Free Doomsday Warrior 14 - American Death Orbit by Ryder Stacy Page B

because the netting had wrapped around the back of his head and throat making it hard to move. A few of the men were moaning and stirring slightly.
    He stared as hard as he could into the dimness. The only light was coming through some windows covered over with opaque plastic material that allowed only a fraction of illumination to come in from the outside. There— he saw them—the two kids far down at the end of the room, the last two in the row on his side. They were clearly out like lights, both of their heads tilted all the way over to one side. He prayed they were still alive.
    Even as he searched around for Detroit, Chen, the others, the door across from him opened up and the room flooded with light from some outside hall.
    Three of the women came walking in, only this time they weren’t wearing the cute sexy waitress outfits and—they weren’t smiling either. At least not the friendly dumb waitress expressions that they had all mastered so well the night before. These were, rather, sneers of disdain. And as they walked in, high heels clicking on the wood, and switched on a light on one wall, they seemed to exude evil. When the room sprang into brightness Rock saw with horror that they were wearing—human skin.
    It was clearly skin, and male, too, as he could still see the hair all over the skin which had been stretched out. The waitresses had cut it into what almost looked like deerskin pants and jackets, half-open, so their breasts poked through like melons being swung on a pendulum.
    “Ah, the males awaken,” one of them, the blonde, said with scorn as she walked up and down the two rows facing each other on opposite walls, poking at them, examining their faces, their necks. “A good batch,” she said to the other two who followed along behind her with little tubes of what looked like blood in their hands, and a set of collars which they secured on each man as they went down the rows, putting them around the men’s necks. They were almost like dog collars, perhaps were, and had numbers written on each one.
    “This one’s an O-positive,” the leader of the three women said as she pointed to one of the men just to the left of Rock. “We’ll put him on the A-list.”
    “Right, Zeran,” one of the subordinates said as she marked it all down in a notebook. Rock noticed that the women were pale now, like death itself, having washed off the make-up and rouge.
    “Well look here—we got us a live one,” the head woman Zeran said, stopping in her tracks as she came right in front of Rockson. He looked her squarely in the eyes without flinching, even though his brain felt like silly putty which had been filtered through a spaghetti colander. He could feel the pure strength of her will as she gazed at him with burning yellow eyes.
    Rockson suddenly realized these were mutants. However, they had hidden it all with contact lenses and other accoutrements that the spider uses to trap the fly—they were clearly mutants. And not of his particular variety of Sapiens new evolution. They didn’t have the star-shaped birthmarks on their breasts, nor the streak of white hair that ran down the center of the true mutants’ scalps like Rock’s. These were of a different ilk entirely. And from the look of them not a very positive branch of evolution at all.
    “What are you looking at so strongly, mister?” Zeran asked, as she kept her cat-slit yellow eyes focused right on his, wanting to make him look away, wanting to subordinate his human male will to her female mutant will. But Rockson of all people, who had stared down snar-lions out in the wastelands, wasn’t exactly the one to test wills with.
    “I don’t know,” Rock replied softly, discovering that he could hardly speak, that his lips felt like they were made of desert sand with a pinch of salt thrown in. “What are you?”
    The yellow eyes burned wildly as he could see fury rise in them. The lips curled back from the mouth revealing two sharp fangs set on