There were old days, before Warcry's time, when hunting was for fun and sport rather than necessity. Snake reveled in those old days, recalling that he could hold his boy like a football. He'd head into the forest for a couple days with nothing but a gun and his boys, and they'd survive off only what they could kill. It was not terribly different than what he did regularly, which involved drugs, guns, and dead gangsters. Maybe he just liked practicing on something that could not fight back.
"Hunting is like sex," Snake once explained, back when wounds from the war were fresh in his boy's memory. "It's violent. There's blood. People die."
That was the first time Snake actually told his son about sex in any meaningful way, though he would later piece the other details together for himself.
And sex was what Snake had on his mind the morning of his great hunting trip. He woke up, as he often did, with a handful of women around him. Three or four, so nothing too drastic. Delilah was one of them, and they were all caked in the dry sweat of the night before. They were free of chains, but knew escape would not be possible. And although they would never admit it to themselves, they did not wish to be free. Not truly. The wasteland was a cruel, painful place and the Overdogs provided protection. And the only price they had to pay was incredible sex.
"Sleep well?" asked the warlord. He addressed the dark-skinned girl lying on his chest. Her hair covered his stomach and stray strands wandered onto the bed.
"Like a baby, sir," she said with a smile, and not a false one. As all of his slaves eventually learned, Snake was a generous lover. It was a rare evening when the ladies did not get to finish.
The word "baby" sent a smile across Snake's face, a smile, that the women had come to love. His teeth were jagged and a little yellow, but the smile was genuine. "I need a baby," he said. As well as Warcry performed last night, the Overdogs needed to be filled with children. Never once had he seen a baby born after the war ended, and he was committed to spreading his seed across the wasteland.
She placed a gentle hand on his cheek as the other women snored gently. "Then I guess I better give you one," she said with a kiss on his lips.
He smiled as they kissed. "I'd stay if I could, but my boy needs me. Besides, you had more than enough fun last night." With any luck, one of them would be pregnant. But that luck didn't exist, and he'd prayed for it for years and it only ended with disappointment and misery. Women collected from all over the wasteland, but not a single conception. Was this the end of the human race? Was this the fate they'd been led to? A slow, ignominious death by radiation poisoning and infertility. The thought was one of the few things that terrified him, though he would never let anyone see the way he got chills down his spine. Not even the women.
"Fine," she said, drawing out the word for far too long.
Snake left them to rest in his oversized bed in the low light of his dirt-stained room. The wallpaper was filthy and peeling and its flowers had curdled and turned grey. A large window loomed over the courtyard below, and the dawn sunlight revealed highwaymen distrusting water, reminding him of how parched and dry his tongue was. Slaves carried buckets of water to their masters in dilapidated shacks across the village, those poor bastards without working plumbing. And the factory loomed in the background. Black columns already rose up high. The word day had begun and the slaves toiled for the glory of labor, the honor of supporting the brave highwaymen who protected them.
Warcry was already waiting for him downstairs, chatting casually with his new slave. They seemed comfortable enough. The physician was carrying a back, certainly carrying weapons and water and other supplies for the great hunt. Slaves filled the armored pickup with gas and some highwaymen examined the engine, just in case some righteous bastard had tried to tamper with it overnight.
When Snake was in his armor, befitting a warlord of the wasteland, he met the morning sun with pride in his eyes. That dumb boy, unfit for life in the wastes, was finally going to make something of himself.
While Warcry could never admit to such a thing, he had brought Needle along for the sole purpose of showing off. All he wanted to do was impress the chained boy, a boy who clearly looked to him with some kind of awe. A knot rested in Warcry's stomach, thick and heavy as a ball of lead, and just as poisonous.
"I'll drive," Snake said, as if there was a possibility that the dead-leg was going to somehow work the gas pedal. "Slave, in the cargo."
"Yes, sir," Needle said, enthused by his full belly and his moist tongue and the company he kept. His eyes widened whenever he looked at Warcry, with that ridiculous ponytail and thin face, and even the crutch he hobbled on.
Needle climbed in the back of the cargo, careful not to cut himself on any of the rusty nails or spikes. Last he checked, he didn't have a tetanus shot, and plenty of highwaymen died from that sort of nonsense.
His chains jangled loudly as the engine hummed, and he stared off as the palace and the factory and the whole fortified town fell into the distance. It was a wicked place where people came to suffer or to make others suffer. And yet, it had been a happy place for him, if only in the most bittersweet of ways, and only in the presence of his new owner.
