The Red Riders

Gangs of highwaymen are an ever-present danger on the roads of the Boomlands, but most gangs are small, poorly-organized, and temporary. If they don't tear themselves apart with infighting and power struggles, they eventually meet their end at the hands of a vigilante posse, the RRV, or a bigger gang. The Red Riders are the exception. They've been terrorizing the highways for nearly a decade, strike with planning and precision, and are estimated to have at least a hundred members.   The Red Riders mainly operate in southern Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas from what's left of Route 66 to Lake Mojave and the Rio Grande to the south. They can and do prey on convoys and camps in other areas--especially Utah and Neavada--but these raids tend to be targeted at specific cargos or resources. They shy away from the roads under heavy RRV protection, but will conduct raids there if the prize is big enough to justify the risk. There have only ever been 3 successful attacks on RRV convoys, and most people believe the Red Riders were responsible for all three.   The Red Riders get their name from their command vehicles: souped-up muscle cars with red paintjobs that are kept in as pristine of a condition as the Boomlands allows. These cars stay well ahead of the main convoy and serve as a warning to anyone on the roads who isn't an intended target that they should probably find somewhere else to be. If the Riders are attempting to overtake a moving convoy or attacking a stationary objective, the lead car will pull back as they near the target so as not to raise the alarm. This doesn't happen very often however, because the Riders specialize in ambushing their victims.   When conducting raids or otherwise openly identifying themselves as gang members, Red Riders cover their faces, usually opting for Old West train robber tradition of wearing bandanas--preferably red--but sometimes wearing ski masks, gas masks, tinted-glass helmets, or other gear. The only member who regularly bares his face when "working" is the gang's leader Clyde "Rowdy" Dalton. In addition to their masks, some members wear jackets painted with a red skull and crossbones captioned with the group's motto: "Strength. Speed. Survival."   The group is believed to be headquartered somewhere between the Las Vegas and Flagstaff hot zones, but their hideout has never been discovered. The gang knows the territory well enough to lose most pursuers, and those who can keep up inevitably run into a heavily-armed contingent of the home guard. Even in the unlikely event of the pursuers winning the fight, the convoy they were chasing is long gone by the time it's over. One Boomlands legend claims that the gang is based in a cave system somewhere deep within the Grand Canyon that isn't affected by the surrounding fallout due to depth, engineering, or some combination of geological physics and weather conditions that directs the fallout away from the hideout.