As they advanced, Doc noticed the cultivated fields behind the Welcome Center. On closer inspection, he saw they were just truck gardens. The crops were far too small to support the number of people milling about in the enclosure.
Doc could easily pick the sec men from the rest of Sunspot’s inhabitants. They were armed; the ville folk weren’t. To come up with a force-strength figure for Malosh, he was going to have to count blasters.
He was up to eleven when a group of unarmed people confronted him. The women outnumbered the men by three to one.
“What’s your business here, mister?” demanded a tall, blond-haired woman.
“I have no business, as such,” Doc said, struck by the unusual color of her eyes, which were pale violet. “I’m just traveling with my friend, here. We’re looking for a safe place to spend the night.”
“Your friend could use a wash,” the woman said, crinkling up her nose. She had tiny wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, and there were a few strands of white mixed in with her yellow hair.
“He could use several,” Doc said.
“You still have your blaster,” she said. “Are you a Haldane man?”
Doc admired the resolve in her face, her wide mouth and firm chin. She was truly a handsome woman. “I’m nobody’s man,” he told her. “The guards at the gate found my sidearm less than terrifying. That’s why they didn’t take it from me, I imagine.”
“It does look like it might blow up in your hand.”
“Looks can be deceiving.”
“So they can. Are you harmless?”
Doc smiled, displaying his remarkably excellent teeth. “When called upon to be.”
“Are you a spy for Malosh the Impaler?”
“I am no one’s spy,” Doc lied. “Why do you persist in questioning my allegiance?”
“Because,” the woman said, “you are either with us or you’re against us. Either aligned with one or the other baron, or with the people of this ville. We have learned there’s no difference between our occupiers. One is just as bad as the other.”
“But surely Malosh has a reputation…”
“Deserved, no doubt,” she said. “But he doesn’t torture or abuse us. He doesn’t dare. When he has control of Sunspot, he depends on our labor, our food and our water. Whether it’s Malosh or Haldane in charge, it doesn’t matter to us. Both barons rob us, and the sec men of both chill us every time they attack.”
“Why do you stay here, then?” Doc said.
“It’s our home. We don’t have anywhere else to go. But even if we wanted to leave, we couldn’t. Malosh and Haldane would never let us. They need us here to farm, to maintain the ville. If we were gone, they’d have to move their own people into the chill zone and risk their lives. Neither baron is willing to do that because their populations are too small to be stretched that far. If we were gone, the armies would have to carry enough supplies to last them through their campaigns. And without long convoys of wags and overstocked storehouses, that just isn’t possible.”
“You are caught in a terrible dilemma,” Doc said.
“Our community is slowly dying under the weight of it,” she said. “When our members get chilled, they can’t be replaced. As you can see, most of our menfolk are gone.”
It occurred to Doc that no one else had spoken a word. The others had all deferred to this lovely woman. She was in fact the leader of the tragic little hamlet.
“I have jack,” Doc told her. “May I purchase some food and drink, and acquire lodgings for the night?”
“Jack’s no good here anymore,” she said. “We’ve got nothing left to sell. Water’s free. The only thing nukeday ever did for us was to open up the sweet springs over behind the Welcome Center. You can’t buy food here, but you can come along with us and catch your own dinner if you like.”
“Much obliged, madam.”
“Call me Isabel.”
“I am Theophilus Tanner. Please call me Doc for short. And this is Young Crad.”
Isabel sized up the hulking, odoriferous man. Her evaluation only took a few seconds, but evidently included an IQ test. “If the dimmie’s hungry, bring him along, too,” she said.
Baron Haldane’s kidneys ached, his butt ached, his neck ached. For the better part of two-and-a-half days, he had been a pebble trapped inside the constantly shaken tin can that was Magus’s Humvee. The military SUV lurched and bucked, breaking its own trail across the hardpan, throwing its occupants this way and that, slamming them against the doors, the full length, central console, the head liner, compressing their spines as the seat springs bottomed out over and over again.
With the artillery piece in tow, Magus’s convoy had virtually crept along. The first day they covered fewer than forty miles. This from ten hours of running time and eight hours of breakdowns, backtracking and retrieving stuck wags from potholes. Once they crossed the predark interstate and headed due south, the going got even slower.
In Haldane’s opinion, traveling on horseback or even on foot would have been preferable; they could have dragged the gun carriage behind a mule team and made more speed. But the baron had no say in the matter.
To avoid being spotted by Malosh’s army, the convoy had made a wide detour to the south of Sunspot. Their snail’s pace kept the dust clouds to a minimum. There was no way to keep out of sight of the ville because it stood on a prominent high point, the gorge rim, and had a panoramic view.
Haldane was on the wrong side of the Humvee to check on their progress. With all the jolting he couldn’t have focused on the horizon even if he could have seen it. Except for the front windshield, the windows were coated with fine, beige dust.
One thing was certain—when the convoy could see the gorge rim ville, the gorge rim ville could see them. There was no cover for the big wags among the low hills and broad stretches of flatland. The baron knew his hilltop garrison would do nothing but watch them creep by. A group of wags as large and well-armed as this one could defend itself against anything but an all-out attack. Because of the distance involved, engaging the convoy would mean leaving Sunspot unprotected for an extended period of time. His men would follow orders, stand their ground and wait.
There was another reason for the detour, as Magus’s chief gunner had explained. The prevailing winds swept through the narrow gorge from the west. To prevent the deadly gas from blowing back on the artillery position, a healthy tail or crosswind was absolutely necessary. Something a southerly approach provided.
By nightfall, if all went well, the weapon would be in firing position, seven or eight miles from the target. The sarin gas barrage would commence the next day, after Haldane’s garrison had been withdrawn and Malosh’s army had reoccupied the ville. Shelling Sunspot with gas while the masked baron and his raiders were caught inside its berm would end the threat from the west for the foreseeable future.
But at what price?
Haldane had entered into the deal with deep moral misgivings. To protect his people and their offspring, he had sold his soul to the devil.
And in the process placed his own beloved child in the devil’s half-steel hands.
Could he trust Magus to let his son go once the murderous deed was done and the jack was duly paid?
It was a question he couldn’t answer without help. And help was forthcoming.
The ponytailed driver caught his eye and noted his dour expression in the rearview mirror. “Did you really think you could do business with Magus and not come out holding the shit bag?” he said. “Baron, you are a major disappointment.”
“What would Magus want with my son?” Haldane said. “He doesn’t need a guarantee of payment other than my given word. Everyone knows I’ve never robbed a living soul.”
“Mebbe that’s Steel Eyes’ game,” said the shotgun seat passenger. “You being such a straight-shooting, noble fucking bastard, mebbe he wants to knock you down a peg or two.”
“You think you’re so much better than us,” the driver said, “but you’re not. You’re paying Magus to poison gas an entire ville. Haldane, you’re a mass-chilling, coldheart son of a bitch.”
“To me, the kid looked too old and too young to interest Magus,” the man sitting next to the baron said, showing off his verdant teeth.
“What do you mean?” Haldane demanded.
“Magus likes his young ’uns fresh from their mamas’ bellies, or big enough so he can use their organs for transplant. Like I said, your boy’s too old and too young.”
“What does he do with the newborns?”
“Makes milkshakes out of them,” Mossy Teeth said.
Haldane’s hands clenched into white-knuckled fists. “Nukin’ hell, you say!” he snarled.
“Hey, easy, now,” the driver said. “Don’t blow a gasket. He’s just messin’ with your head a little, Baron.”
“Yeah, actually Magus makes spaghetti sauce.”
The Humvee crew guffawed over the vile joke while Haldane seethed in impotent silence.
“I’m sure he’s showing your kid all sorts of interesting things right now,” the road trash in the shotgun seat went on, shrilling every “s” like a steam whistle. “Good old Uncle Steel Eyes and his Rolling Shop of Horrors. Poor kid’ll never be right in the noodle again.”
“He’ll be pooping in his drawers for the rest of his life,” the man with the mossy teeth stated.
“If he hurts Thorne,” Haldane said, “he knows I’ll chill him. I’ll chill him dead.”
“Don’t think that ain’t been tried, Baron,” the driver told him. “Magus’s been shot, stabbed, some big-time heavy shit’s been dropped square on top of him, and he’s still ticking, still kicking. One time he even got himself blown up. Lost a little meat from the blast, but the metal parts held everything together and he pulled himself right out of the crater. Still got a bit of a tranny leak from that one.”
“Magus ain’t afraid of anyone or anything,” said the whistler. “He does what he wants to whoever he wants.”
“I once saw him crush a gun barrel with his bare hand,” Mossy Teeth said. “A 7.62 mm AK. Mashed the sucker flat. Some folks say he started out life flesh and blood like you and me, but now he’s made himself all nuke-powered and bionic. If you ask me, Steel Eyes never was human. He started out as a machine, not the other way around. Whitecoats put him together before the nukecaust. They all got fried on the big day, but he survived. Over a whole lot of years, he added human bits and pieces to himself because they were easier to come by as spare parts. He’s always tinkering with his innards, trying to make them work better. He tinkers with the world the same way, ripping stuff out, jamming new stuff in to see what happens. I swear the clanker thinks he’s God. And who knows, mebbe he is.”
“Ugliest god you ever saw,” the driver added.
“Meanest, too,” the shotgun passenger whistled.
“See,” Mossy Teeth went on, “it’s just like I said. He wasn’t born with a regular heart. He don’t feel things the way regular people do. He was assembled with a rad-blasted pneumatic pump in his chest. Sounds like a bag of cheap alarm clocks. Deep in his soul, he’s a machine, but a real curious one. Baron, you shouldn’t have let Magus take your kid.”
“I didn’t ‘let’ him do anything,” Haldane reminded the man, barely able to control his anger. He shifted the sawed-off Remington on his lap, pointing its muzzle across the console, at Mossy Teeth’s rib cage. Slipping his finger inside the trigger guard, he took a firm hold of the pistol grip, clamping the forestock against the top of his thigh. The weapon was already cocked. A high brass buckshot round was in the chamber.
“Get your mind around this little fact, Baron,” the driver said, a big grin plastered across his mug. “Now he’s got your boy, he’s never going to give him back.”
The baron realized that it was possible the road trash were just jerking his chain again, trying to get a rise out of him, seeing if they could make him fall to pieces, but the stupe louts had opened a gigantic can of worms. Essentially, they were telling him if he played it straight, as he had intended, he was going to get double-crossed.
In that case there was no point in playing it straight.
A dangerous conclusion to come to.
At the edge of Sunspot’s truck gardens was a banked wood fire, on top of which the ville folk set water-filled caldrons made from fifty-five-gallon drums. Wreathed in the pungent smoke, women and children stooped between the garden’s rows and began carefully harvesting very small piles of new potatoes, greens, carrots and onions.
“Given the quantity of liquid,” Doc said, “those are the makings of a rather thin and unsatisfying stew.”
“We’re going to do something about that,” Isabel said.
She led Doc, Young Crad and a dozen others to the back bumper of the school bus. The eight ville women were armed with pitchforks or long wooden clubs. The two pairs of men carried empty, lidded, sheet steel garbage cans by their handles.
As they passed through the stripped school bus and out the front door, the no-shirt sentry said, “Good hunting.”
Stepping down from the bus, Doc remarked, “I take it that the occupiers don’t help with the foraging?”
“The troopers can’t leave their posts,” Isabel said. “Baron Haldane’s orders. It’s down to us to feed everybody inside the berm.”
“How come you got no pigs in the ville?” Young Crad asked her.
Doc knew the droolie was thinking about something less wholesome than garlic-smothered pork chops. He gave the swineherd a swift, hard jab with his elbow to shut him up.
“They’re all gone,” Isabel admitted. “The last of the hogs went three weeks ago.”
“The invaders appropriated them, I presume?” Doc said.
“No,” the head woman said. “And unfortunately we didn’t get to eat them, either.”
“What happened, then?”
“You look like a man of imagination, Doc. A man who enjoys unraveling a mystery…”
“Yes, I will admit to that.”
“Well, here’s a little mystery for you to play with. Trust me, the answer will be apparent soon enough. In the meantime, feel free to puzzle it out, yourself.”
When she walked ahead of him down the path to the interstate, Doc found his gaze immediately dropping to take in her backside. It was the instinctive, hardwired reaction of a human heterosexual male, an automatic response that even a quarter millennium span of existence couldn’t extinguish. To Doc’s credit, he refrained from openly leering at her charms. He only glanced long enough to appreciate the shapeliness of her bottom outlined against the well-worn seat of her BDU pants. Tight, muscular but unmistakably and heartrendingly feminine.
Ever the chivalrous gentleman, Doc Tanner turned his head, forcing himself to stare at the bleak horizon. The woman stirred him in a most pleasant and unusual way; that was undeniable. Not just her mature physical beauty, which was a rare enough thing in a land where tragedy, hardship and the elements sent men and women reeling into premature old age. It also turned them into burned-out emotional wrecks long before they reached thirty. Isabel still had her serenity, and a vital spark. A bright, wonderful spark.
Lost in the warmth of its afterglow, for a few remarkable seconds Doc was able to forget everything.
His past.
His mission.
In a single file, the ragtag food gatherers descended from the mouth of the gorge onto the shoulder of the ruined highway. After traveling a short distance down the grade, they crossed the interstate and started to trek south, over the arid hills and the barren plain.
Doc surveyed the terrain that stretched in front of them. He saw nothing remotely green. It was a moonscape of beige on beige. Of sand and sandstone. For many years Doc and his companions had been on what amounted to a permanent scavenger hunt, themselves. Experience was a cruel teacher. In this sort of sun-blasted geography the best that could be hoped for was to stumble onto a nest of mutie rattlesnakes sleeping in a deep, cool, rock cairn. Or if there was an oasis hidden somewhere ahead, it might be possible to set up an ambush, waiting for birds or antelope to come to drink—although how pitchforks and clubs could help bring down either was beyond him. Perhaps the ville folk already had nets stashed away at the site?
Doc voiced his growing doubts to the lovely Isabel. “There appears to be nothing alive here,” he said. “No plants. No animals. No source of water in this direction.”
“As you said before, looks can be deceiving,” she told him.
“Frankly, my dear, all I see is desolation.”
“Ah, that’s where you’re wrong, Doc. You’re only looking at what’s on the surface. You’ve got to look harder, deeper, to see what’s really here.”
“Deeper? I am sorry…”
“Until a month ago my people were starving to death. We had been bled dry by successive waves of invaders. Most of us were convinced that the next winter would be the ville’s last. Then it came, like manna from heaven. Like the sweet spring gushing forth from the rock. And we were saved.”
“Madam?”
“A wonderful plan is unfolding before our very eyes, Theo Tanner. You will see it, too, I am convinced of that.”
He started to ask another question, but Isabel reached up and placed her finger gently on his lips, stopping him from speaking. “Wait. It won’t be long. It isn’t far now.”
The food gatherers walked without hesitation, on a route that was well known to them. Whatever their destination was, they were heading straight for it.
With Isabel in the lead, they descended into an arroyo and began following its meandering course. Dried stalks of grass the color of gunpowder sparsely fringed the gully’s rims. The dry streambed was filled with soft, fine sand. There were no signs or sounds of life. Not even the buzz of an insect.
Despite his attraction to her, Doc found himself starting to question the head woman’s sanity; looking on the darkest of dark sides had become a habit, a survival instinct. Then he had a sudden uncomfortable twinge. It occurred to him that perhaps she and the others were cannies. It occurred to him that he and the swineherd had been taken out of earshot to be slaughtered, then lugged back in quarters that would give body and substance to the evening’s pot of stew. Young Crad would certainly be no help, even in a fight to the death.
And there was plenty of him to eat.
Except of course brains.
“Look,” Isabel said.
Across the arroyo, a strip of white rag tied to a stick marked a hole about a yard across in the waist-high bluff.
“It appears to be a burrow of some sort,” Doc said. “Something quite large, based on the diameter. What’s in there?”
“Dinner on the hoof,” Isabel told him.
Doc noticed other, similar holes spaced at irregular intervals along the length of the low bank.
While the ville menfolk set down the garbage cans and the women leaned on their pitchforks and clubs, Isabel waved for Doc to follow her. “Be very quiet, now, and don’t get too close to the hole,” she said.
They hunkered down on either side of the opening. Isabel cocked her head, listening at the burrow entrance. Doc listened, too, but he could hear nothing but the pounding of his own pulse in his temples. An odd odor emanated from the hole. Both fecund and fecal with a hint of ammonia.
Then in a scrambling rush that sent Doc rocking back on his boot heels, a huge, shiny black creature lunged partway out of the hole. Its horizontal, pincer jaws snapped shut, making a sound like punch press. Blue-black jaws that could cut a man—or a hog—in two in a single bite. Doc glimpsed a broad, domed, eyeless head, segmented, armored backplates, and thousands of short, bristling yellow legs beneath.
As Doc and Isabel jumped out of the way, the creature darted in a blur back inside its hole.
“By the Three Kennedys!” Doc exclaimed. “What was that?” As he spoke, Doc pointed his cocked LeMat shotgun barrel at the burrow, prepared to unleash a chamber packed with “blue whistlers.”
“A mama scagworm protecting her nest.”
“That was a scagworm? Good Lord, the ones I have seen were much smaller than that. Perhaps two feet long, and four inches across. And even at that size they were triple-mean chillers, virtually impossible to dispatch with blade or blaster.”
“Those were just the babies,” Isabel informed him. “The breeders are like that one, mebbe three or four hundred pounds.”
“A bit testy, was she not?”
“She’s still carrying her young in her belly. We don’t want to mess with her. We’re looking for a worm that’s just given birth. We’ve learned the hard way that timing is everything.”
The entire crew advanced along the bank as quietly as possible. Isabel and Doc moved from burrow to burrow, listening from a safe distance.
At the fourth hole, they heard strange noises. Quite loud noises. They sounded like grunting, wet sloppy, sloshy, slurpy grunting, and high-pitched squealing.
“We have to wait until the babies finish,” Isabel said.
“Finish what?” Doc asked her.
“The ultimate gift of a mother worm to her offspring,” Isabel said. “Their very first meal is her living flesh. And in turn the baby worms give their flesh to us.”
“I had no idea they were edible.”
“The mamas aren’t. Their meat tastes like old snow tires.”
“How do you remove the little ones from the burrow?”
“We smoke ’em out,” she said.
On her signal, some of the ville folk wrapped oily rags around the ends of sticks, lit them on fire and tossed them into the den. In seconds, dense gray smoke was billowing from the hole.
“We lost some mighty good folks figuring out how to harvest these muties,” Isabel said. “The trick is to catch them at just the right moment, when they pop out of their mama’s minky.”
Doc couldn’t help but recall his initial experience with scagworms. They were like shadows flying low over the island battlefield, shadows weaving erratic trails through the heaps of the dead to reach the living. He aimed his LeMat at the center of the gushing smoke, once again cocking back the shotgun barrel’s hammer.
“You won’t need that,” Isabel assured him.
The creatures that spilled from the burrow were identical to those he had seen before—slick armored shells, blue-black bullet heads, rippling rows of crisp insect feet—but they moved much more slowly.
Half suffocated by the dense smoke, packed to the gills with their own mother’s meat, they slithered sluggishly across the sand.
The womenfolk set upon the newborn worms with pitchforks and clubs. Leaning all their weight on the fork handles, they pinned the snapping, squirming muties to the ground with the tines. The club-wielding women brought their weapons down on top of the eyeless heads, again and again. These weren’t love taps. The thick carapaces withstood multiple, full-force blows without denting or cracking, but the peabrains inside took a shellacking. After a moment the worms stopped squirming.
Scooping up the stunned creatures on their forks, the women tossed them into the waiting open garbage cans. With the lids slammed closed, the worms regained consciousness, banging and scrabbling around inside. They couldn’t bite their way to freedom because their jaws couldn’t get a purchase on the curved surface.
While this was going on, the burrow’s last worm burst through the veil of smoke. It made a hard right turn and ran along the foot of the bank. It seemed much livelier than the others.
“Get it!” Isabel cried. “Don’t let it get away!”
The woman nearest to the worm lunged with her pitchfork. She tried to lead the fleeing creature, but as if sensing the strike, it stopped dead in its tracks. The fork speared deep into the bank, missing the bullet head by inches. Before she could jerk back her weapon, the worm jumped onto the handle and scampered up it. Its jaws snapping like bolt cutters, the two-foot-long mutie attacked. It bit through her trousers and flesh in an instant, then twisted its head into the flesh of her upper thigh, trying to bore up into the warmth of her body cavity.
“Yee! Yeeee!” she shrieked, staggering backward, grabbing the armored shell in both hands. With a supreme effort, she corkscrewed it out of her flesh and flung it away. Bright blood sprayed between her fingers as she desperately clutched the inside of her thigh. She couldn’t stop the bleeding. Nothing could stop it. Her femoral artery had been severed.
The gory scagworm landed at Doc’s feet, jaws snapping. Instinctively he stomped on its head with one boot, then both boots. It was all he could do to keep the thing pinned to the ground. Then help came in the form of a well-aimed pitchfork. The women clubbed the trapped creature senseless, then flipped it into one of the garbage cans.
By that time, the unfortunate victim had bled out in the sand. The ville folk stood around her still form, staring down ashen-faced and stunned. Some wept into their hands.
“Margie knew the risks,” Isabel told them. Her face showed strain and sadness, but she didn’t give herself permission to cry. Because she was the leader she had to be a rock the others could lean on. “It could have been any one of us. We’re not going to carry her body all the way back to the ville. She wouldn’t have wanted us to. We’ll bury her here.”
Using the pitchforks and their bare hands, they dug a shallow grave in the arroyo, then unceremoniously rolled in the limp, still warm corpse. No one said any words over the dead woman before they filled in the hole with sand. Maybe they were all out of goodbyes. The men moved two slabs of heavy rock on top of the earth.