by James Axler
Bollinger vaulted away from the bank, crow-hopping over the severed, drop-jawed head.
He hadn’t clearly seen what had just taken his men. He was left with a vague impression of smooth, domed heads, like the noses of five-hundred-pound bombs. And heavy, powerful jaws. Jaws that could cleanly sever a human neck in a single bite. Whatever the hell they were, they were very large, very quick and very deadly.
When he glanced down the arroyo behind him, his heart sank. In starlight, the dry river channel was alive with movement. Glistening, sinuous movement as the earth vomited forth dozens upon dozens of black segmented creatures. They poured out of the ground and slithered toward him, moving like streaking shadows above the sand. Even if he could have hit them, there were way too many for him to shoot.
“Oh, shit, oh, shit,” Bollinger groaned as he turned and broke into an all-out sprint. He felt good, felt strong, light and fast on his feet. Thanks to a jet-assist of adrenaline rush, he could make it. He was sure he could make it. He had to make it. There was no time to dump his gear and lighten his load. The effort would have slowed him a few fractions of a second, and he would have lost precious ground to the pursuit. He had to concentrate on running.
Running like all holy hell.
He pushed past his own limits, trying to put as much distance between the muties and himself as he could. Distance was the great dissuader. If he could make them give up hope of catching him, he had a chance. That was the only way he was going to reach the ville alive. He no longer had the luxury of picking an easy, meandering path through the clearings; he raced overland, busting brush, beelining it for the ruined interstate.
He didn’t think about how far he’d run, or how far he had to go until his legs started burning and growing heavier and heavier. He could hear his own breath rasping in his ears and he couldn’t seem to suck down enough air. Even as his pace faltered, as he began to stumble, from behind he heard scratching sounds, growing in volume like an onrushing storm, crisp feet scurrying, tens of thousands of them.
He knew then that he wasn’t going to make it. That his mission was lost. In that last moment of despair, he begged his doomed friends in Sunspot for forgiveness, and cursed the god that had abandoned them all.
Something heavy latched on to his right ankle and wouldn’t let go. As he dragged it along with him, the creature writhed and shook its head, the savage movement caused its serrated jaws to sever tendons and ligaments and score deeply into the bone. Hot blood squished inside his right boot. His foot went dead. He screamed as he ran a step or two more, unable to kick it free.
In the distance he could see the firelights of Sunspot.
Help was far away.
Too far away.
Pain lanced into his other leg and he tripped, crashing facedown in the sand. The creatures swept over him in a chitinous wave. Rolling over onto his back, he instinctively raised his hands to cover his face, which opened his torso to attack. Once the two-foot-long black worms sank their jaws in his belly, there was no getting them out. While he pulled and pounded on the powerful armored bodies and the rippling rows of scratchy bug feet, the worms shook, snapped and burrowed in a frenzy. Over his shrill screams, he could hear his ribs breaking like dry sticks and then they were squirming inside his torso, fighting over the choicer bits.
Only when one of them made a meal of Bollinger’s beating heart did his agony end.
Chapter Sixteen
Young Crad hightailed it downhill, his injured hand raised and clenched in a tight fist, blood trickling steadily down his arm. He ran parallel to the ravaged highway. The loose flesh of his face bounced and jiggled with each impact of bare feet slapping sand, as did the heavy muscles of his chest and stomach. Snot in twin clear streams trailed down his cheeks and swayed from his chin. The swineherd was a strong man, in the prime of his life, and if he knew how to do one thing, and one thing only, it was how to flee.
He had been fleeing pretty much his entire life. Usually to avoid kicks, sticks, spit, hurled stones and howled insults. Young Crad understood human cruelty, having received it for as long as he could remember, yet he had never once asked himself, “Why me?”
Because he knew why.
He had been marked at birth, abandoned by a mother who either sensed his mental deficit or shared it. Like most Deathlanders, the barrel-chested swineherd knew nothing about the predark myths that described orphaned babies being wet-nursed by wild animals. Supposedly, Romulus and Remus, the founders of the ancient city of Rome, had been raised by a she-wolf. Young Crad, the discarded droolie, had been suckled by pigs. Domesticated pigs. It was likely that his mother had deposited him inside the pen to be eaten by the hulking, omnivorous beasts.
Waste not, want not.
Instead, miraculously, he had been adopted into a sprawling litter of piglets. His earliest memories were of grubbing about in the sty with his oinking littermates. Young Crad had lived his life in constant, close proximity to the porcine species. Now that he was torn from the familiar, he felt terribly alone, and once again abandoned.
Being born a droolie in the hellscape wasn’t unusual. There were a number of ways fetal brains could be damaged between conception and birth, and little in the way of prophylaxis. After the fact, there was no remedy at all, save death. Accordingly, every ville had among its number a few button-eyed Young Crads; some had more, some less.
In Redbone, all the other dimmie girls and boys had had futures, of sorts. When they became old enough to control their respective sphincters and gag reflexes, they found gainful, lifelong employment in the ville’s lone gaudy. The gaudy master and his customers had no use for the pig boy. Not only was he scorned by every other human being—except for Bezoar, who was also an outcast and fellow swineherd—the ville folk actively sought to do him bodily harm, just like his birth mother had. It seemed he was always ducking, dodging, barely escaping their wrath.
Young Crad was a morally degenerate triple stupe, but he was smart enough to be scared shitless. The memory of the creature he’d just seen put wings on his heels. A dim memory. He hadn’t seen it all that clearly. But what stuck in his mind the most was all those legs, and the sheer size of it. Not only did it have twice as many legs as normal, eight instead of four, each leg had too many knees. Four or five, it seemed. All capable of bending. When it straightened its legs and stood to its full height, he could have walked under its belly without crouching. Crad was a bona fide droolie, but he instinctively sensed the creature was a stone chiller, not just a grave robber. And that it was looking for its next meal.
Then he heard the sound of blasterfire from up the grade behind him. Boom after rocking boom rolled against his back. The old geezer was blasting away like there was no tomorrow—if he was missing his target, there probably wasn’t any, either. The awful silence after the shooting stopped made him run even faster.
Other than Bezoar, Young Crad had never had a human friend. And he’d certainly never had a friend who would sacrifice his life for him. That’s what Doc Tanner had just done. The act of selfless heroism amazed him. That it had been done on his behalf made him feel wonderful and horrible at the same time, and he didn’t understand why. His new friend Doc had hurt him, cut on him, but he was accustomed to being hurt. Sometimes Bezoar beat him with a stick to drive home a point he was trying to make. It was useless of course, but it seemed to make the elder swineherd feel better.
Young Crad was crushed that he had lost a friend like Doc so soon after finding him. He blubbered a bit over a man he’d hardly known. Pathetic and limited and grotesque as it was, his world was collapsing around him.
For the life of him he couldn’t quite recall why he was returning to the baron’s army. Young Crad was a three-dimensional person with a two-dimensional mind. A cardboard cutout who walked and talked and ate and crapped. He knew he was in mortal danger, though, and that he would be safe when he reached the camp.
Broken bridge, he muttered as he ran.
Broken bridge.
> Broken bridge.
A two-word prayer to ward off the thing with too many knees.
He was still muttering to himself when the shattered blocks of the collapsed four-lane span came into view below him. He scrambled over the uptilted plates of roadbed and dropped down into the dry riverbed. Without pausing to look behind him, he ran north, up the wide channel. After traveling a quarter mile, he climbed out of the riverbed and into the low hills.
He didn’t have to think about where he was headed, and he didn’t look to the stars to find his direction. Which was a good thing because if he had he would have become lost in a hurry. Below the conscious level, some ingrained homing sense told him which way to go.
He ran up and down the slopes of the low hills for what seemed like a very long time before he crested a rounded summit and looked down on a wide hollow where Malosh’s fighters had made camp for the night. Though there were no fires and no lights, he could make out horses, mules, dogs, carts, tents and, scattered everywhere, the dark forms of men sleeping curled up on the ground under the stars.
Young Crad was so relieved and so excited to see them that he didn’t think to yell or to wave his arms to announce his return. It didn’t even occur to him that there would be sentries on duty and that they would be armed. He raced full-speed down the hill toward the camp.
No one challenged him.
They just opened fire.
From behind rock outcrops on either side of him came starburst muzzle-flashes and the raucous clatter of automatic weapons, and he was caught in a withering cross fire of lead. Bullets whined all around him, kicking up dirt, zinging off into the night.
Young Crad didn’t know what to do, so he shut his eyes and kept on running.
Chapter Seventeen
Ryan Cawdor couldn’t sleep. He sat crosslegged on the ground beside Mildred and J.B. Though they were curled up side by side, they weren’t asleep, either. In the starlight he could see that their eyes were open. He figured they were thinking about the same thing he was, and feeling the same extreme sense of urgency.
The whole camp was dark. The baron had ordered no fires. Even though they were settled in a hollow, the combined glow would have lit up the surrounding hilltops and given away the position to Haldane’s force in Sunspot. Darkness presented a perfect opportunity for the companions to slip away. All that kept Ryan from organizing an escape was Doc Tanner, who hadn’t returned from his involuntary spy mission, yet. As soon as he showed up, they could sneak past the perimeter guards, moving in ones and twos so as not to attract attention, and join up somewhere to the west well after dawn.
There was of course a possibility that Doc wouldn’t return from Sunspot at all, not by choice, but due to circumstances beyond his control. If that happened, Ryan vowed before he’d let the others get spiked he’d take out the baron personally. Shoot the horse out from under him and empty the rest of the SIG’s mag into the side of his head. Before he was shot down in turn, he’d rip off that black leather mask just to see what was crawling underneath.
The mask, the man of mystery, the black gear, the big horse, the legendary cruelty and ruthlessness was the kind of stagey, cornball shit that worked on dirt-farmer audiences in a carny show.
But in real life there was a downside to theatrics.
The sudden death of the seemingly invincible commander would leave a power void that would send his army into chaos. Fighters would turn on one another to avenge old scores. Norms versus muties. Norms versus norms. Sec men without axes to grind would hightail it for their homes. Without Malosh’s presence the officers couldn’t maintain control. Ryan figured his companions could even get away in the resulting confusion.
The sound of rapid footfalls from the summit above broke Ryan’s train of thought. Whatever it was, it was coming downhill full-tilt. As he looked up, the sentries opened fire.
By the light of flickering muzzle-flashes, he saw a lone, shadowy figure running with arms raised through a withering hellstorm of slugs.
The figure only managed a few steps before crumpling and falling, then driven by gravity and its own momentum, it rolled head over heels down the slope.
“Hold your fire!” Ryan shouted.
Although they were unsure who had given the order in the dark, the guards did the safe thing and stopped shooting.
“We got him!” one of them said.
“Nailed that sneak-ass piece of shit,” said another.
Ryan was already dashing over to the still form. When he got close, he was relieved to see that the man lying on the ground was the Redbone swineherd and not Doc. He rolled the man over onto his back, expecting him to be shot full of holes and stone dead. He was surprised to see the barrel chest heaving and the button eyes blinking.
The stammered sounds “whuh-whuh-whuh-whuh” came out of the swineherd’s mouth.
Ryan turned to shout for Mildred, but she and J.B. were already beside him.
Mildred quickly, expertly, checked his body for bullet wounds and, finding no evidence of serious injury, made him sit up. “It doesn’t look like he’s hit except for his hand,” she said.
“Luck of the dimmie,” was J.B.’s wry comment.
“Come on, let me see your hand,” Mildred coaxed Young Crad. She carefully opened his balled fist, and held it that way while she poured a little water from her canteen on the wound to soften the congealed blood and dirt. Then she started to gently clean it with scrap of rag.
Behind them, the whole camp was on its feet, blasters out, adrenaline pumping. Malosh the Impaler had burst from his tent and was calling for his officers.
“Where’s Doc?” Ryan growled through clenched teeth. “Where’s the man who went to Sunspot with you?”
When Young Crad didn’t answer, Ryan took hold of his baby-smooth chin, squeezed until the first two joints of his fingertips disappeared into the fleshy cheeks, and repeated the question. “Where’s Doc?”
“A thing chased us…”
“What kind of thing?”
“Big. It was hunting on the old road. He told me to run and he went back to chill it.”
“Did you see him chill it?”
“No.”
“Did you see it chill him?” Mildred asked.
“No. He shot and shot and shot, then it got quiet. I was running hard as I could.”
“You didn’t go back?” Ryan said.
Young Crad shook his head. “He said to come here.”
“Ryan, we don’t know that he’s dead,” Mildred said.
“That’s true, but if he was okay, he would have caught up with the droolie. He’d be here by now.”
“Mebbe he’s hurt?” J.B. said. “Mebbe he’s down?”
Ryan swore in frustration.
“This isn’t a bullet wound,” Mildred told them as she poured more water over the swineherd’s open palm.
At that moment Malosh stepped up behind them, accompanied by his cadre of staff officers. The baron held a burning torch that cast a ring of weak, flickering light on the ground around the companions and gave off a steady hiss. He leaned down in all his black-masked, black-caped glory. “What did you find out?” he demanded of the seated swineherd.
Crad looked up at the baron. He swallowed hard, he opened his mouth, but no sound came out. There was blind panic in his eyes.
“You’d better have found out what I asked you to. Or it’s gonna be heinie-stretching time.”
Crad responded by making desperate little squeak. He didn’t have a clue what the baron wanted of him. But it was clear he remembered the heinie stretching.
Some things were unforgettable.
“Look!” Mildred exclaimed, raising the swineherd’s palm up to the torchlight for them to see. “Look, it’s the number 76! Doc must’ve done this. He knew Young Crad wouldn’t remember it. He cut it into his hand so he couldn’t lose it. So we’d have to see it.”
“Smart geezer,” the baron said.
“Triple smart,” Ryan said.
“If
there’s only seventy-six soldiers in Haldane’s garrison,” one of the officers said, “we can overwhelm them with main force.”
“Where’s that scout?” Malosh said. “Get him over here.”
When the scout approached, Malosh held the burning end of the torch close to the sand. “Draw the defenses for me again,” he ordered.
The scout knelt and started making a sketch in the dirt with the point of his knife. Ryan had to squint his good eye to see it. First, the man drew the circular oblong of Sunspot’s berm. On the south side, he put in the gorge with the interstate running through it. He crosshatched a section of highway directly below the ville, indicating a major break in the road. On the north side of the berm, and parallel to it, he sketched some narrowly spaced contour lines, which were meant to describe the steep back of the hill on which Sunspot sat. He added a path on the gorge side running from the interstate up to the ville and out the other side, bypassing the disrupted section of highway.
When the scout put in the heavy machine gun positions, Malosh said, “They’ve moved the emplacements since we were there last.”
Together, the gun positions provided overlapping fields of fire, nearly 360 degrees of kill zone. On the south or gorge side of the berm, two widely spaced emplacements controlled the western, uphill approach from the interstate and the westernmost path leading to the ville. The path leading from the ville to the east was controlled by two more emplacements. A fifth machine gun was positioned on the north side of the berm, defending the steep hillside approach.
