country, a power in the world.
Ryan stared at the figure sprawled grossly and grotesquely in the chair, seeming
to fill it to overflowing, one foot on the platform, the knee bent back, the
other leg hanging over the top step. Except for black knee-length riding boots,
worn and dulled, he was evidently naked under what looked to be some kind of
fantastic robe, blue in color, thickly lined with soiled white fur, and open at
the front. His massive belly bulged in folds, lapping at his thighs. His flesh
was pinkish, his face red, the cheeks sagging around a small thick-lipped mouth
around which was a fringe of white stubble. The eyes were tiny flesh-choked
beads. His head was flung back so that he was gazing up at the mirrored ceiling
as he talked, his image gazing back down at him. In his right pudgy hand he held
a thick cigar, which, from the look of it, consisted entirely of dry-cured
happyweed leaves, rolled tight.
Jordan Teague. Baron of Mocsin.
Ryan almost couldn’t believe his eyes, for a moment convinced that the incense
that clogged the air was some kind of drug and that what he was seeing was a
weird, outrageous vision.
But it was real enough. Two years had clearly made a hell of a difference.
Teague had been fat, sure, but this was way different. The guy looked as if he’d
need help walking. Or maybe he stayed up there the whole time? There’d been
nothing remotely like this in the old days. Teague had gotten around town, done
his business, kept a firm hand on things.
In many ways, as Ryan remembered it from the Trader, who knew the background,
Jordan Teague had been a typical Baron. He’d come up the hard way. Father and
mother had he none—that he knew of, anyhow. He’d cut his own path in one of the
southern Baronies and discovered that, as long as he was paid for it—in food,
creds or women—he didn’t mind killing for his living. Didn’t mind at all. He
became head blaster for a small-time Baron, supplanted him in a bloody coup and
was then, after some years, himself ousted by his own head blaster. There is
very often such a symmetry in these matters, although Teague broke the pattern
by being slightly quicker on the uptake than his predecessor and escaping with
his life. He drifted into the central Deathlands, took up with a band of mutie
marauders who had a rather more liberal attitude toward norms than most—that is,
they accepted him, instead of spit-roasting him over a slow fire and eating
him—and they had a good two years looting, pillaging and raping before the band
hit what on the surface appeared to be a sleepy but fairly prosperous settlement
ripe for slaughter and rape some distance south of the ruins of the old St.
Louis, but which in fact turned out to be a setup by the angry inhabitants of
the entire area, who were, after two years of hell, not unnaturally pissed off
with the marauders’ continual depredations and red-hot for vengeance.
The marauders broke up. Literally. As they drove in they hit a wall of
firepower—much of it having been hoarded for years—which destroyed them, their
trucks, their jeeps, their women, their bags and traps. Teague, a man of
violence but no great brain, for once in his life acted smart by mingling with
the normals in the subsequent massacre and distinguished himself by gunning
down, with a close-range burst from a hand-held MG, the mutie leader, a guy with
a curious piglike snout and the manners to go with it. Actually Teague didn’t
merely gun him down but cut him in two—it was that close a range. And then blew
his head off. Just to be sure. Some days later some busybody with a sharp memory
accused him of being one of the band. There was an altercation that Teague won
by the simple expedient of icing his opponent with a pump-action. He said it was
in righteous rage at such a calumny, but there were those who thought he’d been
suspiciously overzealous in pulling his piece and began to get sulky with him.