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Lowering his spoon, John looked up from his plate of stew. “That’s blasterfire,” he said, scowling.
“Way out here?” Robert rasped in his horrible mockery of a human voice. Unconsciously he touched the bandanna that covered a wide puckered scar around his neck. “Somebody must be getting jacked out in the dunes. Mebbe a nice, juicy caravan, eh?”
“That means wounded to loot,” John said, almost smiling.
“Always are,” Edward added with a gruff laugh, working on his third plate of stew.
The barrel-chested man was huge, almost a giant, yet he had challenged his younger brother John for control of the group only once. That was a mistake he would never make again. Edward was the biggest, but not the meanest, or the most deadly. That honor went to John. It was the elder Rogan who had created the nightmare tortures they inflicted upon the people they captured, and he always had some new idea to try, each one worse than the last. There didn’t seem to be a limit to his brutality.
“Could be Ryan and his crew,” Robert warned, dropping his plate into the fire and licking his fingers clean. “Mebbe they’re trying to lure us out of the glen. Jack the jackers, so to speak.”
“A nightcreep?” Edward said, chewing the idea over.
“Sure. Why not?”
Tossing aside his own plate, John reached behind the box he was sitting on and lifted a gleaming M-16/M-203 rapidfire. The sleek combo wep was one of the many perks the brothers had gotten from the mysterious being who called himself Delphi. The double-barrel predark mil wep was in perfect condition, without a speck of rust or corrosion. The M-16 rapidfire on top had ammo clips that held thirty live rounds of shiny brass. It could vomit a hellstorm of lead that mowed down a roomful of people like wind bending the prairie grass. But underneath that barrel was the gaping maw of the M-203 gren launcher. The portable cannon fired only a single shell at a time, but the huge 40 mm gren could blow down a house or chill a dozen muties in a thundering blast of steel fléchettes.
Working the arming bolts, the three brothers stood and started across the glen. A few yards away, three black bikes rested on the cool green grass. Strapped across the rear fender of each were cargo pods, molded to the frame as if installed when the bikes were new. Inside the pods was a wealth of canned food, meds, clothing, grens and piles of ammo clips for the combo rapidfires. Advance payment for chilling Ryan and capturing the whitehair called Tanner. John flinched at the memory of Delphi forcibly reminding them not to hurt the wrinklie in any way. If they did, the punishment would be worse than anything the Rogans had done to their own victims. John was stubborn, but not feeb enough to doubt that the strange outlander meant every word of the dire threat.
“We take the bikes, but leave in pairs,” John commanded, checking the handblaster at his side, “each covering the other as we go. Ace anybody you see who doesn’t have white hair.”
“Sounds good, bro,” Robert stated, dropping the clip from his rapidfire to check the load. Satisfied, he shoved it back into the wep. “Let’s ride.”
Tucking the rapidfires into the cushioned holster sets along the front yoke of the sleek bikes, the two men climbed onto their two-wheelers and twisted the handgrips to bring the electric engines softly purring into life. The dashboard came alive with glowing green lights. But there was no sound from the vibrating engine between his legs, only a soft hum. The usual gear chain had been replaced with an enclosed transmission that connected the engine to the rear wheel. The effect was that the two-wheeler was as silent as a grave.
As the bikes came alive, Lily tried not to shudder in revulsion. Bastard tech-lovers, she thought hatefully.
While Robert and Edward opened the gate that closed off the gap in the bushes that surrounded the hidden glen, John rolled his bike over to Lily.
“Gimme,” he said bluntly, extending a hand.
With great reluctance, Lily removed her clothing and passed over the garments. Taking the bundle, John rode to the blockhouse and locked them behind the iron door. He thought his sister was a feeb slut, but not crazy enough to try running without a stitch to cover her ass.
Moving like ghosts, the three Rogan brothers drove through the bushes that surrounded the hidden glen, but paused to swing the gate shut and arm the explos boobies hidden in the greenery.
Sighing in resignation, the naked girl went back to her cooking, building up the fire to stave off the evening chill. Stirring the dented steel pot full of rabbit stew, Lily shivered involuntarily at the memory of the people who hadn’t been given the boon of a swift death. The men with only one eye, and the wrinklies who proved not to be the sought-after Tanner. Sometimes, Lily could still hear the screaming in her dreams at night. The poor bastards had been taken apart like a blaster, and left that way to slowly die, while bugs and muties gnawed on their guts. It was horrible beyond words. It seemed impossible that the same blood ran in her veins as in those chilling freaks. But they had all come from the same mother, even if each of them had a different father.
Kin was supposed to care for kin, but the Rogan brothers never obeyed anybody, and they seemed to take special delight in torturing their little sister. Someday, it would be her turn to taste the sharp steel of their horrible knives.
Unless she did something about it.
CRAWLING ON the ground, Rolph tried to ignore the burning sensation along his cheek where the pilgrim’s blaster had just missed removing his head. Rad-sucking mutie fucker! The slaver didn’t know if he had hit the bastard, but he did know for certain that blasters in the night would always attract the attention of any muties in the area. Time was against him now. Rolph had to find the crossbow, ace the man, capture the two women and get back to his cart as fast as possible.
Pausing in the darkness, the slaver listened for any sounds of folks moaning on the ground, but there was nothing. Only deep silence. There wasn’t even the chirping of the bugs in the weeds to be heard.
Starting onward again, Rolph froze as something moved on the sandy slope of a nearby dune, the shadows disguising the figure. Then the clouds broke and the cold moonlight revealed only footprints in the shifting sand. Damn! Was the pilgrim trying to get behind him, or was he running away?
Increasing the speed of his search, Rolph bite back a cry of joy as his hand closed around the wooden stock of the crossbow. Yes! Quickly, he pulled an arrow from the quiver on his back only to discover the shaft was broken in two from his fall off the cart. Cursing, he went through the arrows until finding one intact, and hurriedly notched the deadly shaft into place. Two brass, two arrows. He had to make every shot count.
Leaving the thick weeds, Rolph proceeded along the dirt road after the escaping family. The sandy ground rose to a small crest, then dropped away into a dark plain, jagged rocks rising around the area in a circular pattern. A blast crater!
Holding his breath, Rolph saw nothing glowing in the darkness and forced himself to relax. If it didn’t glow, the rads were gone and it was safe to go through. Well, most of the time, anyway, he thought unhappily.
Proceeding swiftly, the slaver found the ground softening and there was definitely the smell of water in the air. An oasis in a nuke crater? Mebbe this was what the pilgrims had been running toward, not the ruins. A hideyhole where they could get fresh water. Curling a lip in disgust, Rolph started toward the sound of water gently lapping onto a muddy bank. Bad move, pilgrim.
Staying low and moving quickly, Rolph found only a scrawny gopher licking at the wet shoreline. Angrily leveling his crossbow at the animal, Rolph raised it again, knowing its life had been his to take. That had been fun, but he had bigger prizes this night.
Just then, bright white lights split the night and big creatures came charging over the hill in the dirt road as if they owned the world. Already keyed for action, Rolph instinctually aimed the crossbow and fired. Anything new presented a threat, and it was always best to ace odd things on sight rather than to risk being attacked for something really dangerous.
The arrow vanished into the night. Somebody cried out from behind the lights, and the desert was filled with the sound of blasters. Hundreds of them!
As the slaver dived to the moist ground, Rolph heard another scream from the water of the crater oasis, and knew that the escaping pilgrim had just gotten onto the last train west. Excellent! One down, two to go.
But the chattering blasterfire went on and on, until Rolph thought he had to be hallucinating. Nuking hell, how many sec men were there? The blasters never seemed to stop! A burst raked the ground in front of the cringing slaver, the sand flying up in tiny puffs from the impact of each round.
Impossible! Rolph thought in growing terror. Nobody could shoot that close together in unison. These had to be—what was the word?—rapidfires! Working predark rapidfires, with more ammo than a dozen barons!
Capturing the mother and child no longer seemed important, and Rolph felt a rush of raw greed at the thought of the deadly barkers in his possession. Rapidfires! Just one of those and he could become a baron himself! Checking the knife in his belt, Rolph reloaded the handblaster with his last two rounds, and notched a fresh arrow into the crossbow. After that he was down to a knife, but there was nobody better than him at blade chilling in the Deathlands. Especially in a nightcreep.
Let them come! I’ll slit every throat before they even knew I’m here. Those fancy blasters are already mine!
Forcing himself to breathe slowly and calmly, Rolph dared to risk a look above the tall grass edging the road. Less than a stone’s throw away three machines were parked in a group, their headlights throwing blinding cones of white light. The figures sitting on the back of the two-wheelers each held a weird double-barreled longblaster of some kind. The machines didn’t seem to be working; they shook slightly, and he could see the waves of heat radiating from the compact engines.
Muttering something low and guttural, one of the men slid off his machine and fell to the ground. Instantly, the other climbed off their machine and went to aid their fallen comrade. For a second, their features were lit by the reflected shine of the lamps. Rolph saw they were big men with all sorts of mil stuff dripping off them, as if they were a group of sec men.
The man on the ground had an arrow sticking out of his chest, and he snarled as a barrel-chested man took hold of the shaft and slowly pulled it out. The wounded man grunted as it came free, then went limp. The big man tossed the shaft away, as another one opened the back of a black two-wheeler and pulled out some items. Kneeling on the ground, the tall man started to bandage the wound, while the barrel-chested man stood guard. Occasionally, he would trigger a burst from the rapidfire randomly into the darkness of the crater, the muzzle-flash resembling a fiery flower.
Med supplies, bikes and blasters? Who were these sec men? Wisdom said it was time for Rolph to leave, but lust for the blasters filled his heart, and the slaver stood to fire the handblaster at the two closer strangers.
Even before the smoke of the discharge cleared, the night was filled with chattering fire and something red-hot punched Rolph in the shoulder, belly and hip. He staggered from the multiple impacts and tried to run. But then the two rapidfires rang out in staccato destruction, and white hot knives stabbed him across the back, red blood blowing out from his shirt.
The world became chaos then, the pain blurring consciousness. Rolph tripped on a rock and went flying. He hit the ground hard, and the raw wounds flared with pain until he blacked out.
AN ETERNITY LATER Rolph sluggishly came awake. A pair of boots stood near his face, shiny new boots without patches. Worth a fortune! Then one of the boots kicked him hard in the side. Rolph wanted to play dead, but he couldn’t stop himself from grunting at the blow.
“Still sucking air, eh?” a voice snarled.
A knee dropped into view and somebody roughly grabbed his hair to painfully haul his face upward. Rolph found himself looking into a furious face. This was one of the bikers. Thick bandoliers criss-crossed his chest, full of little metal boxes stuffed with live brass. Clips. He had dozens of ammo clips. The wealth of an entire ville was on display only inches away. If only he could snatch one of those….
Angrily, Edward slapped away the bloody hand of the dying man. “Ya got balls, I’ll grant ya that,” he said grudgingly. “But it was a triple-stupe move to shoot at us. Ya hit my bro.”
“I th-thought…you were s-stickies…” Rolph panted, forcing out the words.
“Shut up,” Edward ordered, backhanding the wounded slaver. “You’re just lucky that Robert is gonna live, it was only a flesh wound. If you had aced him…”
Edward backhanded the slaver again, harder this time. “If he had been chilled, John and I would have done things to you that’d make a cannie vomit.” A knife came into view, the moonlight reflected off the razor-sharp edge. “But as it is, we’ve got friends coming. So we have to leave.”
Not sure that he wanted to know what was going to happen, Rolph tried to think of a bribe to offer for his life, when the big man reached out and slashed the laces of his boots. Then he yanked them off, leaving Rolph barefoot.
What the frag? Rolph tried to summon the strength to ask a question, when there came a terrible pain at his ankles, and warm trickle sensation could be felt. Bleeding, he was bleeding!
“I just cut your tendons,” Edward said with a chuckle, displaying the crimson-smeared blade. “Now ya can’t walk.”
“Please…” Rolph whispered, holding on to his aching chest. “I…have many…”
But the slaver was interrupted by a distant hoot. Everybody froze motionless. The cry was answered by another hoot, closely followed by several more.
“And here comes the welcoming committee,” Edward said with a chuckle, slowly standing. Wiping the blade clean, he tucked it away in a sheath on his belt. “My brother lived, so you live. Say hi to the muties for me, feeb.”
“No! Please…chill me…” Rolph begged, his throat constricted from the racking pain in his chest. Weakly, he tried to rise, but his feet merely flopped at the end of his legs like dead things.
Edward only laughed in reply.
“Don’t leave me like this,” the slaver whined, tears on his dirty face. “Please, I’ll be your slave! I’ll do anything you want. Anything!”
Sneering in disgust, Edward kicked the slaver in the ribs again, doubling him up with the pain. Then the big man pulled something from a pocket.
“Hurry along,” an inhuman voice called from the bikes. “The stickies are coming. We must get moving.”
“No prob.” Edward chuckled, twisting off the cap of a cylinder to scrape it across the nubbin that had been underneath.
With a sputtering rush, a reddish flame extended from the fat cylinder, and Edward stabbed it into the muddy ground. The bank of the little pond was now clearly revealed in the crimson glow as if painted in blood.
“Just so the stickies can find their meal,” Edward said, turning to leave. Then he stopped and looked over a broad shoulder. “Our name is Rogan,” he said clearly. “Remember that as they tear you apart, feeb. We’re the Rogan brothers!”
As the biker joined the others on their machines, Rolph felt a surge of blind panic. Flipping himself over, the slaver started to madly crawl for the pond, using his fingers and knees.
I can hide under water, he thought. Yes, that would work! The road flare was throwing out a lot of stinking smoke that should mask the smell of my blood from the mutie. I’m not aced yet! Get going, keep moving, crawl…
But Rolph made it only a few feet when the inhuman face of a stickie rose above the swaying weeds, and the mutie looked directly into his eyes. Starting to scream, Rolph clawed for the knife on his belt and drew it across his own throat. But he was too weak and only managed a shallow gash. There was no telltale spurting of a major artery being cut, followed by a quick and merciful ride on the last train west.
That was when the stickie grabbed Rolph’s stomach with its sucker-covered hands and started to pull open the wounds.
Shrieking, Rolph slashed at the mutie with the knife, but the blade went flying into the weeds and landed out of sight. More stickies arrived, and they converged on the struggling man, tearing off gobbets of living flesh and yanking out pulsating organs. As the orgy of feeding began, the pitiful shrieks of the dying slaver seemed to last forever.
AS THE THREE MOTORCYCLES disappeared into the distance, David rose from the far side of the pond, his old blaster dripping muddy water. Black dust, it had worked! When the outlanders started shooting, he screamed and hit the water, and they assumed he was chilled.
For a moment the drenched man watched in satisfaction as the stickies enjoyed their gory meal across the pond, then he turned and started to run into the desert. The sooner he got away from the muties the better. David still had his wife and child to find. If they were yet alive.
Chapter Four
Standing on the top of the sweeping hill, Sec Chief Steven Stirling of Two-Son ville scowled deeply at the grassy vista spreading to the horizon.
In every direction there was nothing but endless fields of waving grass. To the west, purple mountains rose into the cloudy sky. To the north were several copses, and that was everything. In spite of the lush green plants, the landscape was as barren as the Great Salt. There were no ruins, or villes, or blaster craters or anything. If Ryan and his people had ridden this way, there was no way of knowing.
“Nuke-blasting hell, we lost them,” Stirling muttered angrily, massaging the back of his neck. “I thought you were supposed to be the best tracker in the whole ville.”
“I am, sir,” Alton answered, pouring some water from a canteen into his palm.
Holding the hand out to his horse, Alton let the animal slurp the water, being careful that his fingers didn’t get in the way. Many a green rider offered a carrot to their horse, only to start screaming as they drew back a bloody stump.
When the stallion was done, Alton poured in some more. The ride had been long and dusty, and the animal was thirsty. So was he, but a good rider took care of his mount first.
Inside the ville, it was blaster and brass, but outside the walls, a horse saved your ass, Alton mentally recited the ancient poem. Learning that had been his first lesson as a sec man and never forgotten. His second lesson had been to not turn his back on a wounded enemy, even if his guts were on the ground alongside him. Alton flinched from the memory. He still walked with a slight limp in the winter, caused by the lead miniball lodged near his hip, fired from the hidden blaster of a dying mercie.
The horse nickered, so Alton gave the animal one more palmful. A short, wiry man with thinning hair, Alton had a lopsided grin that never went away, even when he was chilling a coldheart, or slaver. A remade Remington 30.06 bolt-action rode in a leather holster along the side of the animal, and the saddlebags bulged with supplies, most of them being homie pipe bombs.
“Well, then, which way did they go?” Stirling demanded, scowling. His own horse was similarly equipped with blasters and bombs. The Zone was a dangerous place and with only four sec men; Stirling wanted all the edge he could get. The pipe bombs were a very recent addition to the Two-Son ville armory. J. B. Dix had taught them the secret of making something called guncotton, which turned out to be ten times more powerful than plas.
“There isn’t much that I can do on solid rock,” Alton replied, continuing to water his horse. “We lost Ryan back on that stony plain near the desert, and no amount of yelling is going to make their hoofprints appear.”
Distant thunder rumbled in the cloudy sky, and the sec men sniffed hard for any trace of chems in the air. But the wind remained clear and crisp, without any trace of acid rain.
“What do we try next, Chief?” Renée Machtig asked, tying back her long hair with a strip of rawhide. The sec woman was dressed in loose tan clothing suitable for travel in the desert. A bandolier of ammo pouches was draped across her chest, and a big-bore longblaster hung off a slim shoulder. A crossbow jutted from one of the saddlebags on her horse, along with tufts of straw used as cushioning to protect the delicate glass bottles of a half dozen Molotovs.
Stirling knew that Renée had only come along to stay with Alton, but that was okay with him. She was one of the best shots in Two-Son ville with the BAR longblaster, and this part of the Zone in New Mex had way too many muties in his opinion. Must have been hit double-hard during skydark to yield such a bumper crop of the cursed things, he added sourly. After all, it’s not like somebody is making more of them!
“We could go back and try to find their trail again,” Nathan Machtig offered from atop his horse. Tall and lean, the bearded teenager was carrying an old M-16 rapidfire equipped with a wooden handle to operate the bolt action. The black-powder brass didn’t have the power to operate the rapidfire, but the mil wep still served just fine as a single shot. Nathan was the son of Renée, and in spite of his parent, the teen was without a doubt the worst shot in the ville, including the blind man who carved wooden bowls for the baron. On the other hand, the kid could throw a pipe bomb farther and straighter than anybody Stirling had ever seen. A hell of an arm. The clumsy longblaster was there just to give the teenager some measure of protection in case something attacked closer than the bombs could be used.
“That’s a lot of ground to cover,” Gill McGillian replied, biting off a piece of jerky. He chewed the resilient material for a few minutes before adding, “But I suppose we gotta. So, what the frag, eh?”
Gill was the former driver of the Metro, the flame wag Two-Son ville used to burn the streets of the predark ruins around the ville clean of muties. But the sec man had relinquished that vaunted position of honor to come along with Stirling. Gill was carrying a double-barreled scattergun, his shirt lined with cloth loops stuffed with 12-gauge cartridges for the wep. They were reloads, packed with rocks, glass and nails, but still deadly.
Sitting slumped on his horse, Taw Porter didn’t join the conversation, but merely watched the others through half-closed eyes. The man looked like he was falling asleep, but that was just his way of keeping folks from seeing exactly what he was paying close attention to at any moment. During the fight with the stickies, Porter had been slow to respond. Baron O’Connor had publicly ridiculed Taw for the matter, but then incredibly offered the sec man a chance to clear his rep by going along on this journey. That seemed fair enough. But as a further punishment, the baron had decreed that Porter was to be armed with only a crossbow.
“Well, no sign of any campfires that I can see,” Stirling declared unhappily. “Sure would have been nice of Ryan to light us a beacon.”
“Mebbe there are too many muties around,” Alton suggested, taking a swig from his canteen. “Stickies love fire.”
“Ain’t that the nuking truth,” Stirling growled. “But, no, I think he’s far away from here. Hell, we could be out of the Zone for all I know!”
Fine by me, Porter thought petulantly, brushing a fly off his neck. Let’s go back home. How can anybody feel safe without a stone wall around their ass?
“Chief, if Ryan is a good day ahead of us,” Gill said slowly, “then we may never find them.”
“Yeah, I know,” Stirling admitted. “That just means we have to ride faster.”
“Ride faster in which direction?”
“Give me a second,” the sec chief muttered. “I’m working on it.”
“Does anybody else think that there is something wrong here,” Renée asked, squinting at the horizon. “I mean, this field. This place feels odd. I can sense something wrong with it in my bones.”
“Odd place, I have to agree,” Alton grunted in reply. “Although I can’t tell you why. Mebbe we’re just used to having sand under our boot.”
“Rather than grass under our ass?” Gill added.
The sec men all chuckled at that, but Stirling felt his frown deepen. He had been thinking the same thing about this grassy knoll. Something wrong here, something unnatural. Then it hit him. No insects. With all this green, there wasn’t a single insect making noise in the field. That wasn’t a good sign. Hurriedly glancing around, Stirling saw a clump of tall grass and headed that way. Please let it be empty…
