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skin of a scalie. A skin scraped free of underlying fat, sun-dried, then worked by hand until it was glove-leather supple. Thin, light, breathable. There was a lot of shrinkage in the curing process, though. It took a mighty big scalie to make a man-size cloak like that. A 500-pounder, maybe.
    A bearded face protruded from the pointy hood, lips curled, half smiling. The intermittent lamplight played over sunken brown eyes circled in deep purple. From the man’s belt hung bulging black-powder and bullet bags fashioned from handsomely tanned swampie scrotums. He leaned on a big-bore, double-barreled percussion rifle, what in predark times would have been called an elephant gun. It was the kind of weapon mutie hunters used to blast through foot-thick hut mud walls, ambushing and chilling parents so their offspring could be more easily carted off.
    J.B. stared back until the man broke eye contact, turned and vanished into the crowd. No name came to mind to match the face or the gear. No battlefield, either. J.B. had shot his way down a lot of dark, winding roads—chilling evildoers and defending the innocent—and in the process he had made blood enemies that he had never seen. Those who had escaped. And the relatives of those who hadn’t. And that didn’t take into account Deathlands’ power to transform people’s appearances in short order. It dried them up. Dimmed their lights. Most were guttering candles by the age of thirty, thanks to the elements and privation and constant conflict.
    If Skin Hood had recognized him, or suspected something, he was keeping it to himself, at least for the time being. He either didn’t know for sure, or he had some other agenda. The only thing certain was that discovery by this collection of coldhearts, in these cramped quarters, would get the companions torn limb from limb. Pronto.
    The clank of the anchor chain being raised sent the passengers surging for the bulkhead door. As he allowed himself to be pushed out of the room, J.B. caught momentary sight of Ryan. The one-eyed man looked grim, determined, dangerous. J.B. moved with the crowd up the companionway to the main deck. Most of the crew was already aloft, scampering up the webs of cables, along yard arms, unfurling sails. Captain Eng stood behind the ship’s wheel, bare feet spread wide, barking orders through a steel megaphone in a language J.B. couldn’t understand.
    As the sails filled and the ship started to tack back and forth toward the breakers, the great rock and the wall of fog outside the bay entrance, J.B. watched the passengers’ arrogant bluster evaporate. They were not sailors. They were leaving terra firma for an alien, even more hostile environment. If travel in Deathlands was perilous, travel over the sea was a hundred times worse, fraught with new hazards, the most pleasant of which was drowning.
    The islander crew offered their guests neither comfort nor reassurance. Sullen, humorless, they spoke only to one another in their native tongue and in sign language. They treated the passengers like so many cattle. Which was understandable as Magus no doubt paid them by the head.
    Halfway down the starboard rail J.B. saw Doc conversing with a tall, topknotted black man and a shorter guy with cracked and peeling face paint who looked like a carny clown coming off a jolt binge. He didn’t let his eyes linger for long. Mildred and Krysty were on the far side of the deck, standing back to back. As he scanned the rest of the crowd for Jak and Ryan, once again he locked gazes with Skin Hood.
    The bearded man smiled at him. Then he very deliberately looked away, first at Doc, then at Mildred and Krysty. When he turned back to J.B., he nodded, his hand on the pommel of a sheathed dagger.
    Gotcha.
    J.B. measured the distance, estimated the shot spread left to right, and decided against trying to take him out then and there. At a range of seventy-five feet, a high brass buckshot round was not a precision-guided munition. No