Rawn tramped over piles of rotting refuse in a dim alley, his senses on high alert. Even an armed man was vulnerable to ambush, and hunters were just as skilled at avoiding detection as he was at vigilance. Nowhere was safe in this city, but dark alleys were particularly dangerous. Raiders and mutants used them to waylay victims. The only reason he now traversed one was to get to a wide street on the other side of the block, which would otherwise take hours of walking to reach if he went all the way around. He crisscrossed the route between the store he and Rayne had raided and the meeting place in the grove, hoping she was hiding somewhere along it.
The garbage that choked so much of the city’s infrastructure was a breeding ground for rats, fortunately for the denizens of this evil, depressing place, who ate them. Some of the rubbish was from the time of the rebellion, but most came from the autocrats, whose servants dumped it wherever it was convenient. Rawn cursed whatever ugly twist of fate had separated him from Rayne, wondering how he was going to find his sister in a dangerous, dilapidated warren of filth.
Rawn stopped as his nerves tightened and his nape prickled, his hand dropping to the gun holstered on his belt. A bald, scruffy man with an eye patch stepped out of a doorway ahead, aiming a pistol at Rawn’s chest. From his dirty leather garb and tough, fit appearance, Rawn knew he was a raider. The threat made Rawn pause, and, in his moment of indecision, three more leather-clad men sprang from behind piles of garbage. One hurled a stout net over Rawn, and the other two rushed in to seize it and pull it tight. The net-thrower grabbed Rawn’s weapon as he tried to draw it, and they wrestled him to the ground. The net pinned his arms, and the raiders pulled it tighter while he fought. He kicked a man on the shin and made him hop and curse. These were the worst kind of raiders, who hunted hoboes and other raiders to barter to the autocrats in exchange for food.
The one-eyed raider strolled closer, lowering his gun. Two men hauled Rawn to his feet, the other pushed Rawn’s automatic into his pocket and fished out a pair of handcuffs. Rawn twisted and cursed, trying to free his arms. He lunged at the man with the handcuffs, dragging the two who clung to the net, and head-butted him in the stomach. The raider staggered back, tripped and sprawled, dropping the cuffs, which slid into a storm drain and vanished with a distant splash.
“Hold him!” the one-eyed man shouted.
The fact that they wanted Rawn alive worked in his favour, and he butted another man in the face, breaking his nose with a crunch. He bleated and released the net to clutch his face. The man who had lost the handcuffs scrambled up and grabbed the net. The one-eyed raider aimed his pistol at Rawn again, but he hooked his fingers into the net and yanked it from the raiders’ grip, loosened it with a heave of his arms and flung it off. The two men hesitated, glancing at the one-eyed man. Without the handcuffs or net they would be hard put to capture Rawn, who was larger than any of them. He stepped towards them, and the man who had stolen Rawn’s gun reached into his pocket. Rawn charged and punched him in the solar plexus, taking the weapon as he folded over. The other two bolted as he raised the firearm and cocked it.
Apparently only the one-eyed raider possessed a pistol, and he backed away, his weapon trained on Rawn, who wondered if it was even loaded. He doubted autocrats bartered arms to raiders, and bullets were hard to come by. He was reluctant to shoot the man, partly because he did not want to waste a bullet and partly because a gunshot would bring unwanted attention from far and wide, in the form of other raiders, police and mutants. It was also unnecessary, since they were leaving, and the one-eyed man seemed just as unwilling to fire as Rawn was, if, indeed, he had any bullets. The winded man crawled away, wheezing, while the one-eyed raider sidled towards the doorway through which he had emerged and his cohorts had fled. Rawn lowered his weapon after they disappeared through the door. This was what it had come to now, raiders hunting each other to sell as slaves. Even they had lost their pride and become almost as pathetic as the sludge-eaters who waited at the feeding stations.
Rawn holstered his gun, glad he had managed to retrieve it, and set off back the way he had come. Rayne was too street smart to enter such a dangerous backstreet alone, but that did not necessarily mean the raiders had not captured her, since gangs roved over a wide area. The possibility made him want to hunt them down to make sure, and he paused, looking back. They probably had a stash of captives somewhere, but finding their hideout would be almost impossible. He continued up the alleyway, hoping she was still free.