“You’d like a few of those apples, too, wouldn’t you, Doc?” Mildred chided.
“Look there,” Krysty said, pointing in the direction they had come.
Ryan turned and saw a couple of muties behind them several hundred yards down the road, as if they’d been following the group. After they’d stopped, the muties moved off the asphalt and were approaching the northern corner of the fence, staring at the fruit on the other side through the heavy steel weave. Then the first mutie suddenly grabbed the fence and started to climb.
“Nothing happen,” Jak said, as the companions friends moved toward the muties for a closer look.
The second mutie scrambled up the fence behind the first, but when they were both halfway to the top, Ryan suddenly heard a dull mechanical thrum slowly rising in volume.
The fence was being charged with electricity.
When the current reached them, the mutant’s bodies jerked and spasmed wildly, every one of their muscles twitching and writhing uncontrollably. The air was tinged with the sweet and pungent odor of burning flesh and the sound of sizzling meat. Orange-and-blue flames began to shoot out from the hands and feet of the muties, as well as from their other body parts that came in contact with the fence. The muties’ hair and eyebrows burned away like flash powder, the ashes falling to the ground like dirty snow.
“Why don’t they just let go?” Dean asked.
“Can’t,” Mildred replied. “Their muscles are in total spasm. They can’t control them to release their hold on the fence.”
And then the hum suddenly stopped. The muties fell limp against the fence, their burned hands and feet curled around the steel mesh, refusing to let go. Their flesh had developed a hard outer shell and was producing tendrils of acrid gray smoke.
But the muties were still alive. They were gasping for air and groaning in pain, helpless to free themselves from their agonizingly slow death.
“It’s a terrible way to be chilled,” Mildred commented. “The electricity isn’t even the thing that kills you. It paralyzes your heart, shuts off your breathing and boils the fat under your skin so you’re cooked to death from the inside out.”
It was a horrible way to die.
“Maybe they can turn the power on at will,” Mildred suggested. “And at different sections of the fence, wherever it’s needed.”
“Or it’s governed by motion sensors, turning on the fence whenever motion’s detected.”
“Which may or may not mean that someone knows we’re here, people,” Ryan said, knowing he’d just put the friends on triple alert. “But let’s just continue on as if we’ve seen nothing new here.”
The companions began to move.
The muties continued to smolder on the fence.
FARTHER ALONG, the friends saw their first sec man patrolling the inside of the compound. He was armed with a longblaster, and wore a good pair of boots. Behind the sec man, about thirty people worked a row of trees, pulling weeds, trimming branches and picking fruit. They all looked to be healthy and well fed. A few of the women looked to be pregnant, but they were still able to help with the farm work.
Within a few moments of the friends’ appearance, the first sec man was joined by a second, who came riding up in a small white wag that had an engine that ran without making a sound. There was a heavy blaster set up on a swivel mount on the back of the wag that gave the weapon a 360-degree radius of fire.
The first sec man waved to the friends as they walked along the outside of the fence. Ryan returned the wave, and the others followed suit. But while the first sec man remained where he was overseeing the workers, the second sec man in the white miniwag matched their pace, following them all the way to the farm’s front gate.
“Fox Farm,” Mildred read the sign over the double steel gate that served as the farm’s front entrance. There was a kiosk just inside the gate where a sec man was on duty. The mobile sec man pulled up to the gate. He was joined by several others, all carrying blasters of different makes and models, but presumably all in good working order and fully loaded.