Vanderling waited till Gomez appeared in the doorway, gave him the all-clear signal. It wouldn’t do at all for Animals to see Marshal Willem Vanderling, their next President, palavering with a Brother.
The interior of the Public Larder was one huge, foul-smelling room, lit by a circle of naked torches that ran around the wooden walls far below the shadowy high ceiling. Piled against the far wall was a large mound of human corpses, gray, naked, scarred, men, old women, children; limbs and torsos jammed together, intertwined, as if frozen in the midst of some unimaginable, obscene orgy.
Heavy, rough-hewn wooden tables were scattered over the gray stone floor of the Larder. Many of the tables held whole corpses, some with limbs already hacked away, some intact. Others were piled with raw arms, legs, unidentifiable cuts of meat—ghastly butcher shop displays. Bloody knives and cleavers lay on every table.
The tables, the floor, even the far wall clear up to the seven foot level, were stained a deep, deep umber-brown with a thick crust of old dried blood.
Under a flickering torch along the left wall, four men sat on stools at one of the tables. A body lay sprawled on the stone floor directly by the table; the fresh blood had been wiped away, leaving a drying smear on the scarred wood of the table top, where a big bloody cleaver still lay next to a small radio transceiver.
Vanderling approached the table, Jonson and Gomez, snipguns at the ready, a pace behind him. He saw that three of the men were tense-looking Killers. The fourth was dressed in a black robe, and in the orange torchlight, Vanderling could see heavy wrinkles and folds in the loose flesh of his face, the old-elephant look of a fat man who has recently lost many pounds. His small blue eyes darted from focus to focus like those of a bird. Brother-whoever-he-was was in bad shape and scared stiff.
Vanderling glanced around at the pile of corpses, the half-butchered carcasses on the tables, the cleaver gleaming wetly on the table before the Brother.
He laughed. A goddamned butcher shop! Not a bad place to carve up a planet, he thought as he sat down facing the Brother as Gomez and Jonson stood flanking him.
“I’m Field Marshal Willem Vanderling, Commander in Chief of the People’s Army of the Free Republic of Sangre,” he said with half-sardonic grave formality.
“You’re a filthy ringleader of the stupid Animals,” the Brother shrilled, the fear on his face turning to disgusted scorn. “Say whatever you came to say and be done with it. You will make no demands. You will state your wretched proposal to me and I will relay it to the Prophet. And be quick about it! The stink of this place oppresses me.”
“Screw you, Charlie!” Vanderling snapped. “I’m running this show, and you’ll do as you’re told and like, it, or…”
He gestured negligently, and Gomez and Jonson whipped their snipguns up to cover the Brother and his three Killers. The Killers started up off their stools, then slumped back. The Brother’s bravado evaporated as he stared straight into the muzzles of two snipguns.
Vanderling smiled. “Now that we’ve taken care of the formalities,” he said, “suppose you get Fat Boy on that radio.”
“I—”
“Hop to it!” Vanderling roared. “I’ve got the radio, and I’d just as soon add your carcass to that…” He pointed toward the contorted heap of bodies at the far wall.
The Brother went pale and began to fiddle with the radio. Crackles, sputters, hisses, then abruptly the heavy, oily voice of Moro came through loud and clear: “Well, Brother Andrew, did the swine actually show up?”
Vanderling grabbed the radio, spoke into the microphone grid. “This is the swine speaking, butterball. Suppose we leave personalities out of this. I don’t like you and you don’t like me, but there’s someone else neither of us can take.”
“Which is?” Moro’s voice said, echoing in the cavernous, empty room.
“Brother Bart,” Vanderling said. “Bart Fraden.”
There was a long, pregnant silence. Vanderling wished the thing had a video hookup. Moro’s face would be something to see now!
“Well, Moro?” Vanderling said. “What happened to your big mouth?”
“It’s your treachery, off-worlder,” Moro said. “Obviously, like any Animal, you’re quite willing to betray your own. Obviously, you want something from me, and just as obviously you fancy that you have something to offer in return. I’m waiting.”
“Beggars can’t be choosy, eh, Moro?” Vanderling sneered. “And don’t bother trying to put me on, I know you’re up against the wall—I put you there, remember? So here’s the scoop. Fraden figures on getting rid of me as soon as he’s finished you—which he will unless you play ball—and keeping the whole planet for his private playpen. Now I’m not the pig Bart is. I want the lion’s share of this mudball, sure, but I’m willing to leave you with some turf of your own if you decide to co-operate—say everything within a two-hundred-mile radius of Sade, plus, maybe a regular quota of slaves and Meatanimals.”
“You expect me to give you my planet?” Moro roared.
“Spread it on the ground and watch the flowers grow!” Vanderling said. “You got no planet left to give and we both know it. What I’m offering you is ten times what you’ve got. You think you can double-cross me later and try to reconquer the rest of the planet, you’re welcome to try. Call it a temporary truce—after we’ve gotten rid of Fraden, we can worry about settling things between us. But first things first. You follow me?”
“I’m still listening,” Moro said evenly. “Your plan…?”
“Sweet and simple, man, sweet and simple! This Pain Day jazz I’ve been hearing about? What’s all that?”
“Pain Day? I hardly see what Pain Day has to do with—?”
“Of course you don’t!” Vanderling said. “But then, you’re not too bright. Pain Day is like a national holiday, right?. There’s some kind of celebration in that Stadium, a pageant or something?”
“The great Pain Day Torture Pageant!” Moro said excitedly. “The greatest day of the entire year—a masterful display of no less than a thousand subjects tortured to the ultimate. It is traditional to allow ten thousand Animals to share in the pleasure on this one day, a day of deep significance for all Sangre. Yes… we are all looking forward to Pain Day, despite… despite the present unpleasantness.”
“Just what the doctor ordered,” Vanderling said. “A perfect setup! You send a message to Fraden, tell him you’re willing to surrender conditionally—safe passage off the planet for you and your Brothers. Then—”
“Never!” Moro roared, and the Brother and the Killers sat stunned. “Unthinkable! We will never surrender! We—”
“Can it!” snapped Vanderling. “Let me finish. You offer to surrender, see, but you insist on making a big production of it. You’ll only surrender publicly, on Pain Day, in the Stadium, and Fraden must be there to accept your surrender personally. And then when we’ve got Fraden in the Stadium…”
“I see,” said Moro, and the Brother’s face cracked a wan smile. “But even an Animal like Fraden couldn’t be stupid enough to walk right into such an obvious trap.”
“ ’Course not,” Vanderling said. “Not unless he thought he had an edge. So we hand him the edge. You demand as a token of good faith that Bart must supply a couple thousand victims for the Torture Pageant, right? So Bart figures that’s his edge—he’ll double-cross you and those two thousand men will be armed guerrillas.”
“You expect me to allow two thousand armed hostile troops within the Palace Compound!” Moro screamed.
“Hold your horses!” Vanderling said. “Number One, you’ve got more than enough Killers to pack the Stadium and take good care of any two thousand troops. Just keep most of ’em out of uniform so it won’t look obvious. Number two, you search ’em before you let ’em in—I’m the military commander, remember, and I’ll make sure their weapons are empty. You can check on it. Besides, six, seven, thousand Killers against two thousand of our boys… Come to think of it, they can’t very well smuggle in gu
ns anyway; it’ll have to be knives. You afraid of a couple thousand Animals with knives with all those Killers around? Bart’ll take the chance; he’s a gambler, and he’ll figure surprise is on his side. So you get Fraden, and two thousand of my men as a bonus. It’s a piece of cake, Moro, a piece of cake.”
“It should work…” Moro muttered, “but why should I trust you?”
“Don’t you dig? I’m setting it up so you don’t have to trust me. Six thousand Killers with guns and two thousand guerrillas with knives. And I’ll be right there, where you can get at me. What can you possibly lose?”
Of course it looks like I’ll have to trust you, Fat Boy, Vanderling thought. But don’t sweat that…
“I find it hard to trust an enemy who seems to trust me,” Moro said shrewdly.
“I got no choice,” Vanderling said. “I get rid of Fraden or Fraden gets rid of me. Besides, I got some pretty good insurance of my own… Or are you forgetting that little present I sent you?”
“The Omnidrene!” Moro cried shrilly. Across the table, Vanderling could see the Brother’s little eyes light up greedily. “There really is more Omnidrene? I thought it merely a trick to—”
“Hundreds of pounds of the stuff,” Vanderling said. “More than you can use in five lifetimes. And that’s my insurance, ’cause you don’t get one ounce till Fraden’s dead and I’m safely in the outback. Then you get it all. What do you say? Deal?”
After only a short pause the voice on the radio said, “Why not? You seem to have… thought of everything. We complete the transaction, and then… then perhaps we deal with each other.”
“Fair enough,” Vanderling said. “We work together till Pain Day. Get your end rolling, and I’ll work on mine. Out.”
Without a word to the bemused Brother, Vanderling arose, motioned to his men, and walked swiftly to the doorway, with Gomez and Jonson trailing him with stunned uncomprehending looks on their faces. Vanderling bit his lower lip as he walked past corpse-laden tables and skirted puddles of half-dried blood. His upper torso was shaking convulsively.
Finally, when he and Gomez and Jonson and the sentries he had stationed at the doorway were alone on the dark, silent street, Vanderling broke into gales of laughter.
“Maroon!” he roared. “Oh, what a schmuck! Hook, line and Omnidrene!”
Yeah, the Prophet of Pain thought he had pulled a fast one, didn’t he! Sure, go along till Bart was kaput, then grab me, torture me to get the Omnidrene, kill me, and back to business as usual. What a dumb greaseball!
He saw that the ’heads were staring at him, muttering among themselves, fingering their snipguns uncertainly.
“Stow it, boys!” he said, still half-laughing. “You don’t get the picture? Six thousand Killers in the Stadium to wipe out Bart and the victims? So how many does that leave guarding the Compound wall? Gomez, you’re gonna have the whole bloody People’s Army waiting on Pain Day. Nearly twenty thousand men! While most of the Killers are tied up in the Stadium, you’ll storm the front gate, get our men inside, knock off whatever’s guarding the outside of the Stadium, bust in, and…”
“Kill y’Killers!” Gomez cried. “Kill y’Brothers! Kill y’Prophet! Kill—”
“You got it!” Vanderling said. “Save your yelling for Pain Day.”
Of course, there was still one more angle to this neat little triple-cross, he thought. While our boys are wiping out the Killers, there’ll be enough confusion for me to take care of Bart—maybe toss him to the Killers. That would touch all the bases, all right. Bart Fraden, the Liberator of Sangre, fell today in the final battle. Hearts and flowers, folks, hearts and flowers! The President is dead—long live the President!
And there was only one little loose end left to tie up.
“Come on, boys, back to camp,” he said. “Gotta let our Peerless Leader in on our little scheme, right?”
Too much, man! Vanderling thought gleefully. It was all just too damned much!
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
When Vanderling had finally finished, Sophia was shaking her head in a combination of disbelief, anger, and so it seemed to Bart Fraden, no little amusement As she opened her mouth to let fly some verbal barrage at Vanderling, who sat across the table from both of them with his coarse, tough face a ludicrous mask of small-boy innocence and satisfaction, Fraden shot her a quick, definitive “cool it” look, then turned to face Vanderling again, shook his head slowly.
“I hear it, Willem,” he said, “but I just don’t believe it. Tell me again, once over lightly.”
“What’s so hard to dig?” Vanderling said earnestly. “It’s a perfect setup. I got Moro thinking I’m double-crossing you, which sets us up to double-cross him. The two thousand victims you’re supposed to supply will all be armed, dig?”
Fraden moaned. “As a conspirator, Willem,” he said, “you leave much to be desired. Do you really suppose that Moro trusts you? How in blazes do you expect to smuggle rifles, or anything else into the Stadium on semi-naked Sangrans?”
“You don’t get it, man,” Vanderling said. “Sure Moro don’t trust me. Sure we couldn’t really smuggle weapons in. But I foxed Moro into taking care of that I told him that the only way you would fall for our double-cross was if you thought you were doing the double-crossing. Remember, he doesn’t know that I’m really working with you. He thinks that you’ll think you’ll have the element of surprise, so he’s gonna let you smuggle knives in on the victims to suck you In—because his surprise is that the Stadium is gonna be packed with six thousand or so Killers in mufti. He thinks that will take care of you and the Animals with the knives easy enough, and then he can double-cross me by capturing me and torturing me Into bringing down the ship with the Omnidrene. It’s a gas—he’s so busy double crossing both of us that he doesn’t see that we’re pulling a fast one on him. Sure, the Killers will take care of the boys with the knives, but most of ’em will have to be inside the Stadium to do it, and it’ll make for plenty of confusion. If we time it right, we have the whole damned People’s Army attack the skeleton force guarding the Compound while it’s all going on—and good-by Killers, good-by Moro, good-by Brotherhood.”
Fraden leaned back torpidly, suppressed a laugh. How many of the holes in this juvenile scheme are Willem’s ridiculous attempt to put one over on me? he wondered. And how many are just sheer stupidity? Still, if you gave clowns like Willem and Moro enough rope, they’d be sure to strangle each other… This mess had possibilities.
“And good-by us!” Fraden said. “Okay, so all this hugger-mugger just may let us bust into the Stadium with the whole army. So the Killers will be completely occupied with what’s going on inside the Stadium… But what is going on inside? What’s to prevent all those Killers from just bumping the both of us off on the spot?”
Vanderling’s jaw fell. “Uh… er…” he spluttered.
Well, well, well, Fraden thought So that part of it was sheer stupidity, after all. The idiot’s so busy double-crossing everyone in sight that he was going to walk into the most obvious trap of all himself—and that’s what always happens when a man steps out beyond his depth. Three blind mice… see how they run!
“I see you weren’t thinking that far,” Fraden said. “Well maybe we can make this half-assed scheme of yours work anyway. It’s all a matter of timing. We need a margin of safety between the time the fun starts in the Stadium and the time our boys break in and take control of the situation. Five, ten minutes at the very most…”
“Yeah…” Vanderling muttered, befuddled at having lost the initiative. “That’d do it. But how…?”
“Even Moro couldn’t expect me to walk into something like that without some kind of personal bodyguard. A hundred men or so wouldn’t put him up tight—he’s not thinking in terms of an outside attack, so he’ll figure his six thousand Killers will have all the time in the world to do us in. So why should he object to a hundred man bodyguard that could only keep us from being killed for ten or fifteen minutes?”
&nb
sp; “Hey, yeah!” Vanderling exclaimed. “A hundred ’heads would do it! I mean we should use ’heads, because they’re the most disciplined men we’ve got, right?”
Oh, brother! Fraden thought. A mind as deep as a saucer of milk. Your ’heads, eh, Willem? They all ran after the farmer’s wife…
“Why not?” Fraden said. She cut off their tails with a carving knife…
“Then we’ll go ahead and do it?”
“If I can talk Moro into granting us the bodyguard,” Fraden said. “Start the preparations anyway.”
“Right,” Vanderling said, rising, heading for the door. “Long live the Free Republic, eh?” he said, grinning over his shoulder. Did you ever see such a sight in your life…? “Long live… the President,” Vanderling said, and was gone.
“As three blind mice ” Fraden muttered under his breath.
As soon as Vanderling was out of earshot, Sophia O’Hara exploded. “Bart, you can’t be serious! You can’t be so—”
“Ye gods and little fishes!” Fraden interrupted, laughing. “Give me credit for being a little smarter than the average baboon, Soph! Of course, he’s planning a double-cross—or a triple-cross, if you want to get technical, since he’s double-crossing Moro too. So, of course, we quadruple-cross him!”
“Double-cross… triple-cross… quadruple-cross! Gak! You’ve lost me, oh Peerless Leader, What the hell’s going on in that warped little mind of yours?”
“Shall we unravel it one double-cross, at a time?” Fraden said jauntily. “Moro and Willem cooked up a plan to double-cross me, kill me, and somehow split the planet between them. So far a piece of treachery of classic simplicity. So of course double-cross number two—Moro’s—is to kill Willem as well as me and come out on top. Follow so far?”
“Even old Bullethead seems to have seen through that one…” Sophia said. “But… oh, I get it! Chrome-dome figured on that double-cross and double-crossed Moro by telling you and setting up the attack on the Compound!”
The Men in the Jungle Page 23
