"No Quarter"

by J. Matthew Lemieux

My name is Luscious Jones the Lesser, son of Luscious Jones the Elder and
Amelia Bernhardt-Jones. My father was a virulent racist who hated this and
that about anybody he could find or imagine. Which, living in the
slow-moving and gracious spa town of Cheltenham, Gloucestershire was
thankfully a large portion of white Anglicans, which kept his bitching and
moaning to a bare minimum. He did, however, enjoy accusing everybody from
the local town manager to the gentle retired member of the Admiralty of
being ?pinko comm-niss.? My father, Luscious Jones the Senior, Luscious
Jones the Respectable, Luscious Jones the Manor-Born, you see, was birthed
into a prominent family of respect and standing, and degraded to a commoner
forced to clean up after the wealthy. He insisted this wasn-t because of
poor money management on the part of the family patriarch but rather a
communist plot. This anecdote is recited merely so you can understand a
moment of inspiration, which would and will come to me several years and
some paragraphs later.
My mother, dear Amelia, was a tolerant and loving woman who stayed with my
father because he was a good husband (indeed he was, he never lashed out in
anger once at dear mum) who enjoyed doting on her little boys, that is,
myself and my twin brother Alexander. To tell you a piece of lore which I
remember quite fondly from my childhood will perhaps help you understand why
I am here. You see, in this doting she often took us to see movies. Indiana
Jones was one such movie and I instantly fell in love with the swashbuckling
deeds of a man who, in his clever ingenuity, doctoral intellect, dashing
good looks, and strong moral character always won both the day and the
finest ladies. He even shared my last name. And so seeds of adventure were
planted deep inside my fresh young mind.
I can still recall my father-s words on the day of April 26th, 1986. -Damn
comm-niss, serves -em rih- prolly doin- sommat unduh-anded.- His hatred knew no bounds.
My father, the bitter racist, was at the very least a giving and loving man
to his offspring and his Queen Amelia, and for her part too dear mother did
her best, and so Alexander and myself got one of the finest middle-class
preparatory education they could afford. Scholarships, and later,
fellowships, followed. Father passed on, old Luscious, and as vicious as the
old man could be, I missed him. Dear mum was beside herself, and Alexander
and myself took a sabbatical from Oxford to care for her.
And then, twenty years to the month, the horror returned. The words that
haunted our young lives years ago came crashing back upon our more aged,
wearier heads; Chernobyl, Ukraine, sarcophagus, radiation, fallout,
pollution, mutation, cancer, et cetera, et cetera. It was impulse,
really, that convinced me I had to go, a distant reminiscing about Luscious I and a
little chance to set the good name of L. Jones right again by maybe
doing something for what was now called the ?Chernobyl Zone of Exclusion,? in the
way of good karma. I convinced Alexander that it would be a regular good
time, high adventure and all, and my younger brother of but minutes gave his
ascent and hopped aboard an aeroplane with me, destined for Eurasia.
That was three years past, and quite a bit has happened in the interim. Us
two Jones boys were an inseparable team from the first, rather uneventful
day, and we, over several months, developed a tidy reputation as a capable
team that could deliver the unusual Zone artefacts readily and swiftly to
scientists and researchers. We didn-t adhere to any particular creed or
code, we were simply freebooters. But it wasn-t long before we teamed with
another dozen Zone stalkers calling themselves Bacon-s Swine.
Bacon-s Swine had started out as Baker-s Dozen, a group of thirteen gents
led by John Baker, who, having survived all manner of creatures, blowouts,
and anomalous areas, finally met his end when he tripped down a flight of
stairs and broke his neck. Command of the crew went to Baker-s executive
officer, Will Bacon, and was renamed Bacon-s Swine. They were all foreigners
to the area, a little ragtag of English-speakers that stuck together for
sheer inability to understand the local dialect very well. In all there was
Will Bacon, the English leader, Ian Campbell, his executive officer and a
gregarious Scot, Carl Newman, an American, Giovanni ?John? DiAmico and Paul
Hammersmith, Australians both, Michael McKenzie, Richard Starkey, Brian
Stewart, Reggie Arnold, all English, ?Irish? Patrick Maloney, who was indeed
Irish, Joseph Keith, a Canadian, and Gabriel Klein, an Israeli-American. The Jones boys made fourteen.
The Swine had indeed developed a good reputation around the Zone as fair,
slightly foolhardy, and tough. They helped other stalkers in need, delivered
the goods, and were more than pleased to take in the reputable, if slightly
lost, Jones-s. And so begins the promised part of high adventure.

The fourteen of us Swine sat in waiting as a particularly vicious
Controller we had named Baron Samedi, after the voodoo god, poked about
blindly in the ether with his mind. We had the fanciest in
anti-telepathy
gear on us, the reality equivalent of aluminium foil hats. The Baron wanted
us badly, and we knew it. He loathed us, for we had been cutting his number
of zombies in great droves, day by day.
Alexander, who had turned into quite the fine marksman, had point on this
neat little mission, slid a fresh magazine into his remaindered Dragunov and
stroked gently at the leather holster that housed one of five identical
pieces of inheritance we had received from our father-s estate, a rather
nice Browning Hi-Power. Its twin rested in a holster of my own, and their
triplets were back at our main encampment. I sat next to him with a salvaged
AK-74 across my lap and a pair of binoculars in hand, acting as his spotter.
The rest of the Swine were hiding in the underbrush around the little
shanty hut we had positioned ourselves on, waiting in ambush for the Baron.
Like his other Controller brethren, the Baron favoured out-of-the-way
rooftops, but unlike them, he had come across the rather intelligent ability
to camouflage himself. He would bring along with him scraps of tin or wood,
and hide under them. One time, we had found him hiding in a stack of tyres,
and had almost put a bullet in his spine to paralyse him before he gave a
rather potent mind-blast to Joseph, nearly zombifying the startled lad, and had made his escape.
I brought the binoculars to position across my tired eyes and studied the
horizon yet again. I was getting dizzy, as high tide (Swine-talk for those
times when the anomalies are particularly strong) was beginning to come. But
it was in this swimmy, confused vision that I saw the familiar, loping shape
of Baron Samedi. His movements, with their distinctly sinister feyness, were
unmistakable. I tapped once on Alexander-s shoulder, and he gave a brief nod
as he went prone telling me he had seen the Baron too. I tapped once again
on the tin roof of our hut and alerted the rest of the Swine to the presence
of the Baron.
-Hit him in the lower spine and render him immobile but alive,- an
interpreter for the research scientists told us, -we want him for live
vivisection. You-ll need to place him in this custom container, which ill
block his telepathic blasts that he will frantically use on you. Bring him in alive.-
Joseph Keith had that container, a metal cigar-tube shaped casket, really,
and was intent on putting the Baron in it himself, to let him see his face
as he had seen it, so that he could lock away the Baron physically as the
Baron had done to him psychically. I sat there envisioning the joy on Mr. Keith-s face at the thought.
The Baron had brought with him a pile of wood, tinder, and brush to hide
himself under on a dilapidated shanty-s roof across from our own, near 100
meters out, the binoculars- rangefinger told me. Easy shot for Alexander to make.
He brought the scope to eye level, sighted, made some corrections for wind,
and some more corrections for the effects of the gravitational disturbances
we were bordering on. His finger moved to the trigger and beneath us, the
anticipation of a dozen men moved too.
But the Baron, it turned out, had been stalking us. With a swift suddenness
and surprising co-ordination, scores of mindless human slaves moved out of
the huts, undergrowth, and hidden angles of the area around us, loping
puppet-like along toward our position. The dozen Swine beneath us took up
firing positions, and fought back against a massive onslaught of zombies,
who, to our dismay, were carrying weapons of great variety. The Baron had
been out to harvest, it seemed, plucking up soldiers and stalkers in force, to settle this vendetta with us.
Alexander, though, was cool under the pressure. He kept his target,
sighted, and waited for the Baron to make a vulnerable move, one that would
expose his lower spine v at this distance, the size of a pencil rubber v to
a paralysing gunshot wound. Meanwhile, I was frantic with defending my
squadmates from the onslaught, as well as protecting my rather well
collected brother. My -74 was chattering away, felling scores of pitiful former men.
The Baron, mon frere-s gunshot told me, had made his near-fatal error.
Unfortunately, it wasn-t nearly near fatal enough, and the Baron escaped
unscathed due to a rather good bit of further cleverness on his part. Baron
Samedi, you see, had brought armour with him, and had it not been there to
block the shot, he would be lying immobile, his hordes dead from lack of a
master to tug at their mental marionette-strings.
Now dear Alexander was furious, and the plight of his brothers in both arms
and blood superseded the special circumstances of Baron Samedi-s uniqueness,
and he furiously fired shot upon shot at the retreating Controller-s exposed
head. After he had disappeared from view, my brother drew his pistol and
turned his attention to the dwindling hordes beneath.
By whatever providence is granted by The Powers Above, we came away
relatively unscathed. In all, sixty-odd zombies had claimed a total of two
lives that day, and with Ian Campbell and Reggie Arnold gone, the Swine fell
mournfully to twelve. Alexander earned a much-deserved field promotion to
executive officer, though he was in no mood to celebrate the personal
triumph.
We walked weary through the rubble of the former battlefield, cleaning the
corpses of ammunition and better weapons, leaving behind old weapons. We
stopped momentarily to cremate the corpses of Ian and Reggie after we
realised we hadn-t the stamina to carry them back to camp. Properly
eulogised, we hammered into the scorched ground, around the charred skeletal
remains, a crude cross bearing the legend ?IC & RA? and then, tenderly
enough for men of our battle experience, continued on our way with tears in
our eyes. None of the men made an effort to claim the watering was from the
ashes or the rapid approach of high tide.
It was at this point on our return to our camp that a rather strange thing
happened. A blind dog, apparently a runt of its litter, small and emaciated,
loped along. We took aim, ready to kill it, but were overcome by a bizarre
sense of mercy for it, as it did not seem particularly rabid or wild. The
albino creature came slowly, timidly to the side of Richard and sniffed at a
pants pouch that contained a ration. Curiously, and cautiously, Richard
removed a portion of the ration from his pouch and proffered it to the dog.
It ate it rather gluttonously, barely chewing. And then there it stayed.
After a while of waiting for it to leave and seeing that it would not, we
continued on our way. Somewhat to our dismay, the little dog followed close
on Richard-s heel, returning with us to the encampment.
After several days of hanging around the camp, the dog became a mainstay
and we decided that Richard, apparently the dog-s most beloved of the Swine,
should give it a name. And so the Swine-s number grew by one, as Cerberus
the Blind Dog became a fixture of our ranks.

-Another day, another dollar,- was the nugget of wisdom that came from
our
Yankee brother, Mr. Newman. -I-m getting tired of this job, Lu. I really am,
man. Day in and day out we gotta wade through this radioactive Soviet soup
hunting God-s little science fair projects, just to make a buck. Damn, Lu-
how in the hell do you hang in here always looking so cheerful?-
-Easy,- I answered him, and then slipped into my best, which isn-t saying
much, Harrison Ford impersonation. -Out here, I-m Indiana Jones.-
Carl allowed himself a rare laugh in the wasteland, and put out his hand
instinctively to pat Cerberus, who had turned into an excellent scout, on
the head. -Who though a seeing-eye dog would have no eyes?- he asked,
giggling a little more maniacally this time.
We were out again, hunting the fearsome Baron Samedi once more, a month
after the deaths of Ian Campbell and Reggie Arnold. Mr. Keith-s Nova Scotian
lilt had been chattering away for a full four and then some weeks,
fantasising about not only putting the Baron in his casket, but also
witnessing, and perhaps participating in, the vivisection. It had become an
obsession with him. If truth is told, and this journal is here to do just
that, we had all become a little insane since the deaths of our fellow Swine
Campbell and Arnold. William Bacon was near frothing at the mouth, Alexander
almost never spoke, Newman began laughing at almost everything, Keith had
taken to openly dreaming about gutting things, anything really. Hammersmith
loaded and unloaded a revolver all day. As for me, I became, day by day,
less Luscious and more Indiana. A general air of non compos mentis had
settled around the camp, our own corner of insanity not brought on by the
blowouts, the ebb and flow of the tide, or the psychotropic effects of the
critters in our own private little flat in Hell.
This would be a fateful day in the lives of the Swine before it was over,
and we were yet to discover why. Five minutes away from Carl Newman-s manic
giggling, however, the Baron would come to claim many of our friends, my brother included.
The ambush was more sophisticated than last time. We had no sense of them
being there, and then there they were, all over us, a mere moment after
Cerberus had started in with his frantic barking that always let us know
danger was more than imminent. And in seconds, we were claimed. Explosions,
gunshots, terror and anxiety beyond what was known to mortal men outside the
Zone overtook all our senses, and we fled in all directions. Our protective
gear had been useless.
We regrouped outside the pandemonium, far from each other. The group I was
in had Newman, Hammersmith, DiAmico, Cerberus, and myself. Off a distance, I
could see Keith, my brother, and Bacon. Further off, my binoculars barely
picked up the other of the survivors, Starkey and Maloney.
But the horror began anew. Through the lenses of my binoculars, I watched
in awe and impotence as Keith pulled a pistol from its holster, aimed it at
Will-s head, fired, turned the gun on my brother, fired again, and then
placed the barrel within the confines of his mouth before ejecting one last
missile into the back of his skull. It happened within the span of a second.
Whether the vile Baron had seized control of Keith, or his own frustration
and madness had taken control of him, we will never know, but I watched my
brother and best friend die in one instant by the bitter hand of madness.
Another ambush, another cremation, another cross erected. Another eulogy
spoken, and we all beat ourselves up over the fact that none of us knew of a
Jewish prayer to say for Klein. We made a small Magen David and hung it on the cross instead.
The Baron had cut us in half that day. After my brother, Keith was the
executive officer in waiting, and I was next in line. The Swine became mine.
But the lot of us felt like the proverbial pigs had been led to the
slaughter, and the Swine should be left for dead.
A more dogged, haggard determination overcame our group of six and our furry
mascot, and in a rare moment of glee afforded by alcohol and bittersweet
reminiscing, we decided to re-Christen our group the Hounds of Hell. We
figured, if Cerberus could be good in a place like this, so could we. We
would hunt like dogs to find the Baron and all the other vile creatures that
hid in the shadows of this netherworld, and kill them or die trying.
Hammersmith, the only one artistically talented among us, designed the
first logo our group ever had. It was a stylised head, modelled after
Cerberus, of a Blind Dog, with the eyes being H-d out rather than X-d.
-You see,- he giggled drunkenly, -it represents that we-re blind dogs like Cerby
here, and its like- we-re blind- and dogs, but you know, we-re also the
Hounds of Hell, which is why it-s the letter ?H,? so you see, its
symbolic-like.-
Regardless, we liked it, and it stuck. It went on all our equipment.
That was ten months ago. The only original members of Baker-s Dozen left
alive are now Maloney and Starkey. Luscious Jones the Lesser and Cerberus
count themselves among the remnants of the Swine. But the Hounds of Hell
have swelled to a full twenty-six members now, stalwart and good men not
afraid to stalk the most hideous of monsters in the Zone. Most, if not all
of them, are fuelled by vendetta. There is still no creed. We aren-t like
the Duty Group; we have no want to protect the world anymore. Its been
stripped away from us. There-s only the beasts of hell to us, and we are the
dogs biting violently at their heels, kicked in the ribs one too many times.
I don-t know why I wrote this mini-journal. Maybe its because Baron Samedi
is still out there, and still haunting my dreams. Maybe I just needed to get
it off my chest. Maybe I can-t get the vision of the back of my brother-s
skull exploding out of my mind. God, I don-t know, to be honest with you.
But since you-ve picked this up, and you-re reading it, you know the
annotated, abridged, authorised story of Luscious Jones and his Hounds of
Hell. So Stalker, if you-ve got a score to settle, or nowhere else to turn, seek us out.
But even if you don-t come to join our ranks, go out there, and wipe every
living one of those sons of the devil off the face of the Earth. Take pity
on the gentle ones, and they-ll help you, because even God has his chosen
children in this pit of the Inferno, this Pandemonium. But most are sprung
from the vile loins of Deuce himself, and if that-s the case, give them no quarter.

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