Yuri: Scorpion Town (Draft Pt1)

Foreword: This is an incomplete draft of a story I've had in my head for a while. The background isn't too tricky: in the near future a war between Russia and America turns nuclear, turning the two countries, and possibly many others, into radioactive wastelands.
  Before the bombs fall though, Russia sends a force rampaging through Alaska to strike at America through Canada. The remenants of this force wind up settling after the bombs fall. Yuri is the grandson of one of these invaders.
The rest is pretty self-explanatory. And yes, the title is a work in progress too... Titles were never my strongest suit.
Please feel free to comment on the story so far. On with the show.

Yuri: Scorpion Town (Draft)
It was dark when Yuri wandered into town. He always preferred travelling at night, it was a lot cooler without the sun beating down. Sure there was danger: mutants roaming around, raiders looking for an easy score, predators out hunting. But it was little different during the day, just a lot hotter. Besides, Yuri always found it easier to pick moving shadows at night.
  Looking around, the town was more accurately a settlement, with pre-war buildings ravaged by time rather than by the bombs. Judging from how many houses looked livable, Yuri figured a population of maybe forty or so and there was power from somewhere, probably either fission batteries or generators of some description.
  A few signs were lit dimly by naked bulbs. One proclaimed a building as ‘Macks Drygoods and General Store’, with a smaller ‘Traders and Barterers Welcome’ sign beside it. That was a good sign. If traders were welcomed here then this was probably a permanent settlement, probably slightly off the trade routes but not so far that traders wouldn’t make a slight detour to get here. Being a permanent settlement there was probably easily-available fresh food and water here, two things no wastelander could do without.
  Yuri turned his attention to the largest sign in the settlement, which was unsurprisingly attached to the largest building, the only two-storey with the top floor still intact. The writing was big, blocky and child-like. ‘SALOON AND HOTEL’ it screamed in bright red slightly flaking paint. In smaller, more flowing letters underneath were the words ‘ALL WELCOME BRING NO TROUBLE COS WE HAVE NO JAIL’. Yuri knew what that meant. Wasteland justice was harsh but universally fair. The rules were pretty simple: theft, assault, murder, rape, or getting the wrong person’s wife and/or daughter pregnant usually resulted in being beaten, run out of down, or shot. Or some combination of all three. It was a good, workable system in Yuri’s mind.
  He headed for the hotel. It would be nice to sleep without having to worry about being bitten by anything bigger than a bedbug for a change. To his surprise, the door was locked and apparently barred. Yuri tried knocking instead. The voice that answered sounded tired and old, but that was no indicator. The Wastes had a habit of aging its residents long before their time.
  “Who goes?” the voice demanded.
  “A traveler,” called back Yuri, wincing a little at his own accent. He may have been born in what was once Canada, but he was Russian through-and-through. It wasn’t something that always stood him in good stead. The war may have been over a century ago, but that didn’t mean people forgot so easily and there’d been plenty of times he’d been greeted by a shotgun.
  This apparently wasn’t going to be one of those times. Yuri heard the sounds of several locks being opened followed by the dull thud of the bar being set down. He was just reaching for the handle when the door flew open and an arm about as thick as Yuri’s waist shot out and grabbed him. Before he could react, Yuri found himself yanked inside, only just managing to keep his feet under him as he went.
  Behind him, he heard the sound of the door slamming and the locks being closed. Yuri turned just in time to see the biggest man he’d ever seen lifting a massive beam that looked to weigh about twice what Yuri did back into place.
  With the door secured, the man turned around. There was no way he could have been called handsome, his entire body looked like it had been hewn from granite by a master mason’s less-than-talented apprentice. His head was square, his face was square, his body was square and he was one solid mass of muscle. Yuri figured he could probably crack walnuts with his eyelids if he wanted to. The man stuck out a hand that could have easily engulfed Yuri’s head.
  “They call me Brick,” he said. “Owner and proprietor of this here establishment.” It was difficult to reconcile the voice to the body. It was a raspy, old voice. Loud, but hardly the deep boom one would expect. Name seemed pretty fitting though.
  Yuri took the offered hand as best he could. “Yuri,” he replied. At the man’s expectant look he added: “Uh, freelancer.” Probably about the best description he could come up with.
  “What are you doing travelling at night? It’s dangerous in these parts when the sun’s down.” Brick’s manner was brusque, but he came across as genuinely concerned. Yuri couldn’t help but smile a little. He figured the owner and proprietor of this fine establishment probably hadn’t spent much time in the wastes.
  “It is always dangerous out there. You just have to be careful.” Yuri spoke slowly, carefully enunciating each word. It was the way one spoke to a child or an especially slow adult but he found if he spoke too fast people had trouble deciphering his accent. Besides, it was for his own benefit as much as the listener’s. After a long spell in the Wastes, he sometimes forgot how to talk.
  “You haven’t heard then? There’s problems in these parts. Big problems.” He shook his head, apparently unconcerned with Yuri’s manner of speech. “But where’s my manners gone? Come to the bar, have a drink. First one’s always free.”
  After serving up a surprisingly refreshing beer in a chilled clay mug, Brick introduced the others in the bar. There weren’t many, six in total, and Yuri gathered that they were all staying at the hotel, at least that night. Apparently Brick wasn’t too keen on letting out his patrons after dark. It soon became obvious why.
  Brick made sure the others had full mugs, then came back down towards Yuri. He settled his forearms companionably on the bar, causing it to groan alarmingly. Looking more at the bar than at Yuri, Brick began to speak. His voice grew quieter as it went on, the mark of a man recalling things he wished he hadn’t seen. Yuri didn’t interrupt.
  “All began about 4 weeks ago,” he began. “Just getting ready for last call. Old Rummy, last of the great prospectors and scavengers hereabouts, said he’d better get home. Didn’t so much say it as slur it, he’d put away a fair bit that night. So he went out the door, very same one you came in. Couple seconds later we heard the screams. Pulled open the door and there he was, what was left anyway. Biggest damn scorpion I’d ever seen had him in its claws, ripping and tearing at him. Took off his leg, then ran off into the night. A real mess that one.
  “Next couple of nights we lost livestock, then a couple of people went missing. Had a few traders that make regular runs down here not show up. We slaughtered what livestock was left and took to always ensuring we were inside when night fell, figured the scorpions would just move on if there was no food here. But no, they just kept wandering into town.
  “About a week ago we got a posse together, figured if we couldn’t starve ‘em out we’d hunt ‘em down. Didn’t work. Ten men went out, two came back. Said they’d followed tracks to a cave north-east from here, then when they got close… Whole lot of scorpions poured out. They couldn’t swear exactly how many, but there were definitely a lot, even allowing for exaggeration.
  “We sent runners to the trade centres to the west and south. Haven’t heard back yet, but it’s a two day trip. I’m not right sure they made it through.” He looked up at last into Yuri’s face. “So you see, we have big troubles here. Not right sure what we’re going to do about it, but there’s no way I’m letting you go tonight.”
  Yuri scratched his chin thoughtfully, a habit he’d picked up from his father. It was bristly there; he kept a mustache but shaved his chin and cheeks whenever he could. Beards were for old men or authority figures. He wasn’t sure of his exact age, he figured he was probably around the mid-thirties mark, but Yuri didn’t consider himself all that old.
  “I have no money,” he said slowly. “I am not even sure what money is around here. I suppose I have some small pieces of scrap I could trade, or I could do a little work for you.” Yuri deliberately left the sentence hanging. He would prefer to save the scrap for real trade: gunsmiths were always hungry for scrap and were willing to trade well for it, but if Brick wanted scrap Yuri wasn’t going to argue with him. Not without a much, much bigger gun.
  Brick looked Yuri up and down. Yuri didn’t figure he would cut much of a figure. More of a dusty, slightly bedraggled beggar than a dashing freelance mercenary. Still, he had a rifle slung on his back, a pistol hanging from his hip and a knife under his arm. The others in the bar weren’t armed and there wasn’t even the traditional shotgun on the bar wall. That was something Yuri hadn’t noticed before, something he really should have noticed. In most settlements that worked under wasteland law everyone went armed. Sometimes there were restrictions, but for the most part everyone had at least a derringer hidden on them somewhere. So where were all the guns? Yuri began to have an inkling of what Brick was thinking and he was fairly sure he wasn’t going to like it.
  “Perhaps,” Brick said. “We can come to a mutually beneficial agreement involving you and these here scorpions.”
  At times, Yuri hated being right. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d faced off against scorpions: they were a constant threat in the wastes. But that didn’t mean he enjoyed it. Every species was different, but so far they’d proven remarkably hard to kill.
  He remembered a time, must have been fifteen years ago, when he’d signed on as a caravan guard with a trader out of Quebec. It wasn’t long after Yuri’s father had died and Yuri was keen to be moving on. It was just outside of Old Detroit that he’d come across a small trade outpost and signed on to the caravan. Perhaps he should have paid more attention to the route and taken note of the guards that were already signed on. They were a tough-looking bunch, probably semi-reformed raiders, armed with enough hardware and ammo to take out a large army. Yuri had his trusty rifle, a veritable peashooter he’d found in a burnt out truck after his old rifle had suffered a critical frame failure: he’d bent the barrel and split the wooden frame beyond repair. The bandit he’d damaged the gun on hadn’t fared all that well either.
  The caravan’s route should have gotten Yuri’s danger senses jangling too. From the outpost to New Detroit took around three days, unless one decided to make the treacherous journey through Scorpion Valley. Yuri thought it was just a name, there was a ‘Scorpion Someplace’ near pretty much every town in the Wastes, mostly named because some prospector thought he saw a scorpion there fifty years ago. In hindsight he should have asked around. What should have been a three day journey was a full week of scorpion-filled Hell. Why anyone would choose to go through there was beyond Yuri’s understanding. The whole area was dotted with radiation pockets and the scorpions… The whole trip was one constant attack. All Yuri could really remember was the near constant firing, the flitting shapes, the scream as one guard or another got taken. When the trip was finally over Yuri used his pay to buy a better rifle from a gunsmith and vowed to never again take on a job without knowing the particulars.
  The rifle had served him well, it was the same one slung over his back even now as he sat in Brick’s saloon, and his vow had kept him alive so far. It was the journey through Scorpion Valley that made Yuri scratch his chin as he considered his next words.
  “Well,” he began. “Once I had a bad experience with scorpions. I am not sure I would be the man for the job.” More chin scratching. “But, I can have a look. You say they come at night. If I could perhaps see the scorpions for myself, I could see what can be done.”
  Brick nodded. “Easily arranged,” he said.

To be continued