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
stuffgas, girls and gunsbut 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
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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, anythingthey 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,
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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 muchhe 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
himbut 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
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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 rodethese 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
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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 itand it would be hot.