Immortal Twilight by James Axler

stood in the claustrophobic room and stared at the stacked cages, doing a swift count in his head. Two rows of three-by-three cages, plus six more by the far door—twenty-four cells in all, all but two of them occupied.
    Stripped naked and locked in tiny cages so small that they had to crouch because there was no room either to stand or to lie down, each figure was the size and shape of a human. Hell, they were human, only not quite; something in their genetic makeup had gone awry. Their skin was pink, the same dark shade of pink that Kane went if he caught too much sun, and it glistened with sweat, thick beads of it like saliva on their arms and legs and chests, the way a horse sweats. Some had hair on their heads or protruding from their bodies, but it was straggly, a few long strands budding from their skulls like those of an old man or someone after chemo. Kane had no doubt that there were males and females here, but it was hard to tell the difference, even stripped naked as they were. Under the orange glow of the lights, their naked bodies looked stark, the shadows sharp and abrupt, nowhere to hide, no way to cover themselves up.
    Their eyes were wide as they stared at Kane, and they were human eyes with irises of green or blue or brown, whites around them just like a person’s. Only humans had eyes like that; no animals had white that way.
    But they had no eyebrows, and their lips were cracked and dry. They called to Kane from those lips, crying out from throats turned raw from mistreatment or simply from lack of use. There were many different strains of muties, but these were all the same, Kane recognized—they were called “Betties” on the streets, among people who knew about muties and what they could do.
    The cages featured big bottles on the sides, locked to the outside and upturned with a hard plastic straw that bent inside the cage so that the sweating muties could drink. The straw worked by a simple valve to ensure that the prisoner had to suck at it to get any water—or more likely a glucose solution to keep them healthy, Kane suspected. He’d seen this kind of setup before.
    Around him, the muties shrieked for attention, their raised voices sounding like wild animals fearing for their lives. In a way, Kane guessed, they were.
    A lot of people thought muties were dead by the twenty-third century. Most, even. The world had been transformed by the Program of Unification by then, people resettled within the mighty towering villes that divided the old territories of the United States of America. As such, they had lost touch with what the nukecaust had wrought two hundred years before—with its brood of radioactive children, each turned from man to beast or beast to something worse in the era that had become known colloquially as the Deathlands.
    Mutants—or “muties”—had been the consequence of the nuclear fallout that had swept across the globe, new products of the old weave of DNA. But while the muties had been hunted down and culled, they yet survived as loners or in small enclaves of hideous, godless things with extra eyes or scaled flesh, rogue limbs and razor teeth. Some mutations had helped them to survive.
    In his role as a magistrate, Kane had crossed paths with a few muties. Not many. They kept to themselves these days, hiding in the shadows, well away from man. Seeing a load of muties here like this, twenty-two of them in all, was likely the result of a raid on a single settlement out in the desert, well away from human eyes where the muties had felt they were safe.
    There were sodium-orange strip lights arranged in double rows close to the floor. No, not lights, Kane realized as he took a closer step—they were portable heaters. There were a dozen or more of the heaters arrayed in close succession, warming the cages and their occupants, forcing them to sweat and to keep sweating. It was sweltering hot in here, like noon in the desert, but Kane’s shadow suit had automatically