Sooner Dead (Gamma World) - Mel Odom [15]
Hella took a pair of binocs from her chest pouch and held them to her eyes. The binocs whirred as the servos automatically adjusted the magnification and focus. Stampede wasn’t against all tech. Binocs and cutting-edge weapons were adopted with relish, but he haggled for them fiercely.
Two corpses littered the bridge. Both men had been shot in the back, evidently while trying to flee, and had been picked over. No gear or firepower remained on them, and one man’s boots had been taken.
On the other side of the creek, Deener’s Crossing sat in ruins. The whole trade camp had consisted of three permanent buildings. Two hundred years earlier, the place had been a farmhouse, barn, and an outbuilding, all made of cinderblock against the tornadoes. Transitory shelters, mostly tents, had filled in some of the empty places around those buildings, all of them paying rent to the merchant who ran the trade camp.
The tents sat in pools of tattered ash, and the three buildings had all suffered severe damage. All of the structures had broken walls that had tumbled inward, and the barn lay in devastation like two halves of a broken egg.
More bodies littered the cracked hardpan road that lay between the buildings. The road continued beyond Deener’s Crossing, but the forest had already reclaimed most of it. A larger city had once lain in that direction, but large cities had been the first to die when the food shortages and transportation problems started after the effects of the collider kicked in.
Sickness twisted through Hella’s stomach as she put away the binocs. She’d known some of the people who had lived in Deener’s Crossing. Most had been good people, and even the worst among them hadn’t deserved what she saw.
“Stampede.”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t think there’s anyone left alive there.”
Stampede didn’t answer right away. “Before we bring the others in, we need to know for certain. I don’t want to walk into an ambush.”
“Okay.” Hella urged Daisy up onto the trail then across the bridge. The lizard’s claws scraped and skittered against the concrete.
When they passed the first of the dead bodies, Hella glanced down at the corpse, wondering if she’d recognize the man. Thankfully she didn’t. The second was unknown to her as well. She hated crossing the bridge. It had been a long time since she’d felt that exposed. Constant awareness of what a sniper could do left a permanent chill threading through her spine.
“Whoever it was slaughtered the whole trade camp.” Stampede pulled a dead man into the pile they’d made in the center of the area between the buildings. “With this much firepower backing them, I’d bet it’s a brigand gang that’s trying to stay together instead of splitting up.” He snarled in disgust and spit. “Idiots.”
“What are you talking about?” Riley pushed a dead woman onto the pile.
“The vermin that did this got too big.” Stampede glared at the collection of bodies. “As harsh as the world is these days, it’s hard for a city to survive. Gangs like this are better off staying to smaller numbers. They’re not farmers; they’re predators. A predator has to have a hunting ground that will support it. Otherwise it overhunts an area and runs out of prey, eventually starving out or cannibalizing itself. Brigand groups aren’t much above hunter-gatherer clans. If they get too large, they have to separate, find separate hunting territories.”
“In order to survive, this group has to kill more people?”
Hella dragged over the body she’d found. She tried not to look too closely at the face in case she recognized the woman. “They don’t have to kill more people. They have to take more supplies, more food and trade goods, clothing and ammunition. In order to do that, they generally take those things from people not willing to give them up. Killing people is just part of the process.”
“Why didn’t the trade camp just give up their goods?”
Anger stirred inside Hella. She wanted to know what Riley’s life in the lab had been like because he certainly had no clue what things were like in the Redblight.