Suddenly there was a massive groaning noise behind the raider, and something fell and collapsed part of the roof with a crash and a roar. The raider, startled, stood up for a moment, and suddenly there was a cracking sound and something dropped down and coiled around the raider’s body in a tight, painful embrace. The rifle fell and clattered on the ground, and then there was a tug and the raider, helplessly bound, crashed down as well.
“Got ’em!” Ryan called.
“Mine, too,” responded the younger man. An electric torch flared. “Holy shit! It’s a woman!”
A second torch went on. “Mine, too.”
The one with the whip around her was screaming and writhing and trying to break the hold, but could not. Her rage was so strong she was mostly unintelligible, but she appeared to be mouthing and growling a lot of graphic obscenities. Still, the leather whip had cut through her clothes and the more she struggled the more it bit into skin. She was getting bloody fast.
Ryan pulled her up with an expert’s move, and coolly rammed his fist into her jaw. Her head snapped back, then came forward limply. A trickle of blood came from the side of her mouth, but she was out cold.
He undid the whip; then dragged her over to a hitching post, using leather straps from bridles to bind first her hands, then her feet around the post. She hung there like some game tied in a hunting camp.
The other one they bound, face out, to a tall, deeply sunk pole. Only then did they begin to survey the rest of the scene.
“You did pretty good hanging on that horse’s ass and side,” Ryan told the younger man. “Glad you could. I’m getting too old for that stuff.”
“Looks like you’re pretty good to me,” Rondell responded with more than a note of admiration in his voice. “Let’s see—God!”
His light shone on one of the raiders’ victims, a man who looked to be about thirty, although looks were deceiving, even in New Eden. He’d been shot twice, but then somebody had stripped him and castrated him with a knife.
There were two other males, one in his teens and one not that old, who had met identical fates. They found one other body not a raider, a woman, who’d been almost cut in two with a hail of bullets. She was so beautiful that it seemed almost sacrilege to have done that to her. She’d fallen with a shotgun nearby.
Rondell was clearly shaken, but he could still think straight. “I thought these Fluxgirls were passive.”
“Ain’t nothing meaner and more dangerous than a Fluxwife when she sees her family in danger,” the bearded man responded. “Except maybe two of ’em going at each other over something. Come on. Let’s look at the raiders. . . .”
Finally, Rondell sighed. “They’re all women. Sure not Fluxgirls, though.” That was an understatement. None of them, including the captives, were very attractive, and clearly none had bathed in weeks or longer. All had rough complexions, calloused hands, and scars here and there, and all had bad teeth, and all were dressed in rags that clearly had once been the clothing of victims. Two had missing fingers; one who might have been attractive was disfigured with a deep, old scar that ran from under her left eye almost to her mouth.
“A couple of ’em ‘been shot twice,” Ryan noted. “I didn’t think we were good enough to fire only fatal shots. Not at that range.”
“You mean the others killed them?” The younger man was already feeling sick.
“Looks like. They killed the survivors who wouldn’t be any help and couldn’t make it anyplace on their way, then dragged their bodies over here after dark. That’s a nearly-full can of kerosene over there, too. After they got done with us, they were gonna burn the bodies. Maybe all of ’em. That way nobody could tell who was raider and who was rancher.” He paused a moment. “What’s the matter? You been around dead people before.”
“I—I just noticed this little sack on the belt of the one with the scar. I—look.”
Ryan looked and then spat. Inside were the three severed penises. “War trophies. Son of a bitch. Wonder what the hell she did with ’em?” At that moment there was a groan from in back of them. “Seems like the sleeping beauties are coming to. You’re looking pretty bad, Grandson. You sure you got the stomach for what comes next?”
“I do now,” Rondell responded, and they walked back to the nearest one, the one bound face-out to the post.
She watched them come, eyes filled with hate, lip curled in an animal-like sneer.
“How much time I take with this is up to you,” the bearded man told her in an even tone. “Now, I know you can talk ’cause we heard you whispering a thousand meters off.”
“Pigs!” she hissed, and spat at them.
“Now, we’re not from New Eden and we don’t have much love for ’em. We’re from Flux,” Ryan continued, wiping the spittle off and not blinking an eye or changing his tone one bit. “We also don’t give a shit about their laws. It’s Flux law here.” He saw that she understood what he meant. There was no law in Flux except that power and brains ruled.
“Go fuck y’selves,” she responded defiantly. “Go ‘head ‘n kill me. You ain’t gettin’ shit outta me.”
“I’m not going to kill you,” the bearded man told her. “I’m going to leave you here for the New Eden boys to really work you over. What I leave for ’em, anyway.”
He thought he saw a gleam of fear in her eyes. “What you gonna do?”
He reached over and with his knife for aid ripped off her rags, leaving her mostly naked. “Back when I was a stringer and we got into a fight, no wizard around, I sometimes had to operate on people cold. Take off whole limbs with just a knife. Got pretty good, too. ‘Course, before I could amputate a leg, it had to have a real bad wound in it.” Slowly he removed his pistol.
“Who the fuck are you?” she demanded with real bravado, but her eyes were entirely riveted on that pistol.
“James Patrick Ryan’s what I call myself these days. because that’s the name I was born with. Strings don’t give their born names, though, not even to each other, but I haven’t been active for fifty years or more. Back then I called myself Matson.”
Her eyes grew wide at the name. “You ain’t Matson! He’s dead!”
“Yeah, I been dead more than once. Once for real, way back when, but I got snatched back. Once again about thirty years ago so I could get some freedom of movement again. I come back to life whenever the stench gets too big. Feel conversational?”
“Go back t’hell!”
The big man fired his pistol into her right kneecap. She screamed in pain, and writhed on the post.
“Oh, my,” the old man sighed. “I do forget the power of these things. Looks like I blew your lower leg clean off. Grandson?”
Rondell looked sicker than ever, but he tied a tourniquet around the upper leg and heated an iron to cauterize the wound. She passed out from the pain, and after she was tended to they went over to the other woman, the one hanging from the hitching post. She’d apparently awakened very early in the game and had been able to witness the whole thing.
“Much too slow and messy, Grandson. I’m really out of practice. We won’t make that mistake with this one. Nice, neat little knife thrust into the lower spinal column here and we’ll just paralyze her from the waist down. Then we’ll do the same at the neck. A lot less messy, nobody passes out, and there’s a lot less blood.”
“You slimy son of a bitch!” she snarled, with difficulty. Clearly she’d bitten her tongue when he’d knocked her cold. “They’ll get you. They’ll get you both for this, and your kin, too!”
“Brave talk,” Matson told her. “Stupid talk, too, from somebody who slaughters kids and then takes their cocks for trophies. Now, like I told your friend, I’m not gonna waste any time. I’m gonna ask you a few questions. You answer straight, and it’s a clean out for both of you. You give me any shit and I’ll leave you both here crippled and hung out to dry for the New Eden boys. They’ll milk you dry with their machines, then take you into their little chambers at the Gate and turn you into good little Fluxgirls. Which’ll it be?” He took out the hunting knife and made sure she could see it in the torchlight.
“You can’t do nothin’ noways anyhow. Ask.”
“You’re with Borg Habib’s bunch?”
“Who?”
The knife came out again and he stooped down. “I might not hit it the first time from this angle. I’m out of practice and it might hurt a lot.”
“All right, damn you! Yeah, Borg’s chief. He and Ayesha.”
“Ayesha?”
“Ayesha the Whore. She can’t do nothin’ but fuck, but she’s his brains. You don’t think a man could run this thing?”
Slowly the story came out. She didn’t know much about their past, but Borg Habib’s reputation as a man of direct action but not a plotter or planner was justified. When he’d fled New Eden, he’d taken along his regiment’s whore, a Fluxgirl of incredible beauty who, for some reason, had not changed when the rest of New Eden was reset, but had been frozen as she was for all time. She appeared both passive and ignorant, but Borg at least knew she had quite a brain in that body, and she knew it, too. Because of her limits, and her needs, she needed Borg, who was incredibly well endowed, and he did pretty much what she told him because it always was right or it always worked. She got power and influence through him that she was incapable of exercising on her own, and he—well, among other things, he got Ayesha.
The gang was less a gang than a huge family, although its exact nature wasn’t clear. A family that, except for Borg, was entirely female. It made a twisted kind of sense. If Ayesha was still under the old Fluxgirl spell, then she was at the mercy of men but could treat other women as equals, even as subordinates.
Their captive wasn’t a family member as such, but had been a captive of a raid. Many if not most of the family had some measure of Flux power, none really tremendous, but combined they were a powerful wizard, powerful enough at least to convert captives. They had no wish to be unconverted, of course; they hated men in general, except Borg, whom they considered a good leader but a stooge of Ayesha. All would die for Ayesha.
Matson had guessed correctly. The band, under Borg, about sixty strong, was headed for Logh Center to steal something of great value they’d learned about. The rest waited in Flux on the other side, ready to smooth a getaway. She didn’t know what they were going to steal, or how, but she knew it had been well prepared and that whatever it was was going to give the family enormous new power.
There was little more they could learn. Calmly, but sadly, Matson put bullets through the heads of both women, then untied them and let them lie where they fell.
Rondell had been silent as they’d gone back to their horses, mounted, and started on down the road into the night. Matson wanted to get down to where the phone lines ran from Logh Center to the interior so he could tap in and perhaps give a warning. Finally, the younger man said, “It really doesn’t bother you, does it?”
“Huh? What bother me?”
“Torturing, then shooting those women. They were creatures of Flux. They weren’t the animals we saw, they got turned into them.”
“Yeah, it rubs me wrong a bit, but I can’t let it get to me. Listen, Grandson, suppose somebody nasty gives you an infection. A byproduct of the infection is that you go mad and infect everybody else, who in turn becomes mad and do the same thing. Now, it wasn’t your fault, but you’re dangerous and crazy all the same and you keep infecting more folks whose fault it isn’t, either. You got to stop the crazy ones, kill ’em, so they won’t drag more innocents down. You feel right sorry for them, yeah, but they are what they are and that’s an insane threat. You save other folks that way, and you give them some merciful relief. If there’s anything to a next life, they’re a damn sight better off, and they won’t ever hurt anybody else. Then you go find the bastard who infected them and get at the cause.”
He sighed, reached into a coat pocket, took out and lit a cigar.
“There’s always been folks who were bad,” he continued. “And there have always been other folks making excuses for ’em. Their father was a drunk. Their mother beat them. They never got an even break. And all that might be true. But it was cold comfort to the victims being robbed and killed by the bad ones. So you treat the bad ones as bad ones, and then you go for the cause so you don’t make any more bad ones, but you don’t let those bad ones keep robbing and raping and killing other innocent folks because it wasn’t their fault they went bad.”
“Maybe. But you ever see anyplace that ever eliminated one of those causes?”
“Well, a Fluxlord can, and so can the New Eden system. Not in a society like the stringers’, or in some of the open Fluxlands. Our ancestors came from a place that had no Flux, only Anchor. Must have been a hell of a mess. Bet they never cured it, either.”
“Then what’s the answer?”
“You treat the symptoms, Grandson. Always the symptoms. And then you weep for the eternal innocent victims and do the best you can and you play the hand and survive.”
There was no reply. Finally, Rondell said, “I hope their target isn’t old Vishnar’s castle.”
“Yeah, I hope the same thing. Still, what would the old fart have that would be worth all this?”