Sunspot (15 page)

The troop of cannon fodder limped after the masked baron and his chestnut steed, heading over the hill in the direction of the interstate. As the sacrificial ranks filed past, Ryan saw that the two Redbone swineherds, Bezoar and Young Crad, had been reunited. Not that it really mattered to him one way or another. Their fate was, well, their fate. It no longer had anything to do with his.

From horseback the baron’s officers organized the procession of norms, muties and dogs. Norms moved to the front of the file, with the muties and their panting beasts bringing up the rear. Once they were in position, they began a deliberate, careful advance to the northwest, keeping to the hollows and saddles between the low hills as much as possible. The only light came from the stars, and it turned the desert into shades of gray spattered with pockets of impenetrable black.

The long row of troops in the main column was easy to get lost in. There were at least 250 souls, not counting dogs. Ryan moved slowly enough so the other norms had to pass him. In this way, without drawing attention to himself, he gradually dropped back to the end of the norm ranks, along with Mildred and J.B.

Figuring Ryan would do just that, Krysty and Jak advanced to the front of the muties until they were walking right behind their companions.

“Doc never turned up,” Ryan said over his shoulder to Krysty.

“But the droolie did,” J.B. said.

“For Gaia’s sake, don’t tell me Doc got chilled up there,” the tall redhead said.

“Truth is, we don’t know,” Ryan told her. “He could be dead already. Or he could have been captured by Haldane’s men. There’s no way of finding out before we attack the ville. Malosh isn’t going to let us wander off and search for him.”

“We can’t desert Malosh’s army without making sure Doc is beyond our help,” Krysty said. “We just can’t.”

“From the way the droolie tells it, Doc sacrificed himself to get the word back, so Malosh wouldn’t skewer us,” Mildred said. “So we’d have a chance to get away.”

“That’s why we’re not going to leave him behind,” Krysty said.

“He would never leave us like that,” Mildred agreed.

At the sound of a snarling dog, Ryan looked over his shoulder. A swampie in a red stocking cap had moved within ten feet of them. He held the massive animal by a chain around its neck. Swampies were sour-faced by nature, but this one was extra unhappy.

“That swampie looks like his dog just died,” Ryan said.

“It did,” Krysty said. “I blew its head off earlier. I didn’t want to, but he didn’t give me any choice. That’s Meconium, the boss swampie. I would’ve shot him, too, but I was outnumbered.”

“Isn’t he the same bastard who shit his pants back in Redbone?” Ryan said.

“I bust his nose good,” Jak said with pride.

Ryan squinted to see. “Yeah, it’s kind of flattened and bent over to the left,” he said. “Can’t breathe a lick through it, I’ll bet.”

“Doesn’t bother him. He’s a mouth breather,” Krysty said. “And he’s got himself a new dog.”

And it was some dog.

The beast was nearly as tall as Meconium. It had pointed ears and huge feet. Slobber swayed from its pendulous jowls as it glowered at Ryan, head lowered, chain biting deep into its thick neck.

Ryan slipped between Krysty and Jak and spoke in hushed tones as they walked along.

“We’re going to get split up once we reach the ville,” he said. “The norm unit is going over the berm first.”

“What are we going to do?” Krysty said.

“We don’t have any choice. We have to follow Malosh’s orders,” Ryan told her. “It’s the only way to get into Sunspot and locate Doc. If he’s there, we’ve got to find and free him as quickly as we can, while the battle is still under way. If he isn’t there, he’s got to be on the interstate, mebbe wounded, mebbe dead. Whether we find him nor not, we need to regroup once we’re inside the ville. We’ll meet close to the western gate. We can use the confusion to slip out and head down the interstate.”

“If he’s in the belly of some mutie,” Mildred said, “we’re never going to find him.”

“If we don’t find Doc on the road,” Ryan said, “we’ve got to face facts. He’s on the last train west.”

“Get your mutie ass back here where it belongs,” growled a voice behind them.

Ryan glanced back at a man in a baseball cap armed with a 12-gauge pump.

“Belongs square on my hairy face,” Meconium said, waggling his tongue between bruised and split lips.

Jak faked a move toward him and the swampie not only flinched but jumped backward behind the dog, which snarled in defense of its new master, showing long fangs, top and bottom. The animal started towing Meconium forward in the hope of taking a chunk out of Jak.

Krysty looked at the head swampie, her hand resting on her pistol butt. “Better hold that pooch nice and tight this time. I think you remember what happens if you don’t.”

“No more of that, rad-blast it!” the keeper of the muties said, swinging the shotgun’s muzzle around. “You shoot another dog, and I’m going to blow you clean in half. Move to the rear of the line, you two. Do it, now!”

Krysty gave Ryan a wink, then she and the albino dropped back among the shuffling shadows and disappeared from sight.

I
T TOOK THE BETTER PART
of three hours of steady walking to circle to the north of the gorge entrance. Looking up at that side of the ridge, Ryan could only see two bonfires burning. From Sunspot’s vantage point the column was invisible. Without a moon, there wasn’t enough light to pick out the formation’s approach.

At the base of the ridge, the officers began dividing the norm fighters into three assault waves. Ryan leaned close to one of the officers and said, “Me and my two friends would like to be in the first bunch that hits the berm, as a matter of personal pride. Is that a problem?”

The officer shook his head and whispered back, “We’re gonna tear Haldane’s bastards a new one this time.”

Ryan waved for J.B. and Mildred to follow him to the head of the line. If they were the first ones over the breach, he figured they had the best chance of locating Doc before someone else shot or clubbed him to death.

At the officer’s signal, Ryan, Mildred and J.B., and the rest of the first wave, began to climb single file up a kind of deer or goat trail that was no more than a foot wide. It zigzagged up a slope that varied between forty-five and sixty degrees. Half the time, they had to use both hands and feet to advance. There was no vegetation; it was bare rock. And they couldn’t see more than a few yards above them.

The north side of the gorge was both the toughest route to attack and easiest route to defend. If Haldane’s soldiers got wind of what they were doing, they were dead meat. They had no cover but the side of the hill. If the enemy started firing down on them from along the edge of the ridge, they didn’t have a chance. And it was a long way to fall.

Which was why Malosh was making such a show of coming up the gorge. The feint was designed to draw attention from the real spearhead of the attack until it was too late to do anything about it.

When they neared the ridgetop, at the officer’s command they fanned out in a line that paralleled the berm. Lying flat on their stomachs, they slowly crawled closer to the lip of the cliff.

Close enough for Ryan to hear the bonfire crackling and snapping. J.B. and Mildred could hear it, too. They were almost directly across from the gun emplacement.

Ryan raised his head, just to the level of his good right eye, confident that his black hair and the black night would hide him. The weapon they faced was a predark heavy machine gun, .308 caliber, belt-fed. The M-60 was swivel mounted on the roof of a Chevrolet Suburban in front of a large hole that had been hacked in the sheet metal. Steel plate replaced the windshield and side windows. Its rear end wasn’t just backed up against the berm; it was buried by it. From the looks of the vehicle, no tires on the front rims, dozens of rust-ringed bullet holes in the fenders and grille, it hadn’t run in more than fifty years. Beside the emplacement a well-stoked fire roared from a fifty-five-gallon drum.

Ryan counted two soldiers behind the gun, although there could have been more inside the SUV. There was seventy feet of open ground to cross before they reached the berm.

When Ryan ducked back down, he gave J.B. and Mildred the info using hand signs. Two enemy. Then he signaled the letter M and Six-Oh. It was all they needed to know.

The sky to the east was already starting to turn from ebony to lavender. False dawn was almost upon them.

Ryan checked the SIG by feel, easing back the slide, reaching in with a fingertip, making sure he had a live round chambered.

J.B. carefully snicked back the bolt of his Uzi, putting a 9 mm round under the firing pin.

Mildred wiped the sweat from her palm on the tail of her T-shirt, then regripped her Czech wheel gun.

On the other side of Mildred, Malosh’s officers knelt with a satchel charge and predark frag grens at the ready. Below them in the dark, the rest of the norm force and the muties and dogs crouched on the slope, waiting in considerable discomfort for the signal to charge the summit and break through the berm.

Then the hard clatter of blasterfire erupted from the gorge side of the ville. As the firing continued, Ryan’s empty eye socket started to itch.

The fight for Sunspot had begun.

“For nuke’s sake, don’t give the droolie that fucking thing!” Bezoar protested.

Ferdinando, the one-armed leader of the cannon fodder, paused as he handed Young Crad a well-worn AK-47, steel shod butt first.

“Don’t give him that blaster,” Bezoar said, “unless you’re looking to get shot in the ass yourself. He doesn’t know one end of a blaster from the other.”

The young swineherd had never been offered a functional firearm before. For him, it was a coming of age moment. He eagerly grabbed hold of the rear stock and the curved magazine and tried to pull the AK to his bosom with main force.

For a crippie, Ferdinando was triple quick. He snap-kicked Young Crad in the groin. When the stupe’s knees buckled in slow mo, he jerked the weapon out of his hands and passed it over to the ten-year-old boy standing next to him.

Though the baron’s cannon fodder was meant to absorb lead not dish it out, they had to throw up some blasterfire or the Haldane force would realize their assault was a ruse. As Bezoar looked around, he saw weapons being passed out to some of the old, the young and the ambulatory infirm. Even though it was dark, he could see the rest of the AKs were battered old blasters, too. Not a speck of bluing was left on the barrels or the receivers; in the starlight, they reflected silver as if chrome-plated. Their front and rear stocks were missing or held together with metal plates and screws or with overlapping winds of duct tape. Fire selector levers were busted off in either single-shot or full-auto position.

Scary ass guns.

But then again, there was no reason to give decent weapons to the walking dead.

Baron Malosh spurred his huge horse, and with a wave of his gloved hand, led them out of camp.

The uplifting sense of power and pride the baron had instilled in Bezoar with the eve of battle/get your glory speech faded with every limping step. The elder swineherd knew they were going to die.

And soon.

Unlike the men, women and children marching behind him who were still bright-eyed and eager for the fight, he had a hard time seeing anything positive in drawing his final breath.

“You shouldn’t have come back for me,” he told the baby-faced swineherd at his side. “You should’ve run off when you had the chance. Now instead of just me, we’re both gonna be dead.”

“I was too scared to run,” Young Crad admitted. “I had nowhere to go. Are we really gonna die?”

“Where do you think we’re going now? To a picnic breakfast? Hell, yes, we’re gonna die. We’re gonna all get shot to pieces.”

The elder swineherd fell into the hypnotizing rhythm of the march. Step, limp, step, he leaned heavily on his willow fork crutch, thinking about the life he had lived. Bezoar was weighing days already long spent. Young Crad was too dimwitted to comprehend the need to make an accounting. And besides, every day had been pretty much the same for him since he was a baby. All pigs. All the time. Bezoar, comparatively speaking, had lived a rich, full life.

In his thirty-eight years, he had had several common-law wives and had fathered many children. Once he had owned more than a hundred pigs, and he had paid others to take care of them. Then he lost everything, thanks to jolt. Wives. Family. Jack. Pigs. Youth. Mental stability. The only job his jolt-holed brain could handle was herding swine. Sometimes he could still taste the white crystalline powder, hot and bitter in the back of his throat, and he caught himself waiting with every muscle tensed, every nerve poised to receive the unholy, wipeout rush that never came. Bezoar’s life in retrospect was a cause for both regret and celebration. But mostly regret. And at the end of his allotment of hours and minutes, his only friend in the world was a triple-stupe droolie who smelled even worse than he did.

He could feel the pain building in his bad leg as he hopped along on his crutch. The original damage to his knee, like every other catastrophe in his life, had been jolt-related. When he had failed to pay the local supplier of the drug, he got his kneecap shattered with a ballpeen hammer. It was meant to serve as a warning. It should have been taken as a warning.

It wasn’t.

Beside him, Young Crad tunelessly whistled through his front teeth.

“Shut the fuck up,” he told the droolie.

They walked along in silence for a long time, following the horse tracks in the sand.

When the cannon fodder column finally reached the interstate and the dropped bridge, Malosh turned them toward Sunspot, detouring around the dropped overpass. On the far side of the rubble, because of the highway’s upward incline, the going got more difficult for Bezoar. It forced him to lean even harder on the crutch. It was too dark to see the mouth of the gorge in the distance, but the silhouette of the ridgetop against the stars and the fire lights on the left-hand rim gave Bezoar a sense of its size. And menace.

To him it seemed like the killing chute of an immense slaughterhouse.

Where was the glory in being led single-file into an abattoir? he asked himself. And unlike slaughtered cows or a hogs, their meat would rot in the desert sun. Fly food.

In front of them, Baron Malosh’s big chestnut suddenly reared and sidestepped, detouring around a section of ruined road.

Bezoar caught a powerful reek of ammonia. It got stronger as they advanced farther. Some kind of vile liquid spoor had been sprayed over the ground.

Young Crad recognized the stench. “It’s the thing,” he said. “It’s what dug up all the graves.”

“Where?” Bezoar said, swiveling his head to look from one shadowy side of the road to the other.

“Take it easy,” Ferdinando told him. “It won’t dare attack. There are too many of us.”

“How do you know that?”

“It was hanging around the last time I fought here, when the dead horse fell on me and I lost my arm,” the head of the cannon fodder said. “Seemed like there was only the one. Like a big cat, I guess it needs a lot of territory to hunt. We never saw it during the day, we just found the tracks in the sand along the side of the road. And the piss or shit, whatever it is it leaves behind. It probably lives in a hole somewhere out in the bush. Only comes out at night. Can’t bury the dead deep enough or pile enough rocks on the graves to keep it from digging them up. Free eats for a big-time scavenger.”

“What the hell is it?” Bezoar said.

“Nobody knows for sure.”

“Legs,” Young Crad said. “Lots of legs.”

“Yeah, and it moves so fast your eye can’t hardly follow it. We never found any part of the dead ones that it took, either. Snatches up its live victims the same way. Zip and they’re just gone. Probably carries them back to its hidey-hole.”

“Alive?”

“Let’s hope not.”

After they’d walked a little farther up the grade, Ferdinando asked, “You made your peace, yet, pig man?”

“Working on it,” Bezoar said.

“Well, don’t work too long. Once we step into the gorge, nukin’ hell’s gonna break loose. You and your triple-stupe buddy better be ready to meet your maker.”

For somebody in exactly the same position they were—about to be shot to shit—Ferdinando was pretty fucking chipper. But not nearly as chipper as Baron Malosh. The masked man rode tall in the saddle, cantering his horse this way and that, leading the column around the scattering of open, emptied graves.

False dawn was breaking in front of them as they neared the entrance to the gorge. In the faint light, Bezoar could just make out the looming walls of rock that bracketed the interstate. Blazing fire cans on the ridge lit up the sides of the three gun positions that commanded and controlled the stretch of ancient highway. The line of sacrificial lambs was about to enter a well-established kill zone. Bezoar knew the heavy blasters outside Sunspot’s berm had to have the range locked in. It was too dark to see clustered bullet holes and rows of spawl marks strafed into the roadbed. And of course, there were no bodies or body parts to stumble over, as the creature had taken care of cleanup.

Malosh’s strategy was to move in just before the break of dawn so the ville defenders couldn’t see that they were up against a token force of cotton tops, peg-legs and eight-year-olds.

Dread hung over Bezoar in a sickening fog as they advanced into the jaws of the gorge. Had they been seen by the enemy already? There was no cover that he could see ahead. It was a four-lane highway, with no divider except for a dirt strip. He couldn’t make out the gun barrels on the high slope above but he imagined their gun sights. Tracking. Tracking. Tracking. He lowered his head and trudged onward, though it was even harder for him to walk, what with one knee stiff and the other gone all to rubber.

If the gunners on the ridge saw them, they held their fire, letting the column advance until it was completely within the kill zone.

“Get ready to run,” Ferdinando said.

“Where to?”

“There’s cover on the far side of the turnoff.”

At that moment Malosh turned to his troops and shouted, “Run!” As the cry echoed through the gorge, he spurred his horse, galloping the last hundred feet to the edge of the blown-up section of road.

It was all Bezoar could do to keep from being trampled by the people running for their lives behind him. Young Crad grabbed him under the armpit on the bad knee side and half carried him forward or he would have certainly been swept under and crushed.

On the other side of the predark turnoff to the Welcome Center, Bezoar could see weak light reflecting off small pools and trenches filled with standing water. The ruined stretch of road was littered with mounds of earth and thick, uptilted slabs of concrete reinforced with rebar. Such was the only cover on offer.

As Bezoar and Young Crad three-legged raced to the disrupted zone, Sunspot’s gunposts cut loose, raining blasterfire down on them from above. Heavy-caliber slugs sparked off concrete and steel, kicking up dust and sending shards of road metal flying.

Ahead of them, Ferdinando leaped over the first of the water hazards and dived behind a three-foot-high pile of rubble. Young Crad gave Bezoar a hard shove, sending him and his crutch skidding into an open trench. The water was cold and hip-deep, but it was shielded from incoming fire by a canted slab of concrete.

As Crad jumped in the water beside him, other fodderites dashed or limped or crawled past, looking for a place to hide.

Although it was getting lighter by the second, Haldane’s gunners couldn’t have seen exactly what they were shooting at. They laid overlapping waves of machine-gun fire onto the road, hosing it down with lead.

The effect was like random meat grinder.

The slow and the unfortunate were chopped down in droves. Flicked to earth. Staggered. Not just chilled.

Disintegrated by converging, triangulated blasterfire.

A man in his forties lurched toward them, his right shoulder blown off, arm hanging by thread of sinew. As he clutched his terrible wound, he was hit in the back by dozens of down-angled rounds. Which opened his torso from throat to crotch and emptied his body cavity in an awful whoosh.

The wash of hot blood and guts sprayed over Bezoar’s head. Gagging, he crouched lower, chin under water, unable to breathe for his own fear. He could feel the ground shaking underfoot from the ravening impacts of machine-gun bullets.

The sky was lightening apace.

In dawn’s glimmer, Bezoar saw piles of still bodies. He saw quivering bodies. Others crawled, mortally wounded, screaming as bullets stitched up their backs, swallowed up in clouds of dust. The water in the swineherds’ trench had turned red.

Of the hundred or so who marched into the valley of death, eighty survivors had found cover.

Bezoar was astonished to see that Malosh the Impaler was still astride his horse, riding back and forth while bullets sailed all around him, taunting the gun positions.

The other fodder was stunned by his bravery, too. The baron and his horse seemed impervious to alloys of lead. When he spurred his steed behind a wide, uptilted section of roadway and dismounted, the shooting from above abruptly stopped.

“Ready for some payback?” he shouted through a gloved hand to his human sponges.

A ragged cheer went up.

A bit less enthusiastic than before, Bezoar noted. If Malosh’s life was in fact charmed, sprawled on the ground all around them was proof that charm wasn’t catching.

“Open fire!” the baron cried.

Ferdinando echoed the order to the troops. “Shoot! Shoot! Get the bastards!”

The armed fodder poked their scarred assault rifles around and over chunks of concrete and mounds of dirt. AKs barked single-shot and streamed blasterfire along the destroyed section of highway. The more cautious shooters fired blind and one-handed, upward in the general direction of the ville. Others stuck their heads out from behind cover and actually aimed.

They were the unlucky ones.

Sunspot’s gun positions resumed firing, this time with muzzle-flashes to aim at. Whether what happened next was the result of concentrated incoming fire or some of the junk AKs blowing up on their own, blow up they did, like frag grens. What metal and wood the shooters didn’t absorb with their bodies and heads flew through the air.

Young Crad shielded Bezoar with his wide chest, and jammed his head under water. When Crad let him up, the elder swineherd sputtered and choked, but he didn’t complain. Not ten feet away, a cotton-topped shooter clutched a shattered buttstock driven through the side of his throat. Moaning, he struggled in vain to pull the thing from his neck. A little farther along, a young boy lay with his cheek pressed to the ground. Jutting from between his dead staring eyes was a dark shape. Part of the receiver and gas cylinder had been driven through his forehead.