Stephen R. Cox's Blog, page 2

The Skin Bags Excerpt

Starling leaned back in his chair, hands resting on the top of his belly, finger tips touching one another. His eyes were narrow slits and he appeared to be studying the young bounty hunter. After what seemed like an hour he repeated, “I said, my bounty hunter is MIA.”

“Trills?” Frakes said. The bounty hunter suddenly felt better, like maybe he could function after all. At least he had some confidence he could fake it. It wasn’t the first time he’d been stoned out of his mind and been forced to carry out a rational conversation with someone who was sober. Also, what Starling told him was big news.

“Remember, what I’m telling you is classified,” Starling said.

Frakes almost laughed. Classified? The term was meaningless to him. The High Counsel may as well have been telling him that the information was blue.

“Of course,” Frakes said. He paused before asking, “What can I do for you?”

“I have to assume Trills is dead,” Starling said. “He and two of my other agents were in the northern sector of the NDZ tracking a group of mutants when they dropped out of the net. Disappeared.”

“So you want me to find Trills, confirm he’s dead? If that’s the case, I have to tell you I’ve never been north of… right here.” Frakes picked up the glass and drained what little whiskey remained. He wanted more, but figured it would be inappropriate to walk around the table, behind the High Counsel and refill his glass.

“Trills is a smart man,” Starling said. “Sometimes I think he’s too smart. Now I’ve got a situation that has too many variables, many of those created by Mr. Trills himself. I need someone who can look at the situation with a fresh set of eyes.”

The young bounty hunter didn’t understand a word Starling had just said. It sounded like gibberish spoken in a foreign language.

“You’re going to have to tell me more,” Frakes said. “I’m not getting it.”

“I see,” Starling said.

For some reason the way the High Counsel said, I see, irritated Frakes. And it irritated him a lot. The tone was condescending, almost disrespectful. The bounty hunter picked up his glass, rose from his chair and walked around the table. Standing behind Starling he poured whiskey, knowing the man was watching him in the reflection of the floor-to-ceiling windows.

“I’m guessing you want me to continue whatever mission Trills was on,” Frakes said.

“For the most part,” Starling said without turning his head.

Frakes looked at the High Counsel’s reflection. “So you’re going to have to tell me what the mission is,” he said.

Starling chuckled, but the sound was devoid of humor. “How can I say this? Once I tell you, you’ve accepted the job. It’s like plutonium. You get it on your hands, you don’t get it off.”

The bounty hunter didn’t respond. He now understood what Starling was saying, and while he knew in his own mind the man’s words should have had a sobering effect, they didn’t.

“You in?” Starling asked.

Frakes still didn’t respond. He walked back around the table while McCoil’s words bounced inside his head. His skull had turned into an echo chamber. Don’t trust the government, don’t trust Starling… He leaned against the window and stared at the High Counsel who was still smiling. The crow’s feet at the corners of the man’s eyes looked like deep cracks in dried mud.

“I’m still a rookie,” Frakes said. “Why don’t you hire someone like Leon Miller and his tracker, Treadwell?”

“Treadlow,” Starling corrected.

Frakes knew Miller’s tracker was named Treadlow, but he wanted to see how knowledgeable Starling was about his business. “Whatever,” he said. “Those guys are good. Why don’t you hire them?”

“Miller’s distracted,” Starling said. “He’s turned into a renegade, more or less. And his tracker’s a sociopath.”

The bounty hunter laughed. He couldn’t help it. Everyone in the mutant hunting business was a sociopath.

Legends of the Fallout Cover Illustration

I started writing the first Mutant Hunter book back in the early 1990s with the intent to sell a three-book series to Gold Eagle Books for whom I had written the science fiction, action-adventure series, HORN. They were interested, but not enough to buy it. And that is probably a good thing because over the years the idea evolved into a story that reflects what I most wanted to write, without inhibitions or editorial restrictions, pure action-adventure in a post-apocalyptic world.

Mutant Hunter plays out through a cast of characters that are based on individuals I know or have known. This is a tale of adventure and heartbreak. A race through the future in which your only real friend has a trigger. A world where redemption comes through violence and hope flees from you like a ghost.

The Slicks Cover Illustration

One of the recurring concepts in the Mutant Hunter books is making excursions into dangerous, foreboding places where the characters’ wits, skills, weapons and luck are all that sustains them.

In The Slicks, bounty hunter Leon Miller continues his epic hunt of the last of the Ten Most Wanted mutants—Number Six. The chase takes him into a giant, polluted oil slick that covers nearly a fourth of the planet.

Miller hires a mercenary pilot to take them into the Slicks. As they fly across the outer boundaries of the oil-covered wasteland, I tried to convey a sense of crossing the Rubicon, going beyond the point of no return. I’ve experienced that sensation a handful of times in my life and it’s a powerful, exciting and scary feeling.

Going into The Slicks is hard – getting out alive is damn near impossible.

Splinterland Cover Illustration

In the third book of the series, the chase takes Miller into the Nuclear Dead Zone and Splinterland, an area that encompasses Siberia. When I think of Splinterland, I think of Tunguska on a larger, massive scale. The godforsaken place is the next step in the progression (or regression):

Enter a wormhole in Hell, come out in the Slicks.

Enter a wormhole in the Slicks, come out in Splinterland.

The Slicks Early Cover Detail

In THE SLICKS, the protagonist, bounty hunter Leon Miller, continues his epic hunt of the last of the Ten Most Wanted mutants on the planet – Number Six. The chase takes him into a sector of the world that is, for all intents and purposes, a giant polluted oil slick.

The Screamer

The Screamer and its mercenary pilot Horn are introduced in THE SLICKS.

The aircraft, one of only a few flying machines still operating after the apocalypse, is a highly-modified military VX-4. It is capable of vertical takeoff and landing (V) with an X-wing configuration (X) and four engines (4). Originally built as a weapons platform that could also haul troops and cargo, I think of it as a cross between a V-22 and an A-10.

Horn has scrapped its original nitrogen-burning engines and replaced them with old petroleum-fueled jets. Fortunately the airplane carries a Portable Field Refinery Unit (PFRU) onboard, which comes in handy in the Slicks where there’s virtually an endless supply of crude.

No Blood

No Blood is the leader of a strain of mutants called Hydrates, although Dehydrates might be a better descriptive term. He was tagged No Blood because he is significantly and unusually pale.

While the majority of all Hydrates have skin that resembles the stretched and dried hide from an animal that lives in a desert hole, toned in browns and reds like the sand and dirt terrain they normally inhabit, No Blood’s skin appears to have no pigment, no tone, no blood.

Once thought to be an outland myth, Hydrates have become recognized by the human population to be what they are: outlaws and murderers who are about as predictable as cornered snakes.

It was a shaky alliance Trills had forged with the Hydrate leader. Trills hated the leader of the Drates as much as he knew the mutant hated him. He was going to kill the freak as soon as he had served his purpose, and he was going to enjoy doing it. But the bounty hunter didn’t make the mistake of underestimating the mutant’s intelligence. When it came to hunting and killing other living things, Trills considered No Blood to be a peer. Almost.

Blinder

Second-in-command of the Hydrates.

Hydrophobic skeletal mutants were freaks among freaks with skin stretched so tight across their skulls that their faces looked like drum heads. And they were crazy mean, radiation-soaked, compunctionless killers.

But most humans didn’t believe Hydrates even existed. They were supposedly another myth of the wasteland, a fiction grandfathers told their grandchildren when they put them to bed and guaranteed their nightmares.

Mutants

Most mutants, Web Heads and Leather Skins, could pass for humans in the right circumstances with minimal disguise; a scarf around the head to hide the marking tattoo, clothing to cover the reptilian-like skin, a hat to obscure the elongated head, sunglasses to conceal the eyes.

Hydrates’ bodies were whipcord thin, all muscle and bone and almost totally devoid of fat. They looked skeletal and disturbing with desert-blotched skin stretched tight over frames of hard bone. Their faces seemed to be permanently masked in anger: thin lips and bared teeth, bulging eyes with red-rimmed pupils that rarely dilated more than a couple of millimeters.

Hydrates rarely evacuated their bodies of waste and, by the same token, they rarely consumed moisture. Most of them were extremely hydrophobic and reacted badly, very badly, when faced with water and other liquids. And Hydrates despised normal mutants almost as much as they despised humans, which they hated with a passion. They considered Webs—��even though they had been outlawed—sub-humans, sell-outs, traitors to the Mutant Race.

The truth be known, Hydrates despised almost anything and everything whether it made sense or not. The same extreme levels of radiation that had sent the genes of their physical forms on a permanent detour had leeched deep into the accelerated declension of their brains and made them crazier than a plague of shithouse rats.

No Blood Sketch

The Mutant Hunter series was born out of two unpublished novels Cox wrote in 1985 and 1986. Meant to be the first two books of a post-apocalyptic series, he found no publisher (or agent) willing to take them on. The books are crude, more violent than Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” and are now buried in an ammunition box in Cox’s back yard.

No Blood and the Hydrates were born in these chaotic novels and through their own cunning wit, managed to survive into the Mutant Hunter epic.