by James Axler
In utter horror, Delphi stared at the decomposing bodies of the men and the muties mingling together on the ground, bits of white bone and golden brass glittering from the gray ashes like broken promises.
“Dead, they’re all dead,” Delphi whispered, gently kicking aside the distorted skull of a stickie. The operative of Department Coldfire couldn’t believe his eyes. This was impossible!
Moving listlessly among the wreckage, Delphi found more and more of the bodies everywhere, the death toll incredible, and every one of the muties had been shot through the head, even when there was only a head remaining with no torso attached. The surviving sec men had shot the dead stickies, just to make sure the muties really were deceased. That was ruthless efficiency he could appreciate. In spite of all his arduous work, and endless planning, slaving over every little detail, the hidden nest of stickies in Two-Son had been utterly destroyed in a single night. One night! Then the locals had done everything but sow salt into the land to make sure the stickies would never return.
“My precious little ones,” Delphi moaned, bending to pick up the blackened skull of a stickie. A cooked eye fell out as Delphi raised the skull high in his palm, wondering if he had known this particular mutant. Then Delphi had a sudden flash in his mind of Hamlet doing the exact same thing, and he cast the grisly remnant aside. It sailed across the smoky destruction to crash against the side of a marble staircase that rose high into the empty air and abruptly ended at nothing. The smashed bones went flying everywhere.
Bowing his head, Delphi tightened his fists, attempting to control his growling rage over the slaughter. How long he held that position, Delphi had no idea, but his somber reverie was disrupted at sound of hooves beating on sand.
Quickly looking up, Delphi scanned the nearby predark city until locating a man on a horse coming this way through the crumbling ruins.
“Hey, rist!” the rider called, tightening his grip on the reins and bringing the stallion to a halt on the cracked sidewalk. “Get the nuking hell out of there! The foundation is weak and could collapse at any second!”
His face an inert mask, Delphi walked across the debris and onto the sandy street. A soft breeze was blowing, mixing sand with the ashes of the obliterated stickie nest.
“Rist?” Delphi said curiously, tucking his hands into his sleeves.
The sec man grinned in embarrassment. “Sorry, Baron O’Connor told us to stop using that word. It means outlander or stranger.”
“Does it now? Well, I am a stranger,” Delphi muttered, his eyes narrowing. “And from those black-powder weapons, you must be a sec man from Two-Son ville. That’s only a klick away, correct?”
His instincts flaring at the tone of the question, the rider let an arm drop so that his fingers rested on the checkered grip of the handblaster resting in the holster at his side.
“Ain’t no other ville for a hundred klicks in any direction,” the sec man stated, tightening the reins as the horse shifted its hooves in the hot sand. “Now what’s your biz here?”
“My biz?”
“What do ya want?” The sec man leaned over the pommel of his saddle and scowled. “Are you a lost pilgrim, or a trader?”
“Ah, an intelligent question at last,” Delphi said, slowly smiling. “Most astute. What I want at the moment is your prompt death.”
Recoiling at that statement, the sec man drew his blaster and fired. But in spite of the fact that the pale outlander was only a few yards away, he somehow missed. Quickly, the sec man fired twice more. The black-powder charges threw out great volumes of dark smoke, and he had to wait for the desert wind to clear the air so that he could see the chilled body.
But the outlander was still standing, unfazed and untouched, without a single wound to be seen.
Snarling obscenities, the sec man fired again and this time actually saw the soft lead ball slam into the man’s face. No, wait. The lead had stopped in midair, flattened into a misshapen lump as if it impacted a sheet of predark mil armor. But there was only air between the two of them! How was this possible?
Throwing back his head, Delphi began to laugh as the cooling sphere of lead fell impotently to the sandy street.
Fear swept over the sec man and he briefly debated galloping away. But the very idea of retreat made him snarl in suppressed fury, and the sec man quickly fired the last two rounds in the handblaster. This time, he saw the billowing clouds of gunsmoke form a halo around the rist, revealing a sort of ball, or sphere, as if the man were a bug in a jar. An invisible glass ball that could stop blasters?
As the sweating sec man hastily went for the knife in his boot, Delphi extracted a crystalline rod from within his left sleeve, and pointed it at the horse. With a snort, the animal went absolutely still, then toppled to the street like so much cooked meat. Wisps of steam rose from the nostrils and ears.
Unable to leap from the saddle fast enough, the sec man hit the asphalt hard, the impact making him drop the knife. Then he heard the bones in his leg snap loudly under the deadweight of the horse. Son of a bitch! A split second later, the pain arrived, and he screamed curses. But then he stopped abruptly as thick blood began to flow from the slack mouth of the deceased horse, as if its internal organs had been liquefied. The sight galvanized the sec man into action, and he desperately clawed for the scattergun hidden in the saddlebags.
As Delphi approached, the sec man yanked the wep clear.
“Eat this, mutie lover!” the sec man snarled, swinging up the scattergun to fire both barrels at point-blank range.
Flame and thunder filled the street as the hellstorm of lead ricocheted off the defensive forcefield that surrounded Delphi. The mix of buckshot and bent nails sprayed randomly to strike the nearby buildings. Predark glass shattered and a rusted wag shook from the barrage, but that was all that happened.
No longer chuckling, Delphi approached the trapped man and stopped just out of reach as the sec man swung the smoking scattergun at his leg, trying to smash a kneecap.
“Do you know how long it took me to make those stickies smart? To raise their baseline intelligence above that of a slavering beast?” Delphi whispered, his hand ever-so-slowly lowering the crystal rod. “To teach them how to sharpen sticks into spears. How to hide and ambush an enemy? Do you? Do you have any idea of the effort I invested into this project?” His hand began to shake slightly, as his voice took on a hysterical tone.
“Now I have to start from scratch again somewhere else!” Delphi bellowed. “More of my precious time wasted! More inefficiency!”
“What are you, a feeb? The muties were chilling us!” the sec man panted, his shaking fingers fumbling to shove a fresh load of black powder and nails into the chamber of the weapon. “The triple-damn stickies were eating our kids! They would have wiped out the whole ville in another few months! We had to ace them. We had to!”
“Cretinous fool, that was the idea!” Delphi yelled, waving the wand.
There was a flash of blue sparks, and a powerful hum filled the air. The partially loaded blaster suddenly turned red-hot, then white-hot, and the sec man threw it away just as it detonated. The blast ripped the scattergun apart, and blew off both of the sec man’s hands. Now shrieking in pain, the mortally wounded man raised his arms to stare at the ragged stumps spurting bright coppery blood.
Delphi gestured again, and the tattered strips of flesh dangling off the ruptured arms glowed with a terrible cold fire, and the gaping wounds closed, as if the limbs had been thrust into a raging furnace and cauterized. The sobbing sec man couldn’t believe it. The bleeding had stopped, but there had been no pain. No pain at all!
“Fool. You’re not going to die that quickly,” Delphi said in a flat monotone. “First, you must pay for your crimes. Only then can I leave to find Ryan and his crew.”
Ryan?
“Wait! I can help! I know Cawdor!” the sec man whimpered, trying to hide behind his half arms. “He trusts me! I can find him for you!”
“Oh, my hunters already know
where he is,” Delphi said, his merciless eyes starting to twinkle. “Besides, I never deal with traitors. Tsk, tsk, turning on the man who saved your ville. How sad. Now your death will be much more…unpleasant.”
The crystal wand flashed again.
RIDING UP THE SIDE of the hill, Ryan and the companions spread out slightly so that they didn’t offer a group target to anybody hidden in the thick cactus growing on the sandy dune. There was no sign of anybody, but only a feeb took chances.
Cresting the top, the companions stopped as they saw the row of bloody crosses sticking out of the damp soil. There were the tattered remains of people nailed onto the wood, the bodies hanging limply with their stomachs slit open, the distended bowels hanging down into bowls on the ground. The prisoners had been opened wide, and their intestines removed, but left connected. Alive, but disassembled. There was a growing smell in the air of blood and nightsoil, a foulness so thick that the companions could almost taste the hellish reek.
Leaning over sideways in her saddle, Mildred began to noisily lose her breakfast, and Krysty closed her eyes to mutter a prayer of forgiveness to the Earth Mother Gaia.
Leveling their blasters, Ryan and J.B. checked for traps as they started toward the horribly mangled bodies. Neither of the warriors had ever seen anything quite like this before, which disturbed them greatly. Bits and pieces of the prisoners were tossed around, the ground alive with insects and green lizards. Scorpions battled over a split tongue, while a swarm of beetles hurriedly consumed something too obscene to be closely identified.
“Remember the craz eunuch from Nova ville?” J.B. asked out of the corner of his mouth.
“Eugene,” Ryan replied. “Yeah, I would have sworn this was his work, if Shard hadn’t aced the bastard right in front of us.”
“There were students, folks he was teaching his techniques at the ville. Mebbe…” J.B. left the sentence unfinished.
Ryan clicked off the safety on his 9 mm SIG-Sauer blaster. “Yeah, mebbe.”
Just then a soft moan sounded from among the sagging figures on the crosses, and Ryan inhaled in shock as a woman opened her eyelids to expose raw empty sockets.
“Ace…me…” she hoarsely whispered, the words almost lost on the dessert breeze. “Whoever ya are…please…”
Without hesitation, Ryan swung his blaster up and fired. The woman jerked back as a black hole appeared on her temple and the back of her head exploded in a grisly pinkish spray across the filthy wood beams.
As the body went limp, Ryan started to ride along the row of crosses, putting a slug into the face of every prisoner, Usually they wouldn’t waste the ammo, but mercy was demanded here. Soon, the other companions followed suit until the dark hilltop rang with the sweet release of death.
“Triple-crazy shit,” Jak said. “Like predark coldhearts Mildred told about. Natzies?”
“Nazis,” Mildred stated, wiping her mouth clean on a handkerchief. “They were called Nazis, and yes, this is exactly the sort of torture they did to enemies of the state.” Then she added, “Not exactly my time, I wasn’t born yet when the Allies took down Adolph Hitler and his mad followers.”
“That’s the baron who tried to take over the world?” Krysty asked, tucking away her S&W Model 640 revolver.
Glumly, Mildred nodded. “Close enough, yes.”
Muttering something in Latin, Doc closed the cylinder of his Ruger .44. The predark revolver was a recent acquisition from Blaster Base One, a redoubt the companions had discovered filled with military supplies. The old man still carried the LeMat at his side, but the black-powder weapon from the Civil War took a long time to reload, while the Ruger took bullets and could be reloaded in a matter of only moments.
Whinnying softly, the horses were clearly nervous among all the carnage, and even Doc had to admit to a certain queasiness in his stomach. This hadn’t been the work of sane minds.
“Well, I’ll be nuked,” J.B. said, walking his mount around in a circle. “Anybody notice something odd about the placement of these crosses?”
“They’re not facing each other,” Krysty said, brushing back her hair. The copper-colored lengths caressed her fingers for a moment before letting go and moving back into place. “The logical thing would be to arrange them in a circle so that all of your prisoners could watch the others being taken apart.”
“But these aren’t.”
“No.”
“They’re all facing north,” Ryan observed, shifting in his saddle. His horse whinnied nervously, and the one-eyed man gently stroked its neck to try to calm the animal. Even though these horses had been trained for war, this much death and bloodshed was making them apprehensive. Shitfire, it was making him apprehensive. He had witnessed cannies cut up their victims to make them sing “death songs”, the screams supposed to make the flesh taste sweeter. But that had been a clean chill compared to this form of butchery.
“This done for us,” Jak stated, as if there was no question in the matter. “Catch attention, make mad.”
“I am mad, sir!” Doc thundered, brandishing a fist. “I am absolutely acrimonious!”
“That not good,” the teen responded, scratching his mare behind an ear. “They want angry, you be calm. Not do expected.”
Breathing through clenched teeth, Doc radiated a fine fury for a few minutes, then relaxed his shoulders. “You are correct, of course,” the old man stated. “That is wisdom, indeed, my young friend. I shall endeavor to comply.”
Raising a hand to shield his face from the crackling campfire, J.B. studied the moon behind the clouds. The Armorer wore a sextant on a chain around his neck, which could pinpoint their exact position anywhere on the planet to within a few miles.
“Yeah, looks like the bodies are all facing north-by-northwest,” he reported, tucking the compass into a pocket. “In the direction of the Mohawk Mountains.”
“Isn’t there supposed to be another redoubt hidden among the peaks?” Krysty asked, brushing away flies. The cloud of buzzing insects was getting bigger with every passing minute. Soon the campsite wouldn’t be habitable by anybody with exposed skin.
“Somewhere, yeah,” Ryan answered, sliding the Steyr SSG-70 longblaster off his shoulder and checking the internal clip. The bolt-action held five rounds in a transparent clip, and Ryan wanted to make sure it was carrying predark brass taken from Blaster Base One, and not some of their hand loads. When he faced down the coldhearts who did this kind of chilling, he sure as hell didn’t want to chance a misfire. “Come on, let’s go find the bastards.”
As the companions began moving off the hilltop, Krysty slowed her mount until she was the last one remaining. Reaching into the saddlebags, she pulled out a mil canister, pulled the ring, flipped off the handle, then tossed the charge into the middle of the blood-soaked ground
Kicking her mount hard in the rump, Krysty started to gallop down the side of the dune. She had travelled only a few yards when the predark gren detonated. A sizzling white light shattered the night as the “willie peter” gren cut loose, the charge of white phosphorous washing over the hellish scene in a searing chem inferno.
As she rejoined the others, the top of the hill was alive with writhing flames, thick smoke rising into the starry sky.
“Why do?” Jak asked with a scowl, his white hair streaming out behind. “Waste gren.”
“They left a message for us,” Krysty said. “So I’m sending one right back!”
“Blood for blood,” Jak said with a nod. “Good think. Mebbe make them mad, eh?”
Stoically, Doc grunted in reply.
“We’re gonna chill these coldhearts on sight, then burn the bodies and piss on the ashes!” Ryan said in a low growl.
“Damn straight we will!” Mildred added savagely. Deep within the woman there was growing the heated rush to kill, an unusual sensation for the peaceful healer. But experience had taught her that some people had to be treated like cancer cells. You killed them to save the rest of the body. So be it. If these fools wan
ted a fight, then cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war!
“Blood for blood,” J.B. agreed, his eyes glinting hard.
As the companions reached level ground, Ryan kicked the big stallion into a full gallop, and the companions urged their mounts to greater speeds across the sandy plain.
In the far distance, the Mohawk Mountains stood immutable on the darkling horizon, the jagged peaks rising like the teeth of some great slumbering beast waiting for its next kill.
Chapter Three
“Faster, you bitches. Faster!” Rolph Gunter cried, leaning dangerously forward in the wooden seat of the cargo wagon.
Holding the reins tight in one hand, the slaver lashed out with the whip in his other, forcing the team of horses on to greater speed. Run from me, will you?
In the rear of the heavy wagon, a dozen chained slaves desperately held on to the iron bars of their cage, as the wag bounced madly across the rough ground. The floor of their prison was covered with straw and windblown sand. The water bowls were empty, and the few insects stupid enough to wander into the cage were eagerly consumed by its starving occupants.
Behind the speeding wag rose a spreading cloud of dust from the wooden wheels crushing the loose soil. The cart was made of scrap lumber, but the cage itself had an iron floor and roof, with steel bars for walls. The only way inside was through a trapdoor in the ceiling, but the hatch was too high to reach, and firmly bolted closed. With iron on their ankles, and inside a steel cage, escape was considered impossible, although many tried. Tried and paid a terrible price under the brutal whip of the slaver.
“Crash, please crash and chill us all,” a woman whispered as the wag shook along the rocky path, the wheels leaving the soil as it hit a bump.
For a moment, the cart went airborne, then it crashed onto the ground again with Rolph nearly leaving his seat from the impact. The captives cried out as they tumbled in the cage, smashing into one another so that their chains became hopelessly entangled.
“Shut up, back there!” Rolph snarled, letting go of the reins with one hand to brandish the hated bullwhip. “Keep quiet, or I’ll skin you alive!”
