1 | THE KILL ZONE
THE WARLORD STOOD in the kill zone, his M4 rifle hanging across his lower back, seeing what the enemy would see, ensuring that his trap would snap shut as he intended and that this stretch of asphalt would be soon littered with the bloody dead and the writhing dying.
It was a small town, the kind where kids would grab a malt and where you bought your hardware at a storefront from a guy you knew instead of at a faceless Home Depot. The main street ran past quaint two- and three-story buildings until it ended in a T-intersection where the residences began. The signage still reflected shops and businesses that were no longer shops and businesses. The Missouri sun beat down; the Warlord’s audience wore scavenged ball caps and sunglasses.
“Those guys,” the Warlord said, pointing to what he knew to be a prepared fighting position in a former hardware shop storefront on the right side of the street, “are going to be shooting at those guys.” He pivoted left and pointed to another concealed fighting position on the opposite side of the kill zone. It had been the TikTok Diner before everything fell apart, before the Fall.
His deputy nodded. A younger man, lean and draped with weathered and worn battle gear, turned to one of the sergeants standing with them and issued gruff instructions to make sure both positions had aiming stakes planted to keep their occupants from killing each other. No need to add fratricide to the mix.
“Right here is key,” the Warlord said, stamping his boot. The street stretched ahead to a clump of houses and commercial buildings—what had been a dentist’s office and a law firm—at the dead end a bit over, one hundred yards distant. “This is where the real fight will be, not up there.”
“That’s where the women and children will be,” the deputy said, looking up the street that ran through the heart of the town. “That’s who they’ll go for.”
“Initially. But we’ll stop them there. They’ll retreat, and we’ll cut them off here. We’ll trap them and then finish them here,” the Warlord said. “This, where we’re standing, is the decisive point. This is where I’ll be during the fight.”
“If we can stop them up there before they get to the women and children you’re using as bait,” a third man reminded his leader. He was smaller, definitely not a warrior. “And your plan’s working assumes they do what you expect them to do.” The deputy smiled at the advisor’s warning. He had thought the same thing, but the advisor always seemed to be the first to raise unpleasant truths to his face. That habit, among others, made him useful.
It was a valid point. The Warlord had studied his enemy. The bad guys would almost certainly charge for the women and children. That was their go-to maneuver. They always did it during raids on other settlements. But there was still a chance they might not this time. The defenders had rehearsed for that contingency, but if the raiders did not act as expected, the fight would be bloodier.
A lot bloodier.
“I think we are well inside their OODA loop,” the Warlord declared after considering his subordinate’s concern, referring to the four-step decision-making model (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) developed by U.S. Air Force colonel John Boyd. Basically, the idea is that you move so fast and decisively that you seize the initiate and force your foe to react to you. The Warlord had read Colonel Boyd’s famous briefing, “Patterns of Conflict,” which helped shape the American military’s warfighting strategy for the last half century until equity and similar concepts had slipped inside its own OODA loop.
“More of that military talk,” the advisor said with a grimace. He was a younger man, carrying an aid bag and a weathered pistol in a flapped holster. The advisor was best in a noncombat role.
“We took this town by not doing what you expect them to do,” the deputy added. It was true. The Warlord had conquered the village using entirely different tactics than he expected from the raiders.
“We’ll accept the risk of them changing tactics,” the Warlord continued. “We have observation posts on the avenues of approach we used; if they come those ways, we can reorient the defense. But I don’t think they are as subtle as we were.”
He would plan on the raiders going for the defenders’ jugular. It was a bold move but one validated by the barbarians’ past victories. The Warlord’s men had been watching them for a while as they had taken settlement after settlement. They had observed how the barbarians had learned that if they could capture a settlement’s women and children, the defenders would always give up in the hope of mercy.
But there would be no mercy. The Warlord’s scouts had watched the marauders from afar long enough to know how it would go for the captives. The useful would live; the useless would die, horribly.
And the useful would envy the useless.
This was the final terrain walk for the defenders, so there were a dozen or so sergeants gathered around the Warlord and his deputy. They all carried some form of M4, military surplus rifles collected after their original owners had died. Some of the men had been with the Warlord from the beginning, or near the beginning; others had joined up later as the Warlord’s settlement grew. Most had been out on patrol with the Warlord, the deputy, or both. All had seen action; you didn’t get sergeant’s stripes until you had been in a fight or two, or ten, and proven yourself. But they were still nervous. They weren’t professional warriors.
That concern was not entirely bad; overconfidence was a good way to get your squad killed.
The Motorola carried by the Warlord’s radioman squawked. The young man—a teenager with a rifle of his own—held a hushed conversation as the Warlord pointed down the street and continued with his orders.
“One more time,” he told his deputy, but loud enough so the audience could hear his commander’s intent for the hundredth time. “You take the skirmish line in front of the women and children. Plant your guys in those houses and storefronts, out of sight. Get clean shots. Keep behind cover. Don’t fight fair. You hold them there until they turn around and run.”
“What if they don’t run?” the advisor interjected.
“They’ll run when they start taking casualties. These are bandits. They aren’t soldiers. They aren’t fighting for a cause. It’ll be every man for himself.”
“Our folks aren’t soldiers either, at least most of us,” the advisor reminded his leader. “They’re mostly farmers now.”
“Farm boys won America’s wars,” the deputy said. “When there was an America.”
“Sir,” the radioman interrupted. “OP 3 is reporting the marauders are about four miles out and inbound. About eighty, mounted.”
“Put the order to take positions out over the net, Sam,” the Warlord told his radioman. He turned back to his deputy and his advisor.
“The Romans conquered the world with farmers,” the Warlord observed. “The legionnaires were regular folks, too, but they beat the barbarians. You know why?”
“You’ve told us before about a thousand times, boss,” the deputy sighed.
The Warlord ignored the demurrer and went on, mostly for the benefit of the young sergeants.
“Because barbarians fight heroically—that is, as individual champions rather than as a cog in a machine. They are after personal loot and glory. No order, no discipline, just bloodlust. Just like the Gauls or Germans. But we’re grimly determined folks protecting what’s ours, not berserkers. Roman legionnaires fought like a team. That’s how we’ve trained our folks. That’s our edge. That, engineering, and logistics.”
The second-in-command nodded. The Warlord had long ago decreed a minimum of an hour of military training every day, hard training, dull repetition to build reflexes and teamwork. That included hand-to-hand brawling and even knives and spears; the Warlord insisted they master weapons beyond firearms both for the aggression they cultivated and in anticipation of the day when there were no bullets left.
Some of the folks had been soldiers before the Fall; they became the trainers. There had been grumbling—the advisor being the most prolific grumbler—but the Warlord was determined. The people trained, hoping sweat spilled in practice would prevent blood spilled in battle.
The Warlord’s band of survivors built their skills and their confidence. They also built their defenses. The Romans were superb fighters but even better engineers. They would build a complete base camp each evening, including ditches and walls. These farmers likewise prepared the battleground, building their defenses, then drilling and training in them. There were concealed fighting positions all along the street that would soon become the kill zone, designed to make it hard for the attackers to kill the defenders but easy for the defenders to kill the attackers. Some were built into old houses, others into old shops. Some were out in the open, concealed behind abandoned cars or piles of wood. Everyone had his place to go when the bad men came.
And they had the advantage of logistics: The endless patrols for supplies, of which ammunition was a priority item for their systematic scavenging, paid off. But bullets in a bunker were useless; he prepositioned the ammo needed to keep the fire up without resupply during the fight. Also important: the medical component. The settlement aid station had a real doctor—a pediatrician, but still an MD. Like the legionnaires, each of the Warlord’s troops understood that if he was wounded, he would get evacuated and cared for. The marauders? Their friends would leave them behind bleeding out and subject to the tender mercies of their enemies. Knowing that you did, or did not, have the hope of rescue mattered when things got ugly. The Warlord had watched the no-holds-barred rescue of America flyers shot down behind the lines in Iran before the Fall and taken the example to heart.
“The shooting is the easy part,” the Warlord reminded his deputy. “Remember what they say?”
“‘Amateurs think operations, professionals think logistics,’”
the deputy said, bored. A few of the sergeants mouthed the incantation, too.
“Yep,” said the Warlord, loud enough for the sergeants in back to hear. “And these marauders are all operations. Just a bunch of individuals focused on individual combat. No centurions. Not like us.”
The sergeants, lean like everyone was these days but also fit and weathered by the elements and toil, stood a little taller. After all, their leader had just called them his centurions.
“All true,” the deputy said. “But there are a lot of them.”
“Quantity has a quality all its own,” the Warlord conceded. “But we still have a lot of troops.”
“Except ours aren’t psychopaths.”
“That’s to our advantage.”
Looking out across the settlement, the Warlord noted a few stragglers hurrying to their assigned fighting positions along the little main street, whose name was “Main Street.” What they had rebuilt as a refuge was about to become a battlefield. The village looked prosperous—the Warlord had been uncompromising in demanding that the buildings they had taken over be maintained and even improved. They may have been thrust back into the Dark Ages, but their settlement did not have to look like it.
“Civilization has fallen, but we’re going to pick up our yard,” he had told his people from the beginning. Other survivors were content to feed on the remains of the dead United States of America, but the Warlord would have none of it in his territory. That the town was neither shabby nor squalid, like most other survivor towns, that there were the beginnings of industry and agriculture, had made it an irresistible prize to the men coming to conquer it. This had been so throughout much of history, as nomadic hunter-gatherers had squared off against civilized men.
“Two miles,” called the Warlord’s radioman.
“You know what to do,” the deputy told the sergeants gathered around them. Get your people into position.”
The sergeants fell out and moved off in different directions.
“Remember that it’s not like when you were in the Army,” the Warlord told his deputy when they were alone but for the radioman standing nearby. “Every life we lose today is someone we all know. And we will lose some, that’s inevitable. But don’t waste them.”
“The Army was simpler,” the deputy said. “At least for me. I was infantry.”
“Let’s get this done,” the Warlord declared, adding, as his deputy walked away, “And tell your guys to try to save the horses. We can always use more horses.”
THE WARLORD was alone with his radioman. His advisor and the deputy were up the street with the blocking force. The Warlord’s command post was a fighting position in a storefront on the south side of the street at the entrance to the town, and it provided him with an excellent view of the kill zone up Main Street and easy access to the other fighting positions that lined it. His radioman was talking into his mic, and the Warlord could hear the Motorolas carried by the sergeants leading their squads breaking squelch around him. He paused to think.
Thinking, he felt, was underrated by most people.
Among the many things bubbling up within the Warlord’s mind was the issue of the batteries they were using up; recharging them was not the issue, thanks to the arrays of scavenged solar panels and their water-driven generator. It was that even rechargeable batteries had a life span, and once they were dead, that was it. Amazon was not going to come drop off replacements.
He sighed. Another technology to somehow figure out how to revive. He did not want to dwell on the number of precious bullets that they would expend today.
Also waiting in his fighting position was a squad led by a sergeant he did not know well. The Warlord was pretty sure the young man was called Dave; Dave had a jagged scar on his face and, no doubt, a sad story, just like everyone else. There were a lot more “everyone elses” lately; word was spreading in the region about the Warlord’s prosperous settlement, and people were coming and asking to be taken in. He accepted some applicants and rejected others. It was becoming harder and harder to know the name of everyone in the town as its population swelled.
Dave’s squad—a dozen scared but steady men ranging from their mid-teens to their sixties, plus a few women—was special because Dave’s squad had one of the M240B machine guns they had collected during their foraging. It was belt-fed and fired 7.62mm bullets; the deputy had personally overseen the machine gunners’ training. The gunners had even been allowed a few bursts of live fire, so their first use in combat would not be their first use of their crew-served weapon. Of course, afterward, they had to collect up the pieces of the M13 metallic split-link disintegrating belt and painstakingly reconstitute a new belt with 7.62mm bullets.
The defenders waited, quiet, lost in thought, some sipping from their canteen, others chewing their ubiquitous pemmican ration. The lucky ones had beef, the less lucky horse.
The Warlord did not have to tell Dave what to do; the men had practiced this battle plan over and over again, so he knew his job by heart. Dave’s job was to wait until the Warlord said, “Now,” and then he would tell his machine gunner to open fire. That’s how you initiated an ambush, with your deadliest weapon, and the M240B was their deadliest weapon.
“OP 7 has visual on the marauders coming up the road,” the radioman announced breathlessly. “Probably a minute out.”
Would the bad guys sense a trap when they saw nothing but women and children in the distance at the other end of town? Would they suspect? The Warlord was betting on their bloodlust to cloud their judgment. But what if he was wrong?
He refused to second-guess himself. There was nothing to do now but wait. The Warlord fought the urge to tell his men what they already knew to do.
Stay undercover.
Let the raiders pass.
Wait for his order.
Kill them all.
Dave was a few feet away, clutching his weapon. The Warlord’s M4 was still slung.
“You’d better get your weapon ready, sir,” Dave said amiably. “The shooting’s about to start.”
“Dave, if the commander has to stop leading and start shooting, he’s screwed up so badly he deserves to get shot.”
Dave found this amusing.
The Warlord looked out through the blinds in the big plateglass window facing the empty street. No enemy in sight yet. He hoped that somehow the glass might survive what was coming. It would be a pain to replace it. The machine gun would fire out of an inconspicuous loophole cut into the face of the building. There were more loopholes for the riflemen.
It was time to wait.
The Warlord’s radioman watched as the great man pulled a small figurine, plastic, wearing a toga, from his pocket and looked at it for a moment before putting it back. The Warlord did that sometimes.
They waited.
No one talked.
Then there was the sound of hooves, galloping hooves clopping on the asphalt of the main drag.
It was go time.
The first rider to charge past their position reminded him of that old movie with Sean Connery—what was it called? There was a giant, floating head that spat guns to these scantily clad barbarians. Zardoz, that was it—a movie about barbarians led by a huge airborne stone head. The old world could be so frivolous that it could spend so much time and effort to make such a piece of crap.
This guy was shirtless but wearing a denim vest with some design on the back. He carried lot of ink, though his tats were hard to see beneath the chest rig and filth. He had what appeared to be a Kalashnikov, and there were several mags in his pouches. It was not enough ammo for a stand-up fight, but these guys did not do stand-up fights. They either overwhelmed their helpless targets or got out of Dodge fast.
Not this time.
The barbarian’s hair was long and brown and stringy, as was his beard. He was howling, and the Warlord acknowledged to himself that this rider was rather fearsome. The barbarian’s horse was less so. It was likewise dirty but terribly thin and unkempt. His gallop was more of a canter, but fast enough to swoop in on peaceful people before they could react.
The rest of the band was similar in arms and demeanor, but not apparel; their fashion senses varied wildly. Some, like the leader, adopted the Viking motorcycle gang look. Others wore jeans and filthy T-shirts, or athleisure wear, or even cargo shorts that may have been from L.L. Bean. It probably reflected their origins as criminals, as rural misfits, or as urban thugs, all bound together by the promise of loot and joy of cruelty. Most rode awkwardly, having never sat upon a horse until the Fall made that a necessity.
But they rode with arrogance; they had never known defeat since they had banded together. But they were only together in the sense of proximity; it was every rider for himself. The fearsomeness level of the riders decreased toward the rear of the charging column. Of course, the biggest, strongest, and most vicious warriors would be up front. They wanted to be in the vanguard to secure the prime spoils—among the barbarians, it was first come, first pillaged.
Up ahead, the presumptive spoils were doing their job. There were a couple of dozen women and children among the buildings at the end of the street, making themselves visible and irresistible in the bright sunshine. The mothers were probably terrified; the kids probably thought it was all a game.
The barbarians had seen bait and taken it—they were charging toward the prize. The Warlord could not see from where he was, but he knew that by now, the bait would be scattering behind the buildings, buildings full of the deputy’s troops who were ready to fire from discreet loopholes in the front face of the structures and from camouflaged fighting positions when the riders got close enough so the shooters could see the bloodshot of the attackers’ eyes.
There were still riders passing by the Warlord’s position when the first shots erupted from the skirmish line at the far end of the road. Then the firing got louder, and then rhythmic. A burst of shots; a pause for one beat, then two; and then another volley. Riders kept on passing by the Warlord’s position for a few moments, but then the river of mounted barbarians slowed and, finally, stopped.
The Warlord moved to a side window where he could see up the street. It was happening as he had planned. The onrushing horde, expecting to sweep through the town and capture the women and children, suddenly found itself under withering aimed fire from its front. The hours of dry-fire training, followed by training with ubiquitous .22 ammo, and finally with combat rifles, were paying off. The Warlord’s men were delivering waves of merciless aimed fire, deliberate and deadly. The Warlord could see raiders falling from horses at the head of the column, and the followers bunching up there, making more and easier targets for the dug-in troops.
One took a round to the skull and his blood splattered out across his friends. Another was on his knees, holding in his viscera that poured from a hole blasted through his ZZ Top concert tee. A third was shrieking, holding the stump of his hand, until he was silenced with a shotgun blast to his bare chest. The street ran red.
The marauders tried to return fire, but it was undisciplined, barely aimed, mere spraying and praying from the backs of terrified horses that were rapidly being pressed in on all sides. The shooters were concealed and behind cover where possible, so the riders had few targets. All the shooters had were targets, a great roiling mass of them.
They could not miss hitting something, man or mount.
With their comrades falling dead and wounded around them, the raiders realized this was not at all the delightful romp they had expected. Raiders were dropping to the ground, horses were rearing and twisting, shrieking in panic, and there was no going forward. Their thoughts of pillaging and the delights of the women vanished and were replaced by a single imperative—to get out.
The mass of barbarian riders fell back the way it had come.
“Now,” the Warlord told Dave, and Dave slapped the back of his machine gunner. The weapon erupted; the roar was deafening, but each man had earplugs.
The machine gun kicking off was the signal for the rest of the men lining the street in concealed positions to shoot. Suddenly, the raiders who had thought themselves safely in the rear, far from the meat grinder up ahead at the skirmish line, were being shot to pieces from both sides as well as above. Gunmen rose up on the flat roofs, mercilessly firing downward into the mass of invaders.
“Come on, Sam!” the Warlord told his radioman. Disregarding his prior comment, he held his M4 ready as he went out the back door of the building into what had been a parking lot. The chaos in the street on the other side of the building was still deafening. Behind him, Dave’s squad was firing nearly point-blank into the mounted men to their immediate front. One rider managed to shoot back with a revolver before he was ripped nearly in two by the machine gun. Sadly, one of the .38 rounds shattered the storefront’s precious plateglass window.
The Warlord went left, toward a couple of big rigs. Their engines were turning over, and a cloud of black smoke was spewing out of the exhausts. Useless on the roads, which were still packed with abandoned wrecks, and needing precious diesel as well as precious time for maintenance, the two Kenworths were useful for one thing—blocking the street.
“Go, go!” the Warlord shouted to the truck team as he approached, but the sergeant in charge had it under control. The trucks lurched forward, rolling across the street, closing off the exit.
A trio of riders saw what was happening and bolted through the opening before the trucks sealed off the street. The Warlord ignored the escapees; they would be taken out by the mounted defenders waiting down the road to eliminate any stragglers or survivors.
Now, squads of the Warlord’s men were flowing around behind the trucks, setting up at the impromptu roadblock and firing into the roiling crowd of horsemen trapped on Main Street. The mob at that end of the street was growing because the riders who had advanced were now retreating. The street was packed with screaming men and panicked horses. Men tried to stand only to be ridden down by terrified stallions. It was the animals that the men felt for, innocent beasts caught up in carnage not of their own making. In their terror, their flailing hooves and great weight were the instruments of their revenge upon the dismounted riders who had dragged them into this cauldron.
There was no order, no discipline, no leadership, and no escape.
The Warlord watched as a sergeant kicked one of his men, shouting, “Aim your shots, aim! Don’t waste rounds!” Centurions never changed.
Except for the machine gun with Dave’s squad on the flank, the shooting was all individual shots, precise, aimed. After all, bullets were more valuable than gold, though that comparison was an anachronism. You couldn’t eat gold or kill with it, so gold really wasn’t very valuable at all anymore.
Main Street was now a mass of dead and dying men and horses, with some still upright trampling those who had fallen in their desperate struggle to get out. The barbarians were firing back, but there was no one to shoot at. The townspeople remained under cover, carefully, systematically, and coldly killing their helpless enemies one by one.
The Warlord did not shoot into the cauldron; his job was to lead, and the town had plenty of shooters. Now, for the next few moments, he had nothing to do. His sergeants were carrying out his plan. So, he watched the massacre, pitiless. It was necessary, and the raiders had brought it on themselves by presenting the Warlord with the choice: his people or theirs.
It would be theirs.
So, he let the massacre go on, feeling nothing but the satisfaction of undertaking a grim necessity. Finally, he muttered something.
“What, sir?” asked his radioman, thinking he missed an important order.
“Cannae,” said the Warlord. The radioman had no idea what that meant and, when the boss didn’t explain, he left it alone.
After five minutes of slaughter, one of the wounded riders in cutoff jeans and a leather vest staggered forward with his hands in the air, desperate to surrender. A round hit the side of his head, and he dropped. There was still a great deal of shooting, but now very few targets.
It was time. The OODA loop remained undefeated, unlike the barbarians.
“Call a ceasefire,” the Warlord told his radioman. The radioman passed the word along the net.
The firing slowed and stopped.
The Warlord’s good ear was ringing despite the orange plugs, reminding him of the time he saw one of The Who’s many farewell tours, but he could still hear the groans and cries of the men and horses piled from one end of the street to the other. This was the most dangerous part of the battle, assaulting the kill zone. The books on tactics he had devoured had taught him to lead his men across it and shoot each body inside it—no sense in leaving a live enemy behind you. But that was a tactic for a military force; the Army could accept casualties. Here, it was not a letter home to a dead soldier’s family. Here, the Warlord would be face-to-face with a crying wife or a hysterical mother. It called for different tactics.
“Have them call for surrender,” he told his radioman.
The order went out. Up and down the line, sergeants from behind cover and on the rooftops began calling on the living among those inside the kill zone to give themselves up. But the defenders kept low and behind cover—after all, these were barbarians.
Here and there among the bodies, a rider would stand up, hands high, weapon tossed aside. Many were bloody, wounded themselves, or soaked in the ooze of their less fortunate comrades.
The Warlord counted two dozen men giving up the fight, and a smattering of horses still on their feet. There were an unknown number of wounded lying in the street, intertwined with other human and equine casualties, who could not rise to give up.
The sergeants called the prisoners forward, cautioning them to move slowly and keep their hands in sight. One greasy gentleman in a Lakers jersey failed to do so; he may have panicked or have been going for a gun, but it did not matter. The defenders riddled him with bullets. His unceremonious demise provided an object lesson to the others, who made sure to cooperate, coming forward slowly and submitting to having their hands tied with reusable ropes. Zip ties were too valuable to waste upon them.
The deputy and the advisor appeared as the last ambulatory prisoner was being taken away. There was blood on the deputy’s chest rig.
“You hit?” asked the Warlord, concerned.
“I’m good,” the deputy replied quietly.
“Mikey Crawford. Lucky shot through his loophole and into his forehead,” said the advisor. There was blood from the wounded man on him too.
The Warlord did not ask if Mikey was dead; even if he wasn’t yet, he would be.
“I’ll go find his mom after we’re done.” He did not relish that duty, but that duty was his alone.
“We got off lucky,” the advisor said. “It went down just like you planned it.”
The Warlord ignored the praise. He looked at the deputy.
“We need to be careful when checking the wounded. Leave them lying there for a couple of hours, then do it. Don’t wait too long—we need to get the dead and wounded horses to the butchers,” the Warlord directed. He was not going to waste that meat; what they did not eat tonight, tomorrow they would dry it into horseflesh pemmican. He did not have to tell his men to search the bodies and gather anything useful, especially guns and ammunition. A book he read once observed that one could never have too many guns or too much ammo.
“Make sure the men going in have body armor. I don’t want any more casualties on our side,” the Warlord directed, adding: “Use spears, save bullets.”
“Yeah,” said the deputy, resigned to the reality of the situation. The Warlord was not going to waste time or medicine on men who were almost certain to die of infection anyway. Foraged antibiotics were too precious to waste on enemies. Nor would he waste lead.
The spear was both a necessity and a mercy.
“Let’s go talk to the prisoners,” the Warlord told the deputy.
“You don’t want me along, because you know what I’m going to say,” said the advisor.
The Warlord did not respond.
THE WARLORD AND HIS DEPUTY walked down to the designated area for the prisoners, their M4s slung in front of their chests. The captives squatted or sat in the dirt in a small depression between the town and the farmland. A couple of squads were guarding them.
“Twenty-three,” declared the sergeant in charge.
“Thanks, John,” replied the Warlord. “How many are wounded?”
“Probably six or seven.”
“Bad?”
“Three or four.”
“Put them aside in Group B.”
Sergeant John nodded grimly and had a couple of his men haul off the seriously wounded.
The Warlord was shocked to see that the Zardoz rider was one of the survivors. The raider sat sullen, his bloodshot eyes darting.
“Are you in charge?” the Warlord asked him.
“Go to hell,” the barbarian replied. He smelled like cheap booze and skunky pot. No surprise there—barbarians often relied on chemical courage.
“You should be more respectful,” warned the deputy. “Seriously.”
“You!” he snarled, his face contorted. The expression was one of recognition.
“Me,” said the deputy.
“Respectful of you? A bunch of cowards. You snuck in and killed my brother, then you couldn’t face us in the open. You fought like little bitches.”
“I bet the Romans along the Rhine heard that a lot,” the Warlord said coldly. The barbarian leader turned to the Warlord.
“You even talk like a bitch.”
“So, where are your people, your women, your kids?” asked the Warlord.
“What the hell do you care? They’re all screwed now with no men to protect them.”
“Some of them might be welcome here. Some of you might be, too,” the Warlord said, loud enough so the rest could hear.
“No, thanks,” sniffed the barbarian.
“You weren’t getting an invitation.”
The Warlord pulled up his weapon and shot the barbarian in the face. Chunks of his head, stringy hair attached, sprayed back over the rest of the prisoners.
“Beat me to it,” observed the deputy.
The raider’s women and children were about ten miles south of the town. In fact, the prisoners helpfully pointed out exactly where on the deputy’s map.
The Warlord talked to each of the captives individually. There was now a distinct lack of attitude. Four of them, each a younger man who seemed to have been part of the band of marauders by necessity rather than choice, were placed in Group A and taken away to the town under guard. They would be on probation pending integration.
“What do you want me to do with Group B?” the deputy asked.
“You aren’t doing anything with them. You’re taking a couple of squads and bringing back those women and children, at least the ones who seem salvageable. Pick a reliable sergeant and get the ones who can work in Group B digging a mass grave for the dead marauders. Have them help drag the bodies over.”
“And then?”
“And then have our guys kill them all and toss them into the hole, too. Better we do them now than let them go and they come back and kill some of ours before we do them later.”
“Yeah,” said the deputy, resigned to the inescapable logic of his orders. The advisor would have objected if he had been there. That’s why he was not.
“And have our guys use their spears and knives,” directed the Warlord. “We’ve wasted enough bullets on them already.”