Sunspot

“What makes you think we ever left them?” Mildred said.

Baron Malosh paced his chestnut horse back and forth in front of the displayed corpses. When the last of his men had entered the square, he reined in the stallion. Reaching down behind his knee, he unscabbarded a Kalashnikov assault rifle, aimed it at the sky and fired off a full-auto burst. A handful of Redbone’s survivors looked up at the baron with desperate dread, the rest looked only at their boot tops.

“I’m offering you Redbone folk a choice,” Malosh shouted. “Join my army and fight beside me. It’s a hard and dangerous life, but it’s profitable, too. There’s booty to be had and plenty of food to eat.” He pointed the autorifle at a heap of skinny, sharpened poles on the ground behind him. “Join me willingly and share in the spoils of war, or I will keep stretching buttholes until I run out of stakes.”

An easy decision for the defeated, a bullet or a saber thrust at some future date being preferable to imminent skewering.

“Form a line, then!” the baron cried. “Do it now!” As his mercies jabbed and shoved the outnumbered captives into a ragged column, he dismounted, handing the reins to a swampie.

The companions closed ranks with Krysty and Jak in front, the swineherds next, then Doc, J.B., Mildred and Ryan. The one-eyed man stepped to the side so he could watch what was going on at the head of the line. Malosh took only a moment to size up the first person before impatiently waving him to the right, where soldiers waited. The fit-looking young man moved off, presumably to join the fighters.

Zombielike, the line of volunteers advanced. Malosh made quick selections, sending the able-bodied young to the right, the middle-aged but still mobile to the left along with the older children. The elderly and the children under the age of seven he waved back to the doorways of the ramshackle huts. Thus mothers and their breastfeeding babies were separated, the former bound for war, the latter to starve.

This way and that the gloved hand motioned, dividing warriors from cannon fodder, and cannon fodder from those he deemed unfit to even serve as human shields.

As the companions approached Malosh, it became clear that he had yet another pigeonhole. A genetic one. The baron started to wave Krysty to the right, toward the norm warriors, but caught himself. He bent closer and examined the springy coils of her red hair. When he reached out, the prehensile tendrils wriggled away from his touch.

“You hide your rad-tainted blood well,” Malosh said. “You almost passed for norm. Of course, almost doesn’t count.” He hooked a thumb over his shoulder at the swampies clustered behind the well. “Join your fellow muties,” he told her.

Krysty didn’t argue with the baron. She wasn’t ashamed of her heritage. She walked by him with her head held high.

Malosh took one look at Jak’s dead-white skin and ruby-red eyes and said, “You, too, mutie.”

“Not mutie!” Jak snarled at the man in the leather mask.

“And my mother wasn’t a two-bit whore,” Malosh said amiably.

“I purebred albino!”

Jak’s explosive protest cracked up the sec men of Malosh, both norm and mutie. Even some of the Redbone folk managed to grin.

The baron wasn’t interested in a genealogical debate; he was the sole arbiter of genetic purity. He gestured with his thumb again. “That way, mutie boy, or you croak on the spike.”

Jak didn’t budge a millimeter. In the Deathlands, being branded a “mutie” was the worst insult imaginable.

“Pride goeth before a fall,” Doc quoted.

“Misplaced pride in this case,” Mildred said cryptically.

“Dark night, what’s Jak doing?” J.B. said. “He’s not careful, he’s gonna get himself chilled.”

“Come on, Jak,” Krysty urged from beside the well. “Come over here. Don’t do this. Don’t die for nothing.”

“Better listen to your long-legged friend there,” Malosh said. “She’s trying to save you a big pain in the ass.”

It wasn’t the first time a dire strategic situation had demanded personal sacrifice from Jak Lauren. As distasteful as this particular sacrifice was, he turned without another word and started walking toward Krysty and the squad of genetic misfits.

The norm fighters didn’t let him off that easy. They laughed, catcalled and mimicked the albino in a whining, singsong chant.

“Not mutie!”

“Not mutie!”

“Not mutie!”

Why Malosh was isolating the mutie element was obvious to any resident of the hellscape over the age of three. Norms wouldn’t fight alongside muties because they distrusted and feared them. For the same reasons, muties didn’t like taking their marching orders from norms. Based on past bloodbaths, both sides were justified in these beliefs.

As it turned out, Young Crad and Bezoar didn’t pass Malosh’s muster, either. They were too slow of brain and foot, respectively. The baron ordered the pair over with the cannon fodder.

When Doc stepped up next, ebony walking stick in hand, Malosh immediately pointed him in the opposite direction. “Go back to the huts,” he said.

“The huts?” Tanner said incredulously. “You have made a grave error, sir.”

“No mistake, old man. You belong with the other diaper-wearers, the doddering geezers and the babies.”

Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner was a courageous man and totally devoted to his friends. No way would he stay behind while they faced death.

“I assure you, sir, I am not ready for a rocking chair,” Doc said, unsheathing the rapier blade of his swordstick and with its razor point cutting a wicked S in the air an inch from the baron’s face.

Before he could retract it, in a blur almost too fast to follow, Malosh grabbed hold of the blade, trapping it in his fist.

Doc threw his full weight against the baron’s grip but couldn’t pull the rapier free or make its edge slice through the man’s hand.

“Kevlar glove,” Mildred said to Ryan over her shoulder.

When Malosh suddenly let go, Doc fell off balance and landed hard on his bony backside.

“Follow the dimmie and the gimp,” the baron said, motioning him toward the ranks of the human shields. “You just signed your own death warrant, old man.”

Ryan watched stoically as the baron consigned Mildred and J.B. to the norm fighters, but deep down his guts were churning. With the companions split up among the three separate units, their chances of success looked even more bleak.

As Ryan stepped forward, Malosh looked him straight in the eye, then said, “From the way you stare back at me with that blue peeper of yours, I’d say you’re a coldheart, chill-for-pay man. A mercie by trade. If you serve me well, mercie, I guarantee you will prosper. If you betray me, I will hunt you down and chill you triple ugly.”

Ryan shrugged.

“I’m wasting my breath,” the baron said. “Dying hard doesn’t scare a man like you, does it?”

“Fear only moves folks so far,” Ryan replied. “And it can push from more than one direction. Once you get this kidnapped crew into battle, you lose your monopoly on death threats. What makes you think you can count on me or any of the others when the lead starts flying?”

“The joy of doing unto others as was done to you,” Malosh said. “It’s what makes the world go around.”

Chapter Four

Under the gruesome banner of its hoisted dead, Redbone ville was sacked to the bare walls. Malosh’s army mainly supervised the work. Under its blasters, the ville folk were forced to loot their own homes. Some sobbed brokenly as they sorted and piled their worldly goods in the square—ammunition, blasters, cookware and trade items—but most moved in a trance of disbelief. The hilltop town’s food caches were also plundered, yielding up bags of grain, beans, potatoes; smoked joints of meat and barrels of sweet water. This booty was packed onto carts drawn by liberated horses and mules.

As always, the mutie contingent got the brown end of the stick.

Krysty, Jak, the betumored, the extra-limbed and the swampies were given the task of searching the knot of still-smoldering huts where Redbone fighters had made their last stand and removing anything of value that remained. The swampies attacked the job with great enthusiasm. Like a pack of tailless rats, the swampies rooted through the collapsed structures, pulling aside charred rafters, crawling on hands and knees into small, extremely hot spaces. For them, it was a treasure hunt.