The baron looked around for the child but didn’t see it.
When he closed the door behind him, the healer jumped and looked over at him, his face pale and his eyes wide and full of fear. As the baron moved closer, he noticed the healer looking even more aged and haggard than he remembered.
“Is she all right?” the baron asked in a whisper. The healer nodded. “Your wife is resting. She will recover in a very short time.”
“And what of the child?”
“It is resting, as well…in the bassinet over there.” He pointed to a small wooden cradle made of tree branches and lined with straw.
The baron looked at the healer for a long time, knowing something wasn’t right. If the child was doing well, the healer would be overjoyed, and his wife would be holding the child to her breast, even in her current state of exhaustion. And then there was the word the healer had used. It was resting, he’d said. Not he or she, but it. Something was definitely wrong. “Can I see—” he wondered which word to use “—it?”
“Perhaps it might be best if—”
“I said, can I see it?” the baron said, much more forceful this time.
Gayle stirred at the sound of her husband’s voice. “Is that you, love?” she asked.
The healer knew better than to defy the baron’s wishes a second time. “Of course.” He got up and walked over to the bassinet, reached into the cradle and took out the bundled child, wrapped tightly in a scarlet blanket.
He handed the bundle to the baron. Baron Reichel found it awkward to hold the bundle properly, but he eventually managed a firm but gentle grasp. He hadn’t held all that many babies in his lifetime, but this child felt different from the ones he’d held before. Its body seemed hard and bony, wrong somehow.
The healer turned away, taking up a position near the baron’s wife.
Baron Reichel pulled aside the blanket and looked upon an abomination.
The child’s eyes were open wide, shining black and glassy in the dim light of the room. There were hard nubs of bones along the crown of its head, almost as if it were the offspring of some mutie lizard.
The baron swallowed, his body shuddering in shock. He pulled the blanket farther aside and saw that the child’s two arms were on the right side of its body and a leg was where the other arm should be. A second leg was positioned in the center of the lower portion of the trunk, looking much like a tail.
Baron Reichel felt his knees go weak and his heart begin to pound in his throat, choking him.
This was no child of his.
It was a child of the rad-blasted Deathlands.
He took another glance at the creature and grimaced.
It wasn’t even a child.
It was a monster.
He wrapped it back in the blanket and held it at arm’s length.
“Have you seen him?” Gayle asked, her voice soft yet proud. “Is he beautiful?”
“Yes, very,” the baron said, taking the child out of the room.
“Where are you going with him?”
Her words fell on deaf ears, fading into silence.
Once he was out in the hall, the baron closed the door behind him and pulled his knife from its scabbard.
The thing was grunting in his arms, sounding more like a pig than a child. He placed the blade of his knife under the creature’s chin, drawing it evenly across its throat.
Blood splattered onto the floor like rain.
Moments later, all was quiet.
AN HOUR LATER the baron, healer and Reichel ville’s sec chief met in the ville’s main square. The day was warm, but there seemed to be a definite chill in the air. The baron had called the meeting because it was obvious that something had to be done about the rash of recent mutie births in the ville. It was one thing when the residents of the ville were having mutie offspring, but now that it had happened to the baron, the problem had suddenly come to the fore.
Not only was the ville slowly dying off with no young blood to replace the old, but the baron was growing old, as well, and he was still without a son, or even a daughter, to one day take his place. If he didn’t have a norm child soon he would grow too old to hold on to the seat of power long enough for one of his offspring to become the new baron. If his wife couldn’t deliver him an heir, he’d eventually be killed by an ambitious sec man.