James A. Hunter
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Wasteland Warlords: Chapter 4 - Keep What You Kill
🕑 Added 2022-07-16 22:00:03 +0000 UTCThen something rebounded off the back of Mohawk’s head, knocking the spikey helmet askew.
Joe reared back his chainsaw for another shot. The chain wasn’t whirling, but it was still big and damned heavy. Bertha slammed into Mohawk’s spine, this time throwing oily blood in an arc. The goblin’s eyes glazed. Its clawing weakened.
Clay wrenched his arm free of the dazed creature’s fang-studded jaws. Before it could recover and launch a fresh assault, he ripped the Kbar out of its webbing and planted it in the side of Mohawk’s neck. It took three stabs and two more heaping helpings of blunt force trauma from Bertha, but the gobbo finally slumped forward, dead.
With a grunt and a heave, Joe helped Clay shove Mohawk’s corpse off, then offered him a hand up.
Alex and the Wilfords came out of cover, the other goblins reduced to bullet and shot-riddled piles of meat and biker gear.
“Who got the kill on that one?” Roy Lee asked, nodding at Mohawk.
Clay looked at Joe, then shrugged. “We were both going at it. Why?”
“The one rule pretty much everybody around here respects is ‘Keep What You Kill,’” Derail said, changing out the banana clip on his Uzi. “You two work out who gets the loot amongst yourselves.” He nodded at Alex. “And you, little lady, got the rights to that headless lump of snot over there.”
She crouched next to Clay and inspected the ragged bite marks in his forearm.
“I need a minute to stitch this up, then I’ll get on it.” She unslung her pack and started digging for the suture kit and iodine.
Roy Lee snorted. “You tumbleweeds are so green you might as well be photosynthesizin’. Derail?”
The eldest Wilford leaned over Mohawk’s corpse and slapped around its leather jacket until he came up with a clear glass flask full of sloshing red syrup.
“Here.” Derail tossed the potion to Clay. “It’ll cure what ails ya.”
Clay caught Alex’s shocked look. Behind her, Joe had craned his neck to see the bottle better, his eyes wide.
“Shit, y’all, it’s just a Modest Healing Potion.” Roy Lee spat off the edge of the bridge. “Nothin’ to crap your armor over. Mosta these little low-level bastards drop ’em.”
Clay’s fist tightened on the bottle, and a brief pop-up appeared:
╠═╦╬╧╪
Modest Health Potion
Restores 25 HP
Uses: 1
╠═╦╬╧╪
He couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t even fathom that someone would just toss this away without a care in the world.
“Really?” Alex sounded like someone had punched her in the gut, which wasn’t far from how Clay felt. Unlike him, she wasn’t the type to keep her disbelief on lockdown. “They’re just… everywhere?”
“For really reals,” Derail said with a nod. “We don’t even bother picking up anything lower’n Ultimate Health anymore. By the end of the day, you’ll be chucking the Modests at walls just to get rid of ’em.”
“How the hell do you like that?” Joe kicked a ragged scrap of exhaust pipe, sending it clanging and tumbling along the concrete. With a sigh, he slung Bertha over his shoulder. “Well, drink up, Clay, and let’s get looting. I want to see what else is so common on this side of the Containment Barrier that nobody sells off half their life for one.”
Huffing a bitter laugh, Clay pulled out the cork and chugged the health potion in three big gulps. It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t the worst thing he’d ever tasted, either. This rated somewhere between cherry cough syrup and over-sugared VBS Kool-Aide.
Better yet, the chunks of shredded skin and muscle pulled back together and repaired themselves in a matter of seconds, knitting cleanly without even shiny pink scars to mark where they’d been.
They looted the goblins’ bodies, Clay and Joe agreeing to split the leader’s loot evenly. When Mohawk died, it had dropped four pieces of gold, two coppers, a ring that looked like a cobra rearing up to strike. There was also his gear to consider—the spiky half-shell helmet and a matching pair of spike-knuckled gauntlets.
As Clay looked closer at the ring, text appeared once more, overlaid on his vision.
╠═╦╬╧╪
Hatchling Naga’s Band of Quickstrike
+2 Dexterity
+2 Movement Speed
╠═╦╬╧╪
Keep what you kill, the Wilford’s had said. That meant this little ring belonged to him. It didn’t look like much, and possessing it outside the containment zone was a federal crime, but the ring in his palms was also worth a small fortune. Fifty thousand dollars, easy, on the black market. Maybe ten grand if he sold it through a reputable artifact consortium.
Clay slipped the cobra ring on. He went to jog a few steps, but ended up sprinting. He shot to the end of the bridge, did a hard pivot and bolted back toward the party. Then on second thought, he wheeled around, zigging and zagging in and out of the decommissioned vehicles. He wasn’t inhumanly fast or agile, but there was an immediate and noticeable improvement—not to mention he could turn on a dime, and the ruck, M4, and gear he was wearing hardly affected his agility.
He came to a dead stop behind Alex, the breeze from his sprint ruffling her short hair and clothes. She jumped, blocking and punching instinctively as she spun around. Clay grabbed the liver shot before it landed.
He grinned. “Look who’s too slow now, Sensei.”
“Yeah, because magic.” Her eyes sparkled as she snatched her fist back. “Without that, I would’ve knocked you on your ass.”
“Dude,” Joe said, “you guys think that’s cool? Check this shit out.”
He pulled on a pair of looted leather gauntlets, studded with metal spikes, then grabbed the back bumper of a crumpled SUV. The wreckage groaned as he slowly lifted the whole back end off the ground. His legs were shaking and his face was red as a beet, but damn if he wasn’t holding the vehicle up a few inches. Well, the ass end anyway.
“I’m freaking Superman!” he crowed. He let the SUV drop, then grabbed a chunk of median with rebar sticking out of it and frisbeed it out into the river like a skipping rock. It sloshed a few feet across the water, then sank. “Aw yeah! I’m going to get so much tail with these babies!”
Clay started to remind his brother that ninety-nine percent of the population back at Camp Liberty was men, but Alex elbowed him.
“Ah, let him dream,” she whispered.
The rest of the looting didn’t take long. Alex’s bobber goblin only had a handful of coppers, a Sufficient Health potion, and a pair of rusty bike chains on it, and the Wilfords kills hadn’t turned up much more. It turned out Joe had finished off Twin Head, but the only item on its corpse was a hexagonal piece of unidentifiable material kind of like plexiglass. Etched across its surface was a jagged sigil that burned with an eerie yellow light.
Its identifying text wasn’t any help. All it said was Piecework Rune – Fyula. And the Wilfords had never seen anything like it, though they figured someone at the camp might be able to make heads or tails of it. Runes were common enough in the IZ, and could do about a million things, depending on how many there were and how they were combined. Multiple combo runes were rarest—hex-chains the Wilford’s called those. Trying to decode them was no easy feat, either.
“Could be something you ain’t got to worry about at all,” Roy Lee said, shrugging. “Could make a random object glow with ambient light, give you a nice little side table lamp. Or on the flip side, it could blow you up.”
Joe nodded like he was tracking, but Clay could see the faraway look in his brother’s eye. It was the same one he got when he saw a rundown piece of junk up on blocks with 500$ OBOspray-painted on the hood.
“Sure, but if somebody with the right intellect put their superior IQ to it…” Joe said.
“You sound like Zack R,” Roy Lee replied. He jerked his head at Derail. “Dude, remember Zack R?”
Derail snorted. “Charbroiled human shreds ain’t a stank that slips your mind.”
With a frustrated grunt, Joe shoved the rune into his pocket and checked the remaining intact motorcycles for gas. Naturally, both tanks were empty.
They spent the rest of the day rousting low-level monsters out of their nests or fending off attacks from the more aggressive ones. They fought gelatinous blobs of slime crackling with electricity, a herd of something that looked like the offspring of a javelina and a beholder, then just before dusk, they stumbled onto a graveyard full of what the Wilfords called Shambling Revenants.
“Cool name for zombies,” Joe said, nodding. “Definite Army of Darkness vibes for sure, guy who supposedly hasn’t seen the movie.”
Clay snorted, and Alex hid a snicker behind a cough.
“Hey, we didn’t name ’em,” Derail said. “That’s just what they were called on the other side of the Merge. Check the old Wikilore archives if you don’t believe me. These bone bags’re always hanging around graveyards, even ones they weren’t original residents of.”
“Are we doing this or not?” Roy Lee cut in, tapping his boot impatiently. “It’s getting close to sundown.”
“What happens at sundown?” Clay asked.
“We’re buttoning up behind the nice, safe wall in camp, that’s what,” the younger Wilford said. “Dark o’clock is when the real big nasties come out to play. You don’t want to be out dicking around when that happens—not unless you’re one crazy sonofabitch with a death wish or a gen-u-ine Incant.”
“Amen to that,” Derail said. “Now let’s scrub these little shitstains, then haul ass back to Camp.” He squinted and looked at the sun, tracing its path toward the horizon. “I reckon we should have just enough time if we get a move on it.”
The Shambling Revenants didn’t have much in the way of defense against ranged attacks. In under five minutes, they had overwhelmed everything in the graveyard with superior firepower. Not to mention one glory-stealing shot from Joe, who charged in at the last second and knocked one revenant’s head off with a sheer brute force swing from Bertha.
Clay, Alex, and Joe looted a handful of copper from their Revenant kills along with a couple potions apiece, plus a Rusty Falcata with no magical enchantments. The Wilfords made out a little better; Derail turned up a Shield of Elemental Strength and Roy Lee found a coveted Ultimate Health Potion. Those bad boys could bring you back from the edge of death and even regrow limbs—assuming the wound was fresh enough.
From there, they turned around and double-timed it north, sticking to the main thoroughfares as they headed for Camp Liberty. It seemed to Clay like the sun was falling out of the sky, but the Wilfords were sure that they could make it back inside before they were in any major danger.
Joe was concerned about other things.
“I can’t believe we didn’t find a single drop of gas out here,” he said. “I mean, what were those gobbos running their bikes on, anyway, magic? This is a bunch of bullshit.”
Alex shrugged. “You saw enchantments deflect bullets. Would magical fuel really be so unthinkable at this point?”
“It could happen,” Roy Lee agreed. “You saw them driving the motorcycles, and you have to think they customized the things themselves, don’t you? Some of these monsters have gotten mighty smart since they came to Earth. Started adopting our tech and shit. A few of the smarter ones can even do rune craft. There ain’t many modern weapons with enchantments floating around, but they do turn up from time to time.”
Derail’s fist went up.
“Aw shit. We’ve got a blockage,” he said, pointing ahead.
Vehicles had been piled up in the highway ahead, abandoned cars and trucks stacked on top of one another to form a bottleneck where there had only been empty road on their trip into the city.
Clay shook his head. “That’s a trap. Has to be.”
“Yeah, some of your smarter monsters’ll do that,” Derail said. He frowned and drummed his fingers on the butt of his Uzi. “Best we backtrack a skosh, get off the 204. We’ll take Truxton west, then Chester north. We should be good from there.”
The alternate route didn’t take much more time, but with the sun sinking fast, it felt like an eternity to Clay. He wouldn’t break and run, but he didn’t like the idea of Alex or Joe being out in the Uninhabitable Zone when the “real big nasties” came out to play, no matter how nonchalant the Wilfords were acting.
As they headed west off the highway, Derail picked up the pace to a hustling jog. They skirted wide of parking garages and hotels, sticking to the middle of the street, but the Wilfords had them circle the long way around the block to avoid the Marriott and Convention Center altogether.
“Place is a death trap,” Roy Lee said, his gear bouncing along as they jogged. “Well, all the hotels and malls are—stay the hell out of them—but the Marriott’s one of the biggest dungeons around. This bigass Ettin lives there, and he is not friendly, no sir.”
“What’s an Ettin?” Alex asked. She looked at Clay, but he just shrugged. He hadn’t come across Ettins while they were researching potential Dungeon Lords.
“Big ol’ three-headed giant is what,” Derail called back over his shoulder. “Every one of ’em ugly as sin. This particular Ettin, well he ain’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, I can tell you that, but he’s tough enough to be named and everything. Katotes the Calamity, folks call him.”
“How tough are we talking?” Clay asked.
“Technically, his dungeon’s a Tier 3,” Roy Lee said. “Sounds cute when you’ve got a rating system that goes all the way to 9, don’t it? Well, don’t be deceived. This bastard is big, bad, and damned near indestructible. He’s got insane battle magic, he’s completely immune to disease and poison, and his regeneration rate rivals even the most powerful DLs on record. I saw a buddy of mine cut off Katotes’s arm and watched it regrow right then and there.”
“Shut the fuck up, no you didn’t,” Derail said.
“Okay, not me,” Roy Lee admitted with a shrug, “but a guy I know saw it happen.”
“Oh yeah, who?” his brother challenged.
“You wouldn’t know him. He’s from a different camp.”
While they squabbled about whether anybody had seen the Ettin regenerate an arm or not, Clay shared a meaningful look with Alex and Joe.
This was it. The break they’d been looking for. Now they just needed to get strong enough to take a run at the bastard.
