“The chem weapon warheads are fired by the Soviet Lyagusha D-30 122 mm howitzer,” Magus said. “Its maximum range is a little more than nine miles.”
“And you have this gun?”
“Of course.”
“Where is it?”
“Safely hidden between here and the proposed target.”
Haldane examined the munitions with care. “There are two kinds of shells in the crate,” he remarked.
“That’s right. You have a choice to make, Baron. Would you prefer nerve or blister gas?”
Doc Tanner marched with his eyes narrowed to slits and a scarf securely wrapped over his mouth and nose. The cannon fodder contingent to which he had been assigned formed the tail of a 350-yard-long column. In front of the human shields were the muties and the leashed dogs, then came the horse-and mule-drawn supply carts, the norm fighters, with the cavalry taking the lead.
Doc couldn’t see the other companions for the shifting clouds of dust and all the intervening bodies. Grit crunched between his back teeth, and when he lifted the bottom edge of his scarf to clear his throat, he spit brown. Beside him, the elder swineherd, Bezoar, walked under his own power, limping on a crudely fashioned, willow-fork crutch. Young Crad kept a wary eye on his mentor, ready to come to his aid in case he faltered.
Like Doc, the others were coated head to foot with beige dirt; like him, most had strips of rag tied over their faces. They looked like an army of the disinterred, children between the ages of seven and thirteen, and men and women with healed, horrendous wounds and missing limbs. Some of the fodder resembled the young swineherd—in Deathlands evocative parlance: triple-stupe droolies.
So far, all those who had tried to escape from Malosh’s army had failed. The dust and arid terrain offered little or no cover to conscriptees who broke ranks and sprinted off in the opposite direction. When this happened, the swampies leisurely unchained the dogs, who scrambled after the prey, baying. The deserters got off one, mebbe two shots, then came desperate screams for help amid wild snarling. Screams that were quickly silenced. After the same scenario had played out a few times, there were no more deserters.
Even if successful escape had been possible, Doc would never have left his battle mates.
High above the loose, three-abreast formation, buzzards circled, riding the thermals, waiting for hapless souls to weaken and fall behind. No bullwhips, no threats were required to keep the column of conscripts moving onward. To fall behind was to be abandoned in the desert, and that meant a slow, awful death by heat and dehydration, it meant lying helpless while the carrion birds plucked out your eyes and tongue.
Idle chatter among the ranks had dried up hours ago, along with the rain-soaked soil. The rapid pace of the advance was difficult to maintain, first because of soggy earth, and now because of all the dust the boots, the wheels and the animals were raising. Talking parched the throat and the refreshment stops on the march were few and far between.
Even when wind gusts blew aside the swirling beige dust, there was little of interest to look at. The army trudged down the vast river plain, creeping toward low blue blips on the horizon. The troops and wags and dogs at the front of the column scared off any wild animals.
As Doc put one foot in front of the other, his mind began to wander, inexorably turning inward. This was the first army in which he had served. During his months of captivity before nukeday, he had read about the terrible wars of the twentieth century. Except for the smattering of automatic weapons among the ranks, this army could have come straight from the fifteenth century—or even earlier. It had no mass overland transit. No aircraft. No communications systems. No motor-powered wags.
It was a legion of barbarians, of shabbily clad ground pounders who pillaged the hellscape like locusts.
A
S AFTERNOON EDGED
into evening, Malosh’s column climbed out of the river valley into the low, rolling desert hills polka-dotted with clumps of brush. Sunset tinged the mountains to the east, turning the up-tilted layers of folded bedrock into alternating bands of pink and orange. In a notch between the hilltops, they made camp for the night, unharnessing the horses and mules, lighting cook fires, setting up the tents for the men in charge. Everyone else ate and slept in the open in groups segregated by function and the relative purity of their genetics.
While waiting in line with the rest of the cannon fodder for his supper, Doc saw Jak and Krysty standing over by the dog pack. He tried to get their attention, but in the failing light they didn’t see him.
Ferdinando, the commander of the human shields, supervised the distribution of their evening meal. His right arm ended in a khaki sock-covered stump just above the elbow. His left hand was badly mangled as was the right side of his throat and face. A thick brown beard covered his cheeks, everywhere but that angry, waxy patch of scar.
Dinner consisted of a single, fire-roasted jacket potato and a dipper of water.
“This is what the baron means by ‘plenty to eat’?” Doc said, holding up the charred, stunted spud he’d been given.
“Fighters march faster on empty stomachs,” Ferdinando said. “Dogs are more eager for the hunt. Don’t worry, there will be feasting enough after we retake Sunspot ville.”
“You had control of it and lost it?” Doc queried.
“Our forces were driven out by Baron Haldane’s troops. The battle cost me my arm.”
“A terrible wound, indeed,” Doc commiserated.
“Gren went off under a horse I was walking past. Shrap tore me up bad, and then the horse fell on top of me. Lost this wing altogether, and it crushed my left hand so I can’t fire a blaster no more. To tell the truth, I can hardly pick up a spoon to feed myself.”
“Malosh’s army did that to you?”
“No, no. The gren came from Haldane’s men.”
“But you were a conscript?”
“No, I volunteered.”
“Why in God’s name would you do something like that?” Doc asked.
“Because I come from the heartland of Malosh’s barony,” Ferdinando said. “To the west of here there’s nothing but desert, unfarmable hardscrabble for hundreds of miles in every direction. It’s a place so worthless nobody has ever bothered trying to invade it. Before Malosh took power in the territory, the people in my ville were always just one day away from starvation. We had to watch our children die of hunger and disease. Malosh freed us from our fate. He realized that even though we could never win total victory over the neighboring barons because of our limited numbers, we could raid their territory on a regular basis and send the food back to our people. He forged us into a quick-strike fighting force. We survive by our wits, our courage and our speed of foot. If we stop moving, we die.”
“Surely you could pack up and move somewhere else. To greener, more hospitable pastures.”
“And fall under the bootheel of another baron?” Ferdinando said. “Never. The hard land where we were born has made us who we are. And we are proud of it.”
“And in the name of that pride you swear allegiance to the Impaler?”
“Call him whatever you like. He’s a hero to his people.”
“Perhaps so, but what about the poor souls he has forced to fight and die for him, whose villes he has ransacked?”
“Wait until you see the baron in battle. Wait until you see the effect he has on every person in this army. Malosh has no equal in valor or in daring. His example as a warrior raises everyone up.”
“I’ve seen how he raises people up,” Doc said. “He has no equal in brutality, either.”
“That is a means to an end,” Ferdinando said. “Three die and fifty join us.”
“You are saying he takes no pleasure from those ghastly public spectacles?”
“I have fought under Malosh for two years. Because of that mask he wears I’ve never seen him smile. I don’t know what gives him pleasure. I only know I will die for him because of what he has done for his people, for my kin.”
“No matter what he has done to everyone else.”
Ferdinando smiled. “Mark my words, when the time comes you will die for him, too. And gladly.”
“I will die,” Doc said, “but not for the likes of him.”
Clutching his miserable meal, Doc found Bezoar and Young Crad huddled close to one of the campfires. The elder swineherd comforted the younger, who sobbed bitterly into his palms.
“She’s in a much better place,” Bezoar assured his friend. After a minute he limped over to Doc.
“Poor boy’s brokenhearted,” Bezoar said.
“If you ask me, his attachment to that dead beast seems inordinate,” Doc remarked.
“The feeling was mutual,” Bezoar said. “That black-and-white hog followed him everywhere he went. They ate cheek to cheek, nose to nose at the same trough. She sat at his feet. She slept beside him in the straw. This is their first night apart since the day she was weaned.”
A phrase from Victorian times popped into Tanner’s mind. “The love that dare not speak its name.”
A florid euphemism that originally referred to another sort of socially—and Biblically—condemned behavior. Perhaps he was overreacting.
Bezoar slammed the door on that happy possibility.
Shaking his grizzled head, the crippled swineherd shared the boy’s sad secret. “When it come to getting some of the biscuit,” he said, “Young Crad was shit out of luck. None of the norm women in Redbone ville would take him between their legs. And he never earned enough jack to rent out a gaudy slut. Even the ville’s female triple-stupe droolies turned up their noses at him. His piggie dear wasn’t nearly so picky.”
Doc Tanner shuddered as deeply suppressed, horrific memories swept over him. Shortly after he’d first arrived in the hellscape, he’d been captured by Baron Jordan Teague and tortured by Cort Strasser, the baron’s head sec man. Strasser, of the skull-like face and skin like tightly stretched parchment, had driven Doc into the baron’s pig sties, and at blasterpoint, before an audience of hooting sec men, forced him to have sexual congress with the sows. The ordeal severely tested Doc’s staying power; Strasser wouldn’t let him leave the pens until he had serviced every single pig. And whenever the mood struck him, Strasser sent Doc back for more.
In the process, the Oxford-educated doctor of philosophy and science, a man of elevated sensibilities, of moral values, had been brought lower than low. A hundred times he had considered suicide. He had already survived kidnap and torture by the whitecoats, the loss of his family; his brain had been scrambled by consecutive temporal leaps. Despite all he’d suffered, his will to live was indomitable. He was only thankful that his beloved Emily and his dear children couldn’t witness his utter degradation.
Even years later, the sight of a curly tail made his skin crawl.
The idea that Young Crad might have willingly engaged in similar activity made Doc’s head reel. Dropping his dinner to the dirt, he turned away from the fire, clapping his hands over his ears to muffle the swineherd’s cries of anguish.
Baron Haldane sat in one of the sunken rear seats of one of Magus’s Humvees with his Remington sawed-off resting across his lap. It was slow going on what was left of the main predark east-west road, old Interstate 10. Haldane reckoned he would have made better time on horseback. The ancient roadbed was split and heaved up in places, and missing altogether in others, which made it impassable for the larger wags. The nimble Humvees scouted out a safe route for the heavier vehicles, sometimes on the highway, sometimes off. The convoy made wide detours around the soft spots, the deep craters and the boulders. Even so, Magus’s vast landship got stuck. Time and again, it had to be towed out of hole of its own making.
Despite all the stoppages and delays, Steel Eyes hadn’t showed his face once.
The baron’s three companions in the Humvee were the lowest form of Deathlands road trash. They stank of rancid body oils, spilled beer and diesel fuel. The driver wore a pair of yellow-tinted goggles, the other two wore cracked, wraparound dark sunglasses. All three sported greasy do-rags. The driver’s brown hair was braided into a long ponytail.
To break the monotony of the snail’s pace journey and to satisfy his own curiosity about the mysteries of Magus, Haldane asked them how they had been recruited into his service.
The front-seat passenger turned to glare at the baron. “None of your fucking business,” he sibilated through the two-inch gap of his absent, top front teeth.
The man in the seat beside Haldane wasn’t so touchy about his privacy. His teeth were intact, but mossy-green; the skin of his face was peppered with hundreds of deep pockmarks packed with grime. “I passed out dead drunk in a Siana gaudy,” he said, “and I woke up the next day in the back of a six-by-six with some other hungover coldhearts. Truck crew never said nothing about Magus. They fed us good and we did what we was told to the people we was told to do it to. Had nice new blasters to use on them, too. I didn’t know it all belonged to Magus until a week later when he showed up. By that time, I didn’t care.”
“Old Steel Eyes saved my skin,” the driver said over his shoulder. “I was all set to be hanged from a lamp post. That’s how they do the deed over in Kanscity. See, I got caught chillin’ this dirt farmer and his family. I didn’t plan no blood bath, I was just tryin’ to get my leg over on the little daughter. Dumb farmer heard her yellin’ for help after I got in the groove, then it all went to shit in a hurry. Him shooting at me, me shooting back at him. The other kin came a runnin’. By the time it was over, I’d done all five of them. I didn’t get far before the neighbors ran me down. Ville folk sold my life to Magus for ten gallons of prime joy juice.”
“Do you get a good wage?” Haldane asked.
“Let’s say he don’t pay in cash, as such,” the driver said.
“What does he pay you in, as such?”
“Why are you talking to him?” the front seat guy said. “He don’t need to know any of this shit.”
The driver waved off the protest. “It depends,” he answered. “We get a share of whatever’s on the table. Sometimes it’s ammo, sometimes it’s jolt, sometimes it’s something tender and warm.”
“Apple pie,” said the road trash next to Haldane.
From the salacious look that twisted his filthy mug he wasn’t referring to a home-baked dessert.
“Only pie on this job is gonna be miles away and stone dead by the time we’re done,” the front passenger grumbled.
“A waste of recreational opportunities,” the driver said.
“The women of Sunspot don’t know what they’re missing,” the toothless scum whistled.
Actually, they did know.
When Baron Haldane had control of the ville he kept the raping of the population by his troops to a bare minimum. He punished offenders severely, with public lashings. But when Malosh ruled Sunspot, it was another story. And it wasn’t only the women who got reamed.
“How many fighters has Magus got?” he asked.
“Who knows?” the driver said “He’s got some here, some there, from what I hear. All doing different things for different reasons.”
“Where’s his seat of power?”
“More like, does he even have one,” the pockmarked man said.
“If you’re looking for a stationary target,” the driver said, “in case things go sour on this deal, you’re shit out of luck. Magus is mighty tight-lipped about such things.”
“Jaws like a steel trap,” the toothless man said.
A remark that made the road scum laugh out loud.
“Only thing the Magus ever let us grunts in on is his retirement plan,” the driver said.
“Yeah,” the front passenger chimed in. “Early retirement for coldhearts who talk too much.”
“Or ask too many fucking questions,” the man next to Haldane said.
Threat taken, the baron looked out the dusty side window. He hadn’t come on the road trip unescorted. He had brought ten members of the Nuevaville defense force with him. Fully armed, they rode in the back of one of the six-by-sixes. They weren’t along just for his personal protection. Before he initiated an all-out chemical attack on Sunspot, he planned to send some of them ahead to warn the garrison stationed there. His troops had to pull back from the ville and be miles away from ground zero before the gas assault commenced. Baron Haldane was determined to do everything he could to prevent the chilling of his own people.
The baron-for-life was at a disadvantage in the deal with Magus. He didn’t know how to load, aim or fire the Soviet-made artillery piece. No one else in his barony did, either. In point of fact, no one had ever even seen a cannon that powerful. According to Magus, it took eight trained men to operate the gun.
So, in exchange for payment, Steel Eyes was to provide the weapon, the chemical warheads and the expertise to lay the rounds on target.
Nuevaville had an ample treasury of precious metals, predark relics, stored food, joy juice, weapons, ammunition and wag parts. All collected as tolls or in trade for other goods and services.
The price Magus had demanded of him was steep. The precious metal gold was a common currency in many parts of Deathlands. He wanted half the gold and a quarter of everything else. But Haldane knew it was worth the cost to end the stalemate. He didn’t ask his people to approve spending of their treasure. He didn’t have to.
No fool, Haldane had refused to part with so much as a grain of wheat until he was satisfied that Magus could do exactly what he claimed. Which meant test firing the blaster on a practice range and seeing the crew in action. Because the plan was to proceed directly to Sunspot from the test site, it also meant that the dark deed would be done, the ville obliterated, before payment actually changed hands. Haldane wasn’t surprised that Steel Eyes agreed to those terms. After all, the good baron had a reputation for honesty and fair dealing, even among the bottom-feeding scabs of the hellscape.
The long ride gave Haldane plenty of time to consider the unfathomability of Magus’s true motives. The mechanized creature could have had all of the treasure if he’d used the chem shells on Nuevaville. Perhaps he couldn’t enter a poisoned ville because his troops didn’t have chem weapons suits? Perhaps he had no way to decontaminate the spoils? Or mebbe the real payoff for him was the monstrous act of mass murder itself? Or its anticipated, long-term consequences? A more prosperous barony for Haldane meant better pickings for Magus in the future. Steel Eyes always sided with those who had the best chance of turning a profit.
Because of the bad road and heavy vehicles, it took the better part of a day to reach the site of the predark ville of Akela, the rendezvous point with the blaster team. There wasn’t much left of the ville—a five-acre patch of pocked-and-cratered asphalt that had been a box-store parking lot, concrete foundation pads sprouting rebar and PVC stubble. A rusted-out water tower toppled over on its side, the holding tank split and emptied. A few telephone and power poles still stood, canted over, draping sagging, rotten wires.
Waiting in the middle of the ruined parking lot was another olive-drab six-by-six. Hitched to its rear bumper was a long, two-wheeled, tarp-wrapped trailer. When the convoy pulled up and stopped, men jumped out of the cab and rear of the truck.
Haldane bailed from the Humvee and walked down the row of wags to join his troops. As they stared at the additional potential adversaries, they looked nervous. Nervous men and automatic weapons were a bad combination.
“Easy, now,” he told them in a low, confidential tone. “Keep your safeties on and your fingers off the triggers. We’ve got nothing to worry about, yet. Just watch me and stay alert.”
Then the door to the hulking landship opened. Magus descended to the tarmac and started walking toward the covered trailer. It was horror in motion. The creature lurched forward, swinging its arms, its still-human muscles wedded imperfectly to stainless-steel bones. Despite the convulsive gait, it glided on buttery-smooth, Teflon-coated ball and socket joints.
At a wave of his half-metal hand, the blaster crew began unstrapping and uncovering the steely gray, D-30 Lyagushka. Cannon revealed, they disconnected the lunette under its muzzle brake from the six-by-six’s rear bumper hitch. Lowering the blaster’s central emplacement jack, they raised the wheels high enough to clear the three trail legs. Then they spread the two outer trails at 120-degree angles on either side.
“Where is the practice target?” Haldane asked as the crew rotated the mount, turning the barrel to the north.
“You can’t see it from here with the naked eye,” Magus said. He signaled one of the blaster crew. “Give him a scope.”
The man handed the baron a spotting scope and faced him in the right direction, pointing out the target over his shoulder.
It was a skeleton of a shack. More of a utility shed, really, squatting on the desert plain. Once it had been connected to the electric grid, but the power poles leading up to it were all blown down. The heat waves rising off the sand made it difficult to see, even with predark optics.
“How far away is it?” Haldane asked.
“Eight point three miles,” the crewman said.
Haldane lowered the scope. “You’re going to practice with real chem warheads?”
“No, of course not,” Magus told him. “To lock in the range and the direction and amount of wind drift on the battlefield, the gunners fire a series of smoke rounds. They should be sufficient to convince you that I can do what I say.”
At his command, the eight-man crew loaded a projectile and adjusted the aim. Then they clapped their hands over their ears.
Anticipating the blast, Haldane did the same.
Magus, on the other hand, simply reached up and turned his off.
Steel Eyes signaled and the gunner jerked the lanyard. With a rocking boom, the Lyagushka jumped on its trails, belching flame and smoke. The 122 mm round squealed as it sailed away.
Haldane raised the spotting scope to his eye and reacquired the target. Seconds later a puff of white smoke erupted downrange, followed by a rolling thunderclap. The impact was about two hundred yards short of the shack and one hundred yards to the left.
Through the lens, Haldane saw a family of mutie jackrabbits hightailing it across the scrub. They had seen enough.
The crew readjusted for distance and windage, reloaded the gun and fired off another round. This time the smoke puff was one hundred yards too long but directly in line with the shack.
Their third shot landed within thirty feet of the ruined shed, pelting it with rock and wreathing it in dense cottony smoke.
The elapsed time from first to last shot was about four minutes.
“You can do that to Sunspot?” Haldane said.
“Sunspot is much bigger, so it will be even easier to hit,” Magus said.
“Piece of cake,” the gunner confirmed, grinning up at his half man–half machine master. “And nobody’s going to be shooting back at us from eight miles away.”
“Did you notice how my crew used the wind drift to make the smoke sweep over the target?” Magus asked. “They’ll do the same thing with the nerve gas.”
“How many rounds will it take?” the baron said.
“To saturate a ville of that size with CW agent, it’ll take a dozen of the binary munitions, give or take a few depending on the wind’s speed and direction.”
“And once that’s done?”
“Every red-blooded living thing inside the Sunspot berm will be dead,” Magus said.
Haldane couldn’t help but ask the awful question. “How badly will they suffer?”
“Charming of you to be so considerate of your intended victims, Baron,” Magus said.
The observation wasn’t meant as a compliment.
“If we used the liquid lewisite instead of sarin,” Magus continued, “their agony would be much prolonged. The blister agent causes immediate burning pain in the chest and eyes, temporary blindness, and after a latency period of a few hours causes severe inflammation of the lungs leading to death. On the other hand, high doses of sarin gas chill relatively quickly, if not painlessly. The nerve agent disrupts the normal functioning of the body’s muscles. They go into spasm or cease to operate altogether. Unlike lewisite, its victims once poisoned don’t move very far. They collapse, go into convulsions, then total paralysis sets in, which causes suffocation. Salting the earth and water around Sunspot with liquid sarin will make it uninhabitable for many years to come. Anyone who comes within a mile of the ruins and takes a deep breath or touches the ground will get a fatal dose. A permanent solution to your quandary is what you wanted. That’s what you’ve got.”