“Why do we have to leave here?” Young Crad asked Doc. “I like this ville.” He tipped up his stew container and tapped on the bottom to get the last dribble of scagworm juice. “I got my own can of food. And people don’t spit on me all the time.”
Sound reasons for staying.
“Remember your friend Bezoar?” Doc said.
Young Crad’s too small eyes lit up at once.
“If we don’t depart Sunspot ville tonight,” Doc told him, “by this time tomorrow your friend is going to be fifteen feet in the air with a maypole wedged up his backside.”
After a moment of strain, the swineherd made the mental connection. And was aghast. “Like in Redbone?” he muttered.
“The self-same. We have got to go.”
“Can we come back?”
“Yes, of course,” Doc assured him, “and we’ll be returning very soon.” He didn’t bother to add, “So we can absorb the first salvo of lead from sixty-odd blasters.”
After a pause, a sly grin twisted Young Crad’s mouth. “You like the one with the pretty eyes, don’t you?” he said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“You kissed her. I saw you.”
As might be imagined, a hulking, swineherd pervert’s attempt at coyness was nothing short of horrifying.
Nonetheless Doc replied in the affirmative, if briefly. “Yes, I kissed her. But we must put that aside and leave this ville. Bezoar’s life depends on it.”
Doc pulled the droolie into the shadows beyond the reach of the firelight. There they waited for the dinner party to break up. Eventually the Sunspot folk began to slip away in ones and twos to their pallets in the cargo containers and rusted-out Winnebagos. Haldane’s sec men retreated to their barracks in the Welcome Center. As the last of them crawled off to bed, the unattended campfires burned low and the flames winked out, leaving beds of glowing red coals.
“We’re going to climb the berm,” Doc informed Young Crad.
The droolie looked up at the shadowy, fifteen-foot-high pile of loose rubble and dirt, but asked no questions.
Doc had decided that they couldn’t leave Sunspot via the foot gate. If they’d tried, they would have had to explain to the sentries why they were heading out into the hellscape in the middle of the night. Something that would have looked very suspicious. And they couldn’t risk waiting until daybreak to make their exit. There was a chance they wouldn’t be allowed to leave, even then. Moreover, they needed all the time available in case they got lost en route, or if Malosh had moved the column from its last position.
Given the dark, moonless night and their distance from the Welcome Center and ramshackle shelters, as long as they moved quietly they would attract no attention.
“Make no noise,” Doc warned the swineherd as they slowly started up the forty-five-degree incline. Because the berm wall was made of loose piled debris, and there was only starlight to see by, it was difficult to locate solid hand-and footholds. Young Crad’s weight caused a minor collapse in the structure. Small chunks of concrete rattled to the ground below. They froze near the top of the berm, but no one burst out of the semitrailers to challenge them. Given the building materials, such mini-avalanches no doubt were common occurrences.
After descending the other side of the perimeter wall, Doc and Young Crad turned left and skirted the edge of the heaped riprap. Outside the front gates, bonfires were burning, presumably to deter predators. The light they cast only penetrated thirty or forty yards into the darkness. Doc made a wide detour around the pyres before rejoining the path to the interstate on the slope below.
As they walked down to the predark highway, the only sound came from Doc’s bootsoles softly crunching on the starlit track. The old man could feel his back muscles bunching up into knots. Night was the worst time to be out and about in the hellscape. Unless you were trying to commit mutie-assisted suicide.
As dim-witted as he was, even the droolie was aware of the extreme danger.
“So dark,” Young Crad whispered.
Below them was the eerie, vaguely outlined, colorless landscape of ruined four-lane and towering, canted light stanchions.
“We’re fine,” Doc said. “We’ll just follow the interstate and retrace our route back to Malosh.”
As they moved along the highway shoulder, Doc felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand erect. He had a powerful sense of being watched.
“Wait a second,” he said, drawing the LeMat.
When he held his breath and listened, he could hear something moving stealthily in the dark, just beyond the range of his vision.
“Stinks here,” was Young Crad’s choked comment.
The stench of a freshly excavated grave was unmistakable.
That the swineherd could smell it over his own pungent aroma was a true measure of its intensity.
Thirty feet ahead was a pile of heaped earth and overturned stone slabs. Approaching cautiously, Doc reached down and grabbed a handful of soil. It was still damp. On the other side of the mound was the source of the terrible odor: severed body parts. Strewed long bones. A headless torso. The rotting corpse had been devoured belly first.
Had they scared off whatever it was?
Did it only feed on the decaying dead? Or did it also take its food warm and kicking?
Was there more than one?
Questions without immediate answers.
Doc doubted that he was looking at the handiwork of a scagworm. A worm wouldn’t have bothered pulling the body out of the ground to feed upon it. It would have just burrowed in and done its dining out of sight, on the buried pocket of protein. The creature that had disturbed the grave had to overturn the heavy capstones and pull its meal out of the earth. Which meant it was bigger, stronger than the mama worms, and to grapple with the stones, at least two-armed if not two-legged.
As he scanned the darkness at the edge of the shoulder, Doc considered the possibilities.
A five-hundred-pound scalie?
Scalies were lazy, low-moving bastards, and they liked weak or injured prey, or prey they could ambush at close range or trap in some way. The grave robbing could also have been the work of a band of roaming cannies. He couldn’t recall seeing any bootprints around the opened graves the previous afternoon. And it was too dark to make out any now. For cannies to dig up graves, they had to be triple desperate. Congealed human blood and decaying tissue being preferable to no blood and tissue at all. Their alternative to starvation was to eat one another, which they usually only did when a member of the band became too sick to live.
As Doc turned his attention west, something crossed the four lanes left to right in front of them, about forty yards away.
Though the light was dim, he could see that it was neither scalie nor cannie. It was the size and height of a full-grown bull or an ox. And it had more than two legs. He squinted, hard.
It had more than four legs.
For its size, it was amazingly quick and light on its feet. In a crouching run, it disappeared soundlessly into the pitch-dark desert.
Doc swept the highway shoulder with the sights of the LeMat. There was nothing to shoot at.
“Damnation,” he said.
Young Crad had glimpsed it, too. “Whuh-whuh-whuh-whuh?” he stammered.
Doc got the swineherd’s drift. “Your guess is as good as mine,” he said. “I think it is running back along the road to the east, trying cut us off from the ville.”
They looked behind them, at the distant fires perched on the silhouette of ridge.
“We go back now?”
“That isn’t an option. It’s already probably lying in wait for us.”
“We go on, then.”
“If we do that, it will run us down from behind.”
There was only one choice, Doc realized. Most unpleasant. Because he could shoot, he had a chance in hell of holding off the creature long enough for Young Crad to get away.
“Can you find your way back to Bezoar?” he asked the droolie.
Young Crad nodded. “Broken bridge. Broken bridge.”
“That’s right. Turn at the broken bridge. If I tell you a number can you remember it?”
“What?”
“This is very important,” Doc told him. “To save Bezoar and my friends, can you remember a number?”
“What?”
There was no time for droolie games.
Doc set down the LeMat and unsheathed his swordstick. He said, “Give me your palm.”
When Crad extended his hand, Doc seized it by the wrist. “Hold still,” he said. “This will only hurt for a moment.” Holding the sword near its razor-sharp point, he dragged the edge across the droolie’ skin, making quick, shallow slashes.
“Ow!” the swineherd yelped, jerking his hand back.
“Find Malosh and show him that mark on your palm. Can you do that?”
Young Crad looked down dumbfounded at the scratches in his flesh, which oozed a thin trickle of blood.
“Can you do that?” Doc demanded.
The swineherd nodded.
“Then, go! Now! Run!”
Young Crad took off without further prompting, clutching his injured hand to his chest, lumbering barefoot into the darkness below.
Doc resheathed his sword, picked up the LeMat, and started back up the grade. There was no way of knowing whether the droolie would find the column in time. He could only hope.
Grimly, Doc advanced with the heavy pistol raised. Every broad puddle of shadow, every low hummock along the road’s edge could have concealed his enemy. He was determined to confront the monster head-on and to at least cripple it. He had his LeMat to accomplish the task. After that, he only had his swordstick to rely upon.
As he neared the highway exit for the Welcome Center, between the turnoff and the one hundred-yard-wide blown-up section of road, the creature reappeared from the shadows. It squatted in what was left of the slow traffic lane, all eight of its legs bending at the first joint. With its belly about three feet from the ground, it made a distinct hissing sound. The body was a vague, flattened oblong. As the beast turned back into the darkness, the silhouette didn’t change, which told him the body was roughly circular in shape.
Doc knew he had to lure it closer, to within sure-chilling range of the black powder pistol. He advanced to the spot where it had just stood, his eyes were skinned for the slightest movement, ears pricked up to catch the faintest sound.
Before him was a wide pool of semiliquid excreta. The creature had marked its turf.
As Doc rounded the wet spot, the thing suddenly raised up from a depression in the roadway ahead.
Doc reacted, opening fire with the LeMat, sending a .44-caliber ball into the center of its body. The rocking blast echoed in the gorge above. The resulting plume of gunsmoke momentarily obscured the creature. Undaunted, Doc walked through the twinkling haze, straight for his target. Because of the combination of the weak light and unfamiliar animal, he wasn’t sure precisely what to aim at, but he gamely continued to fire a fresh round at each forward step.
His bullets thwacked into and presumably through its torso as they whined off the boulders of concrete farther up the road.
The beast seemed impervious to lead balls and content to wait for its dinner to come to it. As Doc advanced through the smoke, he got an impression of shaggy hairiness. And of savage cunning if not intelligence.
Doc emptied all his .44-caliber rounds into the dark shape. With those gunshots still echoing, he cocked the hammer on the blue whistler barrel. Then he heard shrill shouts from the ville gate above. When he stole a glance in that direction, he saw a line of torches bouncing down the path toward him. Haldane’s fighters were coming.
Instead of leaping upon him straightaway, the creature scuttled to the right and took cover behind a rubble pile. The .44-caliber balls might have stung it a little, after all.
Doc knew he couldn’t stop to reload the revolver. He had to press his advantage, if indeed he had one, relying on the LeMat’s single-shot, scattergun barrel. Perhaps a load of grapeshot at close range could create a wound grievous enough to kill or hobble it.
Perhaps.
Doc stepped unblinking into the jaws of death, with raised pistol in his hand.
The many-legged thing surprised him by springing away in a tremendous bound. He instinctively led it with the LeMat’s sights and as he did so he touched off the shotgun barrel. The pistol boomed and bucked in his fist, spitting a yard of blue flame and choking pall of smoke.
Unable to see anything through the plume of burning black powder, his ears momentarily ringing, he holstered the empty weapon and drew his blade, preparing to pursue his quarry into the darkness.
Before he heard the crash of footfalls behind, someone shouted at him, “Stop there! Don’t move or we’ll fire!”
Doc turned to face torches and assault rifle muzzles.
“Put that stabber away,” one of the men said.
Doc scabbarded the rapier without protest.
“What the hell are you doing out here?”
The old man knew that “taking the night air” wouldn’t suffice. Nor would “feeding the animals.” There was no good explanation for leaving the berm’s protection before dawn.