Perdition Valley

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 wanted 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!”

“Do it!” a man spat back, pressing his face against the shaking bars. “Chill us, ya fat fool!”

Furious at the open sign of rebellion, Rolph lashed out with the whip, but the knotted length only smacked onto the bars and failed to reach the living cargo within.

“Mutie fucker!” the man screamed. “Drek-eating prick!”

The whip flew again, this time hitting the man across the face. But as he fell backward with a cry, another slave made a desperate grab for the whip, his fingers missing by only inches.

Flicking the whip forward to urge the horses on to greater speed, Rolph started to pepper the cage with short strokes from the whip, driving the slaves back to the rear of the cart. Stupid meat! Would they never learn to obey?

Suddenly alert, Rolph spotted a motion out of the corner of his eye in the dark desert sand. There they were! The pilgrims he had discovered walking along the Mohawk River! They had dropped their backpacks for better speed, but then left the hard dirt road to struggle across the loose sand of the dunes. That made no sense. Then he saw the reason why, as large murky shapes rose from the desert like square-cut mountains. Ruins!

Black dust, if the pilgrims get in there, I’ll never find them again! Rolph thought. And there was no way he would let all of those potential slaves escape, especially the two females. A fortune in brass was getting away from him. Okay, then, he had no choice.

Tying the reins to a wooden peg set in the middle of the seat, Rolph pulled out a heavy crossbow and worked the lever to pull back the drawstring, then notched in an arrow. Rocking to the motion of the bucking wag, the slaver targeted the three running people, adjusted for the wind and bucking cart, then pressed the release lever. The wooden shaft lanced through the darkness and slammed into the back of the child running between the two adults. She threw her arms wide and tumbled to the ground.

“NO!” SHARON SHOUTED, dropping the canteen to dart back to the sprawling girl.

Kneeling alongside the still form, the woman gently turned the child over and burst into tears of relief at the sight of the small chest rising and falling regularly. Alive, Manda was still alive!

“How bad is it?” David demanded, stepping breathless out of the darkness. Fumbling inside his clothing, he produced a rusty revolver and struggled to open the corroded cylinder. It was empty.

“She’s not too hurt,” Sharon replied, lifting the still form. “Look!”

Searching for any live brass in his pockets, David cursed at the sight of the blunt arrow. Filthy stinking slaver wanted them alive. “Can she run?” he snapped.

“I don’t think so,” Sharon muttered, nervously looking into the night. She could hear the rattle of the slave cart, but the desert wind made the noise seem to move about until she wasn’t sure which direction it was coming from. “The arrow broke some ribs.”

“Nuking hell,” David growled, sliding a single live brass round into the old revolver. Out of food, no water, and down to their last three rounds for the blaster, a piece of drek he won in a dice game the previous month. The cylinder wouldn’t rotate anymore, but the former owner swore that blaster could still shoot, as long as you took out the spent brass and inserted a new one into the same hole.

“Here, take this,” David ordered, yanking a bandanna from around his neck and tossing it to his wife. “Stuff this into her mouth and start running. I’ll try to ambush the slaver when he goes after you. Fems are always more valuable than men.”

No matter the age, he added grimly. Three rounds was all he had, one predark, and two hand loads of questionable reliability, but it was better than nothing. The slaver had chosen his targets well. Sharon and Manda knew enough to keep going if he fell, and he would have done the same if Sharon was taken, but neither of them could leave their only child behind alive.

“David, if…if he takes us,” Sharon started, and touched the knife on her hip, asking a silent question.

Forcing back the hammer on the patched blaster, the man gave a quick nod. It would be better to ace the girl rather than doom her to a life in a gaudy house to be the toy of drunken sec men and jolt addicts.

The clatter of the wooden cart was getting louder, and another arrow shot out of the gloom to hum between the two adults. Instantly, Sharon grabbed the little girl in both arms and took off into the dunes.

As the dry breeze blew across his face, David brushed away a tear, watching them disappear. Then he slipped into the scraggly weeds, the ancient revolver cradled to his chest for protection.

Another arrow shot through the night, and the rattling cart came into view. Blind norad, the back was full of people in an iron cage! The bastard had a full cargo, but he wanted more. With his heart pounding, David stayed low in the weeds and waited for a chance to strike back.

LOADING THE CROSSBOW again, Rolph cried out at the unexpected sight of a man rising from the weeds with a blaster in his hands. With no chance to aim properly, the slaver released the blunt arrow just as the revolver went off, throwing out a bright orange tongue of flame.

Something hot and hard slammed into Rolph’s hands and he was thrown backward from the cart. Falling to the ground, the slaver hit the sand hard and had the wind knocked out of him for a moment. Forcing himself to roll out of sight, Rolph moved among the weeds on the other side of the road. The lead had hit the crossbow! He was still alive and unharmed.

The slaves in the cage started cheering as the runaway cart vanished in the gloom, and from out of the swirling dust cloud filling the road came the man, the blaster swinging back and forth as he searched for a target.

Taking advantage of the masking dust, Rolph slipped along a rocky gully to pull a small handblaster out of his shirt. His grandie had called the thing a derringer, but nobody used that predark word anymore. The wep had two barrels, one trigger, and he had to rotate the barrels to use the second round. Bitch of a thing to reload, but it worked like a charm, and should do the job of finishing off this feeb once and for all. Then Rolph would get back on the cart, find the females and make them pay for losing a brass. Oh yes, they’d pay.

High in the sky, the moving clouds briefly parted to admit a wealth of silvery-blue moonlight. The two men jerked at the sight of each other only yards away. Moving fast, Rolph and David aimed their blasters and fired in unison, the double report filling the area with thick acrid smoke from the combined black-powder discharges.

“MORE,” John Rogan ordered, giving a soft burp.

Taking the big man’s dirty plate, Lily bent over the campfire and filled the hubcap with rabbit stew. The elder Rogan took the food without comment, and started eating again with a homemade wooden spoon.

The glen was quiet this night, the only sounds coming from the cook fire and the small waterfall that splashed from the side of a large boulder near a blockhouse. Tall trees and bushes completely encircled the field of green grass, the only break in the thick foliage sealed off with a crude gate of wood, broken glass and barbed wire.

Soon, the other Rogan brothers demanded refills. Lily hastily complied. Aside from being easily twice her size, the brothers were monstrously strong, and utterly ruthless. They gave her little food and beat her from time to time. The combination left the young woman too weak to protest their treatment, much less think about escape. Although she dreamed of it in her sleep. Freedom, sweet freedom, and of course, bloody revenge.

All of the Rogan brothers were dressed in predark combat boots and loose green mil fatigues, with blasters and ammo belts covering their bodies like primitive armor. At the moment, only three of the giants were sitting around the campfire. There was a fourth seat at the fire, but the wooden box was empty. Alan Rogan was off doing a recce for an outlander called Ryan. Lily’s brothers desperately wanted the man, but only because he traveled with some whitehair called Tanner. That was their real goal, and they needed Tanner alive for some reason. Lily could only assume it was for torture.

Oddly, in spite of their endless torments, the brothers had recently given their sister some predark clothing, much better than anything Lily had ever worn before. She had dark-green leather boots with good solid soles. The denim pants were without any patches, as was the camou-colored T-shirt. The thin material was no protection from the cold. She was fine during the day, but at night Lily had to stay close to the campfire or risk freezing.

The fact that Lily had to wash fresh blood from the clothing when it was offered was just something accepted as a hard fact of life. The brothers didn’t barter for goods. The coldhearts took whatever they wanted at the end of a blaster, and anybody who got in the way regretted it for the rest of their lives. Which usually lasted only a couple minutes. She could almost forgive them the mindless brutality. It was their unclean fascination with predark tech that repulsed the woman to the core of her being. Science had destroyed the world, slaughtering untold billions. How anybody could want electric lights or libraries again was beyond her understanding. It made her skin crawl to merely look at the electric motorcycles with their headlights and radios. The machines somehow drew power from the sun. Power from sunlight. What could possibly be more unnatural than that?

In the distance, there was a sharp noise audible above the crackle of the cook fire, closely followed by two more reports.

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.