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nose and mouth was a small, parrot-like beak lined with tiny serrated teeth. It was a mixture of avian and humanoid characteristics that J.B. had never seen before.
    Trophies of previous voyages, he reckoned.
    He descended the stairs to the ship’s galley. The walls were riveted sheet metal, the ceilings low. There were rows of small, circular portholes on either side of the room, but most of the illumination came from the soft glow of oil lamps, which smoke-stained the walls and ceiling. Looking at the built-in benches and tables, J.B. realized there wasn’t enough seating for the hundred or so passengers and maybe twenty crew. They were going to have to be fed in three or four shifts. Though he was hungry, having waited on the pier since daybreak with nothing to eat but a few strips of venison jerky, the reek of scorched cooking oil and fried fish tied his guts in a knot.
    He followed the man in front of him between the stationary tables, through the bulkhead door into the fo’c’stle. The bow of the ship was jammed with tiers of bunks and sweltering from all the passengers packed inside. Some smoked cigars and pipes; some passed around blue antifreeze jugs filled with joy juice. There was little air to breathe and no ventilation. The sleeping compartment was lit by oil lamps that hung on short chains bolted to the ceiling. Though not a tall man, J.B. could easily reach up and touch the I-beams overhead.
    With difficulty, he pushed his way deeper into the room. There was a lot of jostling going on. Over the general din, he could hear loud bragging contests. Who had chilled whom. Who had robbed whom. Shouted bravado intended to stall or deflect imminent attack.
    Having spent most of his adult life trading bullets and blade thrusts with similar adversaries, J.B. knew his fellow passengers were war gaming, coldly measuring and marking each other for slaughter. Survival in Deathlands was usually a matter of anticipation, of knowing in advance what someone else was likely to do, and getting off the first, well-aimed shot. It was too early for the long knives to come out, but come out they would, the Armorer knew. Many in the room would not live to see the end of the voyage. Fewer open palms meant bigger shares when it came time to divide the spoils of war.
    While searching for a bed, J.B. passed very close to Krysty and Mildred. He didn’t acknowledge them; they didn’t acknowledge him. After the double chilling on the pier, the other passengers were giving the two women plenty of personal space. Somewhere in the milling throng, Ryan, Doc and Jak were laying low.
    J.B. found an empty berth on the bottom of one of the three-bunk tiers. Hunkering down, he saw that the pallet lay right on the deck, a human-shaped depression in its compacted straw stuffing. There was just two and a half feet of space between the floor and the underside of the bunk above. Like everyone else, he chalked his token number on the iron frame. There was no locker to stow personal gear or weapons, which meant taking it all to bed with him, making the bunk space even smaller. He crawled in to check it out. With his head resting on the rock-hard straw, he heard sounds from the cargo hold directly below: squealing, pleading, weeping. There were smells, too, zoo smells seeping up through the riveted seams.
    He had slept in worse accommodations.
    As J.B. crawled back out, he noticed another passenger, maybe twenty feet away, staring at him intently. The man appeared to have large hairy ears set way too high on either side of a steeply pointed head. The bodies passing in front of the suspended oil lamps dimmed and strobed the available light and made it difficult to see. Carefully thumbing his steel-rimmed glasses back up the sweat-slick bridge of his nose, J.B. squinted. Hard.
    The man was wearing a hooded cloak…with attached ears.
    Even in the low light, the material glittered with thousands of tiny flecks. J.B. recognized it at once. It was the excised