mutation that defied the effects of toxic soil, air and water. Its fat, lobate fruits—a gaudy orange, and bigger than a man’s fist—hung in heavy clusters and lay in scattered, rotting piles along the shoulder. In the motionless air they gave off a sickeningly sweet smell, like an exploded joy-juice still.
Food gathering was not an option for them. They were too close to the Houston craters; the fruit wasn’t safe to eat. And they had to cover as much ground as they could before the day really heated up and the threat of death by dehydration forced them to stop and find shade until evening.
They had made the right choice for a getaway route. Dawn also revealed that County Road 90 was well traveled. Narrow, knobby tires had gouged countless, crisscrossing ruts in the black asphalt sand. Predark motorbikes were the answer to the hellscape’s ravaged highways. They used minimal fuel and could run at high speeds offroad to avoid pursuit. There was no chance of getting drive-wheels stuck in mud. Obstacles could be circumnavigated. Motorcycles were ideal for small-payload traders and bands of hit-and-git coldhearts. If someone was lucky enough to score one.
After the sun rose they holstered their sidearms; J.B. slung his scattergun. The likelihood of a surprise attack had diminished, as they could see for miles across the almost tabletop-flat landscape.
As Ryan ran, beads of perspiration trickled in a steady stream from his hairline, following the ragged edge of the welt of scar that split his left eyebrow. He kept brushing away the sweat to keep it from seeping under the black eyepatch he wore and burning into the socket emptied by a knife slash years ago. He couldn’t brush away the familiar ache in the pit of his belly or the burning dryness in his throat. Hunger and thirst were elements of daily life in the hellscape, sometimes in the background, sometimes in the foreground, but always somewhere in the mix.
With Jak in the lead, the companions climbed a slight grade for about a mile under the brightening sky, then the roadbed curved to the right and began a long, straight descent through the stands of black scrub. Looking east from the highest point, Ryan saw the horizon was pale brown, not black. The scrub dead-ended in what appeared to be a definite borderline. He remembered a north-south running river valley from the redoubt’s topo map. The brown had to be that valley. There was no hint of green life ahead, just a beige flatland of bare dirt and rock.
No ambush to worry about.
No shade, either.
Mebbe the river had dried up, he thought. Not that it really mattered. If there was water flowing above or below ground in the streambed, they didn’t dare even wash their faces in it. They weren’t far enough from ground zero for that. Before he and the others reached Louisiana, about 150 miles distant, the odds were good that to survive they would be drinking their own warm piss.
The companions coasted downhill, running in easy strides, taking advantage of the long, gradual grade. After another mile, when they were back on the flat but still five or six miles from the riverbed, over the rasp of his own breathing, Ryan heard the sawing throb of insects. Thousands upon thousands of them. Then he hit a wall of stink. A caustic, invisible fog; not excrement, but excrement-like, on a much grander, more symphonic scale. It was the hellscape’s unmistakable signature scent: ruination, the choking, searing, off-gases of biological decay.
At the front of the file, Jak drew his Colt Python and signaled for the column to slow to a walk.
The others pulled their weapons and advanced with caution. The buzzing increased in volume and intensity.
Ryan looked over Jak’s slim shoulder at what lay on the road ahead. Under a haze of flying insects, half-naked bodies, at least twenty of them, were scattered from one side to the other. Some faceup, some facedown. Pale skin was blotched purple and black. The flesh looked semisoft, like it was melting from the bones; the torsos and limbs were grotesquely bloated.
Bipedal corpses.
But not norm. Definitely not norm.
“Stickies,” Jak announced as he led the others into the obstacle course of decomposition and swarming insects.
For noses, this version of the race of muties known as stickies had two holes in their flat faces. Legions of hairy black flies crawled in and out of the holes, and in and out of lipless, gaping maws lined with rows of black-edged needle teeth. Emptied eyesockets were packed with masses of juddering bugs, feeding, fighting, egg-laying.
Holding her kerchief tight to her face, her eyes watering from the stench, Mildred stopped and knelt beside one of the bodies.
Ryan could see the mutie’s mouth and facial bones had partially dissolved; the inward collapse created a caldera effect in the hairless flab. The creature’s bare, distended belly had burst a yawning seam right up the middle.
“No way of telling what chilled them, or when,” Mildred said. “Daytime temperature has got to be over a hundred degrees around here. And they’ve been cooking on the black sand.”
“Rot quick, too,” Jak said.
Even in cold weather, Ryan thought. Dead stickies disintegrated and dissolved like burning candles.
“They could have eaten the fruit and gotten poisoned,” Mildred speculated as she rose from her crouch. “Or they could have died from gunshot.”
“The damned bugs are eating the bodies and they aren’t dead,” Krysty said, fanning flies from her eyes.
“Neither are the wire worms,” J.B. said, gesturing with the muzzle of his Smith & Wesson scattergun.
Between the lips of the gaping fissure that ran from the corpse’s pubis to sternum, a bolus of the blood-washed, hair-fine parasites squirmed weakly.
“It wasn’t blasters that chilled them,” J.B. said, thumbing his spectacles back up the bridge of his nose. “No empty shell casings on the road. No bullet holes in the muties, either.”
“Too many of the abysmal creatures to be a mere ambush party,” Doc pronounced gravely. “This, my dear friends, is a steed of a different hue.”
Doc had put into words what they were all thinking.
During certain times of the year, the friends had encountered an odd mating ritual. Stickies swept across the hellscape in a living wave, gathering numbers to breed. Some, like these perhaps, dropped dead of exertion along the way. The muties mated en masse, indiscriminantly, for days at a time. To be caught in the path of their sexual rampage meant horrible death. Not just from the needle teeth. Stickies had adhesive glands in their palms and their fingers were lined with tiny suckers; they killed by pulling their victims limb from limb.
“You’re right, Doc,” Ryan said. “They’re breeders.”
“Mebbe we’ve missed them?” Krysty said hopefully. “Mebbe they’ve already passed us by.”
“They’re in front of us, then,” Mildred said. “They could be anywhere ahead.”
“Mebbe so,” Ryan said, shifting the sling and the weight of his Steyr SSG 70 sniper rifle from his right arm to his left, “but we’ve got no choice. We’ve got to keep following the road east. We can’t bust that black brush without getting torn to shreds, and we sure as hell can’t go back the way we came.”
J.B. checked his weapon, cracking the combat pump gun’s action just enough to see the rim of a chambered, high brass buckshot round. Snapping the slide forward,
