Sunspot (13 page)

“He didn’t go through any of the gates,” one of the sentries said. “He must have jumped over the wall.”

“Why did you sneak out of Sunspot?”

Again, Doc had no credible answer, so he kept quiet.

“He showed up this afternoon with a droolie,” another trooper chimed in.

“Where’s your droolie pal?”

“The creature took him,” Doc replied in an even tone. “I tried to help him, but bullets didn’t stop it.”

A reasonable enough story, but the men didn’t buy it. “Rad bastard’s got to be a spy for Malosh.”

“We hang spies around here.”

Bollinger didn’t make a headlong rush for Sunspot. He had six hours to get there and return before the gas barrage started. There was time for caution, though forcing himself to take it slow made his stomach jittery. Safety was far more important to his mission than speed. He knew if he didn’t make it to the ville and warn the garrison to pull out, all of Haldane’s soldiers would die. Either by the hand of Malosh, or the hand of Magus. These were troopers Bollinger had personally helped train and had commanded in battle. Moreover, he had grown up with all of them. He knew their families.

The sec boss sensed his two subordinates were jumpy, too. It wasn’t just because they were traveling at night. They had an awesome responsibility. Many lives depended on their success.

With starlight dimly reflecting off the sand, Bollinger led them along the clearest route, keeping to open ground as much as possible, keeping away from pitch-dark patches of brush, boulders and deep, narrow gullies. That way, if they were ambushed by men or muties, they had a chance to return fire and beat off the attack.

Bollinger could see their goal ahead, rising above the shadowy hills. Firelights twinkled against a black backdrop. He didn’t let his gaze linger; the danger was much closer and all around.

The sec boss knew everything there was to know about Sunspot. He had helped Baron Haldane take the ville from Malosh twice, and had been stationed there himself for months. During that time, he had learned to hate the rank shit pile and its people. He had lost many dear friends during the campaigns’ advances and retreats. He had come to view the ville folk as sneaking, lying, cheating bastards. And murderers. While he had been in command of the Sunspot garrison, they had assassinated four of his soldiers in one night. Bollinger had caught the guilty parties and hanged them in front of the whole ville. He had strung up the ville leader for good measure. He still wished he could have hanged them all, men, women and children.

Though the prospect of their impending annihilation with gas pleased him, he was less enthusiastic about Malosh’s receiving the same fate. Given the man’s history of atrocities, it seemed far too easy a way out. If offered a choice, the sec boss would have preferred to drag the still-living baron by his heels behind a wag for twenty or thirty miles, until there was nothing left but leg bones and feet.

Bollinger was sweating hard as they hopped down into a wide arroyo. His mouth was bone-dry. Not from the exertion of the trek or the lingering heat. The tension was starting to get to him. A man could only stay hard-focused, listening for the slightest sound, looking for the tiniest movement, for so long without losing his edge.

“Let’s stop a minute,” he said.

It was okay to move across open ground, it was definitely not okay to take a rest break there. His assault rifle braced against his hip, finger resting on the trigger, Bollinger headed toward a low, grass-fringed bank on their right. The crumbling, undercut bluff was draped in deep shadow. He approached it carefully, making sure that nothing hid in the darkness.

When he had completed the recce to his satisfaction, he told his men to sit in the shadows. With their backs against the bluff, they broke out canteens and sipped water. They kept their weapons ready and their senses alert. They spoke in near whispers.

“How far to go?” one of the soldiers asked.

“Mebbe five more miles,” Bollinger answered.

“I’m thinking the ville folk are gonna know something’s up when we pull out all our troops at once,” the other soldier said. “We’ve never done that before.”

“Yeah, but they won’t know what the something is,” the sec boss said. “Until it’s too late…” Even though they were sitting quite close to each other, it was so dark Bollinger couldn’t make out their faces.

“All those dead people are really gonna stink up the place.”

“That’ll bring on the buzzards, big time. Do you think the poison will chill them, too?”

“Yeah, stone dead,” Bollinger said. “Them and anything else that wanders by. That sarin gas is triple nasty. Breathe it, you die. Taste it, you die. Touch it, you die.”

Dirt exploded with tremendous force and a grinding roar from the bank at their backs. The man sitting next to Bollinger let out a yelp that lasted about one-tenth of a second, cut off along with his head, which toppled forward into his lap and bounced out of the shadows, landing face-up and bug-eyed in the starlight. Bollinger and the other soldier sat frozen as the still-thrashing body beside them was suddenly jerked backward, out of sight into a hole that hadn’t been there moments before.

Bollinger jumped to his feet, but the other soldier never made it that far. Before he could rise he was seized around the waist from behind and shaken so violently and so rapidly that his body actually blurred before Bollinger’s astonished eyes. Caught in that monstrous, crushing grip, the trooper couldn’t break free, he couldn’t breathe or scream. The only sound came from avalanching rocks and rib bones cracking. All the poor bastard could do was kick his legs and flail his arms. The extended limbs acted as brakes when he was slammed backward into the mouth of another fresh hole. Dirt rained down from the collapsing bluff. Again he was slammed backward, again he just managed to stay out of the burrow. The third time he hit the hole, he doubled over like a ragdoll at the waist and vanished.

Bollinger vaulted away from the bank, crow-hopping over the severed, drop-jawed head.

He hadn’t clearly seen what had just taken his men. He was left with a vague impression of smooth, domed heads, like the noses of five-hundred-pound bombs. And heavy, powerful jaws. Jaws that could cleanly sever a human neck in a single bite. Whatever the hell they were, they were very large, very quick and very deadly.

When he glanced down the arroyo behind him, his heart sank. In starlight, the dry river channel was alive with movement. Glistening, sinuous movement as the earth vomited forth dozens upon dozens of black segmented creatures. They poured out of the ground and slithered toward him, moving like streaking shadows above the sand. Even if he could have hit them, there were way too many for him to shoot.

“Oh, shit, oh, shit,” Bollinger groaned as he turned and broke into an all-out sprint. He felt good, felt strong, light and fast on his feet. Thanks to a jet-assist of adrenaline rush, he could make it. He was sure he could make it. He had to make it. There was no time to dump his gear and lighten his load. The effort would have slowed him a few fractions of a second, and he would have lost precious ground to the pursuit. He had to concentrate on running.

Running like all holy hell.

He pushed past his own limits, trying to put as much distance between the muties and himself as he could. Distance was the great dissuader. If he could make them give up hope of catching him, he had a chance. That was the only way he was going to reach the ville alive. He no longer had the luxury of picking an easy, meandering path through the clearings; he raced overland, busting brush, beelining it for the ruined interstate.

He didn’t think about how far he’d run, or how far he had to go until his legs started burning and growing heavier and heavier. He could hear his own breath rasping in his ears and he couldn’t seem to suck down enough air. Even as his pace faltered, as he began to stumble, from behind he heard scratching sounds, growing in volume like an onrushing storm, crisp feet scurrying, tens of thousands of them.

He knew then that he wasn’t going to make it. That his mission was lost. In that last moment of despair, he begged his doomed friends in Sunspot for forgiveness, and cursed the god that had abandoned them all.

Something heavy latched on to his right ankle and wouldn’t let go. As he dragged it along with him, the creature writhed and shook its head, the savage movement caused its serrated jaws to sever tendons and ligaments and score deeply into the bone. Hot blood squished inside his right boot. His foot went dead. He screamed as he ran a step or two more, unable to kick it free.

In the distance he could see the firelights of Sunspot.

Help was far away.

Too far away.

Pain lanced into his other leg and he tripped, crashing facedown in the sand. The creatures swept over him in a chitinous wave. Rolling over onto his back, he instinctively raised his hands to cover his face, which opened his torso to attack. Once the two-foot-long black worms sank their jaws in his belly, there was no getting them out. While he pulled and pounded on the powerful armored bodies and the rippling rows of scratchy bug feet, the worms shook, snapped and burrowed in a frenzy. Over his shrill screams, he could hear his ribs breaking like dry sticks and then they were squirming inside his torso, fighting over the choicer bits.

Only when one of them made a meal of Bollinger’s beating heart did his agony end.

Young Crad hightailed it downhill, his injured hand raised and clenched in a tight fist, blood trickling steadily down his arm. He ran parallel to the ravaged highway. The loose flesh of his face bounced and jiggled with each impact of bare feet slapping sand, as did the heavy muscles of his chest and stomach. Snot in twin clear streams trailed down his cheeks and swayed from his chin. The swineherd was a strong man, in the prime of his life, and if he knew how to do one thing, and one thing only, it was how to flee.

He had been fleeing pretty much his entire life. Usually to avoid kicks, sticks, spit, hurled stones and howled insults. Young Crad understood human cruelty, having received it for as long as he could remember, yet he had never once asked himself, “Why me?”

Because he knew why.

He had been marked at birth, abandoned by a mother who either sensed his mental deficit or shared it. Like most Deathlanders, the barrel-chested swineherd knew nothing about the predark myths that described orphaned babies being wet-nursed by wild animals. Supposedly, Romulus and Remus, the founders of the ancient city of Rome, had been raised by a she-wolf. Young Crad, the discarded droolie, had been suckled by pigs. Domesticated pigs. It was likely that his mother had deposited him inside the pen to be eaten by the hulking, omnivorous beasts.

Waste not, want not.

Instead, miraculously, he had been adopted into a sprawling litter of piglets. His earliest memories were of grubbing about in the sty with his oinking littermates. Young Crad had lived his life in constant, close proximity to the porcine species. Now that he was torn from the familiar, he felt terribly alone, and once again abandoned.

Being born a droolie in the hellscape wasn’t unusual. There were a number of ways fetal brains could be damaged between conception and birth, and little in the way of prophylaxis. After the fact, there was no remedy at all, save death. Accordingly, every ville had among its number a few button-eyed Young Crads; some had more, some less.

In Redbone, all the other dimmie girls and boys had had futures, of sorts. When they became old enough to control their respective sphincters and gag reflexes, they found gainful, lifelong employment in the ville’s lone gaudy. The gaudy master and his customers had no use for the pig boy. Not only was he scorned by every other human being—except for Bezoar, who was also an outcast and fellow swineherd—the ville folk actively sought to do him bodily harm, just like his birth mother had. It seemed he was always ducking, dodging, barely escaping their wrath.

Young Crad was a morally degenerate triple stupe, but he was smart enough to be scared shitless. The memory of the creature he’d just seen put wings on his heels. A dim memory. He hadn’t seen it all that clearly. But what stuck in his mind the most was all those legs, and the sheer size of it. Not only did it have twice as many legs as normal, eight instead of four, each leg had too many knees. Four or five, it seemed. All capable of bending. When it straightened its legs and stood to its full height, he could have walked under its belly without crouching. Crad was a bona fide droolie, but he instinctively sensed the creature was a stone chiller, not just a grave robber. And that it was looking for its next meal.

Then he heard the sound of blasterfire from up the grade behind him. Boom after rocking boom rolled against his back. The old geezer was blasting away like there was no tomorrow—if he was missing his target, there probably wasn’t any, either. The awful silence after the shooting stopped made him run even faster.

Other than Bezoar, Young Crad had never had a human friend. And he’d certainly never had a friend who would sacrifice his life for him. That’s what Doc Tanner had just done. The act of selfless heroism amazed him. That it had been done on his behalf made him feel wonderful and horrible at the same time, and he didn’t understand why. His new friend Doc had hurt him, cut on him, but he was accustomed to being hurt. Sometimes Bezoar beat him with a stick to drive home a point he was trying to make. It was useless of course, but it seemed to make the elder swineherd feel better.

Young Crad was crushed that he had lost a friend like Doc so soon after finding him. He blubbered a bit over a man he’d hardly known. Pathetic and limited and grotesque as it was, his world was collapsing around him.

For the life of him he couldn’t quite recall why he was returning to the baron’s army. Young Crad was a three-dimensional person with a two-dimensional mind. A cardboard cutout who walked and talked and ate and crapped. He knew he was in mortal danger, though, and that he would be safe when he reached the camp.

Broken bridge, he muttered as he ran.

Broken bridge.

Broken bridge.

A two-word prayer to ward off the thing with too many knees.

He was still muttering to himself when the shattered blocks of the collapsed four-lane span came into view below him. He scrambled over the uptilted plates of roadbed and dropped down into the dry riverbed. Without pausing to look behind him, he ran north, up the wide channel. After traveling a quarter mile, he climbed out of the riverbed and into the low hills.

He didn’t have to think about where he was headed, and he didn’t look to the stars to find his direction. Which was a good thing because if he had he would have become lost in a hurry. Below the conscious level, some ingrained homing sense told him which way to go.

He ran up and down the slopes of the low hills for what seemed like a very long time before he crested a rounded summit and looked down on a wide hollow where Malosh’s fighters had made camp for the night. Though there were no fires and no lights, he could make out horses, mules, dogs, carts, tents and, scattered everywhere, the dark forms of men sleeping curled up on the ground under the stars.

Young Crad was so relieved and so excited to see them that he didn’t think to yell or to wave his arms to announce his return. It didn’t even occur to him that there would be sentries on duty and that they would be armed. He raced full-speed down the hill toward the camp.

No one challenged him.

They just opened fire.

From behind rock outcrops on either side of him came starburst muzzle-flashes and the raucous clatter of automatic weapons, and he was caught in a withering cross fire of lead. Bullets whined all around him, kicking up dirt, zinging off into the night.

Young Crad didn’t know what to do, so he shut his eyes and kept on running.