Sunspot

Jak feinted right, then darted left, punctuating a 360-spin move with a blur of a back fist. The full power strike caught the nearest swampie in the middle of the face. He could feel cartilage crunch under his knuckles, but even though blood gushed from the broken nose and the eyelids momentarily fluttered shut, the blocklike head didn’t move.

That’s how strong her neck was.

As the others closed in for the chill, Jak scampered, as light as a spider, over a jumble of scorched and overturned wooden furniture, to the back of a fallen beam. The rafter lay at a thirty-degree angle, with one end on the dirt floor, the other resting atop the far wall. Like an Olympic gymnast, Jak balanced effortlessly on the six-inch-wide beam.

Hopping to avoid the sideways slash of a short sword, he snap-kicked the stumpy swordsman under the chin. It had as much effect as kicking a boulder. Jak reached up with both hands, caught the end of a loose overhead beam and hauled on it with his entire weight, making it pivot and swing down. As the swordsman lunged with his point, the crossmember landed with a solid thunk between his eyes, driving him backward onto his ass.

Determined to help her companion, Krysty tried to push up from the floor. As she did, the edge of the machete scraped deeper into her neck. The swampie put his boot sole on top of her head and firmly shoved her face back into the ash. At that moment Krysty could have closed her eyes and summoned her Gaia power, the mutie connection with the Earth spirit that gave her superhuman strength for brief periods of time. She could have used the Gaia energy to throw off both the beam and the swampie, but the aftermath of that psychic connection would have left her too drained to be of any use in a fight.

When she looked up again, Jak was running full-tilt along the top of the tumbledown wall. This while the swampies threw themselves at him, lunging with their weapons, trying to cut his legs out from under him. The higher Jak climbed along the wall, the less effective the swampies were. They couldn’t jump for beans.

Jak could have easily gotten away by dashing across the tops of the exposed rafters, but escape wasn’t on his agenda. Instead, he leaped from the wall, over the swampies’ heads, landing behind them. A development that astonished them. Before they could recover, Jak lashed out with a sidekick. It caught the swampie in front of him below the left ear, bouncing his forehead off the mud wall. Then the others attacked all at once.

While Jak danced and dervished, a white whirlwind in their midst, the swampies seemed to be moving in slow motion. He ducked and dodged their rain of blows, they absorbed his like stumpy punching bags. With fists and feet Jak pulped their faces, splitting their brows, closing their eyes, breaking out their yellow teeth. His knuckles and boots were smeared with blood and ash, but they kept on coming.

“Help us get the bastard!” Meconium shouted at the seated swampie.

The crushing weight on Krysty’s back suddenly eased as the mutie jumped up and threw himself and his machete into the melee.

Krysty crawled out from under the beam with difficulty, but without using her Gaia power. As she drew her blaster, the battle spilled out of the hut and rolled down the alley in the direction of the square.

When the skirmish burst into view, Mildred was helping J.B. and Ryan strap water barrels onto a wooden wheeled mule cart. Five swampies chased Jak out of the alley, screaming and waving their blades and clubs. The sec men raised their autorifles, aiming not at the newcomers but at the edges of the crowd, this to keep a wider battle from breaking out. With an AK pointed at her chest Mildred couldn’t draw and fire her ZKR 551. Likewise, Ryan and J.B. were forced to stand and watch.

Not that Jak needed any help.

He turned and attacked the swampies, splitting the pack in two. His feet and fists found their targets over and over again, smashing into already bruised and bloodied faces. Mildred had never seen him fight with such savage frenzy. She doubted that Jak even heard the crowd cheering him on.

The systematic beating and the victims’ inability to return any punishment took its toll. The sword and club strikes began to miss Jak not by inches but by feet; that’s how slowly they came. As the muties weakened, Jak isolated one of their number for special treatment. Pivoting as the swampie swung his hatchet, Jak slipped behind the bastard and clapped a forearm across his throat, seizing hold of his left shoulder. He yanked off the swampie’s red stocking cap, snatched a handful of coarse brown hair and, straining hard, bent back his head until his scraggly chin beard pointed skyward.

“No, Jak!” Ryan shouted from Mildred’s side. “You’ll never break that neck!”

But that wasn’t what Jak had in mind.

He shook a leaf-bladed knife from the sleeve of the arm that pinned the mutie’s chest, then jabbed one of the razor-sharp edges against the base of the hairy throat.

The swampie growled and curled back his lips, showing bloody fractured teeth as he struggled in vain to free himself.

“Time to die,” Jak said.

Over the cries of approval someone bellowed, “Korb!”

A tumor-head mutie in a bill cap stepped behind Jak and shouldered a pump shotgun, taking aim at the back of his skull.

The crowd parted on the far side of the square and Baron Malosh stormed over to Jak. “If you chill that swampie,” he said, “Korb will blow your head off. This is my army. You follow my orders. You fight who I tell you to and when I tell you to. Until then you stand down, mutie!”

“Not mutie!”

The edge of the knife drew a fine red line across the exposed throat. It was a shallow wound and only a couple of inches long, but it made blood spill over the swampie’s madly bobbing Adam’s apple. Jak pressed the blade below the hinge of the swampie’s jaw, poised to cut much, much deeper and from ear to ear.

“Nukin’ hell!” J.B. groaned.

At that moment the expression on the swampie’s face changed from incoherent fury to abject terror. He was certain he was going to die in the next few seconds. Then terror suddenly turned to horror as something fell out of his baggy pant leg and draped across his boot.

He had dropped a turd on his own left foot.

“Let go of the swampie,” the masked baron said.

When Jak didn’t immediately comply, Malosh moved out of the line of fire and the arc of splatter. “I’m going to count to three,” he said. “One…two…”

With a snarl of contempt, Jak shoved the befouled swampie away from him.

“Thank God,” Mildred said, allowing herself to breathe again.

“That was close,” J.B. added.

“Too damned close,” Ryan said.

The baron whirled on the tumor head holding the shotgun. “If you let trouble like this break out again, Korb,” he said, “you’re the one who’s gonna suffer.”

Mildred, J.B. and Ryan watched Krysty step from the crowd and hand Jak his Colt Python. Then the two companions were ushered back down the alley at blasterpoint. Jak walked with his back straight and his head high, having defended the purity of his genetics.

It was unclear from Mildred’s conversations with Jak whether he had ever actually seen another albino, but she knew it was highly unlikely that he had. Before Armageddon, the U.S. had a population of only about eighteen thousand albinos. Back in the glory days of civilization, their life expectancy was normal. In a cruel and brutal new world, however, the physical deficits that accompanied their condition greatly lessened the chances of survival.

If Jak Lauren had no idea how much he differed from a prenukecaust albino, a late twentieth-century medical doctor and whitecoat like Mildred Wyeth knew exactly. The research of her peers had shown that albinism in humans was the result of defective genes on one or more of the six chromosomes that controlled production of the pigment melanin, which was key to normal development of eyes, skin and eye-brain nerve pathways. Aside from pale skin and hair, the genetic condition caused very poor eyesight and extreme skin sensitivity to sun. Human albino eyes were either blue-gray or light brown in color. Any reddish or pinkish cast was temporary, caused by light striking the iris at a certain angle, like the “red eye” effect in a flash photograph.

Mildred had never seen Jak wear corrective lenses; his vision was perfect near and far. He had never worn a hat or special clothing to protect his white skin from sunburn, which he never seemed to get. His eyes were ruby-red all the time, like a lab rat.

Jak could proclaim himself “Not mutie!” until the hellscape froze over, but he didn’t know anything about genetics, or metabolic pathways, or conventional albinism. In point of fact, Mildred was confident that no creature like him had existed before nukeday.

In a world where albinos were virtually unknown, where any sort of physical oddity was ascribed to the curse of mutated genes, it wasn’t surprising that Jak was saddled with the mutie label at almost every turn.

She had never told him—or any of the others—how well the label fit. Passing on that information served no good purpose in her view. Besides, Mildred found the whole concept of “pure norm genes” ridiculous. Science and reason told her that post-apocalypse, everyone and everything was a little bit mutie, thanks to cumulative exposure to the increased background radiation. Her own DNA had undoubtedly suffered permanent damage during the companions’ imprisonment at ground zero on the Slake City nukeglass massif. That didn’t worry her much, either. A century ago, when she was still a medical student, she’d read the statistics on the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A-bomb victims with far higher radiation doses than hers lived for many decades before fatal cancers finally appeared. Based on the level of violence and hardship in the hellscape, the chances were good that she wasn’t going to live long enough to die of cancer, anyway.

After all the wags were loaded, Malosh had his troops line up the Redbone conscripts. The masked baron then walked down the row and quickly selected three healthy young men and three healthy young women, apparently at random.

“You six will stay behind,” he informed them. “I have left you and the others enough food and water to survive. As you rebuild your ville, remember my mercy.”

While the lucky half dozen hurried to join the very old and very young at the doorways of the empty huts, the baron mounted his horse and led the mass exit from Redbone.

Only Malosh’s officers rode, either on horseback or in the carts. Everyone else walked down the zigzag path to the fields below. The column of nearly three hundred was a large force by Deathlands standards, and it was segregated by genetics and military function.

“Where the rad blazes are we headed?” J.B. asked the gaunt fighter walking beside him.

“Sunspot ville,” the man said. “It’s a long march due south. At least two, mebbe three days.”

“What happens when we get there?” Mildred asked, hoping against hope for some good news.

There was none.