by James Axler
After a moment of strain, the swineherd made the mental connection. And was aghast. “Like in Redbone?” he muttered.
“The self-same. We have got to go.”
“Can we come back?”
“Yes, of course,” Doc assured him, “and we’ll be returning very soon.” He didn’t bother to add, “So we can absorb the first salvo of lead from sixty-odd blasters.”
After a pause, a sly grin twisted Young Crad’s mouth. “You like the one with the pretty eyes, don’t you?” he said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“You kissed her. I saw you.”
As might be imagined, a hulking, swineherd pervert’s attempt at coyness was nothing short of horrifying.
Nonetheless Doc replied in the affirmative, if briefly. “Yes, I kissed her. But we must put that aside and leave this ville. Bezoar’s life depends on it.”
Doc pulled the droolie into the shadows beyond the reach of the firelight. There they waited for the dinner party to break up. Eventually the Sunspot folk began to slip away in ones and twos to their pallets in the cargo containers and rusted-out Winnebagos. Haldane’s sec men retreated to their barracks in the Welcome Center. As the last of them crawled off to bed, the unattended campfires burned low and the flames winked out, leaving beds of glowing red coals.
“We’re going to climb the berm,” Doc informed Young Crad.
The droolie looked up at the shadowy, fifteen-foot-high pile of loose rubble and dirt, but asked no questions.
Doc had decided that they couldn’t leave Sunspot via the foot gate. If they’d tried, they would have had to explain to the sentries why they were heading out into the hellscape in the middle of the night. Something that would have looked very suspicious. And they couldn’t risk waiting until daybreak to make their exit. There was a chance they wouldn’t be allowed to leave, even then. Moreover, they needed all the time available in case they got lost en route, or if Malosh had moved the column from its last position.
Given the dark, moonless night and their distance from the Welcome Center and ramshackle shelters, as long as they moved quietly they would attract no attention.
“Make no noise,” Doc warned the swineherd as they slowly started up the forty-five-degree incline. Because the berm wall was made of loose piled debris, and there was only starlight to see by, it was difficult to locate solid hand-and footholds. Young Crad’s weight caused a minor collapse in the structure. Small chunks of concrete rattled to the ground below. They froze near the top of the berm, but no one burst out of the semitrailers to challenge them. Given the building materials, such mini-avalanches no doubt were common occurrences.
After descending the other side of the perimeter wall, Doc and Young Crad turned left and skirted the edge of the heaped riprap. Outside the front gates, bonfires were burning, presumably to deter predators. The light they cast only penetrated thirty or forty yards into the darkness. Doc made a wide detour around the pyres before rejoining the path to the interstate on the slope below.
As they walked down to the predark highway, the only sound came from Doc’s bootsoles softly crunching on the starlit track. The old man could feel his back muscles bunching up into knots. Night was the worst time to be out and about in the hellscape. Unless you were trying to commit mutie-assisted suicide.
As dim-witted as he was, even the droolie was aware of the extreme danger.
“So dark,” Young Crad whispered.
Below them was the eerie, vaguely outlined, colorless landscape of ruined four-lane and towering, canted light stanchions.
“We’re fine,” Doc said. “We’ll just follow the interstate and retrace our route back to Malosh.”
As they moved along the highway shoulder, Doc felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand erect. He had a powerful sense of being watched.
“Wait a second,” he said, drawing the LeMat.
When he held his breath and listened, he could hear something moving stealthily in the dark, just beyond the range of his vision.
“Stinks here,” was Young Crad’s choked comment.
The stench of a freshly excavated grave was unmistakable.
That the swineherd could smell it over his own pungent aroma was a true measure of its intensity.
Thirty feet ahead was a pile of heaped earth and overturned stone slabs. Approaching cautiously, Doc reached down and grabbed a handful of soil. It was still damp. On the other side of the mound was the source of the terrible odor: severed body parts. Strewed long bones. A headless torso. The rotting corpse had been devoured belly first.
Had they scared off whatever it was?
Did it only feed on the decaying dead? Or did it also take its food warm and kicking?
Was there more than one?
Questions without immediate answers.
Doc doubted that he was looking at the handiwork of a scagworm. A worm wouldn’t have bothered pulling the body out of the ground to feed upon it. It would have just burrowed in and done its dining out of sight, on the buried pocket of protein. The creature that had disturbed the grave had to overturn the heavy capstones and pull its meal out of the earth. Which meant it was bigger, stronger than the mama worms, and to grapple with the stones, at least two-armed if not two-legged.
As he scanned the darkness at the edge of the shoulder, Doc considered the possibilities.
A five-hundred-pound scalie?
Scalies were lazy, low-moving bastards, and they liked weak or injured prey, or prey they could ambush at close range or trap in some way. The grave robbing could also have been the work of a band of roaming cannies. He couldn’t recall seeing any bootprints around the opened graves the previous afternoon. And it was too dark to make out any now. For cannies to dig up graves, they had to be triple desperate. Congealed human blood and decaying tissue being preferable to no blood and tissue at all. Their alternative to starvation was to eat one another, which they usually only did when a member of the band became too sick to live.
As Doc turned his attention west, something crossed the four lanes left to right in front of them, about forty yards away.
Though the light was dim, he could see that it was neither scalie nor cannie. It was the size and height of a full-grown bull or an ox. And it had more than two legs. He squinted, hard.
It had more than four legs.
For its size, it was amazingly quick and light on its feet. In a crouching run, it disappeared soundlessly into the pitch-dark desert.
Doc swept the highway shoulder with the sights of the LeMat. There was nothing to shoot at.
“Damnation,” he said.
Young Crad had glimpsed it, too. “Whuh-whuh-whuh-whuh?” he stammered.
Doc got the swineherd’s drift. “Your guess is as good as mine,” he said. “I think it is running back along the road to the east, trying cut us off from the ville.”
They looked behind them, at the distant fires perched on the silhouette of ridge.
“We go back now?”
“That isn’t an option. It’s already probably lying in wait for us.”
“We go on, then.”
“If we do that, it will run us down from behind.”
There was only one choice, Doc realized. Most unpleasant. Because he could shoot, he had a chance in hell of holding off the creature long enough for Young Crad to get away.
“Can you find your way back to Bezoar?” he asked the droolie.
Young Crad nodded. “Broken bridge. Broken bridge.”
“That’s right. Turn at the broken bridge. If I tell you a number can you remember it?”
“What?”
“This is very important,” Doc told him. “To save Bezoar and my friends, can you remember a number?”
“What?”
There was no time for droolie games.
Doc set down the LeMat and unsheathed his swordstick. He said, “Give me your palm.”
When Crad extended his hand, Doc seized it by the wrist. “Hold still,” he said. “This will only
hurt for a moment.” Holding the sword near its razor-sharp point, he dragged the edge across the droolie’ skin, making quick, shallow slashes.
“Ow!” the swineherd yelped, jerking his hand back.
“Find Malosh and show him that mark on your palm. Can you do that?”
Young Crad looked down dumbfounded at the scratches in his flesh, which oozed a thin trickle of blood.
“Can you do that?” Doc demanded.
The swineherd nodded.
“Then, go! Now! Run!”
Young Crad took off without further prompting, clutching his injured hand to his chest, lumbering barefoot into the darkness below.
Doc resheathed his sword, picked up the LeMat, and started back up the grade. There was no way of knowing whether the droolie would find the column in time. He could only hope.
Grimly, Doc advanced with the heavy pistol raised. Every broad puddle of shadow, every low hummock along the road’s edge could have concealed his enemy. He was determined to confront the monster head-on and to at least cripple it. He had his LeMat to accomplish the task. After that, he only had his swordstick to rely upon.
As he neared the highway exit for the Welcome Center, between the turnoff and the one hundred-yard-wide blown-up section of road, the creature reappeared from the shadows. It squatted in what was left of the slow traffic lane, all eight of its legs bending at the first joint. With its belly about three feet from the ground, it made a distinct hissing sound. The body was a vague, flattened oblong. As the beast turned back into the darkness, the silhouette didn’t change, which told him the body was roughly circular in shape.
Doc knew he had to lure it closer, to within sure-chilling range of the black powder pistol. He advanced to the spot where it had just stood, his eyes were skinned for the slightest movement, ears pricked up to catch the faintest sound.
Before him was a wide pool of semiliquid excreta. The creature had marked its turf.
As Doc rounded the wet spot, the thing suddenly raised up from a depression in the roadway ahead.
Doc reacted, opening fire with the LeMat, sending a .44-caliber ball into the center of its body. The rocking blast echoed in the gorge above. The resulting plume of gunsmoke momentarily obscured the creature. Undaunted, Doc walked through the twinkling haze, straight for his target. Because of the combination of the weak light and unfamiliar animal, he wasn’t sure precisely what to aim at, but he gamely continued to fire a fresh round at each forward step.
His bullets thwacked into and presumably through its torso as they whined off the boulders of concrete farther up the road.
The beast seemed impervious to lead balls and content to wait for its dinner to come to it. As Doc advanced through the smoke, he got an impression of shaggy hairiness. And of savage cunning if not intelligence.
Doc emptied all his .44-caliber rounds into the dark shape. With those gunshots still echoing, he cocked the hammer on the blue whistler barrel. Then he heard shrill shouts from the ville gate above. When he stole a glance in that direction, he saw a line of torches bouncing down the path toward him. Haldane’s fighters were coming.
Instead of leaping upon him straightaway, the creature scuttled to the right and took cover behind a rubble pile. The .44-caliber balls might have stung it a little, after all.
Doc knew he couldn’t stop to reload the revolver. He had to press his advantage, if indeed he had one, relying on the LeMat’s single-shot, scattergun barrel. Perhaps a load of grapeshot at close range could create a wound grievous enough to kill or hobble it.
Perhaps.
Doc stepped unblinking into the jaws of death, with raised pistol in his hand.
The many-legged thing surprised him by springing away in a tremendous bound. He instinctively led it with the LeMat’s sights and as he did so he touched off the shotgun barrel. The pistol boomed and bucked in his fist, spitting a yard of blue flame and choking pall of smoke.
Unable to see anything through the plume of burning black powder, his ears momentarily ringing, he holstered the empty weapon and drew his blade, preparing to pursue his quarry into the darkness.
Before he heard the crash of footfalls behind, someone shouted at him, “Stop there! Don’t move or we’ll fire!”
Doc turned to face torches and assault rifle muzzles.
“Put that stabber away,” one of the men said.
Doc scabbarded the rapier without protest.
“What the hell are you doing out here?”
The old man knew that “taking the night air” wouldn’t suffice. Nor would “feeding the animals.” There was no good explanation for leaving the berm’s protection before dawn.
“He didn’t go through any of the gates,” one of the sentries said. “He must have jumped over the wall.”
“Why did you sneak out of Sunspot?”
Again, Doc had no credible answer, so he kept quiet.
“He showed up this afternoon with a droolie,” another trooper chimed in.
“Where’s your droolie pal?”
“The creature took him,” Doc replied in an even tone. “I tried to help him, but bullets didn’t stop it.”
A reasonable enough story, but the men didn’t buy it. “Rad bastard’s got to be a spy for Malosh.”
“We hang spies around here.”
Chapter Fifteen
Bollinger didn’t make a headlong rush for Sunspot. He had six hours to get there and return before the gas barrage started. There was time for caution, though forcing himself to take it slow made his stomach jittery. Safety was far more important to his mission than speed. He knew if he didn’t make it to the ville and warn the garrison to pull out, all of Haldane’s soldiers would die. Either by the hand of Malosh, or the hand of Magus. These were troopers Bollinger had personally helped train and had commanded in battle. Moreover, he had grown up with all of them. He knew their families.
The sec boss sensed his two subordinates were jumpy, too. It wasn’t just because they were traveling at night. They had an awesome responsibility. Many lives depended on their success.
With starlight dimly reflecting off the sand, Bollinger led them along the clearest route, keeping to open ground as much as possible, keeping away from pitch-dark patches of brush, boulders and deep, narrow gullies. That way, if they were ambushed by men or muties, they had a chance to return fire and beat off the attack.
Bollinger could see their goal ahead, rising above the shadowy hills. Firelights twinkled against a black backdrop. He didn’t let his gaze linger; the danger was much closer and all around.
The sec boss knew everything there was to know about Sunspot. He had helped Baron Haldane take the ville from Malosh twice, and had been stationed there himself for months. During that time, he had learned to hate the rank shit pile and its people. He had lost many dear friends during the campaigns’ advances and retreats. He had come to view the ville folk as sneaking, lying, cheating bastards. And murderers. While he had been in command of the Sunspot garrison, they had assassinated four of his soldiers in one night. Bollinger had caught the guilty parties and hanged them in front of the whole ville. He had strung up the ville leader for good measure. He still wished he could have hanged them all, men, women and children.
Though the prospect of their impending annihilation with gas pleased him, he was less enthusiastic about Malosh’s receiving the same fate. Given the man’s history of atrocities, it seemed far too easy a way out. If offered a choice, the sec boss would have preferred to drag the still-living baron by his heels behind a wag for twenty or thirty miles, until there was nothing left but leg bones and feet.
Bollinger was sweating hard as they hopped down into a wide arroyo. His mouth was bone-dry. Not from the exertion of the trek or the lingering heat. The tension was starting to get to him. A man could only stay hard-focused, listening for the slightest sound, looking for the tiniest movement, for so long without losing his edge.
“Let’s stop a minute,” he said.
It was okay to mov
e across open ground, it was definitely not okay to take a rest break there. His assault rifle braced against his hip, finger resting on the trigger, Bollinger headed toward a low, grass-fringed bank on their right. The crumbling, undercut bluff was draped in deep shadow. He approached it carefully, making sure that nothing hid in the darkness.
When he had completed the recce to his satisfaction, he told his men to sit in the shadows. With their backs against the bluff, they broke out canteens and sipped water. They kept their weapons ready and their senses alert. They spoke in near whispers.
“How far to go?” one of the soldiers asked.
“Mebbe five more miles,” Bollinger answered.
“I’m thinking the ville folk are gonna know something’s up when we pull out all our troops at once,” the other soldier said. “We’ve never done that before.”
“Yeah, but they won’t know what the something is,” the sec boss said. “Until it’s too late…” Even though they were sitting quite close to each other, it was so dark Bollinger couldn’t make out their faces.
“All those dead people are really gonna stink up the place.”
“That’ll bring on the buzzards, big time. Do you think the poison will chill them, too?”
“Yeah, stone dead,” Bollinger said. “Them and anything else that wanders by. That sarin gas is triple nasty. Breathe it, you die. Taste it, you die. Touch it, you die.”
Dirt exploded with tremendous force and a grinding roar from the bank at their backs. The man sitting next to Bollinger let out a yelp that lasted about one-tenth of a second, cut off along with his head, which toppled forward into his lap and bounced out of the shadows, landing face-up and bug-eyed in the starlight. Bollinger and the other soldier sat frozen as the still-thrashing body beside them was suddenly jerked backward, out of sight into a hole that hadn’t been there moments before.
Bollinger jumped to his feet, but the other soldier never made it that far. Before he could rise he was seized around the waist from behind and shaken so violently and so rapidly that his body actually blurred before Bollinger’s astonished eyes. Caught in that monstrous, crushing grip, the trooper couldn’t break free, he couldn’t breathe or scream. The only sound came from avalanching rocks and rib bones cracking. All the poor bastard could do was kick his legs and flail his arms. The extended limbs acted as brakes when he was slammed backward into the mouth of another fresh hole. Dirt rained down from the collapsing bluff. Again he was slammed backward, again he just managed to stay out of the burrow. The third time he hit the hole, he doubled over like a ragdoll at the waist and vanished.
