James Axler Deathlands 016 Moon Fate

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There was a circle of seven stickies, all holding muskets. The eighth was
obviously their leader, the one who'd been doing all the talking.
The others looked like the usual run of stickies boggling eyes and lank hair,
with the suckers visible on palms and fingers, bare feet.
The leader was something else. He stood way over six feet, topping Ryan's six-
two by about eight inches, and was so skinny that he looked like he would have
to run around in a rainstorm to get himself wet. He wore a white shirt and an
elegant brocade vest, with dark blue jeans. A golden medallion hung around his
lean neck.
He was holding an Uzi machine pistol, identical to the one that was lying on
the cropped turf at J.B.'s side.
The stickie's hair was long and luxuriantly blond, so thick and curling that
Ryan immediately suspected that the mutie was wearing a wig.
His eyes didn't protrude as much as normal stick-ies, and they were almost
almond-shaped. He was smiling, showing that he had no teeth at all between the
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Axler, James - Deathlands 16 - Moon Fate fleshy lips.
"Name's Charlie."
"This is Krysty, Jak and I'm "
The smile vanished like the last smear of sunlight off a mountaintop.
"You. Man with the patch who rode shotgun with the Trader. Ryan Cawdor!
Never forget a name or a face. You and me'll have some talking."
Ryan remembered.
Chapter Fifteen
The time would be about right. Charlie looked to be in his early twenties, and
Ryan's memory put the hap-pening about ten or eleven years ago.
It had been up near the Darks, near some ragged-ass ville, centered on an old
church with a dome of weathered green copper. Name of the place had van-ished,
but the incident and the stickie brat with curly yellow hair came flooding
back from the past.
Abe had been involved, tall, skinny Abe, with the lugubrious sense of humor
and the drooping mus-tache, hair that he generally used to wear tied back in a
ponytail. He'd done mostly jobs around War Wag One. Started off as helper to
Loz and the rest of the cooks, then graduated to rear gunner.
And it had been the time of&
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Axler, James - Deathlands 16 - Moon Fate
"Gert Wolfram," Charlie, said, face as bleak as iced marble. "And the one
called himself the Magus, Warlock, Sorcerer. Names not even worth the trouble
of forgetting."
Names and men that Ryan himself would never be able to forget.
The Magus. That was most common of his three names.
Sometime in the past he'd suffered an appalling in-jury. Half of his face was
missing, the spaces filled with aluminum and flesh-colored plastic. His eyes
were hidden behind steel shells.
His reputation was linked with stickies.
He'd go out into the bleak wildernesses where the muties congregated and bring
them back alive, then sell them to the traveling freak master, Gert Wolf-ram,
three hundred and fifty pounds of cherubic evil. He was ringmaster in his own
macabre circus that toured the filthy frontier villes where the writ of
de-cency never ran.
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The stickies were an integral part of Wolfram's tented horror show. They'd be
prodded into fighting against each other, or against bears or cougars or mangy
wolves. Wolfram would also arrange cheap displays of erratic pyrotechnics
whose explosions and multicolored flaring fires would drive the drugged
stickies into a frenzy.
People loved it.
Ryan was trying to remember what had happened to the Magus and to Gert
Wolfram when Charlie, the stickies' leader, interrupted his train of thought.
"You recall me, don't you, Cawdor?"
Ryan stood still, left arm lifted across his chest to try to check the
bleeding.
"Yeah. I recollect the time our paths crossed."
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Axler, James - Deathlands 16 - Moon Fate
"Our& paths& crossed." The tall mutie nodded. "Way a blood-eyed norm like you
would think about it, Cawdor. Bet you a hatful of jack you don't recol-lect
the butchered innocents."
"I remember we came across one of the hunting parties of the Magus. Chilled
them. They had a group of& " He hesitated.
"Stickies is the word you're struggling to avoid, Cawdor."
"Yeah. A group of stickies. Trader was ready to set them free."
Charlie's narrow smile vanished. "A 'group,' Caw-dor! It was a family. You
think stickies don't have fucking families!" Controlling his anger, he dropped
Krysty a mocking half bow. "Forgive my language, Firehead, but that was a
family. It was my whole family. My father, my mother, three older brothers.
Two aunts and five uncles. And me. I was nine sum-mers and eight winters old,
Cawdor."
The valley had been dark, steep-sided. The war wags had camped a half mile
away, near a still lake where fish jumped. The heavily armed guards of the
Magus lay where they'd been shot, the blood still trickling into the leaf
mold.
And the stickies huddled together as Abe had struck off their chains.
"We'd have let you go," Ryan said.
"But you didn't."
"No."
Charlie looked around at his silent group of fol-lowers. "No, they didn't let
us go.
They chilled every-one. Except for the little yellow-haired boy. They left him
there, surrounded by corpses, his leg and arm broken."
Ryan bit his lip. He could remember the scene, re-member why the massacre had
happened. But he fig-ured there wasn't much point in trying to explain to this
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Axler, James - Deathlands 16 - Moon Fate unusual stickie how it had been.
Charlie obvi-ously had his own embittered, impressed memory and nothing would
change that.
"Why did you and Trader do that, Cawdor?"
"One of your women had a knife. Several of you backed her when she cut Abe.
Started a chilling fight. We lost two good men there."
"And all I lost was twelve of my family.
All my family, Cawdor."
He remembered the rattle of firearms, the screams and then the silence, broken
only by the gasps of the dying and the moans of the wounded.
And a little boy crying.
"You didn't give us any choice, Charlie. No fire-blasted choice at all."
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"We'll see. Talk more when we get back to our camp. You say there's nothing
over the ridge?" The question was asked with an absence of real interest, as
though he were thinking about something else.
"Nothing."
"Then we'll go. But first we'll check out you don't have any hideaways. If you
have, then you're all dead meat. Now and here."
Ryan was finding it hard to come to terms with what was going on.
Stickies were triple stupes.
Everyone knew that.
Vengeful and murderous, with about as much sense of organization as a
confederation of decapitated roosters.
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Axler, James - Deathlands 16 - Moon Fate
Now this one, Charlie, seemed to be a whole lot brighter than the average
citizen of Deathlands, and he ran a tight patrol with a facade of quasilegal
or-ganization.
It didn't make any sort of sense.
Ryan started, slowly and reluctantly, to peel off his clothes.
"See one of them did you harm, Cawdor." Charlie pointed at the bleeding wound
with the stubby muz-zle of the Uzi.
"Tore some skin. Way stickies do, Charlie. You know that." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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