It wore a long, shapeless sack of filthy material that reached clear to the planks of the wooden porch. Where it had moved up from the garden, Ryan could make out a trail of thick, jellylike slime, like that left behind by a gigantic snail.

The mutie had two seemingly ordinary arms that ended in crooked fingers. The right hand gripped a gnarled club of wood, with several pieces of iron hammered into it. Beneath the normal arms Ryan saw that the mutie had several sets of paddlelike, residual arms, becoming progressively smaller.

During his travels in the Deathlands, Ryan had seen some appalling cases of genetic mutation, resulting initially from the nuking of 2001. But never anything quite as gross as this.

For several moments of stopped time, Ryan and the mutie looked at each other. In those steady, beating seconds, Ryan looked past it, running his eye over the remainder of the group, which numbered about twenty. The moon flickered and died, but Ryan had seen enough to know that whatever stood on the porch was a prince among its peers. Some of the others were unbelievably monstrous in their mutations. And all carried some sort of rudimentary weapon.

"Goodbye," Ryan said, slamming the door, immediately yelling out a warning to the others. "Muties! Up and at 'em! There's muties!"

The colored glass in the top half of the door imploded, splinters of crimson, deep blue, yellow and sea-green scattering over the hall floor. The tip of the great club appeared in the hole for a moment, disappeared, then came crashing down a second time, knocking the door clear off its frail old hinges. The mutie stood there, stooping to enter the house. Its face was in deep shadow.

The door to the music room swung open and Ryan saw J.B.'s face in the gap, peering out behind the stubby barrel of his mini-Uzi.

"Dark night!" he exclaimed, not really sounding that surprised.

"Let's get the fuck out of here," Ryan called, spinning around and putting a triple burst through the middle of where he assumed the mutie's heart might be. The giant staggered back onto the porch, giving a roar of pain and rage, tearing away half the frame of the door as it went. But it didn't fall.

A second burst from the G-12 put it down, the club dropping with a crash. Ryan could hear a dreadful sound from outside, a confused, wordless shriek that mixed anger and hatred.

"Through here and out the back door," the Armorer said.

Ryan glanced over his shoulder, but none of the muties had yet appeared. He darted into the music room, seeing that the fire had sunk low. The others were up and ready, blasters in hands.

"Bad?" Krysty asked.

He shook his head as Jak and Donfil bolted the heavy door behind him. "Muties like you've never seen," he panted. "Real... But I figure they don't have the brains of a self-heat can between them. Mebbe best we outrun them. No point wasting good lead."

Lori appeared from the far door, at the bottom of the rear stairs. "They're out there, through the old kitchens. Five or six. No blasters. Axes and some getting knifes."

"Knives," Doc corrected automatically.

"More than that out front. Jak, pile all the wood we've got on the fire and set the floor burning. Place'll go like a torched gas wag. Give the muties something to think about."

While the boy scampered to carry out the orders, Ryan cautiously led the other five into the rear hall. They could hear a rhythmic drumming and pounding on the music room door, as the muties closed in on their prey.

A face appeared from the blackness, pressed against the glass of a small window opening off the kitchen area. It took a second to see that the skull was totally bald, covered with what looked like small pinkish-white worms or maggots.

Krysty snapped off a shot from her Heckler & Koch silvered P7A-13. The 9 mm round smashed the glass, sending the mutie out of sight in a spray of blood that was almost black in the moonlight as it splattered over the white walls.

"Two down," Krysty said, calmly.

Jak joined them, silhouetted in the doorway against the dazzling light. "Fire burn all. Floor and walls all burn. House gone real soon, I guess."

"You got much ammo, Ryan?" J.B. asked, checking his own pockets.

"Not that much. Forty-four in the G-12 and a few singles."

"I got more. Best I go first and clear the path. You figure these sons of bitches are slow on their feet?"

"From what I've seen, yeah, they are. Hey, that fire's going to catch us if we don't make a move now."

There was a gust of raw heat that scorched at the seven companions, huddled at the foot of the dark, spiraling staircase. For a moment Ryan considered trying to lure the muties into what would be an inferno in a handful of minutes, but the rule was always to get out when you could.

He motioned for the Armorer to go first. "I'll come last. Anyone falls, we stand and fight for time to get them up and away. Head out as far as you can. I'll hold off any pursuit. Right? Then let's do it, friends!"

The next sixty seconds were a blur of violence, noise and death.

There were seven of the creatures. One was probably female, as it was naked to the waist and had a cluster of dangling breasts across its chest. Another had arms so long that they scraped on the frost-rimed grass. A raking burst from the Uzi sent half of them spinning away in a tangle of normal and residual limbs. There was a harsh crying, choked with blood, as J.B. let loose at them, firing from the hip. The others were close behind him, picking their targets. But it was damnably difficult to shoot on the run, and only one more of the inbred monsters was hit.

Ryan hesitated a second, looking back into the burning room. Tongues of flame leaped eagerly at the old floorboards, climbing the paneled walls. Already a chunk of the ceiling was blazing. Through the other door Ryan glimpsed something, very low, near the floor, something pale and sluglike that moved on its belly in rippling movements. He aimed the G-12, then changed his mind, powering after the others into the cold night air.

The garden was filled with chaos. He hurdled a corpse and dodged a hissing blow from an enormous, scythelike blade. Another of the muties, who was gut shot, reached out and tried to grab Ryan as he darted by, but the man was too quick, dodging sideways and making for a break in the bushes where the others waited for him.

"We could chill them all," J.B. said, pointing to the rear of the house. It looked like most of the muties were there, watching them, fifty paces away, ignoring their own dead and wounded.

Even while the two sides stared at one another there was a great whooshing sound and a bursting sphere of flames shot out through the side of the mansion.

It wreathed around the heads of the muties, sending them into a gurgling, screeching, huddled group, several of them actually falling to the dirt.

"Time to move," Ryan said. "I don't figure we'll have any more trouble from them."

Nothing followed them as they circled back around the blazing house. Flames soared a hundred feet in the air, sending a fountain of golden sparks ten times as high. By the time they reached the blacktop that would take them away from Consequence, there was already the first gleaming of the false dawn showing low in the eastern sky.

Just as the smoke had drawn them from their burrows among the trees, so the ferocity of the fire sent them crawling and stumbling back. Houses were bad. They should never have gone near them. That had been a bad thing to do.

At least some of them would have fresh meat for a few days.

The ashes of the old house smoldered quietly for three days and then died away. If anything ever walked there again, it walked alone.