Desperados

Friday 26th of July, 2109.

What used to be Tucson, Arizona.

The man the others called “Bull Frog” pointed his shotgun at the hydraulic Honky-Tonk piano, which started playing a bluegrass version of “Paint it Black”. He was white, sunburnt, about 6’6”, bald, in his mid-fifties. There was yellow grease on his short beard. There was something deeply perverse about him. It was not hard to tell that the man was jaded by violence. No soul in his eyes no matter how long one would stare into them.

He spat out in a typical Arizona accent,

Come out, Meinhof! Froggy knows that you’ve been a bad fly. I ain’t gonna be eating ya. Imma have my way wit’ ya like I did with ya momma. Ma’ shotgun wasn’t the only thing I put in her mouth, babes.

Bull Frog was one of the Sadist Six. They were the captains of the militias of Governor Phobos (Greek for fear). All of them were extremely skilled in combat and their reputation preceded them. They spread fear in the smaller and bigger towns of Aeris with their well-planned and publicly executed atrocities. Sometimes they would force the children of their victims to witness the terrible fate the Sadist Six had prepared for their parents. With their favored enemies, they would have fanfares and litanies of hate with severed heads, limbs or even genitals.

The once prosperous state of Aeris was now the lawless, desolate dominion of Phobos and his militias. Legend has it that the state was once called Arizona but there is no evidence for that. The regime of Phobos controlled all knowledge transfer and the public had no access to such information.

It was all after the fifty-year war which isolated the state from the rest of the continent. The forest areas surrounding the state were mutated by the high levels of radiation. Since science was no longer the way to process things, the inhabitants of the continent were now mere savages living like their ancestors did, three hundred years ago.

Amber Meinhof was the daughter of Andy Meinhof and Penny Hayworth. Andy Meinhof was tortured for many nights on-end, for leading assaults on the Strongholds of Aeris. The Sadist Six executed them by disruption. It involves four pairs of chains and four horses… His daughter, Amber Meinhof was forced to watch the grotesque final moments of this brave man. To call Andy Meinhof a hero, is a crime punishable by hanging.

Phobos rose to power after uniting the six nations that brought the state together. He promised to end the violence among the six nations by creating an alliance, with delegates from all six of them. It worked perfectly fine in the beginning, but then the Governor wrote two laws that changed everything.

The first one was the Law of Approval. For a community’s population to expand, they needed Phobos’ approval. An offspring born without approval would be exterminated and its parents would be castrated. If you are thinking regulated genocide, you are thinking right.

The second law was the Law of Inscription which pardoned crimes punishable by death, provided that the perpetrator murders those “inscribed” in Phobos’ public enemy list. Mobs in every miserable little town in Aeris would lynch people to pardon themselves. It was organized chaos. It helped Phobos get rid of the opposition quickly and calm down the enraged masses in Aeris. It did work.

Even though the wars that preceded his reign had stopped, the body count of his regime was far greater than the casualties of any siege or battle. Violence was justified because food and water were scarce. Killing low-life scum meant more food for the ones that lived like rats in the shanty towns of unforgivingly hot ablaze desert with its nuclear polluted borders.

The interludes of extreme violence that haunted Aeris, left its residents mutilated, scarred and malformed. Not even children escaped that fate. The poor devils would make improvised prosthetics for any missing limbs with scraps they salvaged. Horrifying infections would decorate the inch that flesh and metal met. Conventional medicine was a dark art from the past.

Even the dregs that accompanied Bull Frog had scrapped bolts wherever they missed digits. Small price for three plates of food a day. They say that hunger is a great gateway to madness. The torment of this land was an incontrovertible proof. Bloody Bull Frog was probably the only obese adult for years. The Sadist Six were vengeful gods amongst starving pleb that was bled daily by Phobos’ tyranny.

Amber held the stained silver heart-shaped locker tight in her palm. The pain was a reminder that she was alive. Her girlfriend, Tamara McKenzie was sitting next to her on the wooden floor of the saloon’s kitchen. Both of them holding their revolvers at hand.

They knew that they should not be caught alive, as the locker’s engraving was a map that indicated the secret location of the headquarters of the resistance. Only nobles and former officials of the six nations were given these invaluable tokens. It was the resistance’s way of recruiting those loyal to the cause of bringing down the brutal oppressor and his satanic entourage.

To escape, they needed to kill their way out of the saloon. Hopefully, the monsters that followed Bull Frog were carrying enough food to allow them to cross the desert. They were outnumbered and Bull Frog wanted the full bounty of bringing them alive and interrogating them, himself. Probably rape them in the process. They had no clue as to how many men were surrounding them. Tamara gave Amber a quick, intense kiss. After all, it might have been the last kiss she ever gave.

This thought had been haunting Tamara for a couple of months. It all started with the horrible death of her father. He was a priest, Father Iain McKenzie. An orator with unparalleled skills in inspiring crowds. His beliefs were those of the Church of Time. They believed in the divinity of Time. A byproduct of the post-nuclear madness.

He underwent a horrible torture until he died by the hand of Terrence “Spidersilk” De la Croix, the most terrifying gunslinger in Aeris. There is no record of Spidersilk ever missing. His face was tattooed with spiderwebs, done with a branding iron stamp.

Father Iain finished his prayer,

Mighty ruler of Time with your divine precision, future will be past and present, in between. Bless my hands not to miss. Allow me to send this devil to timeless oblivion, to redeem me and others of the torment. If I fail to complete my task, have mercy on my body and soul and give me a quick painless death. This is all I ask of thee! Blessed be time!

As he finished, he put on his black ceremonial robes and tried his best to conceal two sub-automatic weapons. Phobos had requested that on the 12th of March, Father Iain would bless the anniversary of the 10th year of his administration. The celebration would involve dregs of Phobos giving away bread to the plebs at the main square of Penance, the capital of Aeris. The main event would be of course the public execution of the poor bastards, innocent and guilty that the Sadist Six had harvested.

Father Iain McKenzie was followed by an armed dispatch to meet the governor. He climbed the wooden stage . The sadist six were sitting adjacent to Phobos' throne. Father Iain McKenzie kneeled and bowed in front of the man he hated with every inch of his existence. He put his arm under his robe and as he tried to pull the guns from underneath, Spidersilk shot him three times on his right palm, leaving the remnants of his flesh hanging. It was torn muscles, tissue and broken bone. His screams were louder than the fanfare as he rolled over on the floor grabbing his right wrist with his left hand.

Bull Frog stood up in front of Phobos with the intention to coax his master with his zealotry. It was pretense that he would gladly take a bullet for the governor. The rest of the Sadist Six exchanged an instant sinister grin and proceeded to arrest the priest. Servants brought a large wooden bed. The priest was tied on top of it.

Terrence “Spidersilk” rose and addressed the enraged mob,

Good folk of Aeris, I am -like you- deeply disappointed to say that Father Iain McKenzie, a man we used to respect and adhere to his sermons, is a terrorist and traitor to our beloved Governor. I regret having to shoot him. It is a fair punishment and a message to everyone who jeopardizes the Pax Aeriana (Peace of Aeris), that I execute Father McKenzie by performing Death by thousand shots.

I will need a hundred and sixty-seven revolvers to finish him off. Then, will make public humiliation of his corpse, mandatory. Servants! Bring me the revolvers!

Spidersilk meticulously put on his gloves, as another table was placed close to the one that Tamara’s father was restrained. They emptied sacks, full of little revolvers. As soon as they finished a long drum roll thundered.

Spidersilk moved around like a ballerina as he shot McKenzie from outward angles, peeling an inch of his skin with every shot until the underlying red layer of tissue was revealed. Some of his bullets ricocheted, killing members of the crowd which were instantly looted and ripped apart by their kin.

Flesh was flying around as Spidersilk was dancing ecstatic and shooting the surface of Father McKenzie’s body without a hint of regret. The Sadist Six were artists and the crowd was always pleased by their malignant mixture of gore and bread. Essentially, they provided the animalistic side of the people with a shallow definition and sense of security.

The inhuman process of destroying a body was almost halfway. The dance of Spidersilk was interrupted by two arrows that landed precisely on Father McKenzie’s heart. Spidersilk spat and shouted to his men to run after the two archers. The men simultaneously jumped on their horses as Phobos’ guard started shooting at them from the distance. They dropped smoke bombs behind them and rushed to the desert.

The servants took Father McKenzie’s body in order to offer it to the public for humiliation. They’d let him rot in Penance’s Central Square. Phobos looked at this corpse before leaving the stage with his entourage. That damn priest had achieved to give Phobos a taste of his own poison. Terror was something spread among his people, now it was inside him as well.

If only the Sadist Six knew that one of the shots fired from Spidersilk’s guns destroyed the tiny silver heart-shaped locket that McKenzie wore on his chest. This might be their downfall. They are so keen on stealing, murdering and torturing, their delirium hinders their vigilance.

Tamara and Amber, both had realized that maybe the closure of all of this horror would require them to give their lives to the cause. They had witnessed the famine, the blazing heat consuming the last forests of Aeris, the gore and the malice of the Sadist Six and their militias.

One of the most terrifying aspects of Phobos’ tyranny was that society devolved. The more powerful he became the less accessible knowledge was. People were starting to worship him as a god and believe in all sorts of superstition. It is ironic how this sociopath rose when wheat and fuel started to grow thin. Amber’s dad was a great engineer, one of the last voices of reason.

Pretty much like everyone else, Amber and Tamara had a sole motivation. They wanted to survive. To do so, they’d become outlaws. This was a decade of grim, inescapable despair. They’d become Desperados.

to be continued