If you wanted to live a long life in the Slavestates you followed one rule to the letter: don't mess with a Radlep. When the tax convoys went out they looked for the usual stuff—gas, girls and guns—but the convoy leader always carried a special commission, that of Radlep recruiter. No one knows who first called them radleps—"radiation lepers"—but the name was a good one and it stuck.

It wasn't that unusual for the convoys to come upon, out in the hinterlands, some kid who had strayed too close to "hot" water or had been caught in a radiation storm or had eaten contaminated meat. Eventually, the boy would die, slowly, painfully, of radiation sickness. It was a terrible decline to watch:

their hair fell out, their skin flaked, the creeping heat of the disease ate out their voice boxes. But they could walk and they could fight.

If the convoy commander spotted a likely candidate he made the kid an offer: come to the Cap and  join the Radleps. It was a tempting prospect. In return for absolute loyalty and complete fearlessness Leather would give them anything they wanted, for life. All the guns, food, alcohol, girls, gas, ammo, —anything—they could consume was theirs for the asking. The catch was that they had to be prepared to die. Most accepted the offer. After all, they were dying anyway, why not make the most of it?

They were Leather's praetorian guard, his SS. Leather's enemies were their enemies. They killed those he told them to kill. When he told his Radleps to die, they died. The Stormers, even the best of them, could never be as effective as the Radleps because no matter how courageous or stupid one of them might be, deep in every Stormer heart was planted the simple desire to stay alive, to keep his head down, to cover his ass. Radleps didn't give a damn one way or another. They waded into heavy fire the way kids played in a stream. Where a normal man would avoid a fight, a Radlep sought it out.

They killed, they got killed, but as one fell another jumped to take his place. There were raiders and smugglers hard as nails and tough as sharks, mean as hungry wolves that would run like jack rabbits if they heard there were Radleps ahead on the road.

More than just being prepared to die the Radleps had another quality that drove them. Every single one of them burned with a white hot hate of every normal man, woman and child on the continent. The Radleps hated because they had been dealt the dirtiest hand in a dirty world. Leather could give them everything, but he couldn't give them life. Their future, no matter how you cut it, was death.

People said that the only good thing about Radleps was that they all died eventually.

Marxie had been Radlep captain for about a year— the longest a commanding captain had ever lived— but he could feel his time drawing near. The disease was weakening him, he couldn't get out of bed in the morning without leaving behind a sheet of matted skin on the covers. But it didn't bother him that much—he had long ago accepted his fate. He had gotten used to the looks of revulsion when he passed, the shivers of disgust in the cool, white, perfect bodies of the women Leather gave him—but he did have pride. He wanted to go out in style. He wanted to get Bonner. He wanted to get him alive.

Marxie left the big house and wandered noncha-lantly to the Radlep headquarters, an old ornate building that looked like a castle. It sat right on the green slash that cut through the center of the Cap. Here his force of maniacs ate and drank, took their women and generally lazed around when they weren't on patrol or on duty.

When Marxie entered a few of the Radleps straightened up and tossed off something that passed for a salute. Discipline was a little tighter in the Radleps than in the Stormers.

"Okay," rasped Marxie, "I want fifty men now."

"We going on a job?"

"Yeah. A big one."

There were few sights to be seen in the Slavestates or anywhere else in the continent that were quite as frightening as a battalion of Radleps on the move. Leather saw to it that his elite troops had, along with the best in firearms, the finest in transport. Radleps rode motorcycles exclusively and they weren't the homemade hybrids that virtually everyone rode—these •were the real thing. There were genuine unmodified Harleys, as shiny and as powerful as the day they left the showroom floor. Those big engines throbbed in unison with the other big bikes: Hondas and BMWs, Kawasakis, Yamahas, Nortons, Moto Guzzi, Suzuki, their engines whining in a loud, ear-splitting chorus.

Marxie alone rode in a four-wheeled vehicle, but his was the real thing too: a shiny Jeep C-J circa 1990 with its tough roll bar and a specially fitted eight-cylinder engine that would outrun almost everything on the road.

The beauty of the machines they rode underscored the grotesqueness of their riders. The Radleps sat athwart their mounts looking as ugly and evil as sin itself. Almost all the Radlep soldiers had the crusty mottled skin of the burn victim, hands were scaly and cracked with deep fissures, faces were blistered, tongues swollen and thrust through cracked lips; the radiation had played havoc with cell growth and some of the Radleps were marked with odd tufts of hair, partially grown teeth and eyes and weird twisted extra limbs that flapped ineffectually at their sides like the thin white wings of birds unable to achieve flight.

The Radleps were festooned with weapons. Not one of them had fewer than three. Every chest was crisscrossed with bandoleers of ammunition for every type of weapon. Their status allowed them the finest in firearms. They carried efficient little 9mm automatics, Ingrams, Uzis, .45 M-3Als, weighty Dan Wesson revolvers, Browning automatic shotguns . . . These men weren't overequipped; just dying of radiation sickness wasn't enough to make you a Radlep. Before you could call yourself one, Marxie, or someone like him, made sure that you could handle each weapon like an expert.

Marxie, mounted in the passenger seat of his jeep, looked over his squad and smiled his hideous smile of pride. Bonner was brought down already. With a flick of a gloved hand Marxie gave the signal: move out.

Like a steel symphony, the engines of his soldiers' bikes answered his order. Fifty bikes roared into the late afternoon sun. People watched them roar down Constitution and shook their heads. Some poor bastards were going to catch it—and it would be hot.

Web Site Contents (Unless Mentioned Otherwise) ©2012 By Atlan Formularies, Post Office Box 95, Alpena, Arkansas 72611-0095
Phone: 870-437-2999 - Fax: Out of Order -  Email: Addresses

[ Back ] [ Home ] [ Up ] [ Next ]