Ryan turned and saw Mildred lower her blaster.
A little embarrassed by being taken unawares, Doc got to his feet, unsheathed his sword and was about to run the mutie through when Jak’s voice stopped him.
“More.”
Ryan looked across the field toward the nearby stand of trees and could see that there were at least half a dozen more of the hungry muties ambling toward them. They were all bone thin, filthy dirty and naked except for a flap of material around their midsections. They moved low to the ground, like spiders, hidden by the grass, but betrayed by it as their bodies pushed the tall grass under and left a trail across the field that any scout could follow.
“Hold your fire!” Ryan ordered. He had his blaster leveled, but he wasn’t sure that the muties were going to try what the first one had. And as he watched, his instincts turned out to be right. Instead of attacking the members of the group, the half-dozen muties crawled up to their dead brother and immediately set into its body with their teeth and hands. In minutes they were feeding wildly on the carcass, ripping into its flesh and muscles with all the savagery of a pack of starving wolves.
“Cannies,” Ryan muttered.
“And crazed ones to boot,” Mildred offered.
“Looks like they’ll be busy for a while,” Ryan said.
“So which way do we go?” J.B. asked.
“Feel anything, lover?” Ryan asked Krysty.
The fiery-headed woman closed her eyes and concentrated for a moment, trying to see if she could sense any nearby danger. “Can’t feel anything at all.”
“Okay, then, let’s head up that rise to get the lay of the land. I’ll take point, then Krysty, Jak, Dean, Doc and Mildred. J.B., you cover the rear. Okay, people, let’s go.”
Chapter Two
There was fear in her eyes, and Baron Franz Fox liked it. She was terrified of him, afraid of what he might do to her or what he might give others permission to do to her.
“It’s been five months since your last,” Baron Fox said softly. It was a statement, but both the baron and the woman knew it was intended more as a question. He placed his hands together, the fingertips pressing against each other. “Well, I’m waiting.”
The woman was in her early forties. She was heavy-set, especially in her hips, and her breasts sagged, which was to be expected after giving birth to five children in the past forty-eight months. She was dressed in a thin white T-shirt that left her big dark nipples clearly visible through the worn cotton fabric. She also wore a pair of old denim shorts and pair of fairly new black Western boots, her reward for delivering a set of twins a couple of terms back. The outfit would have looked good on a woman half her age, but as it was, the clothes looked a lot like the woman wearing them—old, tired and wornout.
“I don’t know what’s wrong,” she said, her voice a little breathless and tinged with fear. “I’ve been rutting almost every night.”
“With who?” the baron asked, walking the length of his office before turning to pace back across the same track of plush red shag. His burgundy bedroom slippers had worn a path in the carpet from years of pacing. When she didn’t answer his question, he came to a stop in front of her and put a hand under her chin. He lifted her head up so that she would have to look him in the eyes when she answered the question. “With who?”
“Jon,” she replied. “Jonathan Wyndam.”
“The entire time?”
She tried to nod, but the baron held her head firmly in place.
“Has he sired with anyone else in the past five months?” Fox asked his number-one man, Norman Bauer, who was standing quietly off to the side, observing. Bauer was an accountant by trade, and his ability to handle numbers and other statistics had made him invaluable in the successful operation of Fox Farm.
Bauer opened his ledger, leafed back and forth until he came to the page listing Jonathan Wyndam’s breeding history. “According to the ledger,” Bauer said, “Wyndam’s sired fifteen in the past two years—all norms—but none in the past five months. Either Wyndam has gone sterile, or the bitch is barren.”