Chapter One

Beside the deeply rutted dirt track leading to the ville of Moonboy, wedged between a pair of boulders, a warning sign shimmered in the blistering midday heat. Crudely chiseled into the rectangle of rusted car door were two words NO MEWTEES.
Behind the sign, the good people of Moonboy had left a universal symbol for those travelers who couldn't read. From a gallows made of an old basketball stanchion and backboard hung a naked corpse. Sun-dried, and as hard and brown as jerky, it had a huge head and a misshapen body, its finger bones twice as long as its arms.
Like many of the other small outposts of human survival in Deathlands, the ville had sprung up from rains more than a century old. On January 20, 2001, a Kamchatka-launched ICBM, part of an all-out, U.S.-Soviet nuclear exchange, had vaporized nearby Salt Lake City. The three-warhead airburst had left behind a radioactive, thermoglass rubble field that covered more than fifty square miles. As in the case of other earthly disasterstornadoes, hurricanes, forest firesArmageddon had turned out to be a capricious bitch. Up Highway 15 from ground zero, snuggled in a gap in the promontory ridge of rock, a Salt Lake City bedroom community had taken a less than annihilating hit. What was now the main drag of Moonboy ville had once been a suburban street in the upscale residential development; it was one of the few blocks left standing in the administrative region formerly known as Morgan County, Utah.
Facing rows of stucco-sided, three-story homes, their windows blown out in the same horrific shock blast, were the underpinnings and center point of the ville. Scabrous add-ons and rickety lean-tos used the outside walls of the original buildings as their main structural support. Rusting sheets of corrugated metal formed a jumble of makeshift shanty roofs. Their orange stains streaked the predark stucco, iron oxide bleeding from thousands of less than mortal wounds. Intermittent acid rains had long since turned the asphalt pavement between the rows of houses to coarse black sand, and had cratered and dissolved most of the broad, curving driveways and concrete sidewalks.
On this cloudless summer day, Moonboy's unemployed residents and visitors sought out the shade of the metal-roofed, ramshackle porches that lined either side of the main street. Steel not only defended them from the brutal sun, but from flesh-etching, sulfuric acid downpours. About two dozen women and men, none particularly clean, most gap-toothed and weathered, sat chewing the fat and sipping air-temperature green beer from recycled, plastic antifreeze jugs. A few lay curled up in the shadows on the hard-tamped dirt, snoozing off the remnants of their market day drunk.
By the standards of Deathlands, where wealth and status were measured in armament, Moonboy was a shitpoor place. Along the main street, there were no weapons that would accept high-power, center-fire brass cartridges. The only firearms of modern design were a handful of single-shot, top-break, exposed-hammer 12-gauges, and every one had a rust-brown barrel, a broken or missing stock and a crudely tied, rope shoulder sling. The rest of the population carried long, razor-honed, chilling knives and cheap, scarred, black-powder revolverslate-twentieth-century, mass-produced copies of Civil War-era side arms.
There were no cops in Moonboy. Official law enforcement was unnecessary with so many weapons on display. Justice, or what passed for it, was within easy reach of every hand. And God help the rad-blasted mutie who stumbled within range of blade or pistol ball.
Piercing screams erupted from the top floor of the gaudy house in the middle of the block. It was impossible to tell whether the screamer was male or female, or if the cries were of pain or pleasure. The porch squatters ignored the shrill racket. Moonboy's pure norm sluts were well compensated for their time and trouble. After a few minutes, the shrieking stopped and the echoes faded.
None of the drowsy, streetside spectators expected anything interesting to happen until nightfall. The withering heat made a knife fight to the death highly unlikely. The potential combatants were all either too flagged or too hung over to get into a serious beef with anyone.
Then the air in the middle of the street began to shimmer.
It wasn't just heat waves coming off the ruined asphalt.
At head height, dust motes glittered and whirled, quickly turning into a man-sized tornado. The Moonboy folk blinked in amazement, then hurriedly kicked awake their dozing friends. This was no ordinary dust devil. It sparkled as if it held millions of tiny fragments of mirror in its spinning funnel; with each passing second the glittering bits grew more and more distinct.
And brighter.
So bright, in fact, that the residents had to either squint or shield their eyes from the hard glare.
A powerful wind accompanied this apparition. It set road dust flying and scraggly beards flapping. There was a deep bass rumble below the wind's howl, the building growl of some impossibly huge engine.
An earsplitting thunder crack rattled the corrugated steel roofs over the spectators' heads. The shock wave vibrated up through the soles of their feet, through their legs, to their very bowels. In a flash, the tornado flew apart, and before their eyes, at the epicenter of the ville, the seams of reality split and peeled back.
A tall, humanoid figure in black stepped out of nothing and nowhere, out of the ragged slash in space, birthed full-grown into the middle of the road, accompanied by a nauseating, superconcentrated, petrochemical stench. The figure wore a suit of head-to-foot black armor, and the armor gleamed as if it had been dipped in machine oil. Like the carapace of some gigantic, rad-mutated insect, the suit was segmented over arms and legs, overlapping, contoured plates protecting the torso. The boots, shin guards and helmet were of the same material. An impenetrable, smoke-colored, wraparound visor concealed the face.
All eyes locked onto the blue-black blaster the creature gripped in its gauntleted hands. The weapon was of stubby, bullpup design. A styrene stock held three heavy barrels joined in a triangular configuration, and a single, claw-toothed flash-hider crowned all three muzzles. A massively thick, curving magazine extended below the stock just in front of the rifle's buttplate. No one on the street had ever seen or even heard tell of anything quite like it. Though they didn't know what mayhem the wicked-looking piece was capable of, in their hearts every man and woman lusted after it. Whether traded for jack or jolt, or kept as a personal side arm, such a weapon could make life in the hellscape known as Deathlands a whole lot easier to bear.
Before any of the folk could move to appropriate the blaster, there was another boom of thunder and a flash. A second, identical figure stepped from nowhere into the middle of the road. It, too, carried a magical blaster. It, too, was followed by a gust of foul wind.
The appearance of another armed, apparently mutated stranger galvanized Moonboy's idlers, whose rule of thumb was always to kill first and ask questions later. A hodgepodge of handblasters cleared belts and hip leather on both sides of the street. The intruders stood stock-still, at a range of less than twenty yards. There was a rattle of gritty clacks as single-action hammer spurs locked back.
"Yee-hah!" someone shouted in glee. "We got ourselves a fuckin' mutie shoot!"
The self-appointed firing squads took positions on both sides of the street. Aiming two-handed, the shooters thoughtfully angled themselves to keep from hitting their opposite numbers with near-misses or ricochets.
The figures in black armor responded by shifting position as well, standing back to back in the center of the road, each staring down a line of blaster muzzles. Oddly enough, the all-over armor plate they wore didn't seem to inhibit their movement. The material bent and flexed with them. The strangers held their own weapons at the ready, but unarmed. As if either ignorant or disdainful of the mortal danger they faced, the pair calmly waited for the ville's welcoming committee to make the first move.
They didn't have to wait long.
No formal signal to fire brought on the withering barrage. When the first shot suddenly barked out, the rest of the blasters followed in short, ragged order. Volleys of pistol balls and buckshot rained on the standing figures. As the massed handblasters boomed and flashed, dense clouds of thick, white gunsmoke rolled from both sidewalks, fogging the street and partially obscuring the targets.

A STROKE OF DUMB LUCK had landed Grub Hinton in the upper floor of Moonboy's gaudy house that same morning.
A scrounger by trade, Grub eked out his solitary living beneath the thick glaze of nuke-melted sand on the outer edge of Salt Lake City's crater. He pickaxed holes through the layers of thermoglass, then crawled in headfirst, searching the narrow, jagged air pockets for anything of value. Prospecting the wasteland was largely unrewarding work, as most of the wealth of the city that hadn't been vaporized had been turned into unrecognizable and immovable globs of slag. The work was also extremely dangerous, and not just because of the lingering high levels of radioactivity. Chances were, long before the first weeping, rad-cancer lesions appeared on Grub's cheeks and hands, some other scrounger would have bushwhacked him for his meager bag of booty, or for exclusive mining rights to some especially promising hole. On the upside, he always had more than enough to eat, even if it was just rat-on-a-stick.
Grub Hinton's jackpot find, a 1958 Buick hubcap slightly scorched on the edges, lay propped against the filthy, bug-splattered wall of the gaudy crib. He had traded this singular treasure for a rare, all-night, green beer drunk, and an even rarer, full three hours in the saddle.
As Grub's morning of bliss wore on and on, the gaudy slut in question had cause to rue the deal she'd struck with him. Even her most enthusiastic faked screams of passion had failed to make the little man finish his mechanical rutting and scar-fisted pawing of her body. The sudden thunderclap from the street that rattled the building's walls and floor, and whooshed inward the shredded clear plastic sheeting that passed for window curtains, accomplished what her ham acting couldn't.
"Stun gren!" Grab barked as he rolled off the woman's doughy stomach and pushed up from the straw-stuffed pallet on the floor.
Still staggering drunk and naked, a sickly pale, two-legged, potbellied pig, hairless but for the fringe of reddish fur on his behind, Grab lurched for the frame of the third-story window. As he reached it, there was a second, floor-shaking boom, the tattered plastic curtains fluttering in his face.
He pushed aside the strips of plastic and forced his eyes to focus on the scene directly below. Like a dip in an ice-cold mountain stream, what he saw momentarily sobered him. Grub Hinton had come nose to nose with plenty of nasty, rad-mutated creepy crawlies while rooting in the dark under the dirty glass skin of Slakecity, but nothing like this
At first glance, the three figures in the middle of the street looked like giant black cockroaches, straight out of a jolt-binge, melt-brain nightmare. But on closer inspection, he saw they had two arms and two legs, like men. And like men, they carried stubby-barreled blasters.
If Deathlands had taught Grub anything in his twenty-three years, it was to expect the unexpected; if you could jolt-dream a living terror, odds were it existed there, someplace. Generations after the nuke-caust of 2001, monsters that should never have been born were bornand once born, bred in awesome profusion. Norms like Hinton, lucky enough to have no obvious outward abnormalities, rationalized the hunting down and indiscriminate slaughter of their less fortunate brethren because some of the mutated human subspeciesknown variously as stickies, cannies, scabbies, scalieshad devolved into crazed, senseless killers. As a general rule, mutie bastards didn't pack blasters; they preferred to do their murdering with fang and claw, with club or suckerfist.
From his position at the window, Grub could see the norm folk lined up on the opposite side of the street. A grin spread over his face. The intruders were about to be executed, Moonboy style, and Grub had himself a front-row balcony seat.
"Come over here," he told the woman on the pallet, waving his arm for her to hurry. ' 'This is going to be some kind of show."
The gaudy slut stepped up to the window without bothering to conceal her nakedness. But she did cover her ears when, in a deafening thirty-second fusillade, every norm weapon along the street emptied.
As the haze of burned black powder lifted, Grub saw Moonboy's antimutie posse scrambling to rack fresh, preloaded spare cylinders into their revolvers. Amazingly, the intruders still stood, their armor unmarked.
"I could have hit 'em with a rock from way up here!" Grub snorted. "How did all those triple stupes miss?"
Then, with cold deliberation, the newcomers shouldered their own weapons. As the homeboys and girls tried to scatter from the porches, the roachmen opened fire. And it was clear at once that the assault rifles they carried were as rad-blasted queer as they were.
Instead of the crack of single gunshots or the canvas-ripping clatter of high-rate autofire, the weapons gave off painfully shrill, whistling sounds. From out of their flash-hiders shot single, narrow beams of emerald-green light so intense that they could be seen in the midday sun. Everywhere the pencil-thin beams touched, they cut. And the slicing effect was instantaneous. The sprinting residents and spectators of Moonboy dropped, screaming as they were bisected, along with sundry chair backs, stucco walls, rain barrels and porch posts. The row of rickety roofs collapsed. Out from under the rising cloud of dust, human heads, cleanly severed at the neck, rolled downhill like runaway melons, bounding off the curb and into the gutter.
The battle, if you could call it that, was over in a few heartbeats.
Frozen in place, Grub and his female companion stared slack-jawed at the ruination below.
Though every member of the firing squad had been chopped in two, the screaming continued. A few people were still alive down there; Grub could see them thrashing in the dirt beside the collapsed roof. He recognized one of the survivors as Old Rupe, the man who did all the beer brewing for the gaudy's saloon. Old Rupe's detached legs and hand lay on the ground two yards from where he writhed. Despite his terrible injuries, he hadn't bled so much as a drop. The stumps of his limbs looked blackened and scorched.
Grub and the slut flinched as thunder rolled again, and three more of the roachmen appeared out of thin air. They carried a different assortment of gear than their predecessors. Two of them wore heavy-looking, flat-black canisters strapped onto their backs. The third intruder pushed a squat, shiny black cube on big wheels.
With the initial pair providing cover, this new trio moved quickly from the middle of the road to where Old Rupe lay thrashing. Seeing what was coming his way, the brewmaster flopped to his stomach and desperately tried to drag himself to safety with his one good arm. His considerable effort was futile. One of the canister men blocked Old Rupe's path; the other kicked him onto his back, and easily held him there with a boot heel on the throat.
The cube pusher drew something bright and silvery from his belt. It was a cylindrical, latticework metal cage, about two feet long, with a pistol grip. To Grub, it looked like an oversized, predark drill stand, complete with battery-powered hand drill.
Old Rupe flopped around on the sidewalk, trying in vain to get out from under the boot. The cube pusher jammed the business end of the silver device against the brewmaster's chest, securely pinning him to the concrete. Then the device snicked sharply, steel grating on steel, and brutally ended Old Rupe's torment. The mechanical cookie cutter plunged into his torso right over his heart, crunching through breastbone and ribs, and then snapped back with a fruit-can-sized sample of red, dripping meat, which was quickly dumped into the matching hole in the top of the squat cube. .
The pusher leaned over the cube, intently studying its LED readout. After a few seconds, the roachman looked up from the machine. Without a visible or audible command, the two with canisters began to move among the debris and the sprawled bodies. From short hoses connected to their back tanks, they sprayed creamy yellow foam over each of the downed human forms. Beneath their mounds of foam, the still-living and the newly dead dissolved, liquefying into sheets of bubbling brown goo that poured off the edges of the sidewalk and into the asphalt sand.
Grub heard a hissing sound quite close, and felt a sudden, warm wetness between the toes of his bare feet. When he looked down, heart thudding, he saw that he was standing in a quickly spreading puddle of urine that wasn't his own. The gaudy slut beside him began to wail at the top of her lungs. He grabbed her by the arm and jerked her away from the window. "For nuke's sake, shut your face!" he said, shaking her by the shoulders as he backed her across the room. "Do you want to put them mutie bastards on us?"
But the poor woman was wild-eyed with fear. If anything, her cries got louder.
Grub took hold of her face, squeezing her jaws shut, and gave her a hard shove that sent her stumbling backward onto the mattress. As she scrambled to take cover beneath it, he pulled on his torn desert camouflage BDUs and raggedy jungle boots.
"Good thinking," he said to the human-sized lump under the middle of the pallet. ' 'They sure as shit won't find you there."
Realizing the slut was in no position to complain, Grub picked up the Roadmaster hubcap on his way out the door.