“Tell us what you know of this ville Samtvogel,” Doc said to the leading sec man.
Harvey turned sharply. “How do you know about that, old man?”
Ryan told him they were outlanders looking for a better life, and as they traveled toward Seattle they came across a deserted diner, neglecting to mention the attacking party from the war wag. That could come later. He then produced the map.
“Shit,” Harvey breathed, “if I ever find out which fuckwit left that to be found. You’ll have gathered that the old place is a staging post for us,” he continued, “So you know where we’re going.”
“Only as a name on a map,” Ryan replied.
Harvey paused, walking in silence for some time, Ryan waiting patiently for an answer. By now they were out of the old ville and onto the blacktop, leaving the heavy forest behind and headed out to the scrub.
It wasn’t until they had cut away from the blacktop and were headed across the bare and rough terrain, with the setting sun lending a coolness to the previously humid heat, that Harvey outlined what his people knew of the Sunchildren and Samtvogel.
The Sunchildren were a band of inbred muties descended from a predark cult led by a man named Sunchild, who believed that the nukes were a cleansing fire from the gods and that they should make their base in the wilderness, ready for the Judgment Day, when the gods would come to deliver them. They had, according to the legend that he had tortured from a captured mutie, welcomed the times of the dark, looking upon their mutations as a blessing from the gods, adapting their bodies for the new world to come.
The gods demanded sacrifices of children, the new lives replenishing the energies of the gods. The eating of flesh transferred that energy to the cultists. As they had become more mutated and inbred with each succeeding generation, so their lust for flesh had grown to the point where the current Sunchild was a drooling idiot whose only joy was the snatching of children from the underground ville, which Harvey revealed was called Raw.
He then went on to explain that his ville was run by a baron named Alien, and consisted of some survivors from the old ville of Seattle along with the descendants of people called the Illuminated Ones, who had emerged from an underground installation which they believed had been destroyed by a bomb after they left.
Listening, each of the companions wondered if the bomb had been in charge of the suicide they had found with the journal, but all elected to stay silent on the matter for now.
“… and they do say that there are other Illuminated Ones out there somewhere. Been some weird shit seen around here from time to time, which is why I’m so pissed at whoever left that mother map in the way station. We don’t want our ville left exposed like that.” He paused. “Of course, Cyclops, if you and your people had seen some weird shit on your way toward us, you’d tell me now, wouldn’t you?”
Ryan fixed the sec chief with a steely blue glare.
“No, of course you wouldn’t,” Harvey murmured. “You’re far too smart for that.”
THE SACRIFICIAL FIRES lit the sky a brilliant white and orange, shining like a small sun in the blackness of the descended night. The ville itself was a collection of old ranch houses in a small valley, the original buildings in a state of disrepair and ruin, daubed a myriad of colors that flickered in the firelight. Around the ruined houses were shacks constructed of metal, wood and any raw materials that could have been found, pulled together rather than constructed, in a haphazard and flimsy fashion. And scattered among the shacks were tents made of rags and blankets strung over poles, offering scant protection to the muties who inhabited them.
The ridges of the valley were fenced off with rusty barbed wire strung around the dusty, unstable rock, stretching around for a distance of two miles. At irregular intervals were dead birds, hawks like the one that attacked Doc Tanner, mutated birds that resembled woodpeckers with grotesquely enlarged and toughened beaks, even some creatures that may, once in their genetic history, have been chickens—impaled on the wire and in varying states of decay and corruption.