Sunspot

by James Axler

  Malosh stuck a gloved finger in the sand, pointing out the weakest point on north side, the widest stretch of undefended berm wall.

  It was the very spot Ryan would have picked.

  “The main force attacks here at first light,” the baron said. “On my signal, the norm fighters will breach the berm and take out the two gun posts on the west, here and here. The muties and dogs will follow them through the breach and contain any resistance inside the ville. Before I call for the main attack, I’ll lead troops up the gorge in a feint, to draw the garrison’s fire. Once the berm is breached and the defending gunposts are knocked out, I’ll take the western path and break through on that side. Any questions?”

  There were none.

  Apparently it looked like a piece of cake to the officers. Ryan didn’t consider five machine guns and seventy assault rifles a dessert course.

  “Assemble my army,” the baron said.

  When the three-hundred-odd fighters stood packed in a solid mass before him in the hollow, Malosh mounted his horse and walked it a short way up the slope, far enough so he could look down on them all. On his command, the big chestnut reared up on its hind legs, slashing its forelegs in the air. The two of them formed a stunning black silhouette in front of the starry field of sky.

  A carny act, Ryan thought.

  An opinion that only grew stronger when Malosh began to address his troops.

  “They say life is cheap in my barony,” Malosh shouted to the crowd. “They say it’s thrown away on a madman’s whim. They say that I’m a monster without conscience. I say that’s all lies. Life is the most precious thing, that’s why we fight and chill and die. To preserve it.

  “We have the right and the obligation to those we hold dear to take what the rich barons in the east are too weak or too careless or too stupid to protect. The wealth of their baronies is waiting for us, but first we must conquer Sunspot. We must take it and hold it. With Sunspot in our control, we can bleed the bastard rich barons dry, and convoy the food and the loot back to our home villes and our families.

  “Some of you here have not come of your own free will. Even now you are thinking about escaping before the fighting starts. I say there is no escape from death for any of us. And the only brief victory that death allows is glory, glory while we still live and breathe. I offer you the chance for that glory, the chance to carve your own bloody mark on this land, to take what is yours from it. Follow me and I will lead you into that place where the bullets whine and men scream. My glory is there, too, in the teeth of that howling gale. If a baron isn’t afraid of what’s to come, why should you be? You have nothing left to lose. I have everything to lose, but I won’t hide from the reaper’s blade.”

  The crowd stirred and shifted on its feet, unsure where Malosh was headed, but mesmerized by his physical presence.

  “Show no mercy to any of Haldane’s fighters,” Malosh said. “With bullet or blade or club, dispatch them straight to hell. But let the Sunspot folk who drop their weapons and surrender live. They can fight alongside us in the battle for Nuevaville.

  “The norms and the muties will follow my officers. As for those I have consigned to be cannon fodder, I would never ask another to do something I would not do myself. I will proudly lead the cannon fodder into battle.”

  The revelation drew an astonished gasp from the crowd.

  Even Ryan was taken aback by it.

  Leading a suicide squad was the last thing anyone would expect of a Deathlands baron. As a rule, barons delegated the really dangerous work to the highly expendable, easily replaceable and utterly despicable muties under their command. If barons rode into battle at all, they did so only after the conflict was well under control, to exercise their backhands by hacking off a few enemy heads, maybe emptying a few banana clips of 7.62 mm rounds into rows of bound captives.

  Around him, Ryan saw awe in the faces of the new Redbone conscripts, the wounded and the young and the old and the lame. The seasoned cannon fodder, those who had marched behind Malosh before and survived, sent up a raucous, jubilant cheer at the news. When the newcomers realized it wasn’t some kind of sick joke being played on them, they joined in the celebration.

  With a single, totally unexpected gesture, the Impaler had turned the tide of sentiment from dread and fear to something that approached real enthusiasm for the coming battle. He held them, not just the fodder, but the entire three hundred in his gloved fist.

  Malosh was no sham of a carny master, Ryan realized at that moment. He was something infinitely more dangerous.

  The coldheart bastard was a rad-blasted hero.

  “Nuking hell!” J.B. exclaimed in disbelief. “Most of the fodder don’t even have sticks to swing. What the fuck is he up to?”

  “He’s trying to convince Sunspot that the main attack is coming from the west, up the interstate,” Ryan said.

  “No better way to do that than to ride at the head of the force himself,” Mildred added. “He’s a little hard to miss in that outfit.”

  “And he said I had some balls,” Ryan said.

  “Don’t tell me this rah-rah stunt changes your opinion of the Impaler,” Mildred said.

  “A big set of balls doesn’t make him a sweetheart.”

  “Any more than it makes you one?”

  “Exactly.”

  MALOSH’S ARMY DIDN’T break camp as much as they walked off and abandoned it. They left behind everything that wasn’t vital to the battle—the tents, carts, mules and food supplies.

  The troop of cannon fodder limped after the masked baron and his chestnut steed, heading over the hill in the direction of the interstate. As the sacrificial ranks filed past, Ryan saw that the two Redbone swineherds, Bezoar and Young Crad, had been reunited. Not that it really mattered to him one way or another. Their fate was, well, their fate. It no longer had anything to do with his.

  From horseback the baron’s officers organized the procession of norms, muties and dogs. Norms moved to the front of the file, with the muties and their panting beasts bringing up the rear. Once they were in position, they began a deliberate, careful advance to the northwest, keeping to the hollows and saddles between the low hills as much as possible. The only light came from the stars, and it turned the desert into shades of gray spattered with pockets of impenetrable black.

  The long row of troops in the main column was easy to get lost in. There were at least 250 souls, not counting dogs. Ryan moved slowly enough so the other norms had to pass him. In this way, without drawing attention to himself, he gradually dropped back to the end of the norm ranks, along with Mildred and J.B.

  Figuring Ryan would do just that, Krysty and Jak advanced to the front of the muties until they were walking right behind their companions.

  “Doc never turned up,” Ryan said over his shoulder to Krysty.

  “But the droolie did,” J.B. said.

  “For Gaia’s sake, don’t tell me Doc got chilled up there,” the tall redhead said.

  “Truth is, we don’t know,” Ryan told her. “He could be dead already. Or he could have been captured by Haldane’s men. There’s no way of finding out before we attack the ville. Malosh isn’t going to let us wander off and search for him.”

  “We can’t desert Malosh’s army without making sure Doc is beyond our help,” Krysty said. “We just can’t.”

  “From the way the droolie tells it, Doc sacrificed himself to get the word back, so Malosh wouldn’t skewer us,” Mildred said. “So we’d have a chance to get away.”

  “That’s why we’re not going to leave him behind,” Krysty said.

  “He would never leave us like that,” Mildred agreed.

  At the sound of a snarling dog, Ryan looked over his shoulder. A swampie in a red stocking cap had moved within ten feet of them. He held the massive animal by a chain around its neck. Swampies were sour-faced by nature, but this one was extra unhappy.

  “That swampie looks like his dog just died,” Ryan said.

  “It did
,” Krysty said. “I blew its head off earlier. I didn’t want to, but he didn’t give me any choice. That’s Meconium, the boss swampie. I would’ve shot him, too, but I was outnumbered.”

  “Isn’t he the same bastard who shit his pants back in Redbone?” Ryan said.

  “I bust his nose good,” Jak said with pride.

  Ryan squinted to see. “Yeah, it’s kind of flattened and bent over to the left,” he said. “Can’t breathe a lick through it, I’ll bet.”

  “Doesn’t bother him. He’s a mouth breather,” Krysty said. “And he’s got himself a new dog.”

  And it was some dog.

  The beast was nearly as tall as Meconium. It had pointed ears and huge feet. Slobber swayed from its pendulous jowls as it glowered at Ryan, head lowered, chain biting deep into its thick neck.

  Ryan slipped between Krysty and Jak and spoke in hushed tones as they walked along.

  “We’re going to get split up once we reach the ville,” he said. “The norm unit is going over the berm first.”

  “What are we going to do?” Krysty said.

  “We don’t have any choice. We have to follow Malosh’s orders,” Ryan told her. “It’s the only way to get into Sunspot and locate Doc. If he’s there, we’ve got to find and free him as quickly as we can, while the battle is still under way. If he isn’t there, he’s got to be on the interstate, mebbe wounded, mebbe dead. Whether we find him nor not, we need to regroup once we’re inside the ville. We’ll meet close to the western gate. We can use the confusion to slip out and head down the interstate.”

  “If he’s in the belly of some mutie,” Mildred said, “we’re never going to find him.”

  “If we don’t find Doc on the road,” Ryan said, “we’ve got to face facts. He’s on the last train west.”

  “Get your mutie ass back here where it belongs,” growled a voice behind them.

  Ryan glanced back at a man in a baseball cap armed with a 12-gauge pump.

  “Belongs square on my hairy face,” Meconium said, waggling his tongue between bruised and split lips.

  Jak faked a move toward him and the swampie not only flinched but jumped backward behind the dog, which snarled in defense of its new master, showing long fangs, top and bottom. The animal started towing Meconium forward in the hope of taking a chunk out of Jak.

  Krysty looked at the head swampie, her hand resting on her pistol butt. “Better hold that pooch nice and tight this time. I think you remember what happens if you don’t.”

  “No more of that, rad-blast it!” the keeper of the muties said, swinging the shotgun’s muzzle around. “You shoot another dog, and I’m going to blow you clean in half. Move to the rear of the line, you two. Do it, now!”

  Krysty gave Ryan a wink, then she and the albino dropped back among the shuffling shadows and disappeared from sight.

  IT TOOK THE BETTER PART of three hours of steady walking to circle to the north of the gorge entrance. Looking up at that side of the ridge, Ryan could only see two bonfires burning. From Sunspot’s vantage point the column was invisible. Without a moon, there wasn’t enough light to pick out the formation’s approach.

  At the base of the ridge, the officers began dividing the norm fighters into three assault waves. Ryan leaned close to one of the officers and said, “Me and my two friends would like to be in the first bunch that hits the berm, as a matter of personal pride. Is that a problem?”

  The officer shook his head and whispered back, “We’re gonna tear Haldane’s bastards a new one this time.”

  Ryan waved for J.B. and Mildred to follow him to the head of the line. If they were the first ones over the breach, he figured they had the best chance of locating Doc before someone else shot or clubbed him to death.

  At the officer’s signal, Ryan, Mildred and J.B., and the rest of the first wave, began to climb single file up a kind of deer or goat trail that was no more than a foot wide. It zigzagged up a slope that varied between forty-five and sixty degrees. Half the time, they had to use both hands and feet to advance. There was no vegetation; it was bare rock. And they couldn’t see more than a few yards above them.

  The north side of the gorge was both the toughest route to attack and easiest route to defend. If Haldane’s soldiers got wind of what they were doing, they were dead meat. They had no cover but the side of the hill. If the enemy started firing down on them from along the edge of the ridge, they didn’t have a chance. And it was a long way to fall.

  Which was why Malosh was making such a show of coming up the gorge. The feint was designed to draw attention from the real spearhead of the attack until it was too late to do anything about it.

  When they neared the ridgetop, at the officer’s command they fanned out in a line that paralleled the berm. Lying flat on their stomachs, they slowly crawled closer to the lip of the cliff.

  Close enough for Ryan to hear the bonfire crackling and snapping. J.B. and Mildred could hear it, too. They were almost directly across from the gun emplacement.

  Ryan raised his head, just to the level of his good right eye, confident that his black hair and the black night would hide him. The weapon they faced was a predark heavy machine gun, .308 caliber, belt-fed. The M-60 was swivel mounted on the roof of a Chevrolet Suburban in front of a large hole that had been hacked in the sheet metal. Steel plate replaced the windshield and side windows. Its rear end wasn’t just backed up against the berm; it was buried by it. From the looks of the vehicle, no tires on the front rims, dozens of rust-ringed bullet holes in the fenders and grille, it hadn’t run in more than fifty years. Beside the emplacement a well-stoked fire roared from a fifty-five-gallon drum.

  Ryan counted two soldiers behind the gun, although there could have been more inside the SUV. There was seventy feet of open ground to cross before they reached the berm.

  When Ryan ducked back down, he gave J.B. and Mildred the info using hand signs. Two enemy. Then he signaled the letter M and Six-Oh. It was all they needed to know.

  The sky to the east was already starting to turn from ebony to lavender. False dawn was almost upon them.

  Ryan checked the SIG by feel, easing back the slide, reaching in with a fingertip, making sure he had a live round chambered.

  J.B. carefully snicked back the bolt of his Uzi, putting a 9 mm round under the firing pin.

  Mildred wiped the sweat from her palm on the tail of her T-shirt, then regripped her Czech wheel gun.

  On the other side of Mildred, Malosh’s officers knelt with a satchel charge and predark frag grens at the ready. Below them in the dark, the rest of the norm force and the muties and dogs crouched on the slope, waiting in considerable discomfort for the signal to charge the summit and break through the berm.

  Then the hard clatter of blasterfire erupted from the gorge side of the ville. As the firing continued, Ryan’s empty eye socket started to itch.

  The fight for Sunspot had begun.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “For nuke’s sake, don’t give the droolie that fucking thing!” Bezoar protested.

  Ferdinando, the one-armed leader of the cannon fodder, paused as he handed Young Crad a well-worn AK-47, steel shod butt first.

  “Don’t give him that blaster,” Bezoar said, “unless you’re looking to get shot in the ass yourself. He doesn’t know one end of a blaster from the other.”

  The young swineherd had never been offered a functional firearm before. For him, it was a coming of age moment. He eagerly grabbed hold of the rear stock and the curved magazine and tried to pull the AK to his bosom with main force.

  For a crippie, Ferdinando was triple quick. He snap-kicked Young Crad in the groin. When the stupe’s knees buckled in slow mo, he jerked the weapon out of his hands and passed it over to the ten-year-old boy standing next to him.

  Though the baron’s cannon fodder was meant to absorb lead not dish it out, they had to throw up some blasterfire or the Haldane force would realize their assault was a ruse. As Bezoar looked around, he saw weapons being pa
ssed out to some of the old, the young and the ambulatory infirm. Even though it was dark, he could see the rest of the AKs were battered old blasters, too. Not a speck of bluing was left on the barrels or the receivers; in the starlight, they reflected silver as if chrome-plated. Their front and rear stocks were missing or held together with metal plates and screws or with overlapping winds of duct tape. Fire selector levers were busted off in either single-shot or full-auto position.

  Scary ass guns.

  But then again, there was no reason to give decent weapons to the walking dead.

  Baron Malosh spurred his huge horse, and with a wave of his gloved hand, led them out of camp.

  The uplifting sense of power and pride the baron had instilled in Bezoar with the eve of battle/get your glory speech faded with every limping step. The elder swineherd knew they were going to die.

  And soon.

  Unlike the men, women and children marching behind him who were still bright-eyed and eager for the fight, he had a hard time seeing anything positive in drawing his final breath.

  “You shouldn’t have come back for me,” he told the baby-faced swineherd at his side. “You should’ve run off when you had the chance. Now instead of just me, we’re both gonna be dead.”

  “I was too scared to run,” Young Crad admitted. “I had nowhere to go. Are we really gonna die?”

  “Where do you think we’re going now? To a picnic breakfast? Hell, yes, we’re gonna die. We’re gonna all get shot to pieces.”

  The elder swineherd fell into the hypnotizing rhythm of the march. Step, limp, step, he leaned heavily on his willow fork crutch, thinking about the life he had lived. Bezoar was weighing days already long spent. Young Crad was too dimwitted to comprehend the need to make an accounting. And besides, every day had been pretty much the same for him since he was a baby. All pigs. All the time. Bezoar, comparatively speaking, had lived a rich, full life.

  In his thirty-eight years, he had had several common-law wives and had fathered many children. Once he had owned more than a hundred pigs, and he had paid others to take care of them. Then he lost everything, thanks to jolt. Wives. Family. Jack. Pigs. Youth. Mental stability. The only job his jolt-holed brain could handle was herding swine. Sometimes he could still taste the white crystalline powder, hot and bitter in the back of his throat, and he caught himself waiting with every muscle tensed, every nerve poised to receive the unholy, wipeout rush that never came. Bezoar’s life in retrospect was a cause for both regret and celebration. But mostly regret. And at the end of his allotment of hours and minutes, his only friend in the world was a triple-stupe droolie who smelled even worse than he did.