Devil Riders

Darkness came with sunset, and a bonfire was built of rubbish and some wood taken from ruins along the dried river. Dinner was canned beans and some freshly killed dog. Good food, but Denver Joe had to force down his share to not appear weak from the horrid butchery. He had washed his hands four times in the runoff of the little pool, but could still detect the coppery reek of human blood and entrails.

As several of the bikers lit up joints and passed around a bottle of triple-brewed shine, Denver claimed he was still too tired from the earlier knife fight to join in the gang rape of the female prisoners. The man he replaced on watch was delighted to swap, and Denver Joe was given a Winchester longblaster to watch the opening of the arroyo, more for snakes and wolves than any possible human invaders.

Putting the Learning Tree at his back, he fed wood chips into the campfire and tried not to listen to the screams from the slave pits. Then when he was fairly sure nobody was watching, the old man reached into his boot and removed a flat plastic box. The casing had been slightly cracked from the fight at the creek, but there didn’t appear to be any water damage. Unfortunately, he didn’t know of any way to test the damn thing. The transmitter either worked, or it didn’t. As surreptitiously as possible, he laid the predark device near the campfire and watched as it hopefully was accumulating electrical energy from the heat of the campfire. Something about a thermocouple, but exactly what the old tech talk meant was far beyond him.

As the silver crescent of the moon rose over the mesa walls and filled the canyon with silver light, Denver Joe added a branch to the campfire and knocked the device into the crackling flames. The transmitter caught fire and burned very quickly from the oily rags stuffed inside to protect it from moisture, and soon there wasn’t a trace remaining that it had existed. Soon his replacement guard sauntered over, naked except for his boots and blaster, smoking a handrolled marijuana stogie. Denver Joe listened to the biker boast about the sex in the pit for a while, then passed over the Winchester and stumbled off to bed for some much needed sleep.

Masked by the deep shadows of the sandbag nest on top of the largest hut, Cranston smoked a cig laced with jolt and wondered what in hell the newbie had been doing at the campfire. Unfortunately, the Learning Tree had been in the way and the chief biker never got a clear view. Mebbe he was just trying not to be sick in front of the others. Made sense. Lots of men vomited their guts out cleaning a deader for the first time. But the secretive actions made him mighty uneasy, and Cranston spent a long night thinking hard on the matter.

AS THE ELECTRONIC FOG faded from the mat-trans, Ryan cursed in recognition at the cream-colored walls with their golden lattice pattern. They were in the exact same redoubt! Glancing about, Jak frowned. “Went nowhere!”

“Damn LD button must have shorted, or something,” J.B. growled, sliding on his glasses and peering at the control panel. There was no obvious damage to the array of buttons, but who could really tell with the predark machinery?

Shifting the Steyr rifle on his shoulder to a more comfortable position, Ryan rubbed his good eye, debating the possibility of trying one more time to jump out of the infested redoubt. But his gut feeling was that the machine was broken, and that they had been riding luck from the first moment they arrived.

“Should we try again?” Dean asked, hitching the straps of his backpack.

“Can’t take the risk,” his father said grimly. “A malfunk in the mat-trans could send our atoms to the middle of nowhere.”

“Think the entire network is down?” Krysty asked in concern, looking around as if she could see inside the armaglass walls.

“Only one way to find out,” Mildred said, scowling at the sole door of the chamber.

Just then the lights in the chamber flickered, and a scream erupted in the control room.

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