amoral mentality that in Tanner’s Victorian Era had been ascribed to “primitive” peoples in distant lands, and to the criminally insane.
Alone in a small boat in such company, Doc felt considerable unease, himself. His ebony sword stick leaned against the thwart, its silver lion’s-head handle pressing into the side of one of his tall, cracked leather boots. Under his black frock coat hung a massive, holstered black-powder pistol. The LeMat represented a high point in Civil War weapons technology—two sidearms in one. A .63-caliber, single-shot scattergun barrel was married to a 9-shot .44-caliber revolver. Properly angled from the rowboat’s bow, the LeMat’s “blue whistler” barrel could incapacitate the entire crew and tillerman in one horrendous, stem to stern blast.
Despite the undeniable appeal of that course of action, Doc put it out of his mind. When it came to evil, these were minnows.
The man rowing on the thwart in front of him had four sections of black PVC pipe strapped to his back. Connected in a crude rope frame, the pipes were two feet long, four inches in diameter, and securely capped at both ends. Air holes had been drilled along the sides every few inches. Leaning over the gunwhale a little, Doc managed to catch sight of the side of his face. It was painted a flat white from forehead to neck, ear to ear. A grizzled short beard stuck through the crusted pigment. Where the paint had flaked off, Tanner could see tiny, scattered whorls of red. It appeared the man had taken a load of birdshot full in the face.
Looking more closely at the plastic pipes, Doc saw clustered yellowish feet sticking through the air holes.
Crisp, hairy, insect feet.
“For lack of a proper name, we call them scagworms,” said the black man rowing beside him. He was the same height as Doc, but the dreadlocks gathered on top of his head, sprouting up like the jutting leaves of a great pineapple, gave him another eighteen inches. He had a hugely muscled back and corded neck. He, too, wore a rack of PVC pipes.
“With a plethora of appendages, it would seem,” Doc remarked. “Pray tell, precisely how many creatures am I looking at?”
“One organism per tube,” the black man said.
“I am unfamiliar with the species,” Doc admitted.
The face-painted man chimed in over his shoulder, “So is everyone else. That’s why they’re worth large jack.”
“All we know about scagworms we learned the hard way,” the black man said. “They’re armored, bullet-headed, venomous, ill-tempered, oversize mutie millipedes. When we keep them head down and in the dark, it puts them right to sleep. They don’t seem to need food or water. Just air.”
“Inversion and light deprivation induces a state of hibernation,” Doc speculated.
“Logic would so indicate.”
The old man turned to stare at his seatmate. Logic—or even a pretense to same—rarely showed its face among the gaudy porch crowd. The black wild man wore a big, friendly smile, which also seemed a bit odd.
“That isn’t the only reason we carry them butt-up,” said the painted man. “Ugly mothers shit all over the place when they’re the other way around.”
Doc reached over and tapped one of the tubes.
And was rewarded by a shrill hiss and the rasp of a thousand clawed feet.
“That’s not a good idea,” the black man said. “They get testy when you wake them up.”
“Are they fully grown?” Doc said.
“We’re pretty sure these are just babies,” the black man said. “We found an untended nest in an arroyo south of Phoenix. Snatched up a few before mama worm got back.”
“How large do they get?”
“We didn’t stick around to find out. The entrance to the nest was nearly three feet in diameter.”
Tanner noted that both men wore desert camou BDU pants rimed with dirt and patched at the knees with duct tape. Their weapons—M-16 1-A rifles and military-issue Beretta handblasters—were of the same vintage and fine condition, which was unusual. In Deathlands, armament was almost always catch as catch can, a jumble of calibers and blaster types. They had either stumbled onto a well-stocked redoubt or they had traded away something very valuable.
“You two are mutie hunters,” Doc said, dipping in his oar.
The black man nodded.
Of all the blackheart professions in the hellscape, mutie hunter was one of the most profitable, and the most loathesome. It involved supplying freaks to fill barons’ mutie zoos and Deathlands’ traveling carnies. Seeing and ridiculing something obviously mutated made the “norms” feel more “normal,” more secure in the purity of their own genetic makeup. The collection process required kidnapping not just the clearly inhuman, like scagworm larvae, but the nearly human. The two-legged. The one-headed. The scaled. The dwarfed. The misshapen. Beings that could think and talk. And love. If the unlucky parents objected to losing their children, they were beaten senseless or chilled. Generally speaking, mutie hunters targeted the very young because they were more easily controlled and transported. That meant the victims would spend their entire lives behind bars.
“We were in the middle of selling our worms to a zoo master when we heard about the bounty being paid for extra-freaky freaks,” the black man said.
“To what end?”
“Don’t know. We changed our plans in a hurry, though.”
“For all we care, Magus can roast them over a charcoal grill,” said the man sitting in front. “Long as we get our jack.”
“You didn’t have to leave shore to do that,” Doc said. “You could have sold the worms on the dock.”
“For less than half of what they’re worth,” the black man said. “Besides, we want to find out what Steel Eyes has got going on down south. Figure it could be a gold mine for enterprising types like us. What about you? You got a specialty?”
“I’m just a mercie,” Doc said. “In search of some new scenery and paying work.”
“Better keep your eyes open, mercie, and your blaster in reach,” the black man said.
The rowboat slowly approached the moored ship. The frigate was more than 150 feet long. It had three masts, and the main mast was at least eighty feet tall. Its riveted iron hull had been painted and repainted in thick layers of white. Rust streaks ran from the scuppers, down the sides, like bloodstains. As they rounded the ship, they could read the name emblazoned on its battered stern: Taniwha tea .
“What kind of tea is that?” one of the few literate rowers asked.
“Not tea,” the tillerman growled back at him. “Tee-ahh. Taniwha tee-ahh .” He put his palm on the machete handle, daring someone to crack wise. “She is my mother.”
The black man leaned over to Doc and whispered, “It’s in the Maori language. It means white monster.”
Chapter Three
As J. B. Dix climbed the rope ladder to the ship’s gangway, the
