Which was why an advance scouting party had been sent ahead.
J.B. wondered how they were faring. Obviously, there was no trouble as they hadn’t doubled back with a warning. But they had been in the heat a whole lot longer.
“EASY ON THE WATER, Whitey. We need it a lot more than you.”
“Why?”
” ‘Cause there’s a whole lot more of us.”
Ant creased up with laughter, Dee cackling and shaking his head, dreadlocks flying in the arid air.
“Man, you are one stupe mother,” he gasped between the laughter. “Any fool knows that us brothers got the skin for this rad-heat weather. Shit, we already got tans. That was Mama’s gift to us.”
“Will you two shut the fuck up?” Blake yelled. “We’re supposed to be an advance scouting party, and here we are making enough fuckin’ noise to drown out a gaudy house.”
“So who’s yelling, man?” Ant asked in a mocking soft tone.
Blake narrowed his eyes. “They should have left you guys back at Raw. You’re still jolted out of your fuckin’ skulls.”
Dee smiled, his eyes sparkling with the chemical high. “True, my friend, true. But that’s kind of good in a way, you know? It means we won’t give a fuck if some mutie son of a bitch takes our legs away. Just keep fighting.”
Jak sealed the canteen of water and returned it to the pouch that was slung around his waist. Despite the heat, he had kept on his camou jacket, protecting his white skin as much as possible from the searing sun. One of the problems of his albino heritage was that he burned easily, and in the cancerous sun of a postnuke atmosphere, he had to be careful. Sunstroke was a minor thing, but it could get you chilled if you weren’t one hundred percent focused during a firefight. For the twins, it wasn’t a problem. Their dark skins were better adapted than Jak’s to the sun, the extra pigment giving them that fraction more protection. As for Blake, his wizened and weathered brown skin was a testament to the number of patrols he had undertaken in the sun.
The advance scouting party was four strong. Harvey had picked Ant and Dee because they survived better in the sun, and because they were junkheads who were still high on jolt. The powerful narcotic had a tendency to affect people in different ways, perhaps because of the different and minute mutations that had followed the period of skydark. In the case of the dreadlocked twins, it acted as a stimulant to their senses, and dulled their perception of danger. They were ready to fight.
Blake was one of Harvey’s senior men. He had survived longer than anyone except the sec chief himself, and had spent a long time in the desert regions. He was the obvious party leader.
It was Blake who had insisted that Jak come with them. His admiration for Jak’s fighting skills, and the bond that had formed, told the experienced sec man that Jak’s instincts, along with his own experience, would act as a perfect foil for the twins’ jolt-enduced recklessness. The albino, trusting the sec man’s judgment, had agreed.
The scouting party had set out with forty-five minutes head start on the rest of the war party. That was enough time for them to get a good lead, but not so long that they would be out of reach should they discover anything.
The journey out through the forest had been uneventful. The twins were high, and chattered incessantly, yielding little to Blake’s pleas for them to keep the noise down. He and Jak said little, trying to block out the prattle of the twins and try to discern any sounds from the undergrowth that may speak of a mutie raid. It wasn’t an immediate worry, but there was a chance that Sunchild had rallied his people immediately on his return, and was planning yet another, larger retaliatory raid. There was also the chance of a random mutie party in search of sacrifices. If they chanced on the advance scout party and the noise the twins were making acted as enough cover, then the scouts wouldn’t even make it out of the forest.