vaporized had been turned into unrecognizable and immovable globs of slag. The work was also extremely dangerous, and not just because of the lingering high levels of radioactivity. Chances were, long before the first weeping, rad-cancer lesions appeared on Grub’s cheeks and hands, some other scrounger would have bushwhacked him for his meager bag of booty, or for exclusive mining rights to some especially promising hole. On the upside, he always had more than enough to eat, even if it was just rat-on-a-stick.
Grub Hinton’s jackpot find, a 1958 Buick hubcap slightly scorched on the edges, lay propped against the filthy, bug-splattered wall of the gaudy crib. He had traded this singular treasure for a rare, all-night, green beer drunk, and an even rarer, full three hours in the saddle.
As Grub’s morning of bliss wore on and on, the gaudy slut in question had cause to rue the deal she’d struck with him. Even her most enthusiastic faked screams of passion had failed to make the little man finish his mechanical rutting and scar-fisted pawing of her body. The sudden thunderclap from the street that rattled the building’s walls and floor, and whooshed inward the shredded clear plastic sheeting that passed for window curtains, accomplished what her ham acting couldn’t.
“Stun gren!” Grab barked as he rolled off the woman’s doughy stomach and pushed up from the straw-stuffed pallet on the floor.
Still staggering drunk and naked, a sickly pale, two-legged, potbellied pig, hairless but for the fringe of reddish fur on his behind, Grab lurched for the frame of the third-story window. As he reached it, there was a second, floor-shaking boom, the tattered plastic curtains fluttering in his face.
He pushed aside the strips of plastic and forced his eyes to focus on the scene directly below. Like a dip in an ice-cold mountain stream, what he saw momentarily sobered him. Grub Hinton had come nose to nose with plenty of nasty, rad-mutated creepy crawlies while rooting in the dark under the dirty glass skin of Slakecity, but nothing like this
At first glance, the three figures in the middle of the street looked like giant black cockroaches, straight out of a jolt-binge, melt-brain nightmare. But on closer inspection, he saw they had two arms and two legs, like men. And like men, they carried stubby-barreled blasters.
If Deathlands had taught Grub anything in his twenty-three years, it was to expect the unexpected; if you could jolt-dream a living terror, odds were it existed there, someplace. Generations after the nuke-caust of 2001, monsters that should never have been born were bornand once born, bred in awesome profusion. Norms like Hinton, lucky enough to have no obvious outward abnormalities, rationalized the hunting down and indiscriminate slaughter of their less fortunate brethren because some of the mutated human subspeciesknown variously as stickies, cannies, scabbies, scalieshad devolved into crazed, senseless killers. As a general rule, mutie bastards didn’t pack blasters; they preferred to do their murdering with fang and claw, with club or suckerfist.
From his position at the window, Grub could see the norm folk lined up on the opposite side of the street. A grin spread over his face. The intruders were about to be executed, Moonboy style, and Grub had himself a front-row balcony seat.
“Come over here,” he told the woman on the pallet, waving his arm for her to hurry. ‘ ‘This is going to be some kind of show.”
The gaudy slut stepped up to the window without bothering to conceal her nakedness. But she did cover her ears when, in a deafening thirty-second fusillade, every norm weapon along the street emptied.
As the haze of burned black powder lifted, Grub saw Moonboy’s antimutie posse scrambling to rack fresh, preloaded spare cylinders into their revolvers. Amazingly, the intruders still stood, their armor unmarked.