LITMIR.BIZ

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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.

      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

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