Even the wastes give, sometimes. It’s not often. It’s rare, in fact. But, now and again, the wastes provide enough for two gangs to pillage a long sunken settlement and they don’t need to fight over the spoils. Today was one of those days and Ol’ Jim Beaver was feeling pretty good about himself. He wasn’t afraid of a fight but he preferred not to have to unless it was for something his boys really needed. So the White Dogs went to one side and the Vicious Venoms Escher gang went to the other, never the t’wain to meet.
It wasn’t until some rocks started falling around them that it became apparent the cavern everyone was interested in wasn’t quite as stable as everyone believed. The only trouble was, there was one way in and one way out. They weren’t exactly gonna march up together, hand in hand.
The Escher Queen shouted out a proposal across the transom. “We did really good here, biker,” she said. “Why don’t we just keep minding our business and get out before the roof falls in?”
It sounded fair to Beaver. Any way to make an orderly exit sounded good to him. He was just about to reply, “Ladies first” when a pistol shot rang out across the cavern.
“Emperor’s tits!”
The pistol was answered by “Bullet Dodger” Beam’s combat shotgun. It was a distinctive sound. It didn’t make the rat-tat-tat automatic burst taps of an autogun. For an automatic shotgun, it was more like one of Helmawr’s firework’s displays, or what he’d heard of a Terran legend named John Lee Hooker’s music: Boom. Boom. Boom. There was no other weapon like it. In quick succession, an auto-pistol lit up someone else, and everyone fell shouting.
Beaver only had a second to make eye contact with his gangers on the level below him and, in that instant, he knew the truce was off. People had been ventilated. Maybe his people, maybe hers. But there wasn’t making any of it right. Not now. Beaver racked his bolter and headed for the ledge, firing off a three round burst that made some drug pusher squeal.
It all became a blur after that. A long, violent blur. He saw Dodger earn his nickname and survive a salvo only to be torn to shreds by a living zombie. And poor Frank Black, still black an blue from the whoop’n he took after riding his bike into the last fight, went down again, almost as hard.
But Beaver couldn’t do anything about them. He was living in the smoke of the gun oil burning off his bolter as it took down one Escher after another. Franky may have forgotten the bolter ammo last time but Beaver wasn’t going to let that happen again. No, sir. And his bolter rang out through the cavern without ever stopping.
Even as the cavern collapsed behind him, Jim Beaver kept that bolter humming and the Escher leadership pinned down. Hurt and pinned down, which was when his gang’s own village idiot, Jack Dempsey decided to contribute something for once. Since they’d bought the prize fighter, he’d done nothing but cost the White Dogs money. He’d lose. He’d get captured. The stars were never aligned with him. Sinatra and Martin had used his lucky socks to polish the Quad. It was always something. But today, he saw his moment.
Blitzing out from under a riser, he rushed a girl who looked like she could barely stand after taking a bolter round or three to the face. He came out like a flash and, with a cigarette punch, connected under her jaw, snapping her mouth shut, and carrying her off her feet and into oblivion.
Son of a bitch almost made Beaver proud, right then.
Johnny D also did some damage, personally rushing a sister and engaging her hand to hand. He had her on the ground and, another round would have let him finish her when he was riddled with some evil concoction only an Escher could devise. “Vicious Venom” indeed. Johnny fell to the ground, writhing in pain as his blood caught on fire. His eyes went red and the only thing he could think to do was to take out his rage on the sister nearest him. Gripping her throat, he choked her out right before the ceiling collapsed and buried him, Dempsey, and Beaver together. The rubble covered them all.
Somehow, Swayze, the scummer that had glommed onto the White Dogs had survived. And not just survived, but still carrying a loot casket. Braver than most of the gangers she’d thrown her lot in with, she made a break for the ladder and climbed to the first level. Someone fired on her and she felt it graze her ribs but if she kept climbing, maybe she could climb out of range. Bruno climbed next to her and managed to outpace her with his own casket. He could have offered a hand. She would have taken it. Instead, A Death Maiden leapt over a power generator and onto her level, shredding her back and turning her skin into ribbons of flesh. Swayze fell over in a pool of her own blood, the world growing dim but her dedication to the gang such that her last thoughts were “I hope Bruno made it” before the world wen’t dark.
But Bruno didn’t make it. He saw the fight go out of what remained of the Vicious Venom and, when he finally had a chance to get out of that hole, he let his fear take over. Leaving the crate, he turned to run to save his own skin. When Matt Gin decided, he too, had had enough, the violence finally ended and those who weren’t already buried, scrambled up into the relative safety of the wastes.
After Beaver was dug out of the rubble, he heard that the Venoms considered themselves the winners of the engagement as they managed to get a single loot casket out of the hole. But, as he looked at the captured Escher juve, chained to her bike, he took a swig of Second Best from their shared plastic jug and wondered if maybe it wasn’t more of a tie.
Sinatra and Martin had been carrying the gangs bags. It’s what they did. They were a one-quad baggage train, carying what the other’s couldn’t when they were off to fight for the gang’s honor.
Frank Black blasts off on a dirt bike without Jim’s approval… well… I guess these things happen. But if Sinatra and Martin fuck up, that’s the whole game. Everyone’s water, gone. More importantly, everyone’s Wild Snake, gone.
Which is why they were surprised when ‘ol Jim Beaver came their way, kicked the tires of Rosemary’s Revenge and asked if they were up for a little fun. “Ja”, Sinatra said. “Unsre Bolter braucht trainieren.”
“Well, if a workout is what your rig needs, I got word of a gang of corpse-grinders it can stretch its legs over.”
“Seriously?” Martin asked.
“Serious as a bullet through the head,” Beaver said.
“Then let’s go!” Martin climbed onto the the driver’s seat and Sinatra into the gunner’s swivel chair, gunning the engine. They were off in an instant.
It didn’t take long for them to see the scavengers going after a Rhino that was little more than scrap. But it was potentially their scrap. They waved at Beaver on his dirt bike, looking for confirmation that those were the guys they were supposed to kill and the Beav gave them a tip of his hat.
The White Dogs were lining up across from the cultists but still so far away. Rosemary’s Revenge was the tip of the spear and Sinatra jerked back the bolt to load a fresh round into the chamber of the heavy bolter. Bless St Mina’s tits that the quad was a well tuned machine. Then the heavy gun thumped a beat at the corpse grinder’s chieftain.
All that power.
And it missed.
Then it jammed.
Sinatra cursed, “Scheïsse”
But Martin wasn’t about to let this be the end of the fight. They’d traveled so far across the wastes. He’s inhaled only the the Emperor knew what. He hadn’t been breathing right in cycles. And he was finally in the thick of it. No. He had one more trick up his sleeve.
He gunned the engine, tires burning a dirty rubber scent against the ferrocrete road. He barreled into first one ganger, swiveled, and then through three more…
But the road was old and the chemical wastes had worn it down to be almost smooth. Maybe a little too smooth…
“You Black Dog sons of bitches have been a pain in our balls to track down but we done and captured you now,” The Butcher of Souls said, strutting among Mark and his fellow gangers, trussed like hogs, and gagged, each of them. “We done followed you to the end of this God Emperor forsaken wasteland and now you gonna face justice among your own, whatever that might look like. Queen of Hearts! Do Orlocks flay their own?”
“I hear,” she said, her voice a rasp through the burlap sack she wore over her disguised face. “I hear they flay, starting at the fingers. And they finish over a wooden stake, the fires fed by Promethium fumes.”
“Nasty,” the Butcher said. “Nasty way to go.”
“Wug nog da blag dag,” Mark said, spitting into his gag.
“What does the human say?” the Queen asked.
“Wug nog da blag dag.”
She leaned close. “Is that high or low Gothic?”
“By the sweat of the Emperor’s balls, Queeny, he’s gagged!” the Butcher said, and then wrenched the cloth from Mark’s mouth. “Now, what’d you say, dog?”
Mark spit.
“I said, ‘We’re not the Black Dogs.’ That’s another gang. We’re the White Dogs. Out of Cinderak City? Maybe you’ve tried our Second Best? I mean, it’s not great but but it’s not bad.”
“Uh…,” said the Duke, pushing himself off the wall. “If he’s right, I think we have a problem.”
“Of course I’m right,” Mark said.
“What do you mean?” asked the Butcher.
The Duke turned to Mark. “What’s your gang sigil?”
“A drunk ambull on his back with a bucket over his face?”
“Fuck…”
“What is this nonsense?” the Queen of Hearts demanded.
“Fuck…”
“Seriously, Duke,” the Butcher said. “What’s going on?”
The Duke waved his fellow bounty hunters into a huddle and whispered. “We got the wrong guys.”
“What do you mean, ‘wrong guys?'”
“These are the White Dogs.”
“So? So, what?”
“We were sent after the Black Dogs.”
The Butcher held the Duke’s look until he couldn’t and then he opted to stare at his boots instead. The Queen of Hearts, from behind the burlap sack of her mask, eyes and face unreadable, shifted her head between the Duke and the Butcher.
“Is this a problem? Black or white, we will get our credits, yes?”
The Duke looked away from her sack covered face and at the four gangers trussed up by the fire.
“I mean…,” he said. “I’m going to write my mother about this… but I think I just thought of a way to turn corpses into corpse starch, as they say.”
When the bounty hunters left, Mark was missing a kidney, Bruno was short one spinal nerve, Lucky Johnny was down a finger, and fucking Loafy had both eyes amputated and had gone deaf from his own screaming.
“Making up the difference,” the Duke explained.
“It’s not personal,” the Butcher said.
The Queen of Hearts didn’t say a word and Mark almost wished the rest had followed suit. After all, being harvested for organs in lieu of a bounty didn’t exactly make it any better.
The bounty hunters also took their trousers. That was definitely just to spite them.
It put Mark into mind of a saying his Grandmother used to attribute to Terrans: And it’s still only Tuesday.
Because the days ahead weren’t exactly looking bright.
The images in this post were generated using GPT Image 2 from tableaus built by the author using his own miniatures.
