Sunspot (16 page)

Those with assault rifles that didn’t explode or jam kept on shooting. Ferdinando moved up and down the ragged firing line and passed out extra 30-round mags. The thousands of unaimed rounds being expended weren’t a waste, any more than the dead fodder that decorated the battle field. They were the cost of victory. The enemy for its part was unleashing tens of thousands of rounds. And every bullet fired in this direction was a bullet that couldn’t be used to turn back the main attack.

When there was lull in the firing from Sunspot, Bezoar could hear Malosh laughing. “Conserve your ammo!” the baron shouted down the line. “Space your shots. Let ’em burn out their gun barrels.”

The elder swineherd saw Malosh turn to his horse and open one of the saddle bags. He took out a fat-barreled, orange-colored handblaster. He broke open the barrel to make sure it was loaded, then snapped it shut. Cocking the strange weapon, the baron aimed it over the top of the concrete slab that protected him and his horse.

The pistol made a hollow pop when he fired it. The round trailed a thin coil of smoke as it sailed away. It didn’t sail fast. Bezoar could easily follow its path. It flew in a high, looping arc toward Sunspot. High above the berm walls, it exploded.

The bright red flash against the lavender sky signaled the beginning of the end.

Doc Tanner sat huddled with his back pressed against a wall of hurricane fence, his long legs tucked up under his chin. His hands and feet were unbound, but his LeMat and swordstick had been confiscated by Haldane’s men. The holding cell in which he had been placed was actually a cage, with wire on five sides and a six-by-twelve concrete pad for a floor. Completely open to the elements, it stood next to the Welcome Center building. Before the nukecaust it was a locked utility and storage area.

Now it was death row.

Twenty feet away, a fire blazed in a fifty-five-gallon drum. Two armed guards stood beside the barrel. Behind them were the ville’s extensive communal gardens.

Doc tried to move as little as possible. Moving hurt. He was sore from his lengthy interrogation by Haldane’s sec men, which consisted of short periods of questioning interrupted by long periods of kicking and punching. They had asked him how close Malosh’s army was. They had asked him if attack was imminent. How many troops he had? Did he have artillery? They asked him what happened to the triple-stupe droolie.

Doc had chosen to say nothing except “I do not know.”

To offer any information to his interrogators meant committing to something that he would have had to keep track of.

After a few hours the soldiers realized they could kill him but they couldn’t break him. Killing him would have robbed the garrison of the drama of the hanging ceremony, certainly the high point of the week. And on top of that, they had gotten tired of knocking him around.

During the questioning, Doc flashed back to torture he had previously endured, at the hands of Cort Strasser. Compared to him, Haldane’s men were pikers.

The knowledge that Malosh and his army were coming, and soon, helped Doc endure the punishment. He knew that Haldane’s men were outnumbered, three to one. If he wasn’t going to survive the battle for Sunspot, he was confident that most of his torturers weren’t, either. He would dance at the end of a rope, satisfied that he had saved his dear companions’ lives and that they in turn would avenge his murder.

The sudden roar of heavy machine guns from outside the berm made the guards at the burn barrel jump. As the clattering blasterfire roared on and on, the Welcome Center garrison doors banged open and armed troops raced to their battle stations. One of the barrel guards took off, as well, disappearing around a corner on a dead run.

The remaining guard, who had enthusiastically participated in the interrogation, looked over at the caged Doc Tanner.

Doc rose to his feet as the short, skinny man stepped up to the wire, a nasty look on his weather-seamed face.

“Think your pal Malosh is gonna save you?” the guard said, dropping his AK’s fire selector lever to full-auto and sticking the muzzle through the fence. “Think again.”

There was nowhere for Doc to go in the narrow cage, nowhere that bullets couldn’t find him, so he stood perfectly still.

Before the guard could pull the assault rifle’s trigger, he was hit from behind and slammed face-first into the mesh, grimacing in pain. Steel points protruded through the front of his T-shirt, pitching four little pup tents in the fabric. Black blood drooled from his parted lips, spilling down his chest.

Moving out of the now-fixed line of fire, Doc saw Isabel standing behind the guard, her hands gripping the handle of a pitchfork. She had stuck the soldier in the back with such force that she had driven the eighteen-inch tines through his chest.

With a vicious twist, she freed the fork. And when the guard staggered backward, clutching his chest with both hands, she pivoted from her hips, slamming the end of the fork handle into the side of his head. He dropped to his knees, vomiting blood in a torrent.

She jabbed him with the business end of the fork and he toppled to his side on the ground, twitching helplessly.

Doc had no doubt that either of the blindingly fast blows would have been enough to chill him. They were that savage.

Isabel put down her weapon and searched the dead man’s pockets. She quickly found the keys to the cage’s lock.

“Madam, I am forever in your debt,” he said as she opened the door to his cell.

“No time for thanks, let’s go.” She pulled the AK from the wire where it hung by its muzzle and front sight.

“I must collect my own armament before we proceed,” Doc told her. “I know where it is.”

Ignoring her protests, he trotted around the side of the building and pushed through the Welcome Center’s front doors. Leaning against the cinder-block wall was a pair of huge, two-inch-thick steel plates designed to reinforce the flimsy entry doors. Torches in stanchions lit a hallway that led to the reception area. It was obvious that men had been sleeping on the tiled floor. There were mattresses of piled cardboard, ratty blankets and dirty clothes scattered around. There was also evidence that at some earlier time, intense fighting had taken place inside the building. Everywhere he looked there were bullet craters.

Doc made a beeline for the information desk, which was pocked and splintered with slug holes. He rounded the counter and bent behind it. Fumbling on the top shelf he found his ebony-handled walking stick. He unsheathed the rapier blade to make sure it hadn’t been damaged. Satisfied that the edge was intact, he started looking for his handblaster.

“Hurry up,” Isabel urged him.

As she spoke, the door behind the counter banged open and a soldier stepped out. He was as surprised to see Doc as Doc was to see him.

Before the man could swing his assault rifle around on its shoulder strap and bring the muzzle to bear on Doc, before Isabel could swing her own weapon up to shoot him, the old man snatched up his sword and lunged from his knees, driving with both legs. The rapier’s point entered just below the soldier’s sternum, and lickety split it slipped into his torso like a well-oiled scabbard, all the way to the hilt. As Doc whipped the blade out, he rolled his wrist and forearm, cutting a precise, overhand figure eight, which severed the heart from its major blood vessels. The soldier was dead before he hit the floor.

Doc wiped the blade on the man’s shirttail.

“Get your blaster, let’s go!” Isabel said.

Doc found the LeMat and its Mexican rig holster in a cardboard box on the bottom shelf. “After you, my dear,” he said as he strapped the hand-tooled belt to his waist.

Outside the Welcome Center, blasterfire from the ville’s gun positions raged on, unabated. He could hear intermittent answering fire from attackers at the bottom of the gorge. Ineffective fire, as it was directed at hardened positions and yards-thick berm walls.

Doc followed Isabel past the portable gibbet where he had been scheduled to hang. As he ran under the basketball backboard and its stiff, empty noose, he smiled.

It was a fine day to die, but not that way.

The ville’s head woman cut across the compound, moving low and fast. She took him between the rows of wheelless Winnebagos, converted semitrailers and cargo containers where the people of Sunspot made their homes. No one stepped out of the shadows to challenge them. All of Haldane’s soldiers had moved to defensive positions on the berm. Accustomed to invasion, the ville folk had taken cover.

Isabel led him to one of the cargo containers and pushed aside the sheet of opaque plastic that was its door. The windowless space was lit by a single torch. Tiers of wooden bunks lined one wall, all empty; an oil drum stove stood in the far corner. Two men were waiting inside. At Isabel’s signal the two men shifted the cold stove off its wooden platform, then swung the platform aside, revealing a hole braced with timbers, leading down into blackness.

At that moment Doc realized that the folks of Sunspot weren’t the meek victims that they seemed.

Isabel shoulder slung her AK and grabbed the torch from its stanchion. “Stay close, or you’ll get lost,” she warned him.

Doc followed her into the hole. Four feet down was a dirt floor. Ahead in the hissing torchlight, under timbered bracing, was a narrow, dusty tunnel. The ceiling was so low that Doc had to drop to his hands and knees and crawl.

After thirty feet or so, the tunnel grew taller and the earthen walls, floor and ceiling gave way to bedrock. Doc got to his feet, though he still had to lower his head to keep it from hitting the roof. The passage was triangular-shaped, narrower at the bottom than the top, a natural fissure in the stone.

Because of the tunnel’s gradual turns it was difficult for Doc to keep track of their direction. Though the heavy machine-gun fire was muffled by the stone overhead, he could still hear its ominous rumble. They encountered numerous pitch-dark side passages in the bare rock. He had no way of telling whether they were dead ends.

Doc tapped Isabel on the shoulder and said, “Do these passages provide the scagworms access to the ville proper?”

“They do, unfortunately. We’ve blocked off the tunnels we know they are using, but they keep finding new ways in.”

“This is how they decimated your stock of pigs.”

“Hogs are no match for the big old scagworm sows. They burrow up under the sty, get hold of the hogs’ legs and pull them down into the tunnels. Even though we knew what was coming, when it happened, it happened so fast we couldn’t stop it. The poor bastard guarding the last pig jumped into the hole after it. He let out a scream and was never seen again.”

“So they’re fond of long pig, as well.”

“They like their food alive and kicking. And warm-blooded.”

After they had traveled for a few minutes more, Isabel hopped down into wide, low-ceilinged stone chamber brightly lit by a ring of torches. Doc paused on the verge. Leaning against the far wall he saw a row of AKs and olive-drab ammo cans. Armed men and women, at least twenty-five of them, stood waiting, grim-faced.

As Doc dropped down into the room, the muzzles of all the assault rifles swung up to cover him.

“Put up your hands,” Isabel ordered him.

“As you wish.”

“Are you a spy for Baron Malosh?” she demanded.

Doc momentarily considered denying the accusation, but decided it was time for him to start telling the truth. “A most unwilling spy,” he told her. “Malosh holds my dearest friends as hostages. Their lives hang in the balance. I had no choice.”

“You bastard. You lied to me.”

“Would you lie to save your people?”

“I have lied. I have chilled to save them.”

“And you are ready to die in that cause?”

“Of course.”

“Then what separates us is a distinction without a difference, my dear.”

“The difference is you put my people at risk,” she said.

“The risk existed, whether I cooperated with Malosh or not. He is intent on retaking this ville.”

“Why did you walk away from me last night?”

“I would no more dishonor you, Isabel, than I would myself.”

Isabel gave him a searching look. She was handsome, brave, intelligent and utterly capable. There was the promise of great tenderness in her lovely eyes.

“It was not for lack of desire, I assure you,” Doc said. “I could not betray you in that way. Thankfully such an abomination was not part of the terms the Impaler dictated to me. Madam, I did only what I had to do in order to save my friends, nothing more. I owe them my life, many times over. If it costs me my life now, so be it. Do what you will.”

After a pause, Isabel waved for her people to lower their weapons.

“If you thought I was really Malosh’s spy, why did you not just let them execute me?” Doc asked.

“My husband was hanged by Haldane’s head sec man, Bollinger,” Isabel said. “Have you ever seen a person chilled that way?”

“Regrettably, yes.”

“It broke Paul’s neck and stretched it until it was two feet long,” she told him, her violet eyes flashing in the torchlight. “He was Sunspot’s duly elected leader. Paul never personally raised a hand against either one of the barons, or their sec men. He was trying to hold things together, trying to keep as many ville folk alive as he could. Some people here called him an appeaser. But it wasn’t true. He wanted freedom for the ville, an end to occupation. He did his best to protect the emerging underground. It was Paul who discovered the honeycomb of tunnels under the ville. The same slippages of rock that produced Sunspot’s sweet springs also produced the underground passages, which haven’t been completely explored because there are so many of them, and because of the danger of falling into deep chasms or being trapped by cave-ins.

“Though Paul tried, he couldn’t control a small group of ville hotheads. They insisted on not just sabotaging, but chilling our oppressors. It started with poisonings in the garrison mess, which were blamed on bad water, bad food, or contagious disease. Bloody revenge murders weren’t so easily dismissed. Bollinger caught the guilty ones and hanged Paul, too, because he hadn’t turned them in.”

“Why didn’t you side with Malosh, then?”

“One baron is just as bad as the other. Both of them bleed us dry. Which one was in charge at the time didn’t matter. It could have as easily been Malosh who hanged Paul.”

“How have you kept this tunnel system a secret?”

“The entrances are concealed inside the cargo containers. For reasons of personal safety, the barons’ troopers don’t like to enter them. When they do search our homes, it’s over quickly. There is another entrance near the latrines in the garden.”