When the joints had sufficiently cooled, the companions tore into them with both hands, hot liquid fat running down their wrists and forearms. Before Big Mike could begin to eat he had to torque down the knob at the back of his prosthesis with his teeth, closing artificial fingers in a vise grip on the foot end of the leg bone.
“Gaia, that tastes vile,” Krysty said, making a sour face. Her prehensile hair seemed to agree. It had drawn up into tight ringlets.
Behind the smeared lenses of his spectacles, J.B.’s eyes squeezed shut as he forced himself to swallow. “You know,” he said, “this is so bad it makes wolf seem like prime beef.”
“I have to breathe through my mouth to choke it down,” Mildred said.
“Gamier than roast muskrat,” Doc said. “And somewhat more fibrous than armadillo.”
“Bear’s not so greasy,” Jak offered.
“Mebbe we should cook it longer,” Krysty said.
“That won’t improve the taste,” Ryan assured her. The flesh had a definite harsh tang to it already from the burning limber pine resins. It made Ryan’s tongue cleave to the roof of his mouth. As he chewed he felt something hard crunch between his back molars. He rolled the gob of meat around in his mouth until he could pick out the inclusion with his fingertips. When he held it close to the firelight, it looked like a lentil bean, flat, circular, but it wasn’t. It was the coiled-up body of a parasite cooked to a cinder.
He spit the entire mouthful onto his palm to examine it. There were more little hard tidbits.
Lots more.
“For nuke’s sake don’t spit out the wire worms,” J.B. told him. “They’re the best part.”
“Nutty,” Doc agreed.
Ryan popped the entire gob back in his mouth and gulped it down. Parasites cooked that hard were dead. And their eggs were chilled, too. Protein was protein. Like most Deathlanders, he wasn’t all that fussy about food. He just didn’t want to crack a tooth on a pebble or a chip of hip bone.
“I’ve had plenty worse than this,” Big Mike bragged, brandishing his half-gnawed haunch in the air like a club. The dripping grease had washed a clean, shiny stripe down his chin. His skin was bright pink under the beard hair. “Worst thing I ever had to eat was a plate of spider stew down in New Mex. Made with hot green chilis and tarantulas as big as your hand.”
“Tarantulas aren’t edible,” Mildred said dubiously.
“Not much meat on them after they’re cooked, that’s for damn sure, and what little there is you got to suck out of the bodies and legs. Real trouble is, they’re covered with all these little hairs that fall off in the stewing. They get caught down your throat and make you gag, so it’s hard to keep any of it down. And two hours later I had the squirts thermonuclear.”
“Arachnid’s revenge,” Doc said.
“You’d better believe it was hellfire at both ends,” Big Mike said through a greasy grin. He pressed the haunch to his mouth and greedily tore off another strip of meat with his teeth.
After a dozen mouthfuls of the cloyingly rich meat, Ryan had had enough. The pile of flesh he’d gulped sat like a boulder at the bottom of his stomach. As he had no desire to save the leftovers for breakfast, he tossed the rest of it onto the banked fire for cremation. If all went well, by the next afternoon they’d be off the volcanic plain and along the river where there would be plenty of better forage to choose from.
One by one, emitting various expressions of disgust and discomfort, his companions discarded their haunches as well.
“We’ve got things to discuss,” J.B. said, cleaning the grease smears off his glasses with the tail of his shirt.
Ryan glanced over at Big Mike, who was still chewing happily. Would the bastard betray them if given half a chance? Even without hands? Even after they’d saved his stinkin’ hide?
Hell, yes.
“Better do our talking outside,” Ryan said. “You stay right where you are,” he warned Big Mike. Resting his palm on the pommel of his leg-sheathed panga he said, “Stick your nose out and I’ll chop that off, too.”
The companions exited the cave and moved away from the entrance, well out of earshot. An overturned bowl of stars lay upon the black blanket of the lava field. It was difficult to see more than a few yards ahead. The clear night had acquired a bone-penetrating chill.
Ryan put his arm around Krysty’s waist and pulled her close as they looked up at the brilliant swath of the Milky Way. He could feel the tension in her body, and though he worried that she was reliving her humiliation at the hands of the she-hes, he didn’t say anything, he just gently held her. After a few moments in his embrace she relaxed, snuggled against him and said, “Nice and quiet out here.”
“For a change,” Mildred said.
“That fat bastard can’t stop running his mouth,” J.B. said. “You name it, and he’s always done one better.”
“Or one grosser,” Mildred added.
“We have another hellish trek ahead of us tomorrow,” Doc said. “Perhaps if we gagged our guest the time would pass more pleasantly?”
“Gagged him and left him behind, you mean,” J.B. said.
“We can’t part company with Big Mike just yet,” Ryan said. “We need the information he’s got on the she-hes.”
“Why they come back?” Jak asked.
“Mebbe they couldn’t find anything better in the alternate universes,” Ryan said. “Everything that’s missing on their Earth—food, clean air and water, open space, small population—we have plenty of.”
“I thought they’d written off Deathlands because of the infection,” Krysty said.
When the companions had examined the bodies the she-hes had left behind at Slake City, they found massive, ultimately fatal, bacterial skin infections. The invaders had been caught unprepared by native microscopic organisms.
“They must have found a cure for it off-world,” Mildred said. “Not unexpected, given the rest of their technology.”
“We’ve got two options come daybreak,” Ryan said. “We can either head for the hills or we can take the fight to them, only on our terms this time.”
“If we choose to retreat now, dear friends,” Doc said, “rest assured these aliens will propagate and then swarm. Like a plague of locusts they will devour the remains of this Earth, just as they devoured their own.”
“If we can believe what Big Mike told us,” Mildred said, “they’ve been here at least a few weeks already, setting up their operation. Their weapons, armor and transport are better than anything Deathlands has ever seen. Every day they go unchallenged they’re going to get stronger and more difficult to defeat.”
“If we run now, we’ll be looking over our shoulders until our dying breaths,” J.B. said. “I don’t like that.”
“Then we really don’t have a choice, do we?” Krysty said.
“Are we all agreed, then?” Ryan said, looking from face to shadowy face. “We fight them?”
The answer was unanimous and in the affirmative.
“When we last met, the she-hes took us by surprise,” Ryan said. “That’s why we ended up at Ground Zero in laser manacles. We’re going to make sure that doesn’t happen again. They still have their tribarrels