Sunspot (8 page)

“Yes, so it would appear.”

“And you’re ready to pay the price?”

“I’ll pay what we agreed on, after the job is done.”

Magus stared at him in silence for a long moment. It was difficult for Haldane to say whether what passed over that godawful mouth of his was a smile. What lips remained to him turned up at the corners as guy wires slipped through Teflon grommets, coiling somewhere under steel skin onto tiny hidden spools. “Just to make sure you don’t change your mind after Sunspot falls, I’ve brought along an inducement.”

“I won’t change my mind.”

“Nonetheless….” Magus gestured at the landship, steel fingers beckoning impatiently.

The side door opened again and the blond-dreadlocked henchman stepped out, carrying a beige fiberglass box in both arms. The box was a cube two-and-a-half-feet wide, deep and high. At one end was a steel-barred door. The baron had no experience with predark pet carriers, but he could see there was something good-size moving around inside.

As the henchman approached, he saw the small pale fingers clutching at the bars, and behind the locked door, a small, familiar face.

Haldane swung his scattergun up in two-handed grip, bracing himself for sustained rapid fire.

His soldiers shouldered their assault rifles.

Magus’s men reacted, raising their weapons, as well.

It was a standoff, unwinnable by Haldane, and winnable only at great cost to Steel Eyes.

“I think we can agree that the boy is in good health,” Magus said. “If you want to keep him that way, you and your men should lower your blasters. No way can you chill all of us before we chill him. You need to calm down, Baron. You need to think it through. The child is just a good faith guarantee, a deposit on the full amount. You pay me and you get your deposit back. You withhold payment and I will take him apart just to see what makes him tick.”

For Krysty, the third straight day of march was by far the most difficult. There was an unfamiliar leadenness in her legs, and the inside of her head felt like it had been scoured with coarse sand. It wasn’t just the starvation rations, or the hard terrain, or breathing through a filthy handkerchief, or the distance they had covered. For two nights running, she and Jak had sat back-to-back with weapons drawn, unable to sleep a wink because of the threat the swampie bastards presented. Even now, every time they glanced over their shoulders at her, their faces bruised and battered, she could see it in their eyes.

They wanted a chance to even the score.

And more.

Jak gently nudged her with an elbow, breaking her train of thought. He pointed to the left, to a hilltop to the east. A pair of dark riders had crested the rounded beige summit and were racing down the slope toward the front of the column.

The albino pulled his bandanna off his face. “Scouts back,” he announced, showing muddy teeth.

Somewhere out of sight up ahead, Malosh the Impaler called a halt to the advance.

The long line of marchers stood in silence while the dust settled and the midday sun beat down on them relentlessly. Though they were stopped, no water barrels were opened, no dippers were passed around. The baron was hell-bent on conserving as much of the accumulated resources as possible. If he didn’t need to drink, nobody drank.

The cannon fodder unit was standing behind them. Doc slouched about thirty feet away. Krysty watched him peel the long scarf from over his nose and mouth. He didn’t shake it out; he wadded it up in his hand while he gasped for air. Under the coating of dust, Doc didn’t look at all well. In his too long life the reluctant time traveler had suffered much, both emotionally and physically. The whitecoats’ cruel meddling had permanently damaged his brain, creating an intermittent short circuit, a debilitation triggered by stress, by a sound, a sight, a smell, or by Gaia knew what else. From long experience, Krysty knew how to read the signs in his gaunt face and in his body language. If Doc was indeed starting to withdraw into the morass of jumbled memories, of insensate anger, of incalculable loss, there was nothing she or anyone else could do to stop it.

She couldn’t see past the carts and the backs of the horses to locate Ryan, J.B. or Mildred.

The six companions were in a unique predicament. Though separated, they had all their weapons and ammo. They weren’t bound or hobbled. They were free to move within certain limits, even to regroup if they could manage it quickly enough. But if they regrouped and opened fire with their weapons, they would have been blown apart by a hundred blasters.

It was very hard to do nothing.

To just wait.

Above everything else, the companions valued their freedom. They controlled their own destinies, lived by their own code. They wouldn’t be enslaved by anyone or anything. Because Krysty shared that inner core of iron, she would never give up hope while her heart still beat. She was confident that their moment would come. Perhaps in the chaos of a pitched battle or during a lull in a long siege. They had to be ready for it.

She turned her attention to the ranks of dogs and dog handlers waiting in front of her. The hounds were nearly three feet tall at the shoulder, and they looked even taller in comparison to the sawed-off swampies. Their smooth, short coats were brindle-colored. White blazes marked their huge heads and thick necks. She guessed the animals weighed somewhere between 150 and 200 pounds. They were lean and well-muscled. Their pointed ears were bent and notched from blows and teeth. There were dark, crescent bite scars on their muzzles and on the sides and tops of their heads; some were missing their skinny tails.

From what she’d witnessed over the past two days, the relationship between swampies and hounds was not love-hate. It was pure hate. The dogs had either been captured from wild packs or bred and trained to bring out their savage instincts. She had seen hounds suddenly wheel and turn on their handlers, knocking them to the ground and, with a born chiller’s hard focus, going straight for the throat.

Most of the swampies showed evidence of these attacks. They had lost chunks of their faces, earlobes, fingers. When a dog pulled down its handler, the other swampies worked together to quickly bring the animal under control. They pounded on its head with their clubs and worked the ends of the cudgels between the grinding jaws to pry them apart.

Krysty caught movement up the line. The scouts were riding down the edge of the formation, in her direction. Both were tall, skeletally thin black men. One wore a leather earflap hat lined with sheep fleece. The other had a shaved head and crude metal wristlets strapped to his massive forearms. Their scruffy brown ponies looked too short to carry them. They stopped their mounts in front of Korb.

“We spotted a Haldane long-range foot patrol,” the man with the earflap hat told Korb. “They’re a half mile and a couple of ridges over to the west. Baron says we got to take them out before they see our dust. We’re only about ten miles from Sunspot now, so he wants as little shooting as we can get away with. He says we got to use the swampies and the dogs on them. Pick a half dozen of your other muties as backup.”

Without hesitation Korb chose Krysty and Jak. “I’m taking you two along because you showed me you’re not afraid to fight,” he told Krysty. “But I don’t want any extra trouble. You better keep Not Mutie on a short leash. Otherwise neither one of you will be coming back.”

Jak turned his ruby eyes on Korb. Whatever the albino was thinking, whatever he was planning, it was hidden deep beneath those bloodred pools.

“You don’t have to worry about us,” Krysty said. “We know how to follow orders.”

“This way,” Earflaps said, waving the muties after him as he turned his horse. At a gallop he and his partner retraced their route up the hill.

The eager hounds dragged their swampie handlers by their neck chains. Krysty, Jak and the other four muties ran after them, winding around and through the patches of low scrub.

Krysty glanced over her shoulder and saw the column hadn’t moved. Malosh didn’t want to raise any more dust and perhaps give away his position and numbers.

When they crested the first hill, the riders were already down the other side and climbing the next rise. It was up and down on a dead run for the next fifteen minutes. The horsemen lost them after the third hill, but the chewed-up earth of their tracks was impossible to miss. Krysty was amazed that the dogs didn’t bark or howl as they followed the trail. It was as if they somehow understood that the tactical situation required stealth, speed and silence.

Topping yet another hill, they saw the riders waiting for them in a ravine below. There has to be water down there, Krysty thought. Deep water. The notch of land between the summits was crowded with stunted green trees and brush. A perfect ambush site. As the dogs and muties ran down to them, the scouts dismounted.

“They’ll be coming along the top of that hill,” Earflap said, pointing to the crest on the other side of the tangle. “Take cover in the brush and wait until they pass by.”

The scouts opened a gap in the vegetation with machetes, then they led their horses down into the canopied gully, tying them to bushes.

Everyone else followed.

It was very dark beneath the dense undergrowth. And very hot. Along with the others, Krysty and Jak crawled on hands and knees to the far side of the gulch. Muties and dogs lay on their bellies, softly panting.

“Are you going to capture the patrol and make them fight for Malosh?” Krysty asked Korb.

“No, we can’t trust ’em to chill their own,” Korb told her. “They gotta die. Die real quietlike.”

Minutes passed. Krysty lay there, drenched in sweat. The dust trapped under the canopy tickled her nose and made her want to sneeze. Then a soft murmuring sound caught her attention. It was Meconium whispering intently into his hound’s torn ear, and as he did so, he was staring daggers at Jak and her. The beast seemed to be taking it all in, its eyes narrowed to slits, its nose, jowls, tongue and fangs dripping.

“Shh,” Earflap hissed.

Through the screen of foliage, Krysty saw eight armed men working their way single file along the ridgetop. Every one of them looked warily down into the ravine. None saw the concealed enemy.

The hounds could surely smell their quarry’s scent, but they made no noise. Not even a whimper. They had stopped breathing.

The scouts waited until the patrol had vanished over the crest of the hill, then they waved the entire force forward, through the curtain of brush and up the slope. They climbed in a ragged skirmish line, as silent as the dead. Only after they had topped the hill, coming upon the hapless eight from behind, did the swampies turn loose the dogs of war.

At the snarling, growling sound, Haldane’s men whirled. Their jaws dropped at the sight of the madly charging beasts. They froze. Before they could bring their blasters to bear, the hounds were in their midst, lunging with bared fangs. They fired their pistols at extreme close range, but jostled by the animals and one another, they missed their targets.

Two members of the patrol broke and ran down the hill. The man in the lead half turned and frantically, blindly, fired his revolver to the rear, hoping to hit something. Hit something, he did. He shot the man running behind him in the groin, sending him crashing to his knees, then his face. In a second, hounds were tearing into them both.

The six others weighed in with steel-shod rifle butts, and fighting back-to-back, held off the canine onslaught for a minute or two. Then the dogs caught one of them by the leg and dragged him down, and the defensive formation fell apart. The hounds leaped on the backs of the others and sank in their teeth, savagely shaking their heads, pulling the men to the ground by their shoulders, their arms, their necks.

The swampies leaned on their clubs and the scouts held their machetes at port arms while the pack of beasts did the dirty work.

There were many more hounds than victims. Dogs took hold of flailing arms and legs and digging in their paws, pulled against one another. The men caught in the awful the tug of war tried to poke out the eyes of their attackers and clawed at the scarred muzzles. In vain. Spread-eagled on the ground, their bellies were fully exposed. While they screamed, hounds tore into their midsections. And once the animals had opened horrible, gaping wounds, they began yarding out living guts.

Muzzles dripping with blood, the dogs fought one another for the hot goodies. It was competitive eating at its most grotesque. The hounds wolfed so quickly they couldn’t keep their meals down. Gagging, they puked up the gray coils, only to gobble them again, even faster.

“Pull off the dogs, for nuke sake!” Korb yelled at the idle swampies. “They’re gonna choke themselves to death.”

The stumpy bastards laid into the hounds with their clubs, pounding them into submission. After they had rechained the dogs, they hauled them back from the carnage and tethered them to stakes.

Only one member of the Haldane patrol was still alive. And unhappily so. Eyes bugging out in terror and excruciating pain, he thrashed on the ground, trying to shove his ruined guts back into his stomach cavity with blood-slick hands. He stuffed dirt and rocks into himself, as well. Realizing the futility of his effort, he looked up at the muties, desperate for someone to put an end to his suffering.

“You got it, friend,” Krysty said, drawing her Smith & Wesson from its holster.

Before she could fire the coup de grâce, Korb’s hand deflected the barrel upward.

“No more blastershots,” he said.

Beside her, the little albino’s hand moved in a blur. Something sizzled through the air. Like magic, a dark star of razor-sharp steel appeared at the side of the wounded man’s throat. As blood poured from his neatly severed jugular, he closed his eyes, grimaced once and died.

“Dangerous little fucker, aren’t you?” Korb said to Jak.

The albino didn’t deny it.

Meanwhile the swampies gleefully fell upon the corpses, stripping them of their weapons and valuables. Then they confiscated and scarfed down their enemies’ field rations. They left the torn bodies sprawled on the barren hillside for the buzzards.

After they recrossed the tangled ravine, the scouts climbed on their horses and rode east. With Korb leading the way, the muties headed back for the main column at a leisurely pace and in no particular order of march. Chained dogs walked in front of and behind Krysty and Jak. The animals’ appetite for violence was apparently sated. They were no longer dragging their handlers forward. The companions still eyed them warily. And as it turned out, for good reason.

“Hey,” a familiar voice called from behind.

Krysty and Jak both turned to see Meconium grinning at them. The hound at the end of the chain leash he held had its ears pricked up. The dense muscles on its shoulders were bunched into knots, and the short hair along its spine stood up in a bristling ruff.

“Oops,” the swampie said as he let go of the chain.

The huge brindled dog bounded forward, snarling.

Instead of going for Jak, who was most likely the intended target, for reasons of its own the animal zeroed in on Krysty. She dodged the massive jaws as they snapped shut, then twisted away, pulling her .38 pistol from its holster. Jak drew his revolver, too, and tried to sight on the beast, but it and Krysty were moving too fast, circling, feinting, retreating. He couldn’t fire for fear of hitting her, either straight on or with a .357 Magnum round through and through.