Mildred eased off on the M-60’s trigger, her head wreathed in gunsmoke, spent brass piled around her feet. Breathing hard, heart pounding, she realized that someone was behind her in the SUV.
“Feel better now?” Ryan asked.
The gruesome show in the gorge over, Doc descended the berm with Isabel. She seemed withdrawn, subdued, pensive.
“Mildred made some cogent points about the danger, I thought,” he told her.
“You mean, your loose cannon girlfriend?”
“Mildred is hardly a romantic interest of mine. And I do believe an invasion by a hostile species like the scagworms could mean disaster for this ville.”
“I wouldn’t call what is happening an ‘invasion.’”
“But you said the number of scagworms has steadily and rapidly increased of late.”
“Yes.”
“I have witnessed their lethality, myself, in more than one arena. How can you deny the danger you and your people are in?”
“I don’t deny it. Sunspot folk are accustomed to danger. We’ve lived with it for many years, thanks to the barons. And we have learned how to handle the worms. And they can be handled, I assure you. We are top dog in the food chain in this corner of Deathlands.”
“Unless you count Malosh and Haldane.”
“We will defeat them, watch and see.”
“I trust you aren’t counting on the scagworms to help you do that. If you are, I must admit I am stunned.”
“And why shouldn’t we count on it?” Isabel snapped, her lovely eyes flashing. “The barons and their troops have no experience dealing with them. They don’t know anything about their defenses, their habits or breeding cycle. If the scagworms attack and chill the barons and their fighters, the people of Sunspot no longer have a problem.”
“My dear, you can’t possibly think you can domesticate a three-hundred-pound homicidal insectoid,” Doc replied. “These worm creatures won’t be made into pets or penned like livestock. They are nothing but killer instinct. It is hardwired into their nervous systems.”
Isabel turned her face away. Doc gently took hold of her chin and made her look into his eyes.
“Listen to me,” he said. “Even a tiger has some of the same urges as a human being. A tiger protects its offspring, it provides for them, and it teaches them the rudiments of making a living. Just as we try to do. These common urges create an empathetic bond between our two species. Mammalian species. We humans have nothing in common with scagworms. Their instincts are alien to us, and they are utterly incomprehensible. Worm sows teach their offspring nothing, nor do they protect them. And as a reward, the offspring eat their mothers alive.”
“We can herd the worms and we can hunt them,” the ville’s head woman insisted.
“Isabel, you are missing the point. Scagworms are carnivores, first and foremost. Yes, they will feed on one another when prey is scarce. But they will also eat everything else in their path. They will sweep over Sunspot like the nuke wind. You’ll never be able to contain them.”
“I don’t believe there are that many more of them coming,” she said. “There’s no proof that the numbers won’t level out, or even fall off. That the high point of the population isn’t already past. Scagworms haven’t been around long enough for us to know whether they will all stay here or move on. Or whether just a few will stay.
“We have suffered for so long, Doc. Because you weren’t here, you can’t understand or even imagine our situation. Our hopelessness. We are owed this chance. This is the light at the end of the tunnel.”
“Indeed, I know you have been hard set upon by fate, and you are correct, I cannot put myself in your place. But you cannot put yourself in mine, either. I have good reason to respect Mildred’s scientific opinion. She knows whereof she speaks.”
“Perhaps that’s true, but I know what I feel in my heart. And I know what I must do.”
“Ah, yes,” Doc said sadly. “Must do. Two of the most regrettable words in the English language.”
“It seems we have come to a parting of the ways.”
Doc reached out and softly stroked her cheek with the back of his hand. “You set fire to my ancient heart, madam,” he said. “I had forgotten how warmly it could burn.”
“Not so ancient, then.”
“My dear, if you only knew.”
“Some things are not meant to be.”
Doc nodded. After a pause he said, “I wonder if my companions and I might use your caves to take our leave of Sunspot?”
“When will you go?”
“Shortly, I fear.”
“Kiss me goodbye, then.”
Doc leaned down and she raised her face to meet his. Their lips touched tenderly. Again the sensation was exquisite and riveting.
“I could have loved you, Isabel,” Doc said as he pulled back.
“And I could have loved you.”
W
HEN
D
OC RETURNED
to the companions, Krysty was telling the others about what she’d learned of the ridge’s cave system.
“What do you think, Doc?” Ryan said. “You were down there, too. Can we retreat through the caves and reach the desert floor?”
“It is possible if we have a knowledgeable guide,” Doc said. “Impossible if we do not. The caves are natural fissures in the rock. Many of them branch off or narrow down to dead ends. Some of them terminate in sheer drops of untold depth. The geology of the ridge is very unstable, as well. I saw a man most horribly crushed by falling rock.”
“Where are we going to get a guide?” Mildred said.
“Guides,” Krysty corrected her. “Follow me.”
The companions trooped after Krysty as she headed away from the Welcome Center.
“Do you know what she’s up to, Jak?” Ryan asked.
“Wait, see,” the albino replied.
No one stopped or challenged them as they crossed to the lanes of shanties. As long as the conscripts remained inside the berm, they were free to move around as they wished.
Krysty walked up to a pair of blond boys, perhaps twins, certainly brothers, who were sitting back-to-back on a tireless truck wheel lying on its side in the dirt. The boys stared wide-eyed at Ryan and J.B., whose crusty, grizzled, blood-spattered masculine charm had a powerful appeal to ten-year-old aspiring road warriors.
“Will you help us through the caves?” Krysty asked them. “Do you know the way to the bottom of the ridge?”
“We know the way,” one of the boys admitted.
“What do you want in return for guiding us there?” Krysty said.
“You saved us twice,” the other boy said. “We don’t want anything from you.”
“We’ve got to be careful, though,” the first boy said. “We’re not supposed to take strangers down there. If anyone sees us, we’ll be punished and you’ll be stopped.”
“We don’t want that to happen,” Ryan told them. “Where’s the tunnel entrance?”
“Over in that cargo container, the third from the end.”
“Go ahead of us,” Ryan said. “We’ll follow you by twos.”
But before they could move, volleys of blasterfire erupted from the gates and the top of the berm, directed into the gorge.
“Rad blazes, they’re comin’!” shouted a man on the berm’s crest. “Get the baron. The bastards are comin’!”
“Stay here, close to the cave entrance,” Ryan told the others. “Let’s go have a look-see, J.B.”
The two of them ran back to the berm and scrambled up to its crest.
“Nukin’ hell!” J.B. exclaimed as he surveyed the gorge.
It was just as Mildred had predicted.
The main thrust of the scagworm invasion hadn’t arrived yet, but that arrival was only minutes away. Ryan and J.B. could see them coming from the south across the desert, up the interstate and into the gorge. There were tens of thousands of them, perhaps hundreds of thousands of them. They were moving so quickly their numbers were impossible to estimate. There were so many of them they turned the sand black; and the front edge of the wave was already slithering up the side of the gorge.
Blasterfire crackled along the top of the berm.
“Stop shooting!” baron cried as he, too, mounted the summit. “You’re just wasting bullets. Wait until they get closer before you fire. Then blow their fucking heads off.”
Under other circumstances, it was sound advice.
Under these circumstances, it was easier said than done.
Ryan knew firsthand how hard the scagworms were to hit with small-arms fire. And how hard they were to chill even when hit.
“Get up here!” Baron Malosh shouted at the mass of his troops milling around the Welcome Center. He waved them forward to defend the berm alongside him.
Ryan and J.B. did just the opposite. As the soldiers rushed up the slope, they rushed down. They ran across the compound, going against the flow of fighters hurrying into action.
The flow had dwindled to nothing by the time they reached the companions and the two boys.
“It’s the scagworms,” Ryan told Mildred, Krysty, Doc and Jak. “Thousands of them are coming up the gorge. Malosh’s troopers will never beat them back. They’re going to overrun the berm. We’ve got to get out of here before they do that.”
As they turned down the lane, they came face-to-face with the ville’s head woman. Isabel was carrying a folding stock Kalashnikov. Extra mags stuck out of her pants’ pockets. She wasn’t alone. There were at least forty other armed ville folk behind her. The rest of the Sunspot population had once again vanished.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Doc said. “You can’t fight off the worms. There are too many of them.”
“Who said anything about fighting worms?” Isabel replied as she walked past him. “We’re seizing the moment. It’s Malosh and his men we’re after. And this is our chance to get them.”
“You’re making a big mistake,” Ryan said to her back.
Too late.
Kneeling at the end of the lane, Isabel and her followers opened fire on the troopers strung out along the berm top. Their assault rifles clattered and bullet impacts swept across the line of fighters. Ten or so died in that first burst, shot in the back. The survivors, Malosh included, clambered to the gorge side of the berm crest and returned withering fire.
Before the companions’ eyes three of the ville folk, two men and a woman, were chopped down at the mouth of the lane by multiple bullet strikes. Isabel and the others quickly moved to the cover of a Winnebago’s rear end and continued to fire.
Ryan stepped up behind the ville head woman.
“Face it, you’ve shot your wad,” he told Isabel as she reloaded her AK. “You’re not going to get them all. You’ve got to pull back to the caves. Let the scagworms have them.”
“Are you going to talk or shoot?” she said.
When Ryan looked up, he saw the Impaler pop up over the top of the berm. Firing his AKs two-handed, the baron stormed down the slope, leading his troops toward the Welcome Center.
“Stop them!” Ryan shouted to the others as he brought up his SIG. He took a fixed aimpoint and punched out a string of rapid-fire single shots, letting the troopers run into his kill zone. He sent a couple of the fighters sprawling, but Malosh, his number-one target, was already behind the cover of the predark building.
The companions added their fire to the mix, leaving bodies dotting the side of the berm. Most of Malosh’s troopers made it to safety.
“Now there’s nothing between us and the nukin’ worms,” J.B. said ruefully.
“They’ll be coming over the battlements in a minute or two,” Ryan said. “Then it’ll be too late to do anything.”
“Isabel,” Doc said urgently, “it’s time to find cover. We can’t do anything more here, except die.”
“All right, all right,” the blond woman conceded as she stood. “Everybody pull back. We’ll join the others in the caves.”
As they all turned for the cargo container that hid the entrance to the tunnels they heard something in the distance. A whining sound. Coming from high in the sky. Growing louder and louder.
“Fireblast!” J.B. cried. “That’s incoming!”
There wasn’t enough time to take shelter. Ryan shielded Krysty and the boys with his body, anticipating a violent explosion and flying metal. The explosion was all flash and no shrap. More of a wet pop than a thunderclap. When Ryan looked over his shoulder he saw a thick pillar of white smoke rising from the middle of the garden, rising straight up in the air.
“That’s a ranging round!” he said. “It’s got to be Haldane. He’s shelling the ville! Go! Go! Go!”
With Isabel in the lead, they all raced for the cave entrance.
On the eastern side of Magus’s artillery encampment, away from the master and the main body of his road trash, two low-level minions hunkered in the shade of a Winnebago’s flank, waiting for the shelling of Sunspot to begin. They had gotten as far from Steel Eyes’ pounding boom box as they could. Magus was playing some kind of godawful predark racket. Squawking horns. Screeching fiddles. Thundering drums. A selected accompaniment to mass slaughter. It made their skins crawl. And they didn’t dare get caught with cotton wads stuffed in their ears.
Magus took that as an insult to his musical taste.
Insults to his taste, or anything else for that matter, were repaid by insults to living bodies. Vitals removed. Guts strung like garlands over the tops of the sagebrush.
One of the minions wore a headband made from a long strip of plastic trash bag. His face was rimed with dirt mixed with body oils; it made his lips look extra red and his eyeballs extra white.
The other man was equally filthy, as if he’d been slathered with lard, then rolled head to foot in coal dust. He sported a dense black beard that came down to the middle of his broad chest.
In contrast to their shabby duds and absent personal hygiene, both men carried brand-new, full-auto blasters on canvas shoulder slings.
“This job is a piece of cake,” Headband said.
“Yeah, I wish they were all this easy,” Beard said. “Chilling at long distance is sweet. Only hassle is the looting.”
“What looting?”
“That’s what I’m talking about. There ain’t any of that good old hands-on with this one. We get paid out of the price Haldane is giving Magus. No extra. Me, I like a treasure hunt. Adds some spice to the day.”
“Folks up there on the ridge gonna get a big surprise,” Headband said with a grin.
“So will the buzzards who try to eat ’em.”
Headband wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. The hand stayed dirty, and his mouth was no cleaner, either. “Damn, I wish I had me a gallon jug of beer. None of that week-old green shit, either. Gives me the runs something fierce.”
“Yeah, some six-week brew would be good right now. Even warm. Can’t seem to wash the grit out of my back teeth with plain water.”
“You gonna stick around for Steel Eyes’ next job?”
“Dunno,” Beard said. “Been thinking about spending some of the jack I got put away, mebbe take a little vacation from the mercie trade for a while.”
“You mean, two weeks in a trailer-house gaudy?”
“More like a month. Take me that long to catch up on my screwing. You heard about what the next job is yet?”
“No. And I know better than to get nosy. Nosy can get you chilled in a hurry around here.”
“Don’t I know it.”
“What was that?” Headband said, stiffening. His eyes narrowed to slits.
“What was what?” Beard asked.
“I saw something move over there.” Headband raised his H&K, using it to point away from the circle of wags. About twenty yards distant, out on the desert, there was a fresh hole in the dirt.
“What was it?”
“Didn’t see it that clear. Just caught the butt end of it as it slipped down the hole. Looked mighty big and meaty. Mebbe a nice fat jackrabbit. You a little hungry?
“Always.”
“Let’s go get us a snack.”
The pair of road trash spread out and approached the hole gingerly from two sides. Headband paused en route and used his sheath knife to hack off a long branch from a creosote bush. He quickly trimmed off the side stems, creating a pointy stick. Creeping forward, he dropped to his knees in front of the hole and shoved the stick in, poking it around.
Beard had his machine pistol ready to fire, his stout legs braced. Headband was trying to encourage whatever it was to pop out of an escape hole so he could blast it with his H&K.
Nothing doing.
“It ain’t coming out,” Beard said after a minute or two. “Mebbe it ain’t a bunny.”
“What do you mean?” Headband said, drawing back the stick.
“Shit, it could be anything hiding in there. You didn’t see it, you said.”
“You sound scared. You scared?”
Beard didn’t like the question, or its implication. “Gimme that stick,” he snarled, and snatched it away.
“Don’t worry, I’ll cover you,” Headband said sarcastically.
Beard hunkered down on the ground on his belly and rammed in not just the stick, but his arm all the way to the shoulder. Driving with his legs, he straining as far forward as he could get.
“I feel something…”
“Get it.”
“I’m trying.”
“Don’t let it give you the slip.”
“I think I got it. Yeah, I got it. It’s tugging on the end of the stick. Man, the sucker’s strong!”
“Hee, hee, ha.” Headband chuckled.
Beard carefully started backing up, scooting on his knees, pulling his arm and the stick out of the hole.
What was clamped onto the end of the probe was no rabbit.
It had a black, eyeless, domelike head and a black, segmented shell. Halfway out of the hole, its transverse jaws snapped open, releasing the stick. They looked like ebony meat hooks.
“Chill it!” the kneeling and totally vulnerable man cried.
Before Headband could bring the muzzle of his machine pistol to bear, the creature moved in a sinuous blur, its hundreds of legs churning. It shot out of the hole and ran up under the man’s coarse black chin whiskers.
Beard jolted backward. A gargling sound came from his gaping mouth and the thing’s tail end thrashed against his chest.
“I think it’s got you, droolie,” Headband said, “instead of the other way around.” Then he started laughing and couldn’t stop himself. The sight of the squirming fat tail of the black critter hanging out from under the guy’s beard, and the guy trying to pull it off his neck was most comical.
Headband was too preoccupied watching his road buddy roll and thrash in the dirt, unable to dislodge the two-foot-long attacker, to keep his eyes on the hole.
A second black mutie scuttled out of the opening, ran across the sand, up his right leg to his hip. He felt rippling, scratchy bug feet on his chest a second before it sank its pincer jaws into the front of his throat. Their power was astounding. The twin prongs locked down in a vise grip, shutting off his laughter, and turning his breathing into a faint shrill whistle.
As the black worm squirmed from side to side, its jaws dug deeper and gripped even tighter, and hot blood sheeted over his chest.
Headband fought for his life, his eyes bugging out from the pressure of trapped blood inside his head. He let his machine pistol drop on its sling. The creature was too close for him to try to shoot it. Reaching to his belt, he managed to unsheathe a long knife. Grabbing a handful of bug ass, he stabbed at the back of the shell. The knife point, though needle-sharp, slid off; it wouldn’t penetrate. Headband dropped to his knees and stabbed again. Failed again. The blade wouldn’t even penetrate the dark band of cartilage between the armored segments. Because of his angle of attack, he just couldn’t stab hard enough to get the job done.
He became more and more frantic, realizing that his time and his air were running out. He made a mighty stab and the point slipped off the shell. The long blade speared into his chest to the hilt. While he clutched the knife handle, eyes wide with surprise, the creature continued to squirm and thrash, slicing its jaws in deeper, as if trying to behead him.
Even though help was only a few dozen yards away, with their airways cut off, neither of the road trash could scream.
Not that screaming would have helped.
Nothing short of a gunshot could have been heard over the roar of Wagner emanating from Magus’s boom box.
O
UT OF SIGHT BETWEEN
the parked wags, his arms folded across his chest, Baron Haldane watched the two men’s futile struggles with fierce satisfaction on his face.
“Shouldn’t we do something?” Bertram asked him, without suggesting what that something might be. Even the seasoned sec man blanched at the brutality and savagery of the attack.
“Let them die,” Haldane said. The insect muties had saved him the trouble of chilling them.
And when the road trash stopped jerking under their own power, the worms slithered into their bodies, biting holes in their soft bellies, flopping back and forth until their tails disappeared inside. Then the stilled flesh moved again, shuddering, pumped by internal puppet masters.
“That’s what we’ve been hearing creeping around here all night,” Cuzo said. “What the hell are they?”
“Fucking deadly, that’s what,” Bertram replied.
“Stabbers sure don’t chill them,” Cuzo said. “We know that for a certain fact.”
“Mebbe blasters don’t, either.”
“Don’t be a triple-stupe,” the baron said.
“Fucking A,” Bertram countered, looking warily at the surrounding desert, “those rad-blasted things could be anywhere.”
“They could be tunneling under our feet,” Cuzo said.
“They can’t eat through Humvees,” Haldane said. “Safeties off. Keep your eyes peeled.”
“What about those bodies?” Bertram asked.
“Leave them where they are,” Haldane said. “Unless you want to risk getting a dose of what those two got.”
“They might get seen by Magus’s men.”
“So what? We didn’t chill them.”
“They might attract more of those things,” Bertram continued.
“The more the better,” Haldane said. “They can do the mopping up for us.”
The baron stepped out from cover and walked away from the corpses, toward the loud music. Thorne was still out in the open, under the full sun. He knew had to be broiling inside that tiny plastic cage. Haldane could see the remote detonator’s red arming light. It was blinking.
The doomie oracle hadn’t said that his son would be put in danger. Had it slipped his mind? Or had he just not seen it coming? Either way, another chilling was on tap when Haldane got back to Nuevaville. Mebbe he’d toss the whole lot of them over the cliff.
His plan for rescuing his son was to hit Steel Eyes and his men with an all-out assault as soon as the last of the chemical weapon rounds was fired. Before that happened, he and his sec men had to put some of Magus’s wags out of commission.
From what he’d seen of the remote detonator and the firing device, he figured they had to be radio-controlled. Which meant the only way to block the omnidirectional signal was to surround the pet carrier in a thick lead box. Which of course he had no access to. Shooting the firing device out of Magus’s hand was a dicey proposition, even at close range. And the half man still might be able to detonate the bomb before he was hit. The guards surrounding Steel Eyes would expect an attack on foot, and would be prepared to thwart it. Without the element of surprise, there was no way to free Thorne.
His plan involved not only what he hoped was surprise, but a critical supposition about why Magus had ordered his men to draw a wide perimeter around the cage. If the explosive device on the carrier had had a motion sensor on it, there was no need for the circle in the dirt. Just touching it would have set it off. If the bomb didn’t have a motion sensor, then it could be removed.
Even if Haldane was right, he knew the odds for success were piss poor. But failure had its compensations. If father and son were both blown up in the attempt, at least Thorne wouldn’t be vivisected, and the baron wouldn’t have to live with the fact that he could do nothing to stop it.
Magus came into view, lounging in his throne chair. Boom box by his feet. He raised his hand and made a circular motion to the gunner waiting beside the cannon in the middle of the ring of wags.
Let’s roll.
Steel Eyes reached up and turned off his auditory sensors.
“Stand clear!” the gunner barked. Sticking a finger in the ear facing the gun, he yanked the lanyard with his other hand.
Blam!
The Lyagushka jolted on its carriage, its barrel belching smoke.
The ranging round arced away, sizzling and squealing as it cored the fresh morning air.
With the gathered road trash cheering and jumping up and down, Magus turned his ears back on, then cranked up the awful music. Valkyries shrieked at top volume.
Haldane couldn’t follow the round as it streaked downrange; it flew too fast and too high.
Seconds later, a puff of white erupted over Sunspot’s ridge, plainly visible in the bright sunlight. The shell had landed inside the berm; its smoke swept east, into the canyon. The breeze over the target was blowing from left to right, thanks to the funneling effect of gorge.
“Nice shooting!” Magus shouted over the musical clamor. “Let’s see if you can lay another one in the ten-ring.”
As the gunner and his crew started to reload, Haldane and his seven sec men retreated along the outside of the ring of wags; when they were out of sight, they broke and ran. The goal was to decommission all but three of the fastest vehicles. They ignored the Winnebago Braves and the milspec six-by-sixes, which didn’t have the top-end speed to keep up with Humvees. They moved quickly to their preassigned targets.