struggling up a slope that constantly shifted underfoot, he leaned into the wind. From the belly of a line of black clouds to the northwest, lightning licked down at distant mountaintops. Thunder rumbled. In perhaps two hours, three at most, the storm would be hard upon them, turning Nuevaville’s dirt roads to mire and spilling the river over its banks.
Looming above him were the snaggle-tooth pinnacles of the Organ Mountains. With the wind to his back, he followed a well-worn path along the base of the spires. It led to a broad cave in the bedrock, about ten feet high at its tallest, and five times that wide across. Inside the low opening were crude structures built of mud-and-straw bricks. From glassless windows and doorless doorways, rows of faces peered out at him, luminously pale, as round as full moons. He smelled burning excrement, which the cave dwellers dried and used as fuel for heat and for cooking. The filthy hands of three generations of inbred doomies directed him toward the stone hut that stood a few hundred feet down-slope.
As was the custom, Baron Haldane left his blaster outside the rude sanctuary. He unslung his Remington Model 1100 12-gauge autoloader. Its barrel and magazine were chopped down to the end of the forestock, its rearstock cut off behind the pistol grip. After he carefully set the truncated, hellacious scattergun on the ground, he pushed aside the brown polyester blanket that covered the hut’s doorway, ducking his head to enter. As he did, he was greeted by an explosion of snorting laughter.
Dim light streamed into the structure through uncountable cracks in the walls. There was no fire laid on the floor, nor candles lit for fear of igniting the dizzyingly sweet, flammable vapors concentrated therein. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, over the wind sighing through holes in the masonry, the baron heard a gurgling sound. It was from the spring that welled up from a deep fissure in the bedrock.
On a tripod chair positioned directly over the stone vent, enveloped in lighter-than-air petrochemical perfume, sat the oracle. The eighty-five-pound doomie’s sole garment was a diaper made of a once-white T-shirt. He sat with eyes tightly closed, a halo of wispy white hair crowned his knobby skull. Pale skin like parchment hung in folds from under chin and arms. Drooped down his belly were flapjack mammalia, circlets of white hair sprouted around the wrinkled aureolas. The doomie’s chest heaved as he sucked in and held lungfuls of the strange gases, dosing himself for the foretelling.
There was no seat for visitors in the close confines of the hut. Haldane stood slightly bent over to keep the top of his head from bumping into the crust of chemical deposits on the wooden rafters.
“You know why I have come?” the baron asked.
The doomie stifled a giggle by clamping a hand hard over his mouth. He snorted and honked as he tried to control himself. The battle lasted only a second or two. Unable to maintain his composure, he fell into a fit of laughter that set his pendulous dugs flip-flopping.
When the soothsayer opened his eyes, they were alarmingly bloodshot. “A dark deed looms,” he said merrily.
“Yes, it does,” Haldane said.
“The darkest of dark-dark deeds,” the oracle stated. “The noble baron’s hands will drip with the blood of slaughtered innocents.”
Haldane nodded at the grinning doomie.
“You want to know if there’s a less brutal way to accomplish the end you desire,” the soothsayer said. “Some other possible strategy, some sequence of events you may have overlooked.”
“That’s what I want you to tell me,” Haldane said. “Do I have to use the terrible weapon I’ve been offered?”
The doomie shut his eyes and screwed up his face, huffing in and out to force down more of the fumes.
Though all members of the doomie race had the power to see into the future, the rock spring’s sweet gas greatly stimulated and focused their mutie supersense. It also made them very, very happy. Too much perfume and they swallowed their own tongues and strangled to death.
Most of Haldane’s norm subjects believed that the Creator spoke to them through the oracles of the hut. They believed that true future sight, unknown before nukeday, was a kind of compensatory gift, God’s way of saying “I’m sorry for rogering your world so soundly.” Ironically, these chosen vessels of the Supreme Being were judged unfit to reside in Nuevaville proper. When not engaged in unraveling the mysteries of the future, they were seen as filthy, moronic creatures of unspeakable habits. They were kept apart from those they served so tirelessly, in what amounted to a mountaintop doomie zoo.
The soothsayer huffed until his scrunched-up face turned dark and his limbs began to jerk spasmodically. After many minutes passed he opened his eyes and said, “I have looked into your future, Baron. I have seen the struggles ahead. For you there is no other path.”
It was not the answer Haldane wanted to hear.
No baron of the hellscape could be shy about chilling, about ordering others to do it, or doing the deed personally, if it came to that. In Haldane’s case, chilling had always been in the service of freedom or the dispensation of justice. The bands of coldhearts and muties that threatened his people and their livelihood deserved and received the ultimate punishment. Haldane had always seen himself—and had been seen by his subjects—as a defender and a shepherd, both wise and fair.
The course of action that lay before him was wise, but hardly fair.
In target, in scale and scope, in moral consequences, this chilling was different. Even by Deathlands’s standards it was the act of a depraved, unfeeling butcher.
“There will be so much death,” he said.
“You alone have the power to put an end to the cycle of terror,” the oracle countered. “You can prevent the deaths of those you hold dear, for decades to come.”
“I am not a mass chiller,” Haldane said. “I am not a monster. I am a protector. I fight monsters.”
“I have been shown what will be, Baron. You have no choice in the matter. You will put your beliefs aside to advance the greater good. You will become what you hate to achieve lasting peace and security for your people. And after you do this vile deed, I guarantee that history will understand, and forgive you for the excess. History is written by the survivors, and rewritten by their offspring. They will call you a military genius and hail you as the glorious saviour of your lands. A leader with the courage and the vision to decisively act, and thereby change the fate of this barony forever.”
When the baron said nothing in reply, the oracle twisted the metaphysical dagger he held, the dagger of premonition. “If you do not act, Baron Haldane, be assured that Malosh will,” he said. “What you so dread doing to others will be done to you and yours. Nuevaville will become a graveyard. This barony will be turned to dust and scattered to the winds.”
With those awful words ringing in his ears, Haldane staggered out of the hut. Though fumble-fingered from the fumes he’d inhaled, he managed to scoop up the Remington 1100. He caught himself as he reached out to push aside the holed-out blanket. At that moment he wanted nothing more than to blow the oracle apart with high-brass buckshot. But in his heart he knew that chilling the messenger wouldn’t do any good.
An oracle had predicted the fall of his predecessor, Baron Clagg, who had responded to the bad news by dragging the helpless doomie to the nearest cliff and throwing him off, headfirst. Clagg had then tried to change his fate by all means possible, but everything he had done only served to speed the grisly end that had been described to him. Old Clagg had been a typical Deathlands baron: shortsighted, cruel, despotic. His insatiable greed
