Jessie sat up last, grumpy and squinting. "The hell is making all that noise-?" he mumbled, not quite thinking yet.
Simon glanced ineffectually through the dirty window filled with broken glass. "Dogs, Jessie. They're onto us."
Jessie blinked once, then twice, before the light bulb went off. "Oh crap," he grumbled with concern, clumsily pushing himself off the wall to rise to his feet. "How close are they?"
Leaning against a wall, Simon pressed his ear and listened. Rio soon followed suit, either following his example or for actually discerning the closest distance. Together, the two focused on the raucous barking. Jessie grit his teeth and then went into the other room to check on Ramone. "We do not need this right now…" he grumped, concerning the dogs.
"Not sure exactly how close," Simon said after a few moments. "But definitely approaching. They're not running, seems like. It's a deliberate, gradual pace at that speed. There are at least two dogs out there."
Jessie pieces together the scene immediately. "Hnn… probably dogs on leashes, leading some of those monks. They're searching us out… and even if the dogs somehow can't figure out we're here by scent, their masters have no reason not to check this cabin. We're sitting ducks in here! That barricade isn't going to be enough to stop them from getting in, either."
Fortunately, there was some good luck to be had, as Ramone's eyes were open, if just barely. He seemed to be in a daze, groggy to the reality around him. He saw Jessie standing over him, shaking him by the shoulders. "Get up. GET UP. We're in trouble here!"
"Huh…?" Ramone gurgled, rubbing the cold sweat from his brow. "Trouble…?" he repeated in a half coherent slur.
"Are you deaf? Can't you hear those dogs? They found us, Ra. C'mon…" Ramone blinked and winced, groaning as he slowly sat up. He still seemed to be mentally somewhere else.
By now, Simon and Rio retreated to the backroom to join the others. "I just saw one of them peering in from outside," Simon warned. "Creepy looking bastard in a cloth mask."
Suddenly a hoarse masculine voice bellowed out from beyond the porch.
"Drifters, you have defiled our territory with your presence. Our god will punish you dearly for this! Come out now or we will burn you out! You have thirty seconds."
Ramone seemed more awake at this as he stood up. Simon could only raise a brow and glance about, while Jessie squinted. "The hell are they saying?" he grunted, not able to comprehend the local tongue.
"Nothing good. Either we come out and they get us, it sounds like… or we sit inside and they burn us to death," Simon paraphrased.
Jessie stared at him sharply, momentarily forgetting what he was told earlier. "You understood that? Wait… of course. The One Language. Ramone?"
His tall friend seemed to be waking up steadily. Slowly, he nodded. "And with less than half a minute to decide." Jessie rubbed the back of his head sheepishly.
Simon looked about and sighed. He then settled his gaze on Rio, meeting that dark wine red abyss she observed from. "I can see it on your face… they'll do it, won't they?" he asked directly.
She breathed slowly, pursing her lips for a moment. "They will sacrifice you to god, outsiders. This is a roach motel for your kind. Your friends saw the fields and pikes under the Black Sun." Ramone translated for Jessie, while Simon studied her. He sensed no deception or pleasure from her about it. It was simple as an everyday fact. He then became aware that he subconsciously used his psychic talent. It felt natural now. Guiltless. But now was not time for his inner moral monologue to debate.
"But they won't kill you, will they?" he asked her, picking up on less fear from the threat itself in her. Something else in this situation spooked her, but he wasn't clear as to what.
Rio nodded softly and simply showed the scars on her arms and hands. "If you walk outside and surrender, you will be lynched or impaled. If you stay, they will expect the smoke will snuff your breath out long before the flames burn you like dry kindling. I will survive before anything further happens. I will be punished, but they will not kill me."
It seemed to be the truth. Yet, Simon did not understand the how's and why's. He looked confused, but he knew time was running short and there wasn't time to seek an explanation right now.
"So we're boned no matter what?" sighed Jessie rhetorically.
"Nah," said Ramone in a low voice. "Option three. Beat their asses down." He grabbed an old wooden chair and smashed it against the ground in one smooth motion. Then, he scooped up the thickest leg from the debris and glared to the front of the building. "The question, Jess, is how bad do you want to live, now that you know the deck is stacked? Simon?"
What was that? Simon looked at his hand. There was a tremble, but it subsided. Ramone had a point. "This is just like the Green Militia base, isn't it? Except, we can't run this time. I'd rather die on my feet. And I'm tired of getting pushed around like this. Yeah, I'm in." He picked up a timber with bent corroded nails and patted it in his hand. "I won't make it easy for them."
CHAPTER 22
Jessie looked puzzled, his face contorting with suspicion, wondering if he missed something. Why were these two acting so macho suddenly? And for that matter, why did it seem like he didn't realize something again? He hated the feeling- being aware was his forte, wasn't it? But maybe he was overthinking the matter. Ramone wasn't wrong. Death was horrible and certain if they did nothing. Ramone's statement was the equivalent of, "if you find yourself in hell, then you had best keep walking." A solution was not going to magically present itself. Going through the pain, however, offered some slim chance out of this.
The big lug was like a blind squirrel, occasionally still finding a hidden acorn to justify its time in the world. Or he knew better about how to react in a violent situation, which Jessie had to acknowledge that Ramone surely knew the finer arts of. "Like I'd let you two do all the dirty work. Don't think I'm going to sit this out. We're in this together."
He couldn't explain it, but his mood had quickly shifted from confused doubt to that sweet hot indignation he often felt. It was the source of his notorious acidic personality. The constant irritation from dealing with jackasses, the lack of basic respect from most everyone else, and the pandering platitudes of his negligent uncle. He longed to show the world he deserved to be there and he would do it by his own hands, one way or another. It took Ramone only a moment now to show him that was what mattered. Cracking his knuckles, he balled up his sausage fingered fists and felt his quiet unresolved frustrations boil him into action.
The three looked at each other with a silent understanding. The alpha male, the haunted dreamer, and the acerbic intellectual stood as one and marched outside to victory or death. Rio seemed frozen in place, gripping her book.
She had seen many of the 'dreeftahs' come and go. While they exhibited some stereotypes, one could never really know what they were about. Some were panicked, many were lost, and yes, a few showed valor. But they didn't function together; there was often no synergy between them. She observed many in secret, but of the few who encountered her, she was a curiosity at best and a harbinger of something terrible in most cases. Many times, she had been driven off. Sometimes pelted with stones or threatened with makeshift weapons. They were not terrible different from the people here, save for their origins.
These three were… different. They were clearly all friends and good ones at that, despite the tone they sometimes took with each other (especially the short one). But she noticed they all helped one another before anything else. None of them had eaten a thing and they were surely weak as a result, to say nothing of being confused by their surroundings. And yet they still inconvenienced themselves to guard their fellow brother. And they had treated her rather fairly, for some reason she couldn't fathom. Even when she couldn't quite understand them and vice versa, they were at the most, wary of her. And she had noticed several looking sadly at her. Was there something wrong with her, she wondered? She wasn't sure what exactly others saw in her, usually. But at least thi
s time, it wasn't hate or revulsion. It was something else. Something foreign, lovely, and new.
She watched them go, slowly beginning to trail after them. They at least had some dignity to meet their fates this way. And it was particularly brazen, since most of them had directly seen the field of sacrifices and knew them for what they were. But they had nothing to lose and everything to gain, too. Still, many men wavered in this situation and she had seen it, from the mouthy and brave, to the reasonable and timid. Why did these three galvanize not simply in resistance, but unquestioning of their concern for one another? What lives had they led that brought them here?
And why did she want to see them win? It never concerned her much before. They were still strangers. But there was something about them. She felt another strange notion, something beaten, and bled out over many years. It was a word her people didn't use much. Hope.
The three boys from southern New Jersey stepped outside onto the porch. Ramone put a clove cigarette in his mouth and quickly lit it with his free hand. He figured if he was going to fall here and wind up like some bleeding pig on a forgotten god's altar, it didn't matter if he was trying to quit. Simon was quiet, staring ominously behind his perpetually worn John Lennon shades, which he adjusted for a tighter fit. He felt the least certain about his fighting skills but it didn't feel worth dwelling on somehow. Jessie simply glared, his expression frozen sour and filled with disdain. He was not a violent person, expressing his seething disgust and rage through a poisonous tongue usually. Today was simply not a good day. Not for him or anyone in his way.
Before them in a loose semi-circle, stood four of the evil looking monks, dressed drably in ritualistic robes of charcoal grey cotton. Two held scrawny branded Dobermans on crude leather leashes, while the others stood ready with short metal pikes, pronged with two points in the shape of a Y. The dogs snapped and growled, their teeth looking painfully overgrown and twisted like weeds for their thin jaws.
"It appears you have chosen a path of most resistance," said one of the men beneath his cloth mask, baring only holes for his eyes. "We, the children of god, cannot be fought by mere accidents of time and space. You are not welcome here."
Simon winced. That was an 'interesting' way to describe a Drifter, he thought. However, he also felt compelled to find out why Drifters were so hated here. As far as he could see, they hadn't done anything. "What IS your problem with us, anyway? You act like we chose to come here. What is it about us that is so worth killing?"
The same cultist spoke up. "You are here because that is what fate demands of you. It is not a coincidence. It is your place to die here before our god. That is why you exist. You are abominations, whose release of spirits from your cold bodies will honor us all, before something greater than we. Your mewling complaint is like a cow asking why it was born to be slaughtered."
"Really?" Simon asked with more sarcasm than he usually afforded. "Kill Drifters because your tenets say so? Why? What is the point? Why does your religion even care in the first place?" He gritted his teeth. He felt a Jessie-like torrent of insults building, but he suppressed it. It wouldn't have been helpful and he wouldn't have felt better for it.
Instead of answering, the cultist monks seemed to merely laugh, as if the questions were beneath them. It was clear to Simon that he and his friends were regarded probably no better than as talking animals. He began to connect the dots why they looked like KKK stereotypes with melted caps. Likely in this world, their origins were based in that organization and something happened that mutated the situation over time into what it was now. And somehow, they stood atop the pile of what power and influence mattered here.
Rio stepped up modestly next to Jessie, exchanging a quick glance with him before looking back at the cultists. The masked men soon hushed up and grew serious once more. "They are afraid and loathe what you represent," she told the trio, as she kept her inky gaze on the men. "You are not part of their unchallenged status quo and… they need a scapegoat at all times. But more importantly, there is the slim chance that one of you might influence their God and even control it. It would upset everything that they are about. Theirs is not a religion of faith alone. It is a system of control, first and foremost. Drifters are very much the roaming devils to them."
Simon and Ramone, who could understand the girl, glanced at her. She did not make complete sense but it was a unique, if rather strange statement. And Simon did not need his PSI to determine the truth of her words, for the recognized the conviction. What did it mean, though?
"When this is done," said the cultist facing them, "You will be punished, Vessel. Drifters are not to know of their heresies. They are to die, nothing more."
"I know," Rio responded numbly. She offered no resistance to the thought.
They stood, staring off at each other, the cultists staring down the rag tag band of friends from New Jersey with Rio in tow, as if all waited for the critical moment to draw pistols in a Mexican stand-off. Simon mumbled what transpired to Jessie, who shifted his squinting eyes back and forth, feeling only increasing disgust.
"You're not going to do shit," Ramone snarled firmly beneath the puffs of a clove. "And of all people, not to her. I still don't get what you're about, and I don't care. You've been hurting this girl, haven't you?"
"It is her way to-" began the cultist.
"HAVEN'T YOU?!" Ramone bellowed thunderously, interrupting the masked monk. His opponent's hand shook briefly upon the metal pike he held, caught off guard. "Say it. Say it, you ball-less excuse of life!"
The cultist stiffened up. "We all do. We all do! You exist to die. She exists to suffer. It is the way of all things under the Black Sun! There will be no challenge to our rule of law, mongrel."
Ramone's jaw tightened, disgust filling his throat. "Fuck this place. We're doing this." Without a further word, he tromped off the porch to the cultist. And immediately thereafter, everyone else joined in. The time for words was over.
The burly Italian wasted no time. Marching straight up to the mouthy cultist, who prepared to lance the Drifter, Ramone promptly smashed the man's nose in with his chair leg, striking him like some angered cobra. The monk barely had time to react before a wet spot appeared on his face mask, and he staggered, gripping his face with his free hand. Ramone wasted no time and followed it up with a direct punch to the face, straight upon the man's clutched hand. The monk's own hand further pushed his broken oozing nose further into his face, forcing him to fall backwards, gurgling on his own splattering blood under his concealing cloth.
Just then, Ramone saw a Doberman charge him from the corner of his eyes, barking and slobbering under all those warped teeth. Not missing a beat, he swung the chair leg with both hands as one might drive a golf club. The improvised weapon partially splintered in the air as it collided with ferocious power against the side of the dog's jaw. The dance between processed wood and bone made a terrible vile noise, somewhere between a wet squelch and the breaking of celery. The canine yelped, flipping laterally in the process, as it tumbled down to the ground on its neck. There, it laid limp, save for a strained choking sound and an unconscious twitch of a front paw.
Simon approached a pike wielding cultist warily, but broke off quickly upon seeing the other dog race towards an unarmed Jessie. With quick legs of his own, he intercepted the misbegotten creature, kicking it hard in the throat. This dog, too, made a choking noise as it collapsed. It looked up at him with vague defiance, however, indicating there was fight left in the beast. Just possibly, Simon had pulled his kick a bit.
Like Jessie, he disliked violence and never considered himself someone who craved such a thing. It was always Simon's preference to run or talk things through as much as possible. But those weren't options and he couldn't reason with this creature. At the same time, he felt bad for it. It was starved looking. The teeth, probably bred to be as they were, were clearly a source of pain and suffering for the animal. And despite its viciousness, which was certainly another aspect trained into it, he d
idn't hate the dog.
Sighing, Simon put his foot to the dog's neck, holding it down and in place. He raised the nail strewn timber in both hands and resolved himself. "I'm sorry, boy. I'll try to make this quick. Your suffering will be over…" he whispered, not enjoying what was about to happen. After a moment of hesitation, he brought the wood and metal down upon the creature's brain pan and winced, taking no satisfaction in the deed.
He was rewarded by the sudden presence of two sharp iron prongs sticking into his left flank, one burying itself in his shoulder, and the other gouging into the ribs closer to his back. He groaned out and recoiled. Had he not hesitated with the dog for that one brief moment, he surely would have seen the weapon lunging into him from one of the cultists. "Does that feel good, Drifter?" he was asked mockingly. Simon twitched, screaming in pain, as the cultist shook, pressed, and twisted the pole arm's spikes lodged within him, forcing Simon to his knees. The agony inflicted was blindingly exquisite. Simon dropped the improvised club and used his right arm to push back against the cultist's pike head, as his left arm was rendered useless for the time.
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