by James Axler
That was most doubtful, Haldane knew.
“And if they don’t,” Cuzo said, “there’s nothing you could have done about it. Malosh still would’ve broken through the berm. You know he’s going to chill all our people. He never leaves survivors.”
Like Haldane, the sec men were heartsick over losing their comrades. But there was more tough news.
“I’m not going to give up my son to Magus,” the baron told them. “I’ve got to save him. Without reinforcements from the ville that’s going to be a lot harder.”
Cuzo and Bertram and the other five sec men exchanged grim looks. They knew they were going to have a lopsided fight on their hands. That didn’t deter them, though. They were seasoned, dedicated fighters, long in the service of their elected leader.
“We’ll do whatever you tell us, Baron,” Cuzo said.
“No way are we gonna let that clanking bag of bolts hurt your boy,” Bertram promised.
“I know you won’t,” Haldane said. “I’d better go check on Thorne.”
He turned away from his sec men and walked along the perimeter of the circled wags. A 150 feet farther on, next to the landship, a high-backed captain’s chair had been set out on the desert hardpan, facing the battle that raged on the ridge.
It was plenty light enough to see what was sitting in it.
And what it was was more silver than pink, more metal than flesh.
As the baron approached Magus’s throne chair, a pair of road trash stepped forward, blocking his path and taking aim at his chest with their spanking-new H&K machine pistols.
“No, no, it’s all right,” Magus told them. “I have nothing to fear from Baron Haldane. Do I?”
The question was addressed to Haldane. If he said, “No,” it was an admission of defeat. He chose not to answer it.
“From the fireworks up there, it looks like Malosh is getting the upper hand,” Magus said. “Little does he know that it will be his final victory. Everything is working out exactly as planned.”
Haldane wondered what Steel Eyes’ plan really was, and how he fit into it. Eventually he would find out. With luck, before it was too late.
“You’re getting a bargain, I hope you know,” Magus said. “This is all working out so perfectly I should have charged you more for my services. Mebbe triple. But a deal is a deal.”
“What are you getting out of this?” Haldane demanded. “You don’t need the jack.”
“Everyone is measured in this life by their deeds.”
“Your deeds are already well-known throughout Deathlands.”
“That’s true enough. Then let’s say I possess a certain technology and an overwhelming desire to see it put into action. What good is the power to destroy if it is never exercised? Empty threats do not accomplish anything. Resolve must be shown. Besides, I feel morally compelled to help my friends and punish my enemies.”
In any other situation, Haldane would’ve laughed out loud. Magus defined his “friends” by their ability to outbid his “enemies.”
“I hope you are not starting to regret the bargain we’ve made,” Magus said. “It is a great pity that your troops didn’t make it out before Malosh arrived. But there is no turning back now.”
Steel Eyes had no conception of pity. And coming from that hideous mouth, the word had an obscene ring to it.
“Like you said,” Haldane replied, “the deal is done. No turning back. Now I’m going to see how my son is doing, if you don’t mind.”
“Why would I mind? Remember, don’t cross the line. If you do, you know what will happen.” Magus showed the baron his right hand. Clutched in the half-human fingers was a dark object the shape of a playing card, but about a quarter-inch thick.
The remote detonator.
Visible in the early morning light, out on the flatland mebbe eighty yards from the captain’s chair was a beige box with a handle on top.
At least Thorne wasn’t locked up somewhere inside the landship, Haldane told himself as he set off across the dry earth. But it was small comfort. There were no doors, no locks between the boy and rescue; but there was a small electronic device and a wad of gray plastic explosive.
When he got closer to the beige box, he could see a curved line scratched in the dirt. On Magus’s orders a crude, twenty-foot-diameter circle had been drawn around the pet carrier. Inside the perimeter was noman’s land. If he stepped onto it, Magus would detonate the explosive, perhaps chilling both father and son, most certainly chilling son. The booby-trapped cage was far enough from the camp so the blast wouldn’t injure Magus, his wags or his men.
The baron rounded the curve of the circle until he faced the metal-barred door. He couldn’t see inside the cramped box.
“Thorne? Son?” he said.
“Dad?”
“I’m here.”
“I’m cold, Dad.”
Haldane heard the scratching sounds behind him. Before he could turn his head, he caught something moving out of the corner of his eye. He pivoted and swung up the Remington 1100, but whatever it was was already gone, vanished over a hummock in the sand like a shadow cast by a scudding cloud. He had the impression of a blackish body. Mebbe two feet long. Something scooting along close to the ground.
His son couldn’t have seen it from the cage. Mebbe he hadn’t, either, Haldane thought. Mebbe he had imagined it.
“Everything’s going to be all right, Thorne,” he said. “You’ve got to stay strong a little longer.”
“What’s the shooting for?”
“It’s a long way off. It’ll be over soon.”
“Will I get out of here then?”
“Yes, son. Then we’ll go back home to Nuevaville.”
“I’m scared, Dad.”
“I won’t let anything happen to you.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
Haldane hunkered down on one knee, staring at the cage, forcing himself to swallow his fury. So far, he hadn’t been able to protect his only son, to keep him from being humiliated and terrified. Magus was capable of much worse, he knew. The lives of others meant absolutely nothing to him. Human beings were playthings to be toyed with and squashed. They were his spare-parts repositories. The baron had fooled himself into thinking that he could outwit Magus. He had fooled himself into thinking that his barony’s desperate situation required that he surrender his own hard-earned sense of right and wrong. A series of unfortunate, perhaps even tragic, rationalizations on his part had led directly to this catastrophe.
If Haldane felt guilt over the deaths of his brave men and the risk to his innocent son, he had few qualms over the fate of the residents of Sunspot. As a group the ville folk had always been trouble to him. Always difficult to deal with. No matter what Malosh and his army had done to them during occupation, they had refused to see Haldane and his troopers as their liberators. They had chilled his men whenever they could. They had withheld food. They had stolen gear, weapons, ammo. And they had lied about all of the above. Now they were about to be wiped off the face of the earth. If the people of Sunspot had been better subjects, more loyal to him, more honest, his feelings toward them might have been different. But as things stood, he saw their extermination as good riddance.
Behind him, another machine gun dropped out of the conflict. Two guns crackled instead of four. There was no doubt about it, Haldane’s forces were losing the battle. Magus planned wait until the shooting stopped before he launched the gas attack. By that time, every member of the garrison would have been chilled.
It never occurred to the baron to call off the sarin bombardment. For one thing, he knew Magus wouldn’t have honored such a request. For another, if he had done so, his troops would have died in vain. And the Malosh problem would have still existed.
Everything that the baron held dear lay in the hands of Magus. The future of his son. The future of his people.
And Magus couldn’t be trusted.
Haldane had a plan, but it was born of desperation.
As soon as the gas rounds were away, Magus had to die.
Haldane had already decided that he would do the honors on Steel Eyes, personally, while his sec men held off the road trash. Before Magus could detonate the plastic explosive, he’d blow the titanium hip and shoulder joints apart with his 12-gauge shotgun, turning the half man, half machine into a quadraplegic. Then he’d drive a wag back and forth over the head until the body stopped thrashing.
Chapter Twenty-Four
As Ryan and Mildred charged the side of the wag gate trailer, they fired at the defenders crouching behind the wheels and bellying down beneath the undercarriage. Bullets from the SIG and the ZKR sprayed across the double front wheels, blowing out the tires. As they flattened, that end of trailer dropped violently onto its rims.
No way could they stop to take more careful aim.
Answering starburst muzzle-flashes winked at them from the deep shade and the solid cover of the trailer’s steel wheels. Slugs freight-trained past their ears and kicked up the dirt in front of them. They were taking heavy fire from autorifles positioned at the corners of the Welcome Center, as well.
But they didn’t change course, and they didn’t slow down.
That would have been suicide.
The chaos of battle swirled around them like a touched-down tornado. People and dogs running in all directions. Blasterfire rattling on every side. Grens popping off, shooting out clouds of boiling smoke. In the blur of surrounding movement it was impossible to tell friend from foe. There were a hundred simultaneous threats. Ryan and Mildred had on their battle blinders, which reduced the world to a finite goal in tight focus. There was cover and safety under the trailer, if they could drive out the current occupants. With everything they had, they went for it.
Two of the wag gate’s defenders broke under the pressure. They squirted out from under the front of the trailer and sprinted along the berm in the direction of the Welcome Center.
Ryan and Mildred let them go. They were no longer an immediate threat. And there were still Haldane fighters shooting from under the semi.
With his fedora jammed way down on his head and a wild look in his spectacle-magnified eyes, J.B. came at the trailer from the rear. Having emptied his Uzi, he switched to the M-4000 on the run and fired from the hip. The pump gun bucked hard in his hands. He cycled out the empty hull, and fired again. Cycled and fired. Cycled and fired. His shot patterns spread wide under the trailer, raising clouds of dust. The Haldane fighters hiding behind the wheels to avoid Mildred’s and Ryan’s blasterfire couldn’t hide from his volleys of Number Two pellets.
Shrieking with pain, the troopers stopped shooting.
The clatter of their blasters was replaced by concentrated autofire at the foot gate fifty feet farther on. Bullets from outside the berm skipped through the yellow wag’s open rear doors and plowed into the ground. In hail of lead, a pair of bodies fell halfway out of the school bus, headfirst, arms hanging down, blood pouring from open mouths.
Ryan skidded to a stop beside the trailer’s wheel. Ducking, he peered around the ruined tires. Over the sights of the SIG, he saw the last of the wag guards sprinting away from the trailer and down the path that led to the Interstate.
In their haste, the wag gate troopers had left empty assault rifles and spent mags on the ground. They had also left their blood.
J.B. scrambled under the trailer’s rear bumper, crawling on all fours, keeping his head low to keep from bumping it on the undercarriage.
Mildred scooted in behind Ryan as he moved to the path side of the trailer. One look told him that Malosh had brought the cannon fodder into play.
“Bastards ran,” Mildred said, puffing hard as she reloaded her Czech wheel gun.
“Not far enough,” Ryan said. He replaced the mag in his SIG.
Blasterfire chattered outside the berm. It continued until someone shouted to call it off.
Ryan couldn’t see who had been shot, but he could guess.
Then the rest of the wag guards dashed into view, chased by a howling mob. Haldane’s men tried to fight back, tried to run, but for once the oldies and the crippies had the advantage. For once they had hold of the clean end of the stick. The defenders could still move faster than they could, but they had no place to go. The mob closed in with cudgels, rocks and boot heels. Haldane’s troopers disappeared in mass of moving bodies, bobbing heads and stomping feet.
Ryan and Mildred advanced to the front of the trailer while J.B. finished reloading his weapons.
On the one-eyed man’s signal they moved out from under the gate, running along the inside of the berm, to the protection of the back end of the school bus.
Bullets from the Welcome Center slammed the opposite side of the bus and sparked off the berm’s rocks. The dead arms drooping from the bus’s rear opening shuddered as bullets thumped and gnawed the bodies inside.
It was the only direction fire was coming from.
The machine guns had stopped shooting, presumably because the remaining gun posts at the center and east end of berm had been abandoned. The survivors of Haldane’s force had pulled back, retreating to make their stand inside the most solid structure in the ville.
The cannon fodder spilled out from under the wag gate, red-faced and triumphant from their stomp fest. Behind the first wave, a tall figure in black appeared. Baron Malosh held an AK-47 in either hand. At his command, the bullet sponges crossed the stretch of open ground, limping and hopping for the first row of Sunspot’s shelters. Slugs from the corners of the Welcome Center chopped down the fodder on either side of the baron. Sawed by blasterfire, the droolies and cripples were spun down hard to their knees, or hurled aside. The Impaler reached cover untouched by lead. Not all of his companions were so lucky. Easily one-third of the expendable had been expended. They lay facedown in the dirt behind him.
Ryan scanned the battlefield. Some of the hellhounds were running loose, in three-or four-dog packs. Others were dead, either shot or blown apart by gren blasts. There were wounded ones, too. Along the edge of the ville garden a dog with a broken spine pulled itself along with its front legs; its back legs dragged uselessly behind. Malosh’s norm fighters had moved around the other side of the ville, along edge of berm, coming at the Welcome Center through the rows of makeshift shelters. Swampies waited with them at the edge of the shacks. No ville folk were visible. Ryan figured they were hiding in their shacks, trying to keep from being chilled in a cross fire.
The Impaler and his men led the attack in two prongs, a pincer movement closing in on Welcome Center, raining twin streams of small-arms fire on the building.
Haldane fighters shot back from behind the garden’s concrete compost bins, trying to protect the retreat of their comrades.
Grens arced through the air, lobbed from behind an immobile Winnebago into the middle of the garden. They thunderclapped, sending shrap, soil and greenery flying in all directions. When the Comp B smoke cleared, the rings of leveled foliage revealed corpses sprawled facedown between the rows. Some were torn apart. Either before the fact by dogs or by the string of gren explosions.
Following up on the frag grens, Malosh and his fighters poured concentrated fire on the Welcome Center, chipping out chunks of the concrete blocks and the planters out front, driving the defenders back behind their shooting positions.
With no cover between the bus and the center’s entryway, Ryan, Mildred and J.B. couldn’t advance on the target. They held their fire and watched the battle unfold.
Backed by the full-auto assault, Malosh’s norms rushed for a corner of the garden, firing as they went. Haldane’s men abandoned the compost bins, pulling back to the concrete planters.
The attackers pressed on, dashing through the garden rows to the just vacated compost bins. From that position, the Impaler’s men started chucking more grens, blind tossing them over the roof and corner of the Welcome Center. The first couple bounced on the concrete path and rolled away toward the berm, exploding with solid whacks
but without consequence.
The third gren landed smack in the middle of one of the long concrete planters. The four fighters hiding behind it turned to run for the protection of the Welcome Center entryway. The gren blew up before they got there. The rocking explosion lifted and slammed three of them against the concrete block wall. The fourth man was bowled over from behind by a yard-long chunk of flying concrete.
The deadly blast triggered the defenders’ final retreat. As the last of Haldane’s soldiers disappeared inside the doorway, Malosh and his combined forces charged the building, shouting and hollering.
Ryan searched the rampaging mob for Krysty and Jak. In vain. There was no sign of Doc, either.
AS KRYSTY AND JAK USHERED the boys down the lane, screams from behind made them turn to look over their shoulders.
Two swampie females were kneeling in the road beside the corpse of Meconium, grieving their head mutie’s loss with balled fists and shrieks of outrage.
Mebbe Meconium had been their father, Krysty thought. Or their brother. Or the father of their children.
Or all of the above.
The thing about swampies, they stuck together. Inside and outside of the bedroom, which was one reason why Malosh hadn’t given them blasters. The cussed little bastards were likely to turn them on the first non-swampie they came across.
When Krysty saw the females whip a pair of found AK-47s out from under the folds of their loose-waisted, ground-dragging skirts, she had no doubt who they were intending to shoot.
The other thing about swampies was that they lived for revenge.
“Gonna get you for what you done to him, Snowball!” one of the females cried as she clumsily shouldered the predark assault rifle.
The second she pulled the trigger it became obvious that she hadn’t been trained in the art of firing a full-auto blaster. The furious, staccato kick of the predark rifle clearly took her by surprise, and as the muzzle climbed higher and higher with every discharging round, despite the considerable moorings of her big feet and her massive behind, she went down on her butt, firing straight up in the air.
