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the lieutenant stated. "Not running away from us, but headed toward something.
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Hell, there might be more of them hidden in the jungle. I want half of the
remaining
Firebirds launched at anything in sight."
"Ain't nothing there but some ruins," the pilot offered.
"We'll start with those, then hit that tall mesa," Brandon said, pointing at
one surrounded by a flock of condors. "It'll make a good base camp for a
recce. Then at dawn, we'll land and see exactly what those people were running
toward."
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"Who knows? It could even be something the lord baron might have a use for,"
the lieutenant added thoughtfully.
Epilogue
"Here they come again!" a sec man cried, firing his flintlock.
The rest of the sec men and civilians hacked at the muties scrambling through
the smashed gate of Cold Harbor ville, but without any black powder for their
blaster, the clubs and axes did little to stem the invading horde.
Once inside the ville, the stickies spread out, hooting wildly and attacking
anything that moved with their stone clubs: horses, dogs, children, it made no
difference. Red blood flowed along the muddy streets of the ville as the
slaughter became absolute.
A small group of norms had taken refuge behind the sandbag wall surrounding
the locked armory. While a blacksmith pounded on the lock with a sledgehammer,
the rest valiantly fought off the stickies with crossbows, knives and crude
spears. As the dead piled at the wall, a sec man cried out and plucked a
sliver of bamboo from his hand. Trying to toss it away, the sec man discovered
that he couldn't open his numb ringers. Then a terrible cold flowed up his
veins and into his chest.
Breathing became labored, then impossible, and the ville guard fell with his
mouth flapping, as if trying to chew air into his dead lungs.
More bamboo darts hit the last defenders and, as they fell, the stickies
swarmed over the people in savage abandonment, their writhing tentacles
tearing the norms into bloody gobbets.
Strolling among the carnage were a dozen barefoot girls in loose clothing.
Oddly, aside from some scars and length of hair, the strange females looked
almost identical, an unnatural similarity far beyond that of sisters, or even
twins.
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"Bitches!" a sec man cried, wielding an ax as he ran at them, swinging his
dire weapon. "You did this to us!"
Casually, one of the girls shot him in the throat with a blowpipe. He stopped
instantly, then tumbled to the filthy ground, his ax still clenched in a
paralyzed fist.
"No, human," she whispered. "Your race did it to yourselves."
As the strange females turned a corner, a stickie blindly charged at the
two-legs until it got close, then the creature darted away, hooting in terror.
Amused, they continued walking, watching the norms and muties battle to the
death, then stopped to observe the stickies rip skin off the human and mutie
corpses alike to reach the tender organs inside. The feeding was very noisy,
almost bestial in manner.
"How disgusting," a girl sniffed in disdain, stepping over the bodies of the
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slain.
"Look at the mess they're making!"
"Oh, let them feed," Silver chuckled, tucking her blowpipe away. "The extra
food will nicely fatten the mindless ones for when they go into our cooking
pots."
"No wonder the Maker created us," she hissed in amusement. "Norms are
completely helpless without their weapons."
"Most, but not all, sister," Silver corrected, remembering the fight at sea
between the two PT boats.
"Some might even be as dangerous as us," she added grimly.
A forked tongue dangling from lush lips, one of the clones shrugged in
response, while another knelt to knife a wounded man trying to crawl under a
toppled wheelbarrow. He feebly tried to fight back, and so the chuckling mutie
took her time finishing the gory job.
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EVENTUALLY a bloodred dawn rose over the Pacific islands, the dim sunlight
revealing six bodies sprawled on a distant shore, the only movement coming
from the gentle swells cresting over the deathly still forms.
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