Cyr left a single trail of bloody footprints across the arid scrubland, simple to track if anyone cared enough. Used up. Little more than bones and sun blistered skin wrapped in a threadbare shift. Numb, a brain fog allowed for no thought beyond the current moment. One foot in front of the other. keep moving forward, toward the setting sun. Walk away from the sun in the morning. Hide from it when it is at its height and hottest. Move toward it when it sets. It prevented walking in circles mostly and was good enough to cover some distance. There was no destination.
Time passed. Moments occurred when the fog was broken by lightning strikes of rage In those moments they became aware of the carrion birds who circled overhead, and the dull fear and certainty of death. In the Barrens everything alone is prey.
The silhouette of a long-neglected wind turbine sprouted from the flat horizon as Cyr moved closer. A reminder when this land was used to graze cattle in the thousands. Now scrub grass barely had time to grow between waves of ravenous locusts swept the ground bare. Hours passed at a snail's pace before its rusted and screeching form towered over them. Slow, but it was miraculously still turning in the desert breeze.
The windmill's shadow was a reprieve from the baking heat, even a few degrees was a relief. The trickle of water it managed to pull from beneath the earth was a cool blessing on their lips. They lowered themself into the trough and let the water dribble upon them. The memory of rain accompanied the drops as they ran their way over their head. It was shaved, although a week or more of growth crept up between the crisscrossing scars of raised brand burns. A testament to the time it spent on the run since their escape.
The freshest of the brands still ached, it was likely infected. Cyr's former captors, the Rawhide Knot, took pleasure in expressing their cruelty with heated steel rods. The Knot were flesh eaters and bandits, not slavers in the same sense as the clans farther east. They kept a few prisoners from raids on the sparse settlements and trade caravans who crossed between them. Not for labor but for entertainment, and eventually vittles.
"If it is poisoned, at least it will quicken the end," they thought as they raised their mouth to the spigot, catching the tiny stream between cracked lips. "Here would not be the worst place to die."
The groaning of metal on metal stopped as the breeze died and the barrens were silent. The sun dipped low before disappearing and the sky melted into the pinks and oranges of dusk. Cyr collapsed as the deep sleep of exhaustion crashed over them.
...
Not far away, hands folded expansive sheets of solar panels into convenient meter squared piles with practiced efficiency. They were stowed in a locked compartment beneath the flatbed of a modified hybrid electric/biodiesel semi. The truck towered above the landscape on knobby tires patched so often it was doubtful any of the original rubber remained. Atop the flatbed, there were chain linked fences fastened together in cubes and covered in ragged blue tarps and salvaged plastic. Within were the huddled forms of a dozen or more figures, people scraped from the barrens, some hobbled by chains others too broken to run. Most had some inkling of their fate. A ladder was welded to the back of the cab jutting vertically into the night's sky. There a squat figure perched like a hunting spider, a pair of binoculars pressed to his eyes as he scanned the surroundings for signs of prey. His exposed skin was painted white with zinc oxide and he was clothed head to toe in finery that looked to be looted from a museum, or more likely, a props warehouse. Thus cutting the figure of an Elizabethian noble.
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He called himself the Marquis de Carnivale. It was a point of pride to him that the local settlements in the no-man's-land along his loop between the 7Wonders outposts to the west and the Free States to the east used him as a cautionary tale to their children.
"Don't go out alone or the Marquis will snatch you up for his dinner pot! don't wander too far from the campfire or you'll be carried off! Bury your scat or the Marquis will sniff you out!", the parents would tell their young ones. The Marquis had no interest in children, Babylon only accepted adults for conscription and the free states only cared for their own escaped slaves. They were in the midst of some foolish eugenics program and avoided introducing new stock.
After packing away the solar panels the other figures idled lazily adjusting respirators and checking each other's gear. They were covered head to toe in a synthetic black material, snugly fitting over their rough mottled skin. Genetically, they weren't strictly human, though they might pass at a glance. Their limbs were proportionally too long, and they had a tendency to drop to all fours for few strides especially when moving quickly. And they could indeed move quickly. Easily keeping pace with the truck as it crept through the badlands at a steady 40 km/h.
Buzzards circled to the northwest. The figure atop the ladder spoke a few words into a radio headset when the last rays of sunlight slipped below the horizon. With a few clicks, the electric motor came to life and the rig lurched forward quietly. The lanky forms of the hunters moved like shadows in the starlight as they fanned out into a "V' ahead and abreast of the vehicle, probing for hazards and scenting the air. They could smell blood on the wind. They crept ahead carefully in the direction of their quarry.
They came to a halt at an old water refilling station. The Marquis had taken it off his route twenty some odd years ago when the water table dropped and the well was coming up dry. The hunters surrounded the basin in a loose circle babbling at each other. The Marquis threw himself from the cab of the truck with the grace of a sling stone. His high heeled boots skidded toward the circled hunters and they parted to allow him to the center. A scarred and filthy figure curled into a fetal ball. It was still breathing, though shallowly.
"Whooo-eee, not much more than half cooked gristle there lads," He placed a thumb on the side of his nose and blew the dust and mucus onto the ground. "We're less than a day from Babylon, if it's alive they may take it off our hands. If not it's jerky and marrow jelly."
One of the hunters said something that sounded vaguely like "jelly doughnut." The other hunters let loose a peal of high-pitched wet sounding laughter.