pivoted away, the cannie’s filthy cotton shirt and matted chest hair burst into flames. Dead on his feet, he dropped to his knees, then crashed in a cloud of dust at her boot tops.
With the ZKR aimed at the ceiling, she broke open the cylinder and flicked out the smoking empties. Muzzle down, her feet braced wide apart, her steady, deft fingers fitted the speedloader in place and twisted the cartridge release.
She felt a rush of breeze on her neck as the blanket over the entrance whipped aside. In the next instant, something heavy slammed into the back of her head. Her knees buckled under her. Everything went black. She didn’t feel the ground when it flew up and hit her in the face.
WHEN MILDRED OPENED her eyes, the world spun madly around her. She had a splitting headache. She tried to focus and was overcome by a wave of nausea. Shutting her eyes, she leaned back against what felt like a rough wooden post. It was wedged tightly between the cave floor and ceiling. Her wrists were lashed around the post behind her; her ankles laced to its base. The bonds were skillfully tied. There was no wiggle room, and no stretch whatsoever.
As she waited for the vertigo to pass, she recalled the seconds prior to her blackout. She had been poleaxed from behind, and that was the source of her throbbing headache.
Opening her eyes again, she looked up into a gaunt, unshaven face.
At that moment she realized that a possible skull fracture was the least of her worries.
The cannie’s right cheek was marred by a burn scar, a swathe of shiny, pink, pockmarked skin where whiskers no longer grew. To Mildred, it looked like a near-miss from a close-range black-powder discharge. A victim fighting for his or her life had failed to hit the point-blank ten-ring. The cannie had no eyebrow or eyelashes on that side. His right eyelid was shriveled to nothing and the eyeball was milky-white, like a hardboiled egg, cooked in its socket by a flash of Pyrodex. The bastard’s breath stunk like a three-week-old corpse.
But that wasn’t the worst of it.
Stalactites of gray hung glistening from both his nostrils. The thick discharge had smeared and crusted like a snail trail through the dark stubble that covered his upper lip and chin. He was infected with the scourge of Deathland’s cannibal clans, a contagious, blood-born, inevitably fatal disease known far and wide as “the oozies.”
Mildred looked past him. There were two more cannies. Live ones. The trio had entered the cave as she had started shooting, probably rejoining their running buddies for a share in the spoils. With no one covering her back, she had left herself open to attack.
The two kids were still alive, huddled in each other’s arms on the dirt floor, crying softly. From stories told on their mothers’ knees, they knew what was coming next.
The scarred one smiled down at her, showing off yellow incisors filed to points. He was the pack leader, the alpha. Without a word, he reached around her hip and groped her buttocks. Not in a sexual way. His interest was entirely culinary. Mildred tried to twist away from his powerful fingers. He squeezed harder, until she stopped struggling, then he let go.
“She’s a tough one,” the alpha said to his pals. “We’ve got to pit roast her. Slow fire, wrapped in wet leaves. Let her cook all day.”
The other two cannies stepped closer. They had hollow-cheeked faces, skinny arms and legs. Bloated potbellies.
“Or we could slice her into steaks,” the nearly bald one suggested. “Pound ’em flat with a rock. Quick-fry ’em in baby fat.” The fringe along the sides of his head fell in long, greasy coils to his shoulders.
The third cannie licked his cracked lips. He had a narrow groove across his forehead where the bone had been crushed by a blow, perhaps by a tire iron or piece of rebar.
Mildred looked from face to grimy face. Gray pendulums of snot swayed from their noses. Gray discharge leaked from their filthy earholes. They were all goners. Terminal stage oozies.
There had been no such disease in the scientific literature when Mildred Wyeth had graduated from medical school. There had been no such disease when years later she had undergone a relatively minor surgical procedure and had experienced a negative reaction to the anesthetic. In a last-ditch attempt to save her life, her colleagues had put her in cryogenic stasis. That had been shortly before the cataclysmic events of January 21, 2001. After sleeping through the end of western civilization, and a century or so thereafter, she had been revived by Ryan Cawdor and the others, reborn into a strange and violent new world.
Medical science no longer existed. What information there was, was anecdotal and unsubstantiated. Rumors and lies. Lies and rumors. From her own limited experience over the years, Mildred had come to no conclusions about the true nature of cannies, or their fatal affliction. They didn’t exhibit the gigantism or chimerism found in Deathlands other mutated species. Superficially at least, their flesh-eating seemed more like an addiction. One taste of human flesh and they were forever hooked. Oozie infection only seemed to increase their depravity, giving them a bottomless hunger.
In human history, cannibalism was almost always a ceremonial choice, Mildred knew. Eating one’s fallen or captured enemies was a way of taking their physical and spiritual power; it was never the mainstay of diet. Epidemiological studies that might have answered the questions about cannies were no longer an option. That kind of research had vanished forever, along with the Centers for Disease Control.
Dr. Mildred Wyeth stood disarmed and helpless, facing a truly horrendous fate, but she wasn’t thinking about herself, nor about how far she had come to die so miserably. She was thinking about the children. The only way she could protect them was by getting eaten first. There was still a remote chance her companions would track her to the cave before the cannies got hungry again.
“I did your packmates a favor when I blew them apart,” she taunted her captors. “It was mercy chilling. You ought to thank me for easing their way to hell. Dying from the oozies is triple hard, as you boys are finding out. First come the uncontrollable hand tremors, then you start shitting yourselves. You can’t digest human flesh anymore, but you can’t eat anything else. You eat more and more but still you slowly starve, until you’re too weak to fight off the blades of your own blood brothers.”
“We’ve been final stage for over a year,” Rebar Head bragged. “Still hunting strong. Took our medicine…”
In Deathlands, white-coated doctors and scientists had been replaced by raggedy charlatans riding from ville to ville in donkey carts, dispensing homemade potions and elixirs in recycled plastic pop bottles. They were miles away by the time their customers started dropping dead from the “medicine.”
“There’s no drug for what you’ve got,” Mildred said. “It’s turning your brains to pus. That’s what’s dripping onto your boots.”
“You don’t know shit about shit, Lamb Chop,” Alpha said, his carrion breath gusting in her face.
“Let’s eat the bitch first,” the bald one snarled. “Pay her back for chillin’ half our crew. The kids’ll keep.”
“Gotta much better idea,” Alpha said. He pulled a long knife from a sheath hidden in the top of his lace-up boot. It was a predark Ka-Bar combat knife with a black Kraton handle. Alpha knelt beside the first cannie Mildred had shot. He lifted the dead man by the armpits, holding the torso propped upright. Using the knife’s bluesteel pommel, he pulped the residue of brains left in the cratered skull. Mortar and pestle. When he was satisfied with the result, he tipped the man’s head, slopping the lumpy mess into a tin plate.
