by James Axler
Doc thought about mentioning the evidence of a grave-digging critter, but it didn’t seem in good taste, or politic.
Solemnly, and much more warily, they moved down the low bank, repeating the procedure at each likely burrow. Before they had gone forty yards, the men were straining under the weight of half-full garbage cans. And the food gathering was complete.
Doc was amazed at the density of the scagworm population. “Good grief, how many of those things are there?” he said.
“There weren’t any until about a month ago,” Isabel said. “Now there doesn’t seem to be an end to them. More and more are moving up from the south every day. And they’re damn good eating. Like I said, it’s manna from heaven. We don’t have to feed them, either. When they can’t get pigs or prairie dogs, they happily eat each other.”
“Doesn’t that happen when they’re piled up inside the containers?”
“No, they go right to sleep in the dark.”
“Remarkable,” Doc said.
“The only rub is, they aren’t housebroken.”
AN HOUR LATER, when they were back at Sunspot, Doc realized the extent of their unhousebrokenness. The men tipped a garbage can against the rim of one of the caldrons, then carefully opened the lid, sliding the scagworms into the boiling water. The muties were no longer black. They were streaked end to end with vile-smelling, ochre-colored excrement.
The scagworms squealed and writhed, trying frantically, vainly, to swim before succumbing to the intense heat. The few that managed to reach and cling to the barrel rim were immediately knocked back with clubs.
An ochre froth billowed upon the water’s roiling surface, spilled over the rim and oozed down the sides of the barrel.
Doc moved upwind to escape the ghastly aroma.
“We scald them awhile to chill them good and dead, and to clean off all the runny shit,” Isabel told him.
After a fifteen-minute boil, the ville folk sieved the dead worms out of the barrel with pitchforks. The drum full of nasty, clot-choked water was unceremoniously dumped on the ground. When the worms were cool enough to handle, the men shoved sharpened iron rods under their belly plates from tail to throat. They fitted four worms to a rod, then started roasting them over the coal bed. Clear juices dripped down into the fire, spitting clouds of steam. Post-boiling, the aroma was much improved.
“They smell like shellfish when they’re broiling,” Doc said. “Like lobster or crab.”
As the cooks rotated their skewers, the black shells gradually turned gray, then glowed red. When the shells finally split along the backs, the worms were removed from the heat. After they had again cooled and were unskewered, the women used claw hammers to shatter the fire-weakened, armored heads, exposing the end of a tube of meat that was easily pulled free of the carapace. An inner liner like a sausage skin protected the lump of muscle.
After they had stripped the meat from the liner, the women used carving knives to hack it into bite-size chunks. They dropped the flesh into the second fifty-five-gallon drum of boiling water along with the collected vegetables and a few bunches of herbs. The vat of stew cooked at a slow simmer until after sundown, when portions were finally ladled out.
As Doc had hoped, all of Haldane’s sec men lined up for chow. It was a no-fuss, no-muss way to accomplish the mission Malosh had given him. His head turned slowly as he took them in.
Isabel noticed the focus of his attention. Perhaps his lips were moving. “Are you counting the sec men?” she asked.
The question startled him, but he covered himself. “It’s a habit,” he said. “An old road warrior likes to know what he’s up against. It appears the opposition numbers sixty. Is that all of them?” The question came out naturally, effortlessly. And was answered in the same fashion.
“All but the eight stationed on the wag and foot gates. And there’s another eight still out on patrol. Sometimes they spend the night outside the berm, depending on how far they’ve gone on their sweeps.”
“A sizeable force by any measure. Shall we take our suppers over to the fire?”
They carried their pint cans of stew to a fireside log and sat hip to hip, a foot apart.
“What do you think?” Isabel said after he had taken a bite of double-cooked scagworm.
“It’s chewy, but in a pleasant way. It doesn’t taste of the sea, like I thought it might. It’s rather more like possum, only less greasy.”
“This,” Isabel said, hoisting her stew can to the heavens, “is the answer to our prayers.”
“Indeed.”
“The Almighty has chosen to save the people of Sunspot from a horrible death. To lift our impossible burden. It has to be for some reason. For some great purpose. Can’t you see the hand of God in this, Theo?”
Somehow Doc managed to swallow the food in his mouth. He said, “I do.”
But it was a heartless God whose hand he saw.
And he was that God’s lying instrument.
With his assistance, Sunspot was about to change occupiers again, with the accompanying loss of life. It was possible that the woman beside him would be killed in the process. That wasn’t a concern he had anticipated a few hours ago. Though he wanted to warn her, he couldn’t for fear the word might reach Haldane’s men, which would put his companions who were part of Malosh’s assault at greater risk. If Isabel survived the coming battle, she would certainly take his action for the cowardly betrayal that it was.
He had his friends’ lives to consider.
And yet Isabel was sending unmistakable signals with those violet eyes of hers. He could see that she found him attractive. His strange Victorian manners, speech and bearing, and his innate sadness, had cast a romantic spell. Even as he resolved not to press this advantage, he found himself leaning over and kissing her. Her mouth was soft and warm and pliant beneath his. And a surprising sensation passed between them. It was electric.
When Doc broke off the kiss, he saw the rosy color rising in her cheeks. The experience though brief seemed to have sucked the very breath from his lungs. He knew he had to stop before things went any further. He could not in good conscience court this lovely, brave woman. That would be heaping betrayal upon betrayal.
“What’s wrong?” Isabel said.
“I cannot,” he told her, rising to his feet. “I am sorry.”
She called out to him as he walked away, but he didn’t look back.
“Not our ville.” The companions’ standard disavowal of responsibility had never rung so hollow.
Chapter Thirteen
As a salmon-pink sunset faded to black on the horizon, Magus’s convoy circled and stopped on a flat stretch of desert hardpan. Just enough daylight remained to make camp and batten everything down for the night. Thus far, the chem weapon caravan hadn’t attempted to travel after dark. Even with every headlight blazing, it would have been far too dangerous. The potential road hazards and risk of rollovers would have forced an even greater reduction in speed. Now that they were within spitting distance of Malosh’s army, creeping along in a parade of halogen lights was a very bad idea.
When the road trash piled out of the Humvee, Baron Haldane followed suit; only then did he realize they had reached their destination. To the north, some eight miles away, along the summit at the mouth of the gorge, were the pinpoint firelights of Sunspot ville.
After tomorrow, lights would never again dance on that black ridge of rock. Haldane stifled a shiver. There was a decided chill in the air now that the sun had gone. The first stars of evening were coming out.
“In an hour it’s gonna be colder than a bull doomie’s tits,” Mossy Teeth quipped.
“Only there won’t be no fires for the likes of us tonight,” the driver said. “Don’t want to draw attention to the camp in case the Impaler has long-range patrols out.”
In the purpling light, Baron Haldane left the Humvee and headed for the side of one of the six-by-sixes, where his sec men waited. He looked from face to shadowy face and saw uniformly grim
expressions. And with good reason. First of all, they were outnumbered if not outgunned by Magus’s coldhearts. Now, as they looked on, the gun crew unhitched and unwrapped the Lyagushka at the edge of the ring of wags. Very soon their Nuevaville kin would be under the sights of the Soviet artillery piece, inside the kill zone of the predark WMDs, and the hand on the trigger cord had steel fingers.
Haldane took his men aside, out of earshot of Magus’s crew. He hunkered down while they huddled around him.
“I want my son back,” the baron said, “alive and in one piece.”
“We need to know where Magus has got him stashed,” said Bollinger, Haldane’s head sec man. He was tall, squint-eyed, lantern-jawed and harder than predark steel. Unscratchable. A man after the baron’s own heart. “Before we make a plan.”
“He’s in the landship with Steel Eyes,” Haldane said.
“That wag is gonna be a tough nut to crack,” Bollinger told him. “We can’t see inside. They’ve got all the bulletproof shades pulled down. What’s the floor plan?”
“There’s a long, skinny corridor running the full length of the thing,” Haldane said. “And just one armed guard that I saw. He could have more, now. There are steel doors spaced along one side of the hall. The salon at the back end is where Magus does his experiments. Thorne could be in any of the cabins. Or with Magus.”
“Seems like Magus would keep him close by, for safekeeping,” the head sec man said.
“We’ve got problems unless we can force Magus to show his hand. Sweeping that wag room by room is going to get my son chilled.”
“Are we going to try and rescue him before the gas attack?” Bollinger said. “Tonight mebbe? I wouldn’t mind chilling a few dozen of these road scum in the bargain.”
“If we do that, Magus might not fire his chem weapons at Sunspot. He might turn them on Nuevaville, out of pure spite.”
Haldane paused for a second then added, “Nothing can be decided until we evacuate our garrison from the ville. Once they’ve joined us, we have a chance against Magus. We’ll outnumber his blackhearts by almost two to one.”
“When you send men to Sunspot to collect the others,” Bollinger said, “you reduce your force down here by that number. If there’s a hang-up, if something goes wrong, you won’t have enough guns left to free your son.”
“That’s why I’m only sending three runners to the ville tonight,” Haldane said. “Bollinger, pick a pair of men to go with you. Steer clear of Malosh and bring our soldiers back.”
The head sec man chose his team, and they battened down and rattle-proofed each other’s gear. Magus knew the baron was going to pull back his troops before the barrage, so there was no need to conceal the operation. The runners had eight miles to cross at night, with only stars to light their path. Haldane knew the trip could take three hours or more. Each way.
As Bollinger and the others shouldered their blasters and walked off into the gathering gloom, one of the baron’s men looked over his shoulder and said, “Uh-oh, we got company…”
The huddle of troopers gave way, letting the dreadlocked sec man from the landship approach Haldane.
“Magus wants you to eat dinner with him in his wag,” the man said. “He told me to tell you that it was to ‘celebrate the eve of your great victory over Baron Malosh.’”
It wasn’t an invitation the baron could refuse.
“Grub’s on now,” the sec man told him. “Magus doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”
As Haldane followed the man down the circle of wags, he heard the throb of the landship’s generators. When they reached the wag, Dreadlocks again relieved Haldane of his Remington 12-gauge, then pulled the side door ajar. The baron was bathed in bright electric light.
“Go on,” his escort said, waving him inside.
The sec man pointed him to the third doorway along the corridor instead of the rear salon. Haldane was glad to see that supper hadn’t been laid out in the butcher’s grisly playpen.
The baron opened the door and looked into a tiny, windowless olive-drab–painted cell. A single, bare, 100-watt bulb hung from the riveted metal ceiling. The table was also made of painted metal. There were two steel benches built into the walls on either side. On the right-hand bench sat Magus.
“Where is my son?” were the first words out of Haldane’s mouth.
“Safely tucked away.”
“I want to see him, now. To make sure he is safe.”
“Please close the door behind you.”
After the baron complied, Magus said, “Your boy is perfectly fine. You can see him after dawn tomorrow, when our transaction is completed. Sit down. Our meal is growing cold.”
Various uncovered serving dishes were set out on the table. Roasted sliced meats, some in their own juices, some in thick gravy. Stewed vegetables. Piles of long, thin noodles. A gallon jug of foaming ale. If not for the company and the circumstances, Haldane would have found the platters appetizing.
The baron didn’t press the issue of seeing Thorne. He hadn’t expected Magus to give him access to his son. The most he could hope for was a clue where he was being held in the wag. Haldane took his place on the opposite bench, across narrow table from Steel Eyes. He was practically knee-to-knee with the creature. The smell of transmission fluid and fleshly decay competed with the delicious aroma of the food. Baron chose not to show his disgust, for fear it would be seen as a sign of weakness.
“Please, begin,” Magus said. “Help yourself.”
Haldane filled his plate and his glass, then waited for Steel Eyes to do the same.
“It’s very good,” the baron said, swallowing the first heaping forkful of yam.
Magus nodded as he chewed, guy wires spooling, unspooling into his cheekpieces, motorized jaws grinding away. After a moment he picked a plastic squirt bottle from the table, opened his still full mouth and sprayed what looked like water between his lips. Then he resumed chewing.
It occurred to Haldane that perhaps Steel Eyes either lacked or had inadequate saliva glands, which meant he had to lubricate every mouthful with water to fully pulverize it.
Though the baron watched and waited for Magus to swallow the bolus, he never did. Instead he spit a golf-ball-size wad of finely masticated food onto his steel fingers and slapped it onto the side of his plate.
“Eating for the purpose of sustenance is a dim memory for me, I’m afraid,” Magus said, “but there is still the pleasure of the taste.”
To illustrate, the creature stuck out his human tongue.
“Why don’t you try some of the spaghetti sauce,” Magus urged him. “It’s my own recipe.”
THORNE HALDANE WAS ALIVE, but not “perfectly fine.”
The boy was still crammed in the tiny, predark pet carrier. The only position he could assume was fetal. The carrier sat on an unmade bunk in a pitch-dark cabin. Before the lights went out, he had gotten a good look at his surroundings. The room was packed with junk—moldy papers and electronic parts in disintegrating cardboard boxes. Because the air vent was open, he could hear every word of the conversation between his father and Magus in the cabin next door.
Likewise they could hear him.
Thorne would have shouted or kicked the cage to let his father know he was close, but Magus had booby-trapped the cage, placing a shaped explosive charge on the carrier door. The creature had shown him the remote detonator, a whitecoat gizmo the size of a deck of playing cards. Magus had threatened that if he made so much as a sound, a split second after chilling him he would chill the baron.
“There is only a tiny bit of plastic explosive on the door,” Steel Eyes had told him. “Just enough to mebbe rattle the wag’s walls. A little bitty boom to pop a little bitty head from a little bitty neck.”
Like all Deathlands children, Thorne was used to hearing tales about the monsters that roamed the hellscape. Wild animals. Muties. Maniacs. Awful creatures that ate raw human flesh and sucked the marrow from the bones. Or kept children captive to satisfy their
sick urges. Tales devised, and often repeated, to instill fear and caution in the vulnerable. But all those horror stories had done nothing to prepare him for the suffocating terror he’d felt as he’d sat on Magus’s lap in that room full of death.
Steel Eyes’s hands were incredibly strong. When he made a fist, it sounded like it was motorized. Thorne’s wrists still ached from the rough handling he’d received.
Just as alarming to the boy, Magus didn’t seem to ever wear clothes. If he had any private parts, they were covered by a stainless steel cup arrangement that was bolted over his crotch. It had no hinge, no lock. To get it off took a box wrench. Thorne Haldane had guessed that urination, a prime curiosity of someone his age, was accomplished through one of the clamped plastic tubes that dangled between his legs. Sitting on that horrible lap, he could feel ice-cold, metal long bones under his butt. The bare flesh that was attached to them was feverishly warm. Some of the greenish gunk that oozed from the places where muscles met metal had gotten on his pant leg. It smelled real bad. Like fish guts left in the sun.
Thorne blamed himself for what had happened. He kept replaying his last moments in Nuevaville, trying to undo them in his head. The convoy road scum had snatched him up in an old gunny sack as he tried to beat the rain back to his front door. If he had only been able to run faster, or dodge better, mebbe he could have gotten away.
By letting himself get caught by Magus, he had put his father at a terrible disadvantage. And he had put him in terrible danger. He knew his dad would never give up until he was free.
Chapter Fourteen
“Why do we have to leave here?” Young Crad asked Doc. “I like this ville.” He tipped up his stew container and tapped on the bottom to get the last dribble of scagworm juice. “I got my own can of food. And people don’t spit on me all the time.”
Sound reasons for staying.
“Remember your friend Bezoar?” Doc said.
Young Crad’s too small eyes lit up at once.
“If we don’t depart Sunspot ville tonight,” Doc told him, “by this time tomorrow your friend is going to be fifteen feet in the air with a maypole wedged up his backside.”
