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.
“Old Tom, here, is gonna have his revenge,” he said, shoving aside the corpse. “Open her mouth.”
Mildred went rigid against the pole. She clenched her teeth with all her might.
Twenty filthy fingernails couldn’t pry her jaws apart, four hands couldn’t hold her head still.
Alpha broke the stalemate, sucker-punching her in the stomach. The others exploited her moment of weakness. Baldy pulled down her bottom jaw, Rebar Head forced a thick stick crossways, between her back molars.
Mildred couldn’t snap the stick and close her mouth. She couldn’t dislodge it by shaking her head. She flexed her throat muscles, shutting her gullet, her eyes wide with panic.
Then came the metallic taste of the plate on her tongue, followed by warm goo flooding her mouth. Before she could cough out the pureed brains, hard fingers pinched off her nostrils and a callused palm covered her mouth.
Mildred’s stomach heaved violently, but she couldn’t expel a single drop. The resulting explosion of pressure only drove it up into her sinuses.
“How do you like it?” Alpha inquired, pinning the back of her head to the pole and holding it there.
The taste of death was shrill, feral, fecal. The stench in her nose burned like battery acid.
With the hands shutting off her air, it was either swallow or suffocate.
She wanted to suffocate, but the choice wasn’t hers to make. Her nervous system’s hardwiring wouldn’t allow it. Just before she passed out, she swallowed.
When Alpha released her, she gasped a breath, then projectile vomited across the cave floor.
The cannies brayed at her dry heaving, and her frantic coughing and spitting. “You been dosed good,” Baldy said.
“You’ll be hungry for long pig in no time,” Alpha added, wiping his leaking nose on the back of his hand.
“The oozies might chill me, but it won’t make me a rad-blasted cannie,” Mildred said defiantly.
“You think cannies are born that way?”
The monsters laughed some more.
“Which came first, the cannie or the oozies?” Alpha asked her. “Guess you’re gonna find out.” Then he glanced over at the children, his good eye narrowed to a slit. “Throw some more wood on that fire,” he told his packmates. “Let’s get something cooking. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m fuckin’ starvin’.”
Chapter Two
Ryan Cawdor followed in Jak Lauren’s footsteps, trying hard to keep up, his SIG-Sauer P-226 blaster in hand. Behind Ryan in a tight single file was the remainder of the companions. Krysty Wroth, Ryan’s red-haired, emerald-eyed lover, was wrapped in a long, shaggy black coat, and carried a Model 640 .38 Smith & Wesson revolver. John Barrymore Dix, Ryan’s comrade since the days of riding with Trader’s convoy, had his trademark fedora screwed down on his head; his military-style, M-4000 shotgun swung on a shoulder sling. Theophilus Algernon “Doc” Tanner, Oxford scholar circa 1881 and reluctant time traveler, brought up the rear in his tattered frock coat and cracked riding boots. In one fist he held a massive Civil War relic black-powder handblaster; in the other an ebony walking stick that concealed a rapier blade.
One of their number was missing.
They wouldn’t rest until they recovered her.
Krysty had watched Mildred vanish into the night, chasing a pair of cannies who carried off two young children each. Pinned belly-down by withering blasterfire, the tall redhead couldn’t go to her friend’s aid, and in the deafening clatter of the exchange couldn’t summon the others to help. It wasn’t until almost half an hour later, until after the attack had been beaten back and the cannies driven out of the ville’s berm, that Ryan and the companions had regrouped and begun the pursuit.
They had covered less than a hundred yards when Jak called a halt to the advance. Kneeling, he holstered his .357 Magnum Colt Python and carefully