Ryan wondered whether there was any point at all in interfering. The sacrificial prey was doomed. The kindest thing would be to put a 9 mm bullet through his skull and end his suffering.
At one point Ryan had thought the tortured man was dead. Then he drew several racking, shuddering breaths, his whole rib cage heaving with the effort of staying alive. A hank of cloth had been knotted around his mouth to keep him from crying out again. The head turned desperately from side to side, as though he were blindly seeking some sort of salvation.
The leader of the worshipers seemed to be a singularly tall, skinny man. Endowed, Ryan couldn’t help noticing, with an extremely large penis that hung almost to his knee, like a length of rejected hose. He had a shaved head, streaming with rain, his eyes wide and staring. His mouth hung open, showing a series of jagged and broken teeth. His whip was bigger than the others, multithonged, which he was using on his own back, lashing his scarred flesh across alternate shoulders.
Now he held up the dripping flail and called out to his followers in a harsh, croaking voice.
“Best we finish before the weather fucks us in our intention,” he yelled.
Krysty tugged at Ryan’s sleeve. “Are we not going to do something, lover?”
He shook his head. “Man’s almost dead.”
“Still ease his passing.”
Ryan looked sideways at her, seeing the way the storm had flattened her fiery hair against her skull.
“Trader used to say that you didn’t clean up shit unless you’d already trodden in it. Not our business, Krysty. Can only lead to trouble.”
She tugged harder. “I don’t believe what I’m hearing, lover. I don’t.”
“There’s times and there’s times. You know that, just as well as I do.”
Part of him wanted to put a violent ending to this bloody torture. But the more rational side of his character told him to leave well alone and move on. It wasn’t their business. He sighed, rubbing his finger along the side of his nose, huddling his shoulders as the rain beat down even more strongly. The wind was also gathering force, whistling and shrieking through the tall trees, whipping the fire into a steaming inferno.
The dancing had stopped, and the eighteen men and women were gathered around their victim.
“In the name of the gods of sky and land and earth and sun and fire and water and stone and blood… That you might help us to a great harvest, we offer up this worthy sacrifice to you all. He came willing like…” There was a pause, and muffled sniggering from a couple of the women. “Now we offer him to you, through fire and through rain.”
He turned to a stout young man. “Light the torch, brother, and then we can go home.”
The raging storm made it hard to get the brand lit, but it eventually flared into life, smoking with an orange-red glow, showing that they were using some crudely refined petroleum to help it to burn.
“If you don’t, Ryan, then I will,” Krysty warned, aiming with her Smith & Wesson blaster. “Sorry, lover. Can’t let them do this.”
For a fraction of a frozen moment, it crossed his mind to punch her out, knock the blaster from her hands, stop her from disobeying him in front of the others. The crimson rage was blazing, but that microsecond of red-mist rage passed as quickly as it had reared its cobra head.
The teenager, hair dank across his shoulders, was stooping to set light to the pile of brushwood just below the head of the tortured man.
Ryan made his decision. He turned to Mildred, crouched on his left. “Put away their victim. Rest of you, chill as many as you can. Best that none of them escape to carry the word back to their ville.”
Mildred already had her Czech target revolver drawn, in her right hand. She leveled it slowly, blinking away the rain.
Ryan could have spent hours watching Mildred shooting. Her talent with a blaster was truly phenomenal, better than anyone else he’d ever seen in Deathlands. She had once told him that her expertise didn’t just extend to holding her breath before gently squeezing the trigger. She was so aware of her own body that she had the ability to judge the single beats of her heart and fire between them.