Chapter 111: Honey Trap.
As the screams and shots faded they were slowly replaced with the soft crunching of bones and slick wet tearing sounds of something tearing into bloody flesh.
Vizzy turned to Varrel with a concerned look in her compound eyes, "Think they had any clue they were walking into a Yau guai den till it jumped on them?" she asked curiously.
"Not a fucking clue, humans are lucky if they can smell their own stink half and given that most of this lot don't ever seem to have heard of the word hygiene alone a bath they were probably nose blind to them," he said bitterly.
He still couldn't believe their ruse had worked so perfectly, the raiders had been so scared of both Torch and the Boss that their fear and stupidity had over-ridden their caution which they had thrown to the wind when Varrel had said he would tell Torch that they were too scared to pursue their escaped slaves into a cave, which thanks to a healthy dose of narcotic induced machoism they hadn't even stopped to think about before charging head first into.
They had been expecting to find a group of downtrodden and weak human slaves cowering in the rear of the cave when they charged heroically in, what they hadn't been expecting to find was a family of rather grumpy and very hungry yau goai who had been sleeping in the back and wasn't too happy to get woken up by the group charging into their den.
Though by the wet crunching noises now coming from the cave the large bear's moods certainly seemed to have improved somewhat.
"We might want to make ourselves scarce before whatever narcotics those idiots were hopped up on get transferred to the bears currently eating them," Varrel said and his sister nodded making her fluffy antennae bob and swish.
"But where are we going to go now and what if Torch figures out what happened to his men?" Vizzy asked with obvious worry in her voice as well as a soft buzzing in her wings.
Varrel put his upper left arm around his sister's slender shoulders and gently shook her to comfort her, "We'll get through this what's the one thing our queen always said to us?" he said.
She lowered her head causing her antenna to droop obviously in sadness at the memory of their lost but still beloved matriarch and queen.
"Never give up no matter how hard things get a Cazador never quits," she said.
"Exactly! If our feral cousins can be relentless then so can we, they never quit and they never back down, so neither will we, we just have to find the slave freers who liberated that slave hive and hopefully they can get these bloody things off us!" Varrel said balling up his lower left hand into a fist which he shook at the sky while still holding his sister's shoulders in his upper arm.
"But what if they send us away like all the others?" Vizzy asked.
"Then we'll find others who won't and we'll keep searching until we do but I don't think they will, Something tells me someone who runs with a Deathclaw at their side is different to most humans don't you think?" Varrel asked.
Vizzy looked thoughtful and she twirled one of her antennae around her finger idly while she pondered this.
"Well they certainly aren't your average human that's for sure," she said and Varrel nodded.
"Exactly, so maybe just maybe they'll help us and if they can't maybe they can at least point us to someone who can, we at least have to try," he said.
Vizzy nodded and her demeanour seemed to brighten up, "Alright let's do it!" she said balling up all of her hands into fists.
"At a girl with determination like that you'll make a fine hive queen someday mark my words," Varrel said making his sister's face light up into a smile.
"Thanks Varrel you always did know how to cheer me up," she said and he grinned at her.
"Hey what are brothers for?" he said then he flexed out his wings stretching them properly for the first time in what felt like ages, his sister did the same and with a loud buzzing noise the pair of them lifted into the sky and headed back towards the town where Torch and the others were.
The pair didn't enter the town itself infact go near it as they didn't want the buzzing of their wings to tip them off to them having escaped their captors, no instead the pair circled it before dropping back to the ground to continue on foot, they could have kept flying but it was easier to follow the scent trail on the ground.
"The smell of Deathclaw is really strong this way," Vizzy said pointing and the pair noticed what looked like pretty faint claw marks and scratches on some of the stone which indicated that a Claw had indeed passed this way fairly recently.
"Lot of human smell too, many different individuals I'd bet my stinger that this is the group, looks like they stuck to the rocky ground to prevent anyone following their tracks easily," Varrel said lowering his head close to the ground to inspect the scratches.
If he'd have been human he'd have had next to no chance of spotting the faint scratches on the rocks but thanks to his compound eyes the scratches really stood out against the background to him as the multi lenses stitched the image together to form a bigger picture.
After what felt like hours the pair arrived on the outskirts of what appeared to be a town of some kind though it looked like it had been outfitted like some kind of fort to repel a siege.
There were high-sided walls with metal and wooden sides that had been packed with rocks and gravel bags on the inside.
It had four manned lookout towers at each corner with a tall tower of some kind dead centre to the town each seemed to have a human in it keeping watch, Varrel could also smell the very bitter and distinct scent of machine oil as well as Claws.
"There's more than one Deathclaw in there but they smell different," he said from their perch atop a rocky outcrop that overlooked the top but thanks to the high and slightly slanted sides still couldn't see all the way inside.
"I smell a lot of humans too though these smell very different to the other slaves we've encountered, they are more relaxed, and there's still tension in a bit of fear in the air but no-where near as much as at the slave camp, they also smell a lot cleaner too," Vizzy said.
