Light Ice
A Real Bastard
- Joined
- Feb 12, 2003
- Posts
- 5,395
They had killed them quickly and it had been good. Bear had been right in assuming the mercenaries guarding the merchants caravan were carrying unloaded weapons. Few guns that he saw upon the road were loaded now. The firepower lay within the towns, guarded carefully, and those that wandered for trade or better fortune could not find ammunition or failed to conserve it. His men had carved through them, bathed the battered asphalt of the road in their blood, and begun the celebration that followed each hunt in earnest.
“Strip ‘em?” Asked Lizard, named for his sun-scaled skin and the look of his eyes through the small sun-goggles he wore.
Bear nodded.
They had no use for the clothes. They were well-clothed. Their armors, patchwork, were already threaded with bits of metal and cloth. He watched as Lizard bent and slashed a nose from one of the mercenaries and threaded it to the necklace he wore. Bear had the most noses and ears of any in this troop. It was why he lead them. It was why he needed to watch them now.
The merchants had lead four mutie cattle behind them, loaded heavily with goods. Bear watched as those packs were opened. Cigarettes, the new world’s currency, and dirty water. Fresh water was hard to find now and unnecessary. The radiation did not hurt in small doses. A man might piss blood or lose some teeth but he would not die. Drugs helped with those things and they liked them anyways. On the right dose of smack Bear could rip most men apart with his hands. The Merchants did not carry it but their cigarettes would help him get it from the Black Skulls across the hills.
It had been a successful morning.
“Bear?” Came a voice. Cracked and feminine.
Bear turned and saw Bird there, gangly as she was, on all fours with her pants thrust down. The pale skin of her backside was dirty from the road and sweat ran down the small of her narrow back and vanished between her cheeks. His prick swelled. Hard suddenly. He’d almost forgotten her in the high of their success.
It took a moment to move her with his big hands. Pushing her down, lowering her as he claimed a place on his knees behind her. He coughed up a thick wad of phlegm and spat it on the head of his dick, closed his eyes, and sank into her. She gave a rough grunt of discomfort that he ignored. Pounding into her.
She braced herself against his weight with her small hands for some time, pushing back against him, and then it was as though the air went out of her lungs and she went suddenly and abruptly quiet. The strength left her hands and she crumpled beneath him. Bear did not care. He kept pumping, feeling his moment on the horizon.
A shot rang out and he opened his eyes. A big, booming, distant shot that sounded almost as though it came from across the ridge and upon the otherside. So far off that at first he did not feel concerned.
Then, as he looked across his men as saw them return to their work, he saw Lizard. For a moment, Lizard was looking into the hills, and then he was lifted from his feet as though struck by some imaginary fist. It picked him up and rolled him across the roadside, where he landed, absolutely still. The sound of the shot rolled out a short time later. Followed by another as SoreFoot, to his left, crumpled.
“Bird.” He said, and cinched a fist on the back of her vest. She was light and he was strong and even with his body aching with his oncoming climax she offered no resistance.
“Fuck, come on!” But she did not move. He looked down and saw a neat hole behind her ear on one side and a hole the size of his fist on the other. Her brains were splattered in a wide arc across the asphalt and her eyes were pinched closed, features twisted in a grotesque and feral mask of a woman being roughly and unlovingly fucked.
Bear pissed himself. A hot jet of urine arced from his softening prick as he stood ram-rod straight upon the road. He saw the last of his men, Wolf Moon, turn toward him in blind panic. Their eyes met and then Wolf Moon’s head exploded. One moment it was the man’s bearded face and the next it was just a shower of blood and pale bits of bone and flapping flesh. The body went down in a pile, arms twitching grotesquely.
Looking up into the hills, Bear searched for the men who had snuck up on them. He saw nothing. It was not the Black Skulls or more Boot Thiefs. It was only the barren desert hardpan and the broken, rocky ledge. He raised his axe, terrified, and shook it. Then, impossibly far away, Bear saw the flicker of a muzzle flash. He had time to think that nobody in the New World could make that shot before everything went dark.
It stretched beyond the limit of his eyes and forged itself into an uneven and craggy horizon some miles ahead. Experience had taught him to measure those miles, one after another, in a scale of hours. Time was a more precious currency than miles. Value in the New World was determined by a survivor’s measure. A cigarette had taken the place of the American dollar and fresh water had become more invaluable than diamonds or gold. Even corpses, the fresher the better, had their worth in trade. This world did not always have time for the rituals and rights to which humanity had at one time been accustomed. This world was an angry, red world. The sand shifted coarsely across the hardpan on hot breezes by day and billowed against the raging, chilled winds of evening. Beneath his feet, cracked and sand-swept, Interstate 51 stretched on like a long dead snake. Dunes had slid across large sections of it, hundreds of feet at a time, and there were places where the breeze had brushed back the sand and revealed uneven, glossy black glass where the world had been melted under the poisonous blanket of nuclear fire that had swept away the old world.
He walked on and squinted against the sun, despite the power mask that he wore. Metal and leather, the mask gave him the look of some nightmarish haunt. His eyes were black, non-reflective lenses. His nose and mouth were a filtered portal. The mask took hot air and filtered it into something cooler. It veiled his voice into a low, raspy mechanical growl. In the mornings when he rose from his camp and pulled it into place it turned him from a man, dark-haired and sharp-featured, into the monstrous apparition that the raiders of the road and even the brave Caravaneers from the east had come to fear. Looking now, he let the automated computer sharpen the lenses like binoculars. The horizon immediately grew into focus, swelled up to reveal the broken and ruinous cityscape of Dodge City. He was close. He would not camp for the day. He would not stay upon the road.
Turning, he cut his way from the asphalt and onto the hardpan. The sand was not soft. His boots did not sink or leave impressions. This was a desolate place. It was an unforgiving and calloused place. The sun was high and merciless in the sky. Unprotected skin burned quickly here, burned near to the point of blistering within two afternoons of exposure. The experienced travelers of the road covered themselves and he was no different. Dust clung to his coat, it invaded all spaces. It took a great deal of oil to keep the leather from cracking and drying and still, in the folds where the skin of it bunched, the sand found places to hide. It was discolored now. The deep, charcoal gray was now thinner. That suited him fine. He was no carpet bagger. The trenchcoat had the unenviable job of taking the beating of the hardpan. It protected the vest beneath and its many pockets. It protected his slacks and his calf-high boots. It was as much a part of who he was as his own face as far as Dodge City was concerned.
The road lay in a depression between two rocky hills and he climbed the one to the left. Few people braved the hardpan at all on their own. Fewer still were brave (or foolish) enough to stray from the road. His Geiger counter buzzed gently within his mask, numbers scrolling abruptly in the Heads-Up Display it provided. This place was familiar to him and he did not startle. Radiation was a frequent danger of the New World but the hill only provoked the meter to spark a soft, pickle green. The crescent Geiger was metered into three sections. Green, which while irradiated was not inherently dangerous. Yellow, where prolonged exposure to any area or deciding to eat a material registering this high could bring on minor symptoms of Radiation Sickness. And Red, which if not avoided quickly and entirely could rapidly ruin an otherwise survivable day.
He slowed on account of the terrain. The hardpan was unforgiving in every account. A slip could plunge him into a crevice filled with mutie snakes. It could cost him a broken ankle. Time had ensured he would not take his footing for granted and he had taken to measuring his experience in years. Thirty-Three years within the New World. Thirty-Three years surviving. He slowed and that experience paid itself back to him. The display of his helmet flickered to alert him of movement two-hundred meters ahead of him. He picked his way across the boulder-strewn hillside as quietly as he could manage and settled upon its crest. There, under the black holes of his mask’s eyes, the ruins of a Caravan lay strewn across the black skin of the road and the hardpan.
A pair of merchants had passed not long ago with an accompaniment of mercenaries. They wore patchwork armor and hardened faces and each lead a pair of mutie cattle burdened with bundles of material for trade and sale. The cattle were large and grotesque, as unthreaded as could be, but docile and capable and toilless as they moved along. This was the new world. The mercenaries carried automatic weapons but not one of them looked as though they were a capable shot or practiced. He had appraised them from the ridge, low and quiet as they passed, with the same scrutiny he afforded all strangers now.
Now, strewn upon the road, the ruin of their caravan lay open as a group of eight began pillaging through it. The cattle, too far from threaded to be eaten, had been butchered crudely regardless and would be left to rot in the desert sun. The mercenaries had formed two loose lines against the ambush and been cut down where they stood. It had been fast. Not a single man had survived long enough to lose his nerve and make a break from the road. They were riddled with horrible rents and their patchwork armor was cleaved over and over. Bodies upon the hardpan did not make pools of blood. The desert, hungry for the wet, drank it up so quickly it was as though it had not been there at all. A waste for raiders, most of whom were cannibals, so survival and bestial ingenuity had taught them to line their wagons in plastic. They dragged these behind them. The raiders were dressed in clothing stitched together with the prizes of their kills. Teeth. Bones. Ears. Noses. They were festooned across their chests and necks in horrible necklaces.
They were armed with a variety of weapons. Spears fashioned from sign-posts and machete cleavers. The truth, sad and ugly, was that few men brandishing rifles had ammunition for them. Raiders, often drug addicts with a predisposed taste for mayhem, were notorious for charging at groups of armed men. Ammunition was expensive and difficult to find, harder to conserve, and so the Raiders had descended upon them and ignored their lofted firearms and weak threats. A few heads lay in the sand, eyes wide with the horror of inevitability, seeing nothing and echoing the moment of grim realization that fell upon them. A few had drawn their knives. Too little. Too late.
The man looked down upon the carnage dispassionately. His eyes counted and recounted the Raiders numbers and took stock of the ridges nearby. None of the men looked up from their pillaging to search the roadside for signals or to give any. The eight were alone. Two of them, a particularly well-decorated man and a small, stringy woman, were fucking like dogs beside the road. The New World had kept little from the Old World. The man unshouldered his rifle and layed its long barrel on the sun-blistered surface of stone. The mask was synced with the weapon’s scope and allowed him to magnify the scene. The ruined caravan’s strewn loot drew his immediate interest. Cigarettes, which were being gathered in a small heap at the roadside, and a few small rations were being piled into a wooden cart took his immediate interest. Drinking water was being stacked more neatly beside the Raider’s carts and he studied the big plastic jugs. It looked dirty. Unclean. It did not interest him.
Despite eight automatic weapons there appeared to be no ammunition in the loot. The firearms had been left where the men holding them had fallen. They were in fair condition. Most likely, either through neglect or time’s course, a few would not fire. Still, in his mind, he saw the potential for parts. Repair or trade, it did not matter. There were pans, pots, and playing cards. The Raiders ignored them all. They could not trade with towns and did not care to. They traded only with the gangs that existed miles away. It was a grim exchange. The loot of the dead for drugs and liquor. This was not the humanity many had envisioned. The man frowned, took aim, and exhaled.
He squeezed the trigger and felt the rifle kick, too focused to register the booming retort of the high-caliber round exploding from the barrel. The woman, her twisted and sallow face blistered from the sun, crumpled beneath the large man thrusting roughly into her. His eyes were closed and he did not register the sound of the shot. Two shots took two more of the men while the Raiders began to take notice and stare up at the ridges that flanked them. The first took the impact hard and was much lighter than he expected, lifting clean off his feet and rolling across the road. The other crumpled immediately, one hand lifted to point (wrongly) to the hill opposite where the man firing at them still crouched, and went still. He fired on until the eight was reduced to one bewildered and frightened man with pants half-done and his pecker shriveling. For a moment he though the Raider saw him. His horrible features tightened in a crude, ugly grimace up towards the proper hill. He lifted one hand, carrying a rusty and carnage-stained axe, and shook it. The last shot struck true and did not quite remove his head. Instead, as the man in the mask looked on, the top of the Raider’s skull evaporated in a puff of red and pink mist as the large-caliber round turned his head into a canoe. The body fell straight back, stiff as a board, and the booted feet twitched madly.
He had not immediately descended to the road. Instead, after gathering the spent cartridges upon the rock, he had reloaded his rifle and waited. Minutes had passed. Five turned into ten. Ten turned into twenty. Finally, after thirty, he had begun the laborious task of picking his way down to the cracked and carnage-riddled asphalt. He went first to the mercenaries and traders, ensuring what he had known upon arrival. They were dead. There was nothing else he could have done. It would have pleased him to bury them, or in the very least, stack them with a mark. A quick glance skyward told him that he did not have the time.
He filled his pack with the cigarettes and rations first: a solar calculator, a wristwatch, two packs of playing cards with naked women on their backs, a pack of blue playing cards, a camping skillet, a pair of sunglasses, a hot plate, and was thrilled to discover a woman’s flower print dress in the bottom of one of the satchels lashed to the mutie cattle.
(This thread is closed.)
“Strip ‘em?” Asked Lizard, named for his sun-scaled skin and the look of his eyes through the small sun-goggles he wore.
Bear nodded.
They had no use for the clothes. They were well-clothed. Their armors, patchwork, were already threaded with bits of metal and cloth. He watched as Lizard bent and slashed a nose from one of the mercenaries and threaded it to the necklace he wore. Bear had the most noses and ears of any in this troop. It was why he lead them. It was why he needed to watch them now.
The merchants had lead four mutie cattle behind them, loaded heavily with goods. Bear watched as those packs were opened. Cigarettes, the new world’s currency, and dirty water. Fresh water was hard to find now and unnecessary. The radiation did not hurt in small doses. A man might piss blood or lose some teeth but he would not die. Drugs helped with those things and they liked them anyways. On the right dose of smack Bear could rip most men apart with his hands. The Merchants did not carry it but their cigarettes would help him get it from the Black Skulls across the hills.
It had been a successful morning.
“Bear?” Came a voice. Cracked and feminine.
Bear turned and saw Bird there, gangly as she was, on all fours with her pants thrust down. The pale skin of her backside was dirty from the road and sweat ran down the small of her narrow back and vanished between her cheeks. His prick swelled. Hard suddenly. He’d almost forgotten her in the high of their success.
It took a moment to move her with his big hands. Pushing her down, lowering her as he claimed a place on his knees behind her. He coughed up a thick wad of phlegm and spat it on the head of his dick, closed his eyes, and sank into her. She gave a rough grunt of discomfort that he ignored. Pounding into her.
She braced herself against his weight with her small hands for some time, pushing back against him, and then it was as though the air went out of her lungs and she went suddenly and abruptly quiet. The strength left her hands and she crumpled beneath him. Bear did not care. He kept pumping, feeling his moment on the horizon.
A shot rang out and he opened his eyes. A big, booming, distant shot that sounded almost as though it came from across the ridge and upon the otherside. So far off that at first he did not feel concerned.
Then, as he looked across his men as saw them return to their work, he saw Lizard. For a moment, Lizard was looking into the hills, and then he was lifted from his feet as though struck by some imaginary fist. It picked him up and rolled him across the roadside, where he landed, absolutely still. The sound of the shot rolled out a short time later. Followed by another as SoreFoot, to his left, crumpled.
“Bird.” He said, and cinched a fist on the back of her vest. She was light and he was strong and even with his body aching with his oncoming climax she offered no resistance.
“Fuck, come on!” But she did not move. He looked down and saw a neat hole behind her ear on one side and a hole the size of his fist on the other. Her brains were splattered in a wide arc across the asphalt and her eyes were pinched closed, features twisted in a grotesque and feral mask of a woman being roughly and unlovingly fucked.
Bear pissed himself. A hot jet of urine arced from his softening prick as he stood ram-rod straight upon the road. He saw the last of his men, Wolf Moon, turn toward him in blind panic. Their eyes met and then Wolf Moon’s head exploded. One moment it was the man’s bearded face and the next it was just a shower of blood and pale bits of bone and flapping flesh. The body went down in a pile, arms twitching grotesquely.
Looking up into the hills, Bear searched for the men who had snuck up on them. He saw nothing. It was not the Black Skulls or more Boot Thiefs. It was only the barren desert hardpan and the broken, rocky ledge. He raised his axe, terrified, and shook it. Then, impossibly far away, Bear saw the flicker of a muzzle flash. He had time to think that nobody in the New World could make that shot before everything went dark.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It stretched beyond the limit of his eyes and forged itself into an uneven and craggy horizon some miles ahead. Experience had taught him to measure those miles, one after another, in a scale of hours. Time was a more precious currency than miles. Value in the New World was determined by a survivor’s measure. A cigarette had taken the place of the American dollar and fresh water had become more invaluable than diamonds or gold. Even corpses, the fresher the better, had their worth in trade. This world did not always have time for the rituals and rights to which humanity had at one time been accustomed. This world was an angry, red world. The sand shifted coarsely across the hardpan on hot breezes by day and billowed against the raging, chilled winds of evening. Beneath his feet, cracked and sand-swept, Interstate 51 stretched on like a long dead snake. Dunes had slid across large sections of it, hundreds of feet at a time, and there were places where the breeze had brushed back the sand and revealed uneven, glossy black glass where the world had been melted under the poisonous blanket of nuclear fire that had swept away the old world.
He walked on and squinted against the sun, despite the power mask that he wore. Metal and leather, the mask gave him the look of some nightmarish haunt. His eyes were black, non-reflective lenses. His nose and mouth were a filtered portal. The mask took hot air and filtered it into something cooler. It veiled his voice into a low, raspy mechanical growl. In the mornings when he rose from his camp and pulled it into place it turned him from a man, dark-haired and sharp-featured, into the monstrous apparition that the raiders of the road and even the brave Caravaneers from the east had come to fear. Looking now, he let the automated computer sharpen the lenses like binoculars. The horizon immediately grew into focus, swelled up to reveal the broken and ruinous cityscape of Dodge City. He was close. He would not camp for the day. He would not stay upon the road.
Turning, he cut his way from the asphalt and onto the hardpan. The sand was not soft. His boots did not sink or leave impressions. This was a desolate place. It was an unforgiving and calloused place. The sun was high and merciless in the sky. Unprotected skin burned quickly here, burned near to the point of blistering within two afternoons of exposure. The experienced travelers of the road covered themselves and he was no different. Dust clung to his coat, it invaded all spaces. It took a great deal of oil to keep the leather from cracking and drying and still, in the folds where the skin of it bunched, the sand found places to hide. It was discolored now. The deep, charcoal gray was now thinner. That suited him fine. He was no carpet bagger. The trenchcoat had the unenviable job of taking the beating of the hardpan. It protected the vest beneath and its many pockets. It protected his slacks and his calf-high boots. It was as much a part of who he was as his own face as far as Dodge City was concerned.
The road lay in a depression between two rocky hills and he climbed the one to the left. Few people braved the hardpan at all on their own. Fewer still were brave (or foolish) enough to stray from the road. His Geiger counter buzzed gently within his mask, numbers scrolling abruptly in the Heads-Up Display it provided. This place was familiar to him and he did not startle. Radiation was a frequent danger of the New World but the hill only provoked the meter to spark a soft, pickle green. The crescent Geiger was metered into three sections. Green, which while irradiated was not inherently dangerous. Yellow, where prolonged exposure to any area or deciding to eat a material registering this high could bring on minor symptoms of Radiation Sickness. And Red, which if not avoided quickly and entirely could rapidly ruin an otherwise survivable day.
He slowed on account of the terrain. The hardpan was unforgiving in every account. A slip could plunge him into a crevice filled with mutie snakes. It could cost him a broken ankle. Time had ensured he would not take his footing for granted and he had taken to measuring his experience in years. Thirty-Three years within the New World. Thirty-Three years surviving. He slowed and that experience paid itself back to him. The display of his helmet flickered to alert him of movement two-hundred meters ahead of him. He picked his way across the boulder-strewn hillside as quietly as he could manage and settled upon its crest. There, under the black holes of his mask’s eyes, the ruins of a Caravan lay strewn across the black skin of the road and the hardpan.
A pair of merchants had passed not long ago with an accompaniment of mercenaries. They wore patchwork armor and hardened faces and each lead a pair of mutie cattle burdened with bundles of material for trade and sale. The cattle were large and grotesque, as unthreaded as could be, but docile and capable and toilless as they moved along. This was the new world. The mercenaries carried automatic weapons but not one of them looked as though they were a capable shot or practiced. He had appraised them from the ridge, low and quiet as they passed, with the same scrutiny he afforded all strangers now.
Now, strewn upon the road, the ruin of their caravan lay open as a group of eight began pillaging through it. The cattle, too far from threaded to be eaten, had been butchered crudely regardless and would be left to rot in the desert sun. The mercenaries had formed two loose lines against the ambush and been cut down where they stood. It had been fast. Not a single man had survived long enough to lose his nerve and make a break from the road. They were riddled with horrible rents and their patchwork armor was cleaved over and over. Bodies upon the hardpan did not make pools of blood. The desert, hungry for the wet, drank it up so quickly it was as though it had not been there at all. A waste for raiders, most of whom were cannibals, so survival and bestial ingenuity had taught them to line their wagons in plastic. They dragged these behind them. The raiders were dressed in clothing stitched together with the prizes of their kills. Teeth. Bones. Ears. Noses. They were festooned across their chests and necks in horrible necklaces.
They were armed with a variety of weapons. Spears fashioned from sign-posts and machete cleavers. The truth, sad and ugly, was that few men brandishing rifles had ammunition for them. Raiders, often drug addicts with a predisposed taste for mayhem, were notorious for charging at groups of armed men. Ammunition was expensive and difficult to find, harder to conserve, and so the Raiders had descended upon them and ignored their lofted firearms and weak threats. A few heads lay in the sand, eyes wide with the horror of inevitability, seeing nothing and echoing the moment of grim realization that fell upon them. A few had drawn their knives. Too little. Too late.
The man looked down upon the carnage dispassionately. His eyes counted and recounted the Raiders numbers and took stock of the ridges nearby. None of the men looked up from their pillaging to search the roadside for signals or to give any. The eight were alone. Two of them, a particularly well-decorated man and a small, stringy woman, were fucking like dogs beside the road. The New World had kept little from the Old World. The man unshouldered his rifle and layed its long barrel on the sun-blistered surface of stone. The mask was synced with the weapon’s scope and allowed him to magnify the scene. The ruined caravan’s strewn loot drew his immediate interest. Cigarettes, which were being gathered in a small heap at the roadside, and a few small rations were being piled into a wooden cart took his immediate interest. Drinking water was being stacked more neatly beside the Raider’s carts and he studied the big plastic jugs. It looked dirty. Unclean. It did not interest him.
Despite eight automatic weapons there appeared to be no ammunition in the loot. The firearms had been left where the men holding them had fallen. They were in fair condition. Most likely, either through neglect or time’s course, a few would not fire. Still, in his mind, he saw the potential for parts. Repair or trade, it did not matter. There were pans, pots, and playing cards. The Raiders ignored them all. They could not trade with towns and did not care to. They traded only with the gangs that existed miles away. It was a grim exchange. The loot of the dead for drugs and liquor. This was not the humanity many had envisioned. The man frowned, took aim, and exhaled.
He squeezed the trigger and felt the rifle kick, too focused to register the booming retort of the high-caliber round exploding from the barrel. The woman, her twisted and sallow face blistered from the sun, crumpled beneath the large man thrusting roughly into her. His eyes were closed and he did not register the sound of the shot. Two shots took two more of the men while the Raiders began to take notice and stare up at the ridges that flanked them. The first took the impact hard and was much lighter than he expected, lifting clean off his feet and rolling across the road. The other crumpled immediately, one hand lifted to point (wrongly) to the hill opposite where the man firing at them still crouched, and went still. He fired on until the eight was reduced to one bewildered and frightened man with pants half-done and his pecker shriveling. For a moment he though the Raider saw him. His horrible features tightened in a crude, ugly grimace up towards the proper hill. He lifted one hand, carrying a rusty and carnage-stained axe, and shook it. The last shot struck true and did not quite remove his head. Instead, as the man in the mask looked on, the top of the Raider’s skull evaporated in a puff of red and pink mist as the large-caliber round turned his head into a canoe. The body fell straight back, stiff as a board, and the booted feet twitched madly.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
He had not immediately descended to the road. Instead, after gathering the spent cartridges upon the rock, he had reloaded his rifle and waited. Minutes had passed. Five turned into ten. Ten turned into twenty. Finally, after thirty, he had begun the laborious task of picking his way down to the cracked and carnage-riddled asphalt. He went first to the mercenaries and traders, ensuring what he had known upon arrival. They were dead. There was nothing else he could have done. It would have pleased him to bury them, or in the very least, stack them with a mark. A quick glance skyward told him that he did not have the time.
He filled his pack with the cigarettes and rations first: a solar calculator, a wristwatch, two packs of playing cards with naked women on their backs, a pack of blue playing cards, a camping skillet, a pair of sunglasses, a hot plate, and was thrilled to discover a woman’s flower print dress in the bottom of one of the satchels lashed to the mutie cattle.
(This thread is closed.)