"The Desert King's real name is Eco Steckler," Eldon said, scooping up a spoonful of beans. It was night now, and the five of them were gathered around a crackling campfire. "I started hearing about him...I don't know, maybe five years ago? But he wasn't a big deal then. There were a lot of bandits and little wannabe warlords running around the desert in those days. My uncle used to tell me stories about them -- Marvin Mackie, the Big Dog, the Bloody Angel." He paused to swallow. "In the end, though, Steckler was the only one left standing."
"How many men does he have?" Luna asked.
"Three or four hundred, maybe, plus his Elites. But there's more than a thousand people living in the area around the Vroom. He's got doctors, mechanics, laborers of all kinds."
"What's the Vroom?"
"That's his base, out in the desert. It's an old military installation. They built it around a crashed alien ship."
That brought them all up short. "Did you say an alien ship?" Lucky blurted.
"Like, aliens, from outer space?" Millie followed.
He nodded. "Yeah. They called it the Vroom, like I said. I haven't actually seen it, but from what I've heard it's enormous, about a mile long. Half of it is buried in the sand."
Luna was dismissive. "You're telling us there's a crashed alien ship out in the desert? How stupid do you think we are?"
"I'm not surprised you haven't heard of it," he said, unperturbed. "Being from Meku City and all. We only found out about it ourselves...I don't know, maybe three years ago? That was when the Desert King finally managed to break into the base and kill the remaining soldiers. They'd been guarding the place since the outbreak."
It was a pretty fantastic story, but Stu didn't have too much trouble believing it -- was a crashed alien ship any weirder than the zombies, cyborgs, plasma guns, and levitating cars he had already encountered in this backwards world? But Luna, Lucky, and Millie remained very skeptical.
"Anyway, Steckler took over the base, and the Vroom along with it. He's living in it now, with his Elites and his harem and all the rest."
"And the Pale Riders?" Lucky asked. "They've been fighting him?"
"For years, yeah, off and on. We agreed to protect some of the settlements down here in exchange for...you know, for their support. Steckler wants these places for himself. He wants their women, their resources, whatever they have. So he sends his forces out to attack them, and we do our best to protect them." He shrugged. "Pretty simple."
Stu wondered if it really was that simple. The Pale Riders may have had some commendable qualities, but they were, at the end of the day, a gang, and they weren't protecting these settlements out of the goodness of their hearts -- they were plainly running some kind of protection racket. The Desert King might only be the lesser of two evils, as far as the people of Talife were concerned.
"Tell us more about this spaceship," Millie said. "You said the Desert King is living in it?"
"Yeah. It's gigantic, this thing. That's what I've heard, anyway."
"How long has it been there?"
He shrugged. "Beats me. The base was built there long before the outbreak, though, like I said, so I guess the government has known about it for years."
"You really didn't know about any of this?" Stu asked Luna.
"The government must have kept it a secret," she said. "I think I would have remembered something about a crashed alien ship if they had mentioned it on the news."
Lucky frowned. "So aliens really exist, huh?"
"We don't know that he's telling the truth," Luna cautioned, giving Eldon a glare. "He could be making all of this up."
"I's the truth," he said, unbothered by her skepticism. "You don't have to believe me."
"So what's the situation now?" Stu asked. "You mentioned something about a battle earlier..."
"Yeah, at Sunflare. I wasn't there, but my buddy Yuri was, and he said he was lucky to get out alive. I hate to say it, but the Desert King's winning this war...if you can call it a war. Marshal Vorn is a genius, but the fact is, we're outnumbered, low on ammo, and too spread out to really take the fight to Steckler. There's Riders all over the country, of course, but there's only about a hundred of us out here in Talife, and of those, only a handful know how to fight. Take me, for example. I'm a messenger, a courier. Not a fighter." He finished his can of beans and set it aside. "The settlements south of Route 106 are still safe, for now, but places like Rockfort, Centennial, Second Parish..." He shook his head. "I wouldn't go that way if I were you."
Stu got out their map and looked for the towns Eldon had mentioned. One of them, Rockfort, was only about ten or twelve miles north of Delta, which was only a few miles from where they were now. That was uncomfortably close. Fortunately, Route 106 veered south beyond the town of Delta, and from there it was a more or less straight shot through the desert to the coastal metropolis of Lon Halos.
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"You were on your way to Delta?" Stu asked.
"Yeah. Quiet town. I'm supposed to deliver a message to old man Hardy, maybe try to recruit some folks to us defend Sharkhead. That's the main Rider depot out here; Marshal Vorn is worried the Elites will try to attack it, now that Steckler's captured Sunflare." He sighed. "He's probably right."
"What about the zombie situation?" Lucky asked. "You get a lot of mutates out here? Irregulars?"
"They pop up sometimes," he said. "You know how zombies are. They show up when you least expect it. We haven't had any especial trouble, though. Sharkhead's clean, and so are most of the other little settlements out here. They get more around the Vroom, from what I hear -- there's just more people there, you know? -- but the Desert King makes use of them. He turns them into chain gangs."
"Chain gangs?" Stu asked.
"A bunch of zombies, tied together," he explained. "You attach the chain to a truck or something, drive 'em into a settlement, and cut 'em loose. Scares the hell out people."
"How do they capture the zombies without getting bitten?" Lucky wanted to know.
He shrugged. "They've got some kind of light-gun that hypnotizes them for a few minutes. They just stand there stupidly, like a shaker."
"I've never heard of anything like that," Lucky said doubtfully.
"Some kind of experimental thing, I guess," he clarified. "The army must have invented it. They found it in the old base after they took it over." He sighed. "Too bad they only made one, and too bad it ended up in the Desert King's hands. If every Pale Rider in Astria was equipped with one of those things, we could wipe out every zombie in the country, make the world safe again." He leaned back on his arms. "What about you folks? What's your story?"
"Our story?"
He looked at Stu and Luna. "Yeah. You two married or something?"
"No," Luna said, a little too quickly. "We're just traveling together."
"Oh."
"Stu needed to get to Lon Halos, and we owed him a favor," Lucky said. "So we agreed to take him there in our glider. We picked up Millie along the way."
Eldon gave Millie an uneasy glance. He hadn't asked her about her glowing red eye and cybernetic hand, nor affected to notice them at all, in fact, but he had seemed wary of her from the start. "I see. But what's in Lon Halos that's so important? This Dr. Snowe guy?"
"Yeah," Stu said. "It's kind of a long story."
"Well, I hope you find him, then. He's probably dead, though. Like I said before, Lon Halos is a nasty place, and the Dread is supposed to be even more ruthless than the Desert King."
"You mentioned he was a brainy," Stu said. "Do you know anything else about him?"
"Not really. The Riders don't have much of a presence in Lon Halos; we had to pull out of there a couple years ago. Just too many zombies."
"Couldn't be any worse than Meku City," Lucky said, with almost a hint of civic pride.
"I wouldn't know." He yawned. "I'm just a messenger boy. But it's not a bad way to make a living. Marshal Vorn usually doesn't send me anywhere dangerous, and I get to spend a lot of nights like this, sleeping out under the stars."
"You're not worried about zombies attacking you in the middle of the night?"
"I worry more about rattlesnakes." He patted the pistol on his belt. "Zombies die just like anything if you shoot 'em in the head."
"Not always," Millie noted quietly.
Eldon didn't reply to that. Instead, he gave her another uneasy glance and said, "It's gettin' late." He removed a bedroll from his motorcycle and spread it out on the sandy ground. "You folks movin' on tonight?"
Stu looked up at the dark desert sky. It was very late, and they were all tired. "Maybe we should stay here for the night," he suggested.
Luna wasn't happy about it -- she still didn't trust Eldon -- but she nodded reluctantly. "I'll take the first watch," she said.
And so they settled down for the night. Stu had trouble sleeping, however, and soon found himself idly scrolling through the menus of the ICON system. He had received six skill points for killing the Cannibal, but he hadn't spent them yet -- the higher his level, the harder it was for him to acquire skill points, and he didn't want to waste these. Because he had chosen the Bulwark class, the defensive skills like Turtle were the most affordable, but his battles with the Cannibal and the Lab Rat had left him feeling offensively...deficient, and he thought it might be worth it to pick up an offensive skill, something like Guns Blazing or Boulder Smasher. Unfortunately most of the offensive skills were very expensive.
One thing he could afford to do, however, was upgrade his Strong Arm skill. Though the skill had made him stronger than almost any ordinary human, he still struggled against ragers and monsters like the Lab Rat, and increasing his strength further seemed like a cheap and effective way to boost his combat ability. The second level of Strong Arm only cost four skill points.
So he purchased it, which left him with just two points. With four more, he might boost his Speed Freak skill as well, which would come in handy if he encountered any more speedies.
He felt an odd electric tingle run through his body after purchasing the skill -- the same strange sensation he had felt when he had purchased the base level of the skill. How much stronger was he now? If he was twice as strong, he ought to be able to lift a car over his head, although he had no desire to test that out at the moment.
Still unable to sleep, he got up and sat with Luna for a while. She was sitting on the back of the glider, her shotgun on her lap.
"Can't sleep?" she asked.
"Guess not." He sat down next to her. "I bought another skill."
"Oh yeah?"
"The second level of the Strong Arm skill. I should be a bit stronger now."
"You were already strong."
"Not as strong as the Lab Rat. Not as strong as the Cannibal."
"Are you planning on fighting more monsters?"
"I'm not planning on it, but it's always good to be prepared." He set his mouth into a line. "I want to survive. I want to make it to Lon Halos." He glanced at her. "And I don't want anything to happen to you, or Lucky, or Millie. I want to be strong enough to protect you."
She snorted. "Who says we need protecting? We've been killing zombies a lot longer than you have." But then her tone softened. "I appreciate the thought, though."
And to his surprise, she leaned over and gave him a quick little kiss on the cheek, which left him a little flustered. He tried to cover it by changing the subject: "What did you think of his story? All that stuff about a crashed alien ship?"
"I don't believe it," she said. "But..." She shrugged. "I didn't believe your story, either, when we first met. If you come from another world, well, maybe there are other worlds out there, with aliens." But then, having said this, she shook her head in an exasperated sort of way. "It sounds silly when I say it out loud."
"I'd kinda like to see this alien ship," Stu mused. "But it's not on the way, is it?"
"Not unless you want to meet this Desert King. If Eldon really is a Pale Rider, and if he really was telling the truth, we should be able to avoid all this guerilla warfare stuff if we keep heading west. We might want to dip a little further south, though."
"I wonder how long it'll take us to get to Lon Halos. A couple days?"
"That sounds about right."
He blew out a breath. "Almost there," he said quietly.
"Almost there," Luna agreed. There was a hint of melancholy in her voice.