“I want you to douse the torches in that hallway up there,” he told the one-armed captain of the doomed. “Make it to those doors and push grens through the firing ports.”
The fodder captain didn’t argue about the feasibility of the mission. In the weak light, he accepted some grens from an officer, then addressed his motley crew. “It’s up to us to finish this,” he told the twenty-five or so cripples and ville idiots still sucking air. “First, we’re going to put out the rest of the torches. If they can’t see us, they can’t hit us.” He showed them the cluster of frag grens. “Then we knock the bastards out.”
Ryan had a hard time understanding the man’s enthusiasm for the job he’d been handed. Mebbe he was tired of the crippie life?
The one-armed captain counted off a dozen of the fodder, then led them in a mad rush to the mouth of the hallway.
Haldane’s machine gunners let them get inside the entrance of the twelve-foot-wide corridor. Then both blasters roared, sweeping the narrow passage with full-auto streams of lead.
A shooting gallery.
Bullets sliced through the fodder. The one-armed man took a burst through the chest as he reached for a torch, and he went down hard. Somehow the other sponges managed to put out all but two of the torches, nearest the doors. In the process all twenty-five were chilled. The last three of the fodder were so close to the machine-gun barrels that they were literally shot to pieces.
When the ricochets stopped zinging around the dark basement, Malosh turned to an officer. “Go back to the entrance,” he said. “Get the swampies to drag down one of those steel plates.”
It took a while for the muties to accomplish that. Ryan could hear them banging and cursing as they struggled on the stairs. You didn’t have to be a whitecoat to predict what Malosh intended to do with the plate. The only question was who was going to get the job?
A question that was answered after the swampies lost control of the massive plate and it crashed to the bottom of the steps.
The Impaler picked out a hefty-looking norm, then selected J.B. and Ryan. “Use the plate as a shield,” he ordered them. “It’s plenty thick enough to stop machine-gun bullets. Carry it in front of you to the end of the hall. Angle it so one of you can plant a satchel charge against the doors, set the fuse, then back out.”
Sounded easy.
It wasn’t.
When the trio tried to raise the four-by-eight sheet of armor plate from the floor, Ryan knew why the muties had been cursing. Armor of sufficient thickness and temper to deflect heavy duty bullets wasn’t light. The rad-blasted thing weighed more than three hundred pounds. If it was awkward to lift, it was even harder to carry.
To protect their feet and legs from blasterfire, they let the bottom edge scrape along the concrete, and held the top tipped back on their shoulders as they crouched and pushed.
The metal made a screeching sound as it slid across the floor.
When they reached the mouth of the corridor, the machine guns cut loose and the deluge of .308-caliber rounds drowned out the screeching. The din was earsplitting. The vibration felt like a hundred maniacs beating on the other side of the plate with ball-peen hammers. Ricochets sprayed the ceiling and shot back into the steel doors. Under the concentrated bullet impacts, the armor plate started to heat up. They inched forward for five more yards, then hit an obstacle. The fodder bodies were in the way. They had to lift the bottom of the plate over the corpses to get past.
The machine guns continued to fire, perhaps in desperation, even though the rounds weren’t penetrating the steel.
Choking on the dense gunsmoke, Ryan, J.B., and the hefty norm turned the plate at a forty-five-degree angle to the doors and advanced closer, shoving one end against the edge of the left-hand door. Working behind the low cover, which was supported by J.B. and the hefty norm, Ryan quickly planted and primed the satchel charge.
There was no room for error as they retraced their steps under ravening fire. They had to move quickly, but if they let the plate slip, they’d be chopped down. Pulling the plate turned out to be much more difficult than pushing it. Especially when they had to accommodate the corpses on the floor. The way they were hustling Ryan thought they could clear the short hallway before the bag blew.
He was wrong.
Ryan didn’t actually hear the explosion. Nor could he distinguish between the blinding flash outside and inside his head. As the blast’s pressure wave flattened the plate that protected them, the world went white.
Then cold.
Then hot.
Then dark.
Ryan felt nothing as he hit the floor and the heavy plate fell on top of him. He was unconscious.
T
HE ONE
-
EYED MAN
came to as the crushing weight was lifted off his chest. He looked up to see Mildred leaning over him with concern on her face. Torches along the corridor had been relit.
The woman’s lips moved, but Ryan’s ears were ringing so badly couldn’t hear what she was saying.
Beside him, J.B. was sitting up, shaking his head as he tried to clear it. His glasses and fedora were coated with fine white dust.
The hefty norm hadn’t been so lucky. Because he had been holding the right-hand end of the plate, he’d had no wall to protect his exposed flank. Mebbe he’d let the plate had slip down an inch or two at just the wrong moment, as well. Chilled stone-dead by the concussion, he lay on his side while blood dripped from his plaster-dusted ears, eyes, nose and mouth.
The metal doors to Haldane’s underground stronghold were buckled and bent inward. No blasterfire came from inside the room; only smoke and dust.
Leaning on Mildred for support, Ryan and J.B. moved away from the breached entrance.
If there were any Haldane defenders who wanted to surrender, the baron didn’t give them the chance.
He wasn’t known as Malosh the Merciful.
At his signal, his men tossed handfuls of grens through the torn-apart doors, into the smoke.
A string of explosions violently shook the floor. Orange flame belched from the entrance; shrapnel whined through the basement. Ryan could barely hear the blasts. It felt like his ears were stuffed with cotton.
Malosh and his fighters waited until all the smoke cleared before they moved into the room. This gave Ryan and J.B. enough time to recover their hearing. The three companions followed the other norms over the threshold, into an abattoir.
The cellar room was littered with bodies and severed body parts. Belonging to mebbe fifty men, Ryan guessed. The walls and ceiling were decorated in a two-tone palette of black scorch and red gore.
The Haldane garrison was history.
As Ryan surveyed the ruination, he caught a movement in a corner in a pile of bodies. A wounded man raised his head from the heap, his face sheeted with blood.
“We didn’t chill all the bastards,” one of the norms said.
“Spiking time!” another shouted with glee.
As they closed in on the Haldane trooper, someone cried, “Look out! He’s got a blaster!”
The Malosh fighters backed away, reaching for their own weapons.
As it turned out they had nothing to worry about.
The lone survivor parted his bloody teeth and shoved the muzzle of his blaster into his mouth. Without a word, he pulled the trigger, painting the wall behind him with his own brains. Gunsmoke billowed from his gaping mouth.
Ryan, J.B. and Mildred joined the troops pouring out of the Welcome Center. The battle was over. Sunspot had fallen to Malosh. The companions didn’t share the fighters’ jubilation; their only concern was finding their missing friends, and doing it as quickly as possible.
Which turned out to be much simpler than any of them had anticipated.
As they stepped away from the building, J.B. pointed toward the ville’s residential area and exclaimed, “Lookee there!”
“Lookee where?” Ryan said as he stared at the mass of ville folk that suddenly popped out from between the shanty lanes and started heading for the Welcome Center. Then he saw a trio of familiar faces. Krysty, Jak and Doc walked across the devastated compound toward them.
All under their own power and seemingly in good health.
All still armed.
Ryan felt a wave of profound relief. In truth, he had been a lot more worried about them than he had let on to Mildred and J.B.
The tall, smiling redhead came into Ryan’s arms and he embraced her for a long moment.
The embrace ended abruptly when blasterfire chattered behind them.
“Would you look at that masked asshole,” J.B. said.
“Asshole,” Jak agreed.
Baron Malosh was celebrating his big win by riding his horse around the inside perimeter of the berm, shooting his twin AKs in the air.
Ryan checked the gate exits and saw that the victory lap hadn’t been the baron’s first act. Malosh had already assigned a number of armed guards to the exits so the conscripts couldn’t desert. The only way out of Sunspot appeared to be climbing over the berm, which in broad daylight would draw attention and bullets.
“Are you all right, Doc?” Mildred asked, giving the scarecrow Tanner a quick hug.
“I am perfectly fine, my dear Dr. Wyeth,” Doc replied.
Ryan noticed a blond ville woman standing behind the time traveler. Her expression changed when Mildred touched Doc. It went from friendly to irritated in a split second. He also noted her strange, beautiful violet-colored eyes.
In the middle of the compound, the swampies were looting the bodies of foes and friends alike. As they gathered up dropped weapons and ammo, they rifled the pockets of the dead, looking for small, easily concealable items of value.
Other muties and the surviving cannon fodder were cleaning up the Welcome Center. It appeared that Malosh intended on reoccupying it as soon as possible. The limp bodies of the Haldane defenders were lugged out by their hands and feet. The body parts were carried piled on tarps. The human litter of battle was dumped in the middle of the compound, waiting either cremation or burial. Some of the muties had started a bonfire to burn up the cardboard mattresses and bloody rags.
“Dear friends, I would like you to meet Isabel,” Doc said, urging the blond woman forward. “She is the leader of Sunspot ville.”
The companions nodded to her.
She nodded back.
“Isabel and the ville folk,” Doc went on in a more hushed tone, “are planning to hit Malosh.”
“You’ll never beat him,” Mildred told the woman. “He’s got too many troops. It’d be suicide to even try.”
Isabel put a hand on Doc’s arm and looked into Mildred’s eyes. A proprietary hand, it seemed to Ryan. “We plan to wait until Malosh and most of his soldiers leave for the attack on Nuevaville,” she said. “The odds are in our favor then.”
“Timing is everything,” Doc said.
“You might be able to win a temporary victory against a reduced Malosh force,” Ryan said. “But what do you really gain in the long run? Can you hold the ville when Malosh comes back, pissed off as hell, with the rest of his fighters? Can you hold it when Haldane comes back? One or the other of them will crush you, that’s guaranteed.”
Isabel was unconvinced by his argument. “We’ve been caching arms and ammunition for months now. We intend to use it at the very first opportunity. We don’t have any choice anymore. We have to fight. These bastard barons are grinding us into dust.”
“Either way you’re going to die,” Krysty said.
“If you had to choose a way to go,” Isabel asked her, “would you take starvation or a bullet?”
“Bullet,” the redhead replied without hesitation.
“Then you know how we ville folk feel.”
“You could leave,” Doc told her. “You are most welcome to come along with us. Deathlands is an immense place. Its settlements are widely separated. It’s easy to evade pursuit in the hellscape. All that’s required is a week or two of nonstop walking. It’s also easy to start another life somewhere new. Somewhere better.”
“I won’t desert my people,” Isabel said. “And we can’t all come with you. The barons want us here, as their field hands. If we try to run, they’ll just hunt us down and drag us back. The fight is here.”
“Perhaps we could join you, then?” Doc said.
“You have no stake in this. Sunspot’s our ville. We’ve bought it with our blood and sweat and lives.”
Doc was about to say more when he was interrupted by a joyous shout from atop the berm.
“Yee-hah!” one of the norm fighters hollered. Straddling the berm’s crest, he waved his arms over his head. “Everybody! Come up here! You’ve gotta see this!”
A bit of free, light entertainment was hard to come by in the hellscape.
And it was an especially welcome release after a morning of pitched combat and mortal danger.
“Mutie fight! Mutie fight!” the man on the berm bellowed through cupped hands.
All of Baron Malosh’s fighters, save those manning the wag and foot gates, surged for the ville’s gorge-facing wall.
Though she was loath to admit it, the call to spectate touched even Mildred. And for reasons she knew were suspect. Her curiosity about what was chilling what had nothing to do with the spirit of twentieth-century scientific inquiry in which she had been trained. In her previous existence, prior to being put into cryosleep, she had always disliked and avoided brutal sports. She had considered them senseless and of value only to those who promoted them. Her years in the hellscape had changed her in many ways, some subtle, some not. The constant fight for survival reduced everything to the lowest common denominator. Even the concept of suitable entertainment. When Ryan said, “Might as well have a look-see,” she joined the other companions as they rushed up the side of the berm.
Standing on the crest of the barrier, she looked down on the gorge and the blown-up section of Interstate 10. Immediately, she saw movement in the canyon bottom. Rapid movement. In the clouds of raised dust, something large and dark was frantically running and jumping in great bounds.
It appeared to have too many legs by at least a couple of pair.
“What the hell is that?” J.B. asked.
Which was Mildred’s question, too.
“We call it the grave digger,” Isabel told them, as if that explained anything at all.
Doc quickly filled in some of the blanks. “In point of fact,” he said, “that creature is more of an exhumer. I came across it on my way up here last night. Although I couldn’t see it clearly in the dark. From the evidence along the highway, it appears to feed upon the bodies buried in the gorge. Hence, the name grave digger.”
Mildred was amazed by the mutie’s two seemingly contradictory attributes. The shaggy monster was incredibly fast and spry; it made consecutive, twenty-foot standing broad jumps, yet it was very large. She could only estimate its size in relation to other objects in the gorge. The width of the four-lane interstate; the bodies of the fallen fodder. From this she guessed it was at least eight feet across the body. It had very long, jointed legs; by straightening them it could raise its belly six feet from the ground. Despite its size, it had to be very light, otherwise it couldn’t have propelled its mass over such extreme distances and with such alacrity.
Was it a spider? A panther?
It leaped atop a block of concrete and for a second they could all see it in more detail.
“Where’s its head?” Krysty said.
It was true. There was no head in evidence. The hairy body appeared to be nearly circular. And the four sets of legs allowed it to jump in any direction and hit the ground running.
“It could be a trannie,” Mildred said. Trannie was short for transgenic bioweapon. Also known in the ultra-secret whitecoat ranks as chimera. Trannies were living beings constructed from a mishmash of other species’ genetics. It was yet another example of the lunacy and arrogance of predark scientists. They had mixed snippets of DNA from different, naturally occurring species to produce new and unique living creatures for specific functional and research purposes. The technology explosion near the end of the twentieth century had allowed scientists to create bacteria that ate oil spills and other toxics, and that manufactured tiny electronic components in invisible assembly lines. Living industrial machines on a microscopic scale.
If small was good, big was better.
And the military applications were obvious.
The goal of the military researchers was to mass produce custom-designed warrior breeds. Some of these constructs turned out to be so dangerous that the only way to control them was to include a death gene in their chromosomes, a time bomb that limited their life span and their reproductive capability. In many cases, the time bomb hadn’t gone off. And the trannies had multiplied. The companions had crossed paths with such critters several times before. And the outcome had always been hellish and touch-and-go in the extreme.
“It eats the wounded, too,” Isabel added. “It prefers not to fight for its dinner. It showed up down there about a year ago. Nobody knows where it came from, but there’s only the one of them as far as we can tell. It only feeds at night. We’ve never seen it after sunrise. When there’s fighting and dying it’s always hanging around. It stays hidden during the day. Something’s chased it out of its hidey-hole.”
Because of the distance, the terrain, the speed and the dust, it was difficult for Mildred to see exactly what that something was. Although she could tell there were lots of them and they were much, much smaller than the thing they were chasing.
A roar of catcalls and bloodthirsty cheers from the Malosh fighters lined up along the berm top sent chills up her spine. The soldiers were taking bets on which mutie would win the battle in the gorge.
Baron Malosh had joined the fun. He stood watching the show with his men. His expression was hidden by the leather mask he wore.
“The little muties are baby scagworms,” Doc said. “There are so many of them in this area that the Sunspot folk have started eating them regularly. They taste rather like lobster with a hint of pork chop. I highly recommend them.”
Mildred remembered the scagworms from previous encounters. They were an insectoid mutie species, possibly another flawed batch of trannies with a nonfunctioning death gene. They were almost unstoppable because of their speed, mobility and armor plate. And they came factory-equipped with an insane and bottomless hunger.
The grave digger darted about in the gorge bottom like it had eyes in the back of whatever passed for its head. Again and again, it avoided the relentless predators with prodigious bounds and blindingly quick reversals of direction. Even so, the odds weren’t in its favor.
As the great beast leaped over a water-filled trench, scagworms dashed up an overhanging tilted slab of concrete and jumped. When the grave digger landed, the worms came down on its back.
Biting.
The men who had bet on the scagworms cheered while the worms sheared off great clumps of the grave digger’s fur with their jaws.
Whirling, the spiderlike monster shook off two of the black shapes. It scraped off two more with deft blows from its front legs. Then it jumped away before the rest of the pack could close in for the chill.
The worms riding on its back attacked its rear pair of legs at their join with the body. The power of the transverse jaws was immediately evident. In seconds they clipped those legs off cleanly, but in the process were thrown from the grave digger’s back. A creamy white fluid, perhaps blood, gushed from the still moving stumps.
The bucked-off scagworms fell upon the long limbs they had severed, cracking them like crab legs and digging out the meat.
The digger still had six legs to run on, and wasn’t noticeably slowed by the amputations. Twenty or thirty worms were in hot pursuit. Shiny black in the sun, they looked like fat, stubby snakes as they slithered over the broken ground in its wake.
Mildred watched the jittering, jerky, frenetic chase in fascination. It looked like a sped-up motion picture. Prey and predators splashed through pools and jumped over blocks of concrete. The worms showed no sign of real organization; they proceeded in straight lines over and through the obstacle course. Like radar-guided missiles. And it was every missile for itself. Instead of trying to encircle or trap their prey, instead of trying to bring it down, the worms were content to tear off manageable-size chunks for individual consumption.
Both species ignored the fodder bodies at their feet. Mildred couldn’t decide whether the worms were fighting over control of the turf and its spoils, or whether they just considered the grave digger dinner.
If the larger mutie was trying to defend its claim on the Sunspot body farm, the loss of its limbs changed its mind. It reversed course yet again, making for the relatively intact roadway leading out of the gorge. Mildred was astonished at the speed it made on flatter ground. She couldn’t even see its legs, they were moving so fast.
The grave digger quickly put distance between it and the low shapes in pursuit. It raced out of the mouth of the gorge and continued down the ruined highway, heading due west. As the distance increased between predator and prey, the horde of black specks gave up the chase. Their intended target left the interstate and disappeared over a rise in the desert scrub.
Along the berm top, the losers in the fighters’ betting pool cursed and kicked the dirt. The winners laughed and grinned as small quantities of jack and jolt changed hands.
If the scagworms were trannies, what the hell were they made of? Mildred asked herself. Instead of being a simple cross between two divergent species, they were more like a genetic stew. Of millipede. Giant cockroach. Rhinoceros beetle. Mebbe with a helping of anaconda on the side. Unlike the scagworms that had probably been protected in deeply buried, hardsited redoubt labs, the creatures that had provided snips of its component DNA hadn’t survived nukeday and the prolonged stresses of skydark.
Because of her training in predark science Mildred understood full well the danger of invasive species.
New life-form.
New attributes.
Bad news for existing organisms.
Even naturally occurring organisms had the potential for great harm. Killer bees, fire ants, zebra mussels had all taken their toll before Armageddon. In this case, the predator was much larger, and its limitations, if any, were unknown, and may well have been genetically engineered away. There was no information on the worm’s life history, nothing about maximum population densities or range size requirements. If what Sunspot had experienced so far was just the first wave of a much bigger invasion, a spear point driven into the belly of what once had been New Mexico, there was no telling how long it would last or how far it would penetrate.
Adaptation had no conscience and no foresight. It existed outside the individual organism. It was a mechanism of nature without the power of self-understanding or self-analysis. In the end, all that could be done was to cede territory to it, to set up boundaries and to try to maintain them.
“Look, they’re coming back,” Isabel said, pointing at the undulating black shapes flowing into the gorge. “Manna from heaven.”
Mildred turned on the ville’s head woman. “Are you out of your frigging mind?” she said. “Don’t you see what’s happening here?”
“What’s happening is that God has finally answered our prayers,” Isabel told her. “We will have plenty of food again.”
Hunter-gatherer wasteland becomes a hunter-gatherer paradise.
Hunter-gatherers had no obligation to look further than their next meal.
Sunspot ville was living proof that humanity hadn’t advanced an iota in the last fifteen thousand years.
“How can you be so stupid?” Mildred said.
“Easy, Mildred,” Ryan cautioned.
“Easy what? She sees the hand of God and I see extermination for every living thing within a thousand miles. What we’re looking at is a force of nature that can’t be anticipated or controlled. You won’t be eating the bugs, for long, lady. They’ll be eating you! Look down there!”
Back down on the field of death, the scagworms slithered into view. They began feeding at once. Not just on the bodies of the fodder. They also hunted down the living who hid among the rubble. The unarmed deserters, some mere children, screamed for help as they took to their heels. But there was no way for anyone on the berm to render help. The fastest, the youngest of fodder ran from the blown-up section of interstate, trying to escape the gorge.
“You ate scagworm flesh?” Mildred demanded of Doc.
The old man heard the question but didn’t respond. Perhaps because he was too busy fighting to keep down his dinner.
“It tasted like pork, huh?” Mildred said. “Maybe there’s a simple explanation for that. It’s called cannibalism, once removed.”
As they watched, the children and other deserters were chased down from behind and dragged to the ground. Five to ten worms set upon each victim, slashing great gashes in the torso then disappearing headfirst into the wounds. The deserters’ bodies jerked and flailed as they were tunneled and cored. The scagworms went in shiny black, but they emerged red and dripping
To Mildred, the mindless slaughter exemplified everything that was wrong with this world.
“Dammit to hell!” she cried.
She turned and half ran, half slid down the side of the berm. Blaster in hand, she barged past the fighters standing next to the gorge’s center gunpost entrance. She speed-crawled on hands and knees through the culvert, into the front seat of the half-buried Cadillac Escalade.
Seized by blind fury Mildred yanked the charging handle of the post’s M-60, dropped the sights and cut loose on the scagworms. She walked fire over the feeding muties, chewing up the rotten tarmac, blasting the worms to bits, shattering their carapaces. She managed to nail about half of the bastards before the rest slithered back to the blown-up section of road and solid cover.