by James Axler
If he’d had a blaster, Bezoar would have gladly given it to them, just to shut them up.
Some of the sacrificial lambs continued to return fire from behind the larger chunks of concrete. Holding their weapons by the pistol grips, they reached high over their heads. Sticking the muzzles over the tops of blocks of the shattered roadway, they cut loose unaimed bursts in the general direction of the ridge.
Keeping Haldane’s forces honest.
Ferdinando scampered up and down the firing line, jumping from ditch to ditch and mound to mound, carefully doling out a limited supply of full magazines. It was plenty light enough for Haldane’s gunners to see the movement, and for them to track it. As the one-armed man hopped behind a tabletop of uptilted predark roadbed, slipping in beside the droolie already hiding there, concentrated machine-gun fire chewed the edges of the slab to dust. Blinded by flying concrete chips, the dimmie stumbled away from cover before Ferdinando could stop him. Caught in a 100-round, triple cross fire, he was literally blown apart.
It was hard for Bezoar to get his mind around the fact that what dropped to the ground—some here, some over there—had once been human.
Then the machine gun on the western gate stopped firing.
Cut off as if by a switch.
Control of the gorge, and of the access routes in and out of the ville depended on three fully operational blaster positions. One at each of the gates at either end. One in the middle. The gunpost on the eastern gate could only bring its sights to bear on the edge of Malosh’s attack force, which left the emplacement amidships on the berm with the job of pinning them down. A job it couldn’t handle. Without multiple lines of cross fire, it was impossible to contain the attacking force and to prevent them from taking the western gate.
Malosh swung back onto his horse. Spurring it, he rode at a gallop back the way they had come.
“We have them now!” he shouted at his fodder as his stallion leaped over their heads. “Come on!”
The ville’s middle M-60 tried to hit him. But it couldn’t.
Even with daylight fast upon them.
Even with a big, horse-and-rider target.
Despite himself, Bezoar was stirred by the sight of the black-masked Impaler fanned by hundreds of slugs but riding on unharmed.
Those with functioning blasters, those whose courage hadn’t been broken, jumped from cover and ran after him.
“The west gate is falling!” Ferdinando cried to the others. “Get your asses up. Get moving.”
No one obeyed. If anything, they all crouched lower.
The leader of the cannon fodder held an AK in his crippled hand. It wasn’t so crippled that he couldn’t pull a trigger. Ferdinando fired a short burst over the heads of the cowering conscriptees.
“Die here or die there,” he said. “Get the fuck up.”
Everyone who was still able roused him-or herself, crawling out of the puddles and trenches, slipping out from behind mounds of dirt. Young Crad helped Bezoar from the water, then retrieved his floating crutch.
The elder swineherd nearly fell on his face at the first step. His hip and knee joints had stiffened from the cold bath. And he was shivering so violently that he couldn’t speak. He leaned on Young Crad, who half carried him over the demolished ground. Bullets continued to whine past them, but they were more widely spaced and less effective.
As he hobbled along, Bezoar saw a child curled up in a narrow space under a slab of concrete. The boy couldn’t have been more than nine. He was alive. Their eyes met, but Bezoar said nothing. He looked away from the mirror of his own mortal fear. The boy wasn’t the only one hiding in the blown-up section of highway. Other young children concealed themselves in small dark places, hoping to turn invisible until the battle was done.
The going was faster once they reached the turnoff and the more or less intact roadway.
Ferdinando shouted at the ragged file not to bunch together, because they made easier targets that way.
Bezoar looked up at the ville. The pitched battle for Sunspot ground on and on. Blasterfire raged; grens exploded. He was certain that he was going to die this day. Beside him, Young Crad had a smile on his face, no doubt thinking that soon he was going to be with his piggie dear. Then he began to whistle in his irritating way.
The elder swineherd didn’t have the energy to tell the triple-stupe droolie to shut up.
Although heavy machine-gun fire still laced the air, none of the fodder bothered to duck their heads anymore. Ducking every few seconds didn’t do any good; it just slowed you down. By the time you ducked, the slugs were already either past you or through you.
The farther they got from the blown-up section of highway, the less effective the machine-gun fire from the middle of the berm became. The kill zone was way too wide for one blaster to saturate with bullets. The best it could do was harass.
Ahead of the ragged company, Baron Malosh raced across the four-lane road, his horse’s hooves striking sparks on the road metal. As the fodder followed, the machine gun got lucky. In the last few degrees of its firing arc, it managed to lay down a ten-ring hit.
The woman right in front of Bezoar staggered as the back of her head exploded in a puff of red. He and Young Crad were pelted by pieces of her skull with long strands of hair attached. The woman’s legs buckled under her, and she promptly sat down on the road. Her upper body bent at the waist, leaning forward until her chin lay on the ground. As he limped past, Bezoar could see what was left of her brains through the crater in her head. It looked like bloody soup in there.
When they reached the bottom of the path, the middle machine gun could no longer turn far enough to hit them.
There were scattered shouts of triumph as they advanced up the grade. They were celebrating the momentary lull in the hellstorm.
Above them on the path, Bezoar could see the black rider galloping full-speed toward Sunspot’s western gate. The Impaler had an AK-47 in either hand. Neither hand held the reins. Controlling the war horse with knee and boot pressure on its sides, Malosh rode straight for the double gates. The larger of the two was meant for wags. The side of a semitrailer blocked that opening. The foot-traffic gate consisted of a half-buried, yellow school bus.
The sight of their commander charging headlong into combat spurred on the fodder.
Even Bezoar’s spirits were lifted as he imagined the terror in the hearts of the Haldane troopers manning those gates. The berm perimeter had already been broken, which meant enemies were coming at them from behind. Now more attackers were coming from the front.
If the gate guards had had an escape plan before the attack, it was out the window now. And they knew that Malosh never took prisoners.
It was either hold off the fodder or die.
As the baron charged the berm, a pair of AK-47 sights poked out over the bus’s dashboard, through the glassless windshield, and opened fire on him.
Malosh dug his heels into the horse’s sides, making it suddenly veer to the right. He rode for the school bus and the two shooters.
From Bezoar’s point of view, it looked like a suicide run.
Certain death for animal and rider.
But because the baron was on horseback, and therefore elevated above the ground by at least ten feet, he could angle his fire over the end of the engine block. In truth, the school bus sentries had no more protection than he did. Malosh opened fire with both predark assault rifles. Controlling the muzzle climbs single-handed, he peppered the hood, fenders and grille with full-metal jacketed slugs. The rounds he sent through the open front windshield drove the sentries to their knees, forcing them to stop shooting back.
Malosh’s horse didn’t shy at the blasters going off over its head. It bore down on the gate at a full gallop.
Sensing their own impending doom, the two Haldane guards broke and ran, heading for the open rear doors of the bus.
Before they reached them, the baron closed the gap. As the stallion skidded to a stop in front of the bumper, he
emptied the AKs through the windshield, cutting down both men from behind.
While Bezoar and the fifty or so other survivors of the gorge hurried up the path to join him, Malosh dismounted and tethered his horse to the bus’s bumper. Taking fresh 30-round mags from his saddlebags, he reloaded the AKs, then packed his pockets with additional full clips.
Grens were going off inside the berm as the fodder reached the baron. Torrents of blasterfire poured from under the semitrailer. Most of it was aimed into not out of the berm.
A half dozen Haldane fighters scrambled out from under the wag gate, driven from the ville by Malosh shooters on the inside. Though they all held blasters, they didn’t try to use them. They couldn’t; they were out of ammo. Confronted by the baron and his too old, too young, too crippled fodder at the head of the path, they threw their guns down at once. They were the ones who looked scared now. Even though they were stronger, two-legged and two-armed.
Right off the bat, and without a direct order, some of the sponges cut loose with their battered assault rifles. Under the hail of bullets, three of the enemy were slammed, then pinned against the side of the berm, their bodies juddering from full-auto impacts.
“Save your bullets!” Ferdinando yelled at the shooters. “Use your blades and gun butts on the ones without blasters!”
It became a rather one-sided game of run down, beat down.
The fodder showed no mercy to their adversaries. No doubt some were thinking about friends who had been left on the ground in the gorge as they attacked the outnumbered troopers. Some were relishing the joy of dishing out punishment. They fell into a frenzy of mob chilling. Every one was caught up in the brutal tit-for-tat.
Young Crad swung up his massive forearm and clotheslined a running Haldane soldier.
Bezoar hopped in and started beating on the supine man with his crutch. The first blow broke the soldier’s nose. After that, the victim raised his arms to fend off the strikes.
Young Crad seized the man from behind. He grabbed this chin in one hand and the ball of his shoulder in the other, a neck-breaker hold.
With blood running down over his lips and chin, the trooper struggled to stay alive, fighting the thick wrists, shifting his weight, bucking back against his adversary.
The stalemate went on for a few seconds.
Then in a blur Young Crad’s powerful hands twisted and the man’s neck made a wet snapping sound. When he let go of the man’s jaw, his head lolled forward at an unnatural angle. Young Crad flung the chilled trooper aside.
At the top of the path, their fellow fodderites were chasing down and cornering the remaining escaping Haldane fighters. When they caught the men and knocked them off their feet, those without gunbutts or clubs used rocks and bootheels to finish the job.
The last of the troopers made a fight of it. He dashed around, ducking blows, punching, slashing with a razor-sharp sheath knife, doing everything he could to keep the attackers back.
When it was clear that the game was up, that he was about to overwhelmed and pounded to death, he took a running jump off the side of the ridge. His swan dive looked good for the first thirty feet or so, but it ended in an arm-waving, leg-kicking belly flop on the rocks another hundred feet below.
With Malosh in the lead, the cannon fodder scurried under the belly of the wag gate’s semitrailer, entering Sunspot.
When Bezoar stuck his head around one of the flattened front tires, his jaw dropped.
Sunspot was an even worse shit pile than Redbone. The only dwellings were a bunch of wrecked wags and trailers lined up in a pounded dirt field. It wasn’t a place worth dying for, but already more than a hundred people had done just that. There were bodies and parts of bodies strewed everywhere; and it was impossible to tell which side they had been on.
The fight wasn’t over.
Under the Impaler force’s onslaught, the remaining Haldane defenders were disappearing into the entrance of a predark concrete block building.
There to make their last stand.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Rustling sounds from just beyond the circle of Magus’s wags made Baron Haldane prick up his ears. He strained to precisely locate their source, but couldn’t. It was still too dark to see anything moving. He prayed that the noise was Bollinger returning from Sunspot with the full garrison on his heels. Then the sounds stopped. They weren’t like the footfalls of men, he decided. They were more like soft scrapings, scratchings, even hissings. Not from the wind shaking the chaparral. There was no wind. The night was deathly still. After a pause, the sounds started up on the opposite side of the circle.
Haldane’s sec man Cuzo pulled a rebuilt pair of predark infrared goggles down over his eyes and carefully scanned the surrounding darkness. “Whatever the hell it is,” he said, “it sure ain’t Bollinger. I can’t see nothing out there. Not a rad-blasted thing.”
“Something’s sneaking around, though,” said Bertram, another of Haldane’s seven remaining sec men. “Mebbe it’s rattlesnakes.”
“There’d have to be an army of them to make that much noise,” Haldane said.
“And they’d be crawling through the camp for sure, looking for heat or meat,” Cuzo added.
“Where the hell is Bollinger?” Bertram said. “The bastard should’ve been back here four hours ago.”
That wasn’t news to Baron Haldane.
He was well aware of the round-trip time to Sunspot.
As the interminable, awful night had worn on and Bollinger had failed to show up with the garrison’s troops, he had grown more and more concerned. There had been no sounds of blasterfire though, which meant that Malosh’s army hadn’t intercepted Bollinger and the others on their way to the ville. If they had been attacked en route, they would have gotten off at least a few shots. If they had been attacked on the way back, more than a few shots would have been exchanged.
It was just starting to get light when the first crackle of heavy blasterfire echoed down from Sunspot ridge.
“Dammit to hell!” Haldane swore. He recognized his own M-60s opening up. If his garrison had already been evacuated, Malosh would have taken the ville without a struggle. Bollinger and the others hadn’t made it there, and they weren’t going to make it back.
“Our guys are in for it,” Cuzo said.
“Mebbe they can hold them off,” Bertram said.
They listened in silence to the multiple machine-gun fire in the distance. It rattled nonstop. If there was answering fire, it was lost in the torrent coming from the ville.
“Our gun posts are pouring fire into the gorge,” Cuzo said. “Old Malosh is getting the shit kicked out of him.”
After a few minutes of one-sided combat, they saw a signal flare burst high over the ville. The red star slowly floated down and disappeared behind the berm walls.
“Shit,” Bertram snarled.
“Baron Malosh has got something nasty up his sleeve, you can bet on that,” Cuzo said.
Soft booms rolled down from the high ground, followed by additional overlays of machine-gun chatter.
“The gorge assault was a feint,” Haldane said. “The main attack is coming from the north.”
Then a bright flash bloomed in the sky above the ridge, backlighting the berm before winking out. A second later they heard the thunderclap of a much bigger explosion.
“The bastards just blew the berm,” Cuzo said. “There’s nothing stopping them now. It’s gonna be a bloodbath.”
“We should be up there with our people, dammit,” one of the other sec men said.
Haldane looked over his shoulder at the shadowy Lyagushka artillery piece. It stood ready in the middle of the circle of wags, waiting for the warm-up act to end and the main event to commence. Magus’s gunner had done his preliminary calculations the previous evening. He’d determined the distance to target and the necessary powder charge. He’d tilted the barrel up for a high arc lob that would drop the warheads over the wall and into Sunspot’s midst. The Lyagushka was alr
eady loaded with a D-462 smoke round. More D-462 rounds and propellant charges were stacked on the left side of the gun; the chem projectiles were separately stacked on the right. To mark the impact of the smoke rounds, and pinpoint the target for the sarin projectiles, the gunner had to wait until full daylight, which was only ten minutes or so away.
The baron realized that probably he would never learn what had gone wrong the previous night. Bottom line, one way or another, was that his entire garrison was going to die. Which meant that Haldane wouldn’t have enough men to overwhelm Magus’s road trash and rescue Thorne.
It was the worst of all possible outcomes.
Haldane felt a crushing sadness. He knew his soldiers in Sunspot would fight to the death. They could expect no mercy from Baron Malosh. Haldane had failed them. He had failed their families. He should have pulled the garrison out earlier.
Victory, if and when it came, was going to be hollow.
And it was going to taste of ashes.
At that moment it occurred to him that Magus, himself, might have had something to do with Bollinger’s failure to safely reach Sunspot. Steel Eyes could have easily sent a few his own men out to waylay and chill the warning team. By making sure the garrison didn’t escape the ville, Magus could extract the most suffering and pain from the circumstances under his control. By playing his cards right, he could get rid of Malosh and Haldane, and most of their standing armies in one fell swoop. He wouldn’t need to use chem weapons against Nuevaville, then. He could lurch in and take over the entire barony, or loot it and burn it to the ground.
“Are you okay, Baron?” Bertram asked with concern. “Because you don’t look okay.”
“We’re in a bad spot,” he said.
“You can’t blame yourself for what’s happening up in Sunspot,” Cuzo said. “You tried your best to get our troops out. It was up to Bollinger and he blew the mission.”
“Our guys might still turn Malosh back,” Bertram said. “Drive him out of the ville.”
