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
