Sunspot

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“We take the ville,” the soldier said, “or die trying.”

Chapter Five

As Baron Kendrick Haldane crossed the fields en route to his riverside compound, his subjects, old and young, tipped their hats and smiled up at him. They knew nothing of the deal about to be struck. Though Haldane had been made baron by popular acclaim, his fiefdom wasn’t a democracy. The good people of Nuevaville didn’t want participatory government; they wanted a leader, a father figure, someone in charge who was stronger and more intelligent than they were. Success or failure, survival or extinction was the baron-for-life’s sole responsibility.

Parked in the lane in front of the side-by-side, double-wide trailers that housed his residence and administrative offices was a convoy of armored predark wags. Hummers. Winnebago Braves. Military six-by-sixes. One of the vehicles, a veritable landship with a skin of gunmetal-gray steel plate, dwarfed all the others. The metal windshield had two wide rows of louvred view slits for the driver and navigator. There were also view slits above each of the firing ports that ringed its perimeter at four-foot intervals. Bulletproof skirts protected the three sets of wheels; amidships and rear, the wheels were doubled. A full-length steel skidplate protected the undercarriage from improvised road mines and satchel charges. On the roof, fore and aft, heavy, swivel-mounted machine guns controlled 360 degrees of terrain.

The wags’ crews and sec men lounged around cable spool tables set out under a pair of oak trees.

Small children peeked at the convoy and its personnel from behind the outcrops that bordered the lane. From their delighted expressions, they thought the carny had come to town. When Haldane angrily waved them off, they scattered, out of harm’s way.

The baron had positioned his ville defense force in the surrounding buildings, ditches and fields. From these hiding places, they aimed two old RPGs that had been acquired by the old baron at the parked vehicles and the seated men, ensuring that any attempt at a double cross would end as quickly as it started, a grenade attack turning wags into burning hulks—and men into dismembered corpses—in a matter of seconds.

Haldane could hear the big wag’s power generators droning as he approached the crew members and sec teams. There was as much Nuevaville rabbit stew on their beards and forearms as there was on their plates. Those not eating were busy drinking green beer from recycled antifreeze jugs and smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and cheroots. Their predark milspec weapons were prominently displayed. The 9 mm Heckler & Koch MP-5 A-3 submachine guns showed no wear, no scratches in their blueing. They looked brand-new, right out of the Cosmoline.

The visitors didn’t rise in deference or salute as Haldane passed. Some ignored him, most stared with unconcealed contempt. The baron had come face to face with plenty of road and river trash in his day, but this gang was different. And not just because of the quality and condition of their blasters. They had no fear of him.

Or perhaps they had a far greater fear of their employer.

The sec men and drivers were uniformly large—tall, well fed and muscular. They all sported an excess of the scarifications and brandings that passed for body decoration in the hellscape. Angry red tears perpetually dripped down cheeks. Mouths were widened at the corners and turned up into obscene, permanent grins. Spiral brands formed symbolic third eyes in the middle of foreheads. Inch-wide, half-round welts, snakes of scars, wound around bare arms from wrist to shoulder. Ground-in dirt caked their hands and faces and the sides of their heavy black boots.

Haldane entered the big wag via a porthole door amidships. The light inside the narrow metal corridor was dim and filled with the most horrible smell, a combination of slaughterhouse in July and deathbed, blood and pus and bodily wastes. It took his breath away. To the right, down the access way, a sec man with shoulder-length, blond dreadlocks motioned impatiently for him to approach.

“Did you talk to your god?” the guard asked, holding the muzzle of his H&K pointed at the baron’s bowels, his finger resting lightly on the trigger.

“No,” Haldane replied, “my god talked to me, through his chosen oracle.”

“Ain’t but one true god in Deathlands, Baron, and he’s waiting for you back there.” The sec man hooked a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the wag’s rear salon.

As Haldane started to walk past, the sentry put out his free hand and said, “Gimme that blaster.”

The baron let him take the Remington, then started down the hall. On his right were evenly spaced firing ports and view slits. On his left were riveted metal walls and closed metal doors.

He was fifteen feet from the entrance to the rear stateroom when he heard a shrill, whimpering sound over the generators’ steady throb. The sound was instantly recognizable. It made his heart thud in his ears and his blood run cold. He sprinted for the door and without knocking, threw it back and burst into the salon.

Inside everything was in disarray. The lamplit workbenches and tables that choked the middle of the room were cluttered with surgical tools, rusting cans and piles of rags. Under the tables were buckets of what looked like dirty transmission fluid. Floor-to-ceiling metal shelves overflowed with electronic and computer parts. In front of a double ceramic sink streaked with blood was a fifty-five-gallon plastic barrel in which floated human body parts. The concentrated reek of abattoir made his eyes water and his gorge rise.

In the gloom on the far side of the jumble of tables, something moved on the broad, rear bench seat. Haldane caught a glimpse of a face, of sorts. In a full moon of festering flesh sat eyes like chromed hens’ eggs.

An ancient, unblinking evil.

That wouldn’t let itself die.

When Haldane moved closer, he saw the small blond-haired child sitting ever so still on the creature’s lap. It was his son, Thorne. The boy’s blue eyes wore an expression he had never seen before. And never wanted to see again. Thorne was paralyzed with terror. A half metal, half human claw rested easily on the back of the boy’s slender neck.

“You have a very inquisitive child here, Baron,” the Magus said. “He asked me for a guided tour of my war wag. I think I have satisfied his curiosity.”

Thorne Haldane looked up at his father, desperate to be away, but afraid to move a muscle.

As adrenaline flooded the baron’s veins, a mechanized hand slipped down to cover the center of the child’s chest.

“He has such a strong little heart,” Magus said.

The clanking laugh than emanated from the spiderlike torso jolted Haldane to the core, as did the implied threat.

Magus wasn’t a child molester.

He was something infinitely worse.

“Come here, son,” Haldane said.

Steel Eyes held the boy fast on his lap, and the baron sensed the creature’s insane jealousy, his envy of the budding young life.

Haldane had a nine-inch killing dirk concealed up his sleeve. A weapon designed to open a wound that would never close. But where to stab, which of the rat’s nest of plastic tubes and colorful wires to cut? And failing a one-strike, instant chill, those metal fingers would crush his child’s head like a piece of ripe fruit.

The dirk remained in its forearm sheath.

“Son, come to me. You have no business here.”

Magus didn’t try to stop the boy as he cautiously slipped off his lap. Thorne hurried between the tables to hide behind his father’s stout legs. The six-year-old clung to the back of his BDU pants.

From the bench seat came a faint, high-pitched whirring sound as the pupils in Magus’s metal eyes dilated. Then he opened his mouth and licked his lips with an all too human tongue. When he closed his jaws, the supporting guy wires slid into the grommets set in titanium cheek braces.

It was said, and widely believed, that this monstrous, suppurating creature experimented with the organs of other people in order to find ways to improve his own ability to function. It was said that Magus was so removed from his human origins that he performed operations on himself. He could turn off his pain centers and yank out and replace his own innards, like components of a wag motor.

There would be no experiments on Haldane’s only son. Not while the baron still drew breath. Without a word, he picked up the boy and carried him down the hall, past the grinning sec man, to the porthole door.

“They grabbed me and brought me in here, Daddy,” Thorne told him. “I didn’t wanna see this place.”

“I know you didn’t. It’s okay, now,” Haldane said as he put the child down. He opened the door and whispered in his son’s ear, “Run, Thorne. Run!”

The boy jumped to the ground and took off down the lane like a shot, through the first spattering of rain. Lightning arced across the northern sky, and a moment later thunder rumbled.

As Haldane turned back for the salon, his hands began to tremble and shake. His mouth tasted like he’d been sucking on a bullet. This was how Magus took and maintained control of even the strongest, the bravest of men; this was how he corrupted them. He showed them their most terrible fear, and that he had the power to make it come to pass.

Steel Eyes dealt in weapons of mass destruction, the deadliest instruments that civilization had ever produced. No one knew for certain how he got access to the predark technology, whether he stole it from the secret redoubts scattered around the nuked-out world, or whether, as was rumored, he traveled back in time to rob it from the past. Either way, Magus was much more than a trader in rare and dangerous goods. Although he didn’t seek to acquire territory or to amass armies, his spies were said to be everywhere. He didn’t aspire to baronhood, but he pulled strings behind the scenes like a puppet master, applying pressure here, pressure there, for motives that were unfathomable.

The baron reentered the salon and stepped right up to Magus. Close enough to see the inflamed joins of live flesh and polished metal. Through the rear window’s view slits, in down-slanting shafts of light, fat flies buzzed and zigzagged.

“You shouldn’t have touched my son,” Haldane said.

“I did him no harm,” Magus countered. “I am not contagious. It was an educational experience for him. He saw the greatest miracle of whitecoat science at close range.”

With Thorne’s life out of the mix, an instant chill strike wasn’t necessary. The baron could have taken his time with the killing dirk, absorbing whatever punishment the mechanized hands dished out, stabbing and slashing until the creature finally died. He would have done so with relish, but he needed Magus to save his barony.

“Before we proceed,” Haldane said, “I want assurances that the loss of life will be confined.”

“I never give guarantees,” Magus said. “The weapons systems I have brought you are indiscriminate by design. My sources tell me that even as we speak, the Impaler is advancing on Sunspot with a large military force. He will rout your small detachment of fighters, take over the ville and reestablish his staging point for another hit-and-run attack on Nuevaville. Yes or no, Haldane. I need your decision now.”

The puppet master understood the trap in which Haldane and his arch enemy were caught. Both controlled minor fiefdoms with small populations and large, mostly uninhabitable territories. Malosh wanted the natural resources of Haldane’s barony, Haldane wanted to protect them. Haldane couldn’t defeat Malosh’s mobile army, Malosh couldn’t defeat his hardened defenses. Neither had alliances of mutual defense with baronies on their other borders.

For the past five years Haldane and his western neighbor had battled across an ill-defined boundary, losing blood and treasure in a steady flow, and the key to staging or holding off successful attacks was Sunspot. The remote ville had the misfortune of standing roughly halfway between the barons’ respective capitals, on the most direct overland route. For military purposes, it was a strategic lynchpin, a place for an army recover after the long desert trek, a place to store supplies and gather reinforcements. For years, control of Sunspot had swung back and forth between the adversaries, with the ville folk caught in the middle.

Haldane saw the fighting and the loss of life as a waste of precious resources and time. The constant conflict kept him from developing economic relationships with the wealthy eastern baronies, from building new trade routes, from bringing more prosperity to his people. It kept him from giving them a future.

Magus had appeared on his doorstep with a long-term solution to the problem. The only way to end the stalemate was to obliterate Sunspot ville and make it useless to either side.

For some to live, others had to die.

The price of peace was mass murder.

Haldane knew if Magus offered Malosh the same opportunity, he would jump at it. Not to use against Sunspot. To use against the defenses of Nuevaville. Not to end to the conflict at a gentlemen’s draw, but to win a one-sided victory.

The storm had closed in. Thunder boomed directly overhead. A hard rain rattled the landship’s roof.

“Show me what you’ve brought,” the baron said.

Magus lurched from the bench seat with speed and agility that surprised Haldane. He whipped aside a tarp on the floor, exposing a pair of lidless crates. They were painted olive-drab and bore the mark of the hammer and sickle. Inside one, in neat rows, were point-nosed artillery projectiles. The second crate held cased propellant charges. Like the wag crews’ H & Ks, it all looked straight-from-the-armory, brand-spanking-new.

“The chem weapon warheads are fired by the Soviet Lyagusha D-30 122 mm howitzer,” Magus said. “Its maximum range is a little more than nine miles.”

“And you have this gun?”

“Of course.”

“Where is it?”

“Safely hidden between here and the proposed target.”

Haldane examined the munitions with care. “There are two kinds of shells in the crate,” he remarked.

“That’s right. You have a choice to make, Baron. Would you prefer nerve or blister gas?”

Chapter Six

Doc Tanner marched with his eyes narrowed to slits and a scarf securely wrapped over his mouth and nose. The cannon fodder contingent to which he had been assigned formed the tail of a 350-yard-long column. In front of the human shields were the muties and the leashed dogs, then came the horse-and mule-drawn supply carts, the norm fighters, with the cavalry taking the lead.

Doc couldn’t see the other companions for the shifting clouds of dust and all the intervening bodies. Grit crunched between his back teeth, and when he lifted the bottom edge of his scarf to clear his throat, he spit brown. Beside him, the elder swineherd, Bezoar, walked under his own power, limping on a crudely fashioned, willow-fork crutch. Young Crad kept a wary eye on his mentor, ready to come to his aid in case he faltered.

Like Doc, the others were coated head to foot with beige dirt; like him, most had strips of rag tied over their faces. They looked like an army of the disinterred, children between the ages of seven and thirteen, and men and women with healed, horrendous wounds and missing limbs. Some of the fodder resembled the young swineherd—in Deathlands evocative parlance: triple-stupe droolies.

So far, all those who had tried to escape from Malosh’s army had failed. The dust and arid terrain offered little or no cover to conscriptees who broke ranks and sprinted off in the opposite direction. When this happened, the swampies leisurely unchained the dogs, who scrambled after the prey, baying. The deserters got off one, mebbe two shots, then came desperate screams for help amid wild snarling. Screams that were quickly silenced. After the same scenario had played out a few times, there were no more deserters.

Even if successful escape had been possible, Doc would never have left his battle mates.

High above the loose, three-abreast formation, buzzards circled, riding the thermals, waiting for hapless souls to weaken and fall behind. No bullwhips, no threats were required to keep the column of conscripts moving onward. To fall behind was to be abandoned in the desert, and that meant a slow, awful death by heat and dehydration, it meant lying helpless while the carrion birds plucked out your eyes and tongue.

Idle chatter among the ranks had dried up hours ago, along with the rain-soaked soil. The rapid pace of the advance was difficult to maintain, first because of soggy earth, and now because of all the dust the boots, the wheels and the animals were raising. Talking parched the throat and the refreshment stops on the march were few and far between.

Even when wind gusts blew aside the swirling beige dust, there was little of interest to look at. The army trudged down the vast river plain, creeping toward low blue blips on the horizon. The troops and wags and dogs at the front of the column scared off any wild animals.

As Doc put one foot in front of the other, his mind began to wander, inexorably turning inward. This was the first army in which he had served. During his months of captivity before nukeday, he had read about the terrible wars of the twentieth century. Except for the smattering of automatic weapons among the ranks, this army could have come straight from the fifteenth century—or even earlier. It had no mass overland transit. No aircraft. No communications systems. No motor-powered wags.

It was a legion of barbarians, of shabbily clad ground pounders who pillaged the hellscape like locusts.

AS AFTERNOON EDGED into evening, Malosh’s column climbed out of the river valley into the low, rolling desert hills polka-dotted with clumps of brush. Sunset tinged the mountains to the east, turning the up-tilted layers of folded bedrock into alternating bands of pink and orange. In a notch between the hilltops, they made camp for the night, unharnessing the horses and mules, lighting cook fires, setting up the tents for the men in charge. Everyone else ate and slept in the open in groups segregated by function and the relative purity of their genetics.

While waiting in line with the rest of the cannon fodder for his supper, Doc saw Jak and Krysty standing over by the dog pack. He tried to get their attention, but in the failing light they didn’t see him.

Ferdinando, the commander of the human shields, supervised the distribution of their evening meal. His right arm ended in a khaki sock-covered stump just above the elbow. His left hand was badly mangled as was the right side of his throat and face. A thick brown beard covered his cheeks, everywhere but that angry, waxy patch of scar.

Dinner consisted of a single, fire-roasted jacket potato and a dipper of water.

“This is what the baron means by ‘plenty to eat’?” Doc said, holding up the charred, stunted spud he’d been given.

“Fighters march faster on empty stomachs,” Ferdinando said. “Dogs are more eager for the hunt. Don’t worry, there will be feasting enough after we retake Sunspot ville.”

“You had control of it and lost it?” Doc queried.

“Our forces were driven out by Baron Haldane’s troops. The battle cost me my arm.”

“A terrible wound, indeed,” Doc commiserated.

“Gren went off under a horse I was walking past. Shrap tore me up bad, and then the horse fell on top of me. Lost this wing altogether, and it crushed my left hand so I can’t fire a blaster no more. To tell the truth, I can hardly pick up a spoon to feed myself.”

“Malosh’s army did that to you?”

“No, no. The gren came from Haldane’s men.”

“But you were a conscript?”

“No, I volunteered.”

“Why in God’s name would you do something like that?” Doc asked.

“Because I come from the heartland of Malosh’s barony,” Ferdinando said. “To the west of here there’s nothing but desert, unfarmable hardscrabble for hundreds of miles in every direction. It’s a place so worthless nobody has ever bothered trying to invade it. Before Malosh took power in the territory, the people in my ville were always just one day away from starvation. We had to watch our children die of hunger and disease. Malosh freed us from our fate. He realized that even though we could never win total victory over the neighboring barons because of our limited numbers, we could raid their territory on a regular basis and send the food back to our people. He forged us into a quick-strike fighting force. We survive by our wits, our courage and our speed of foot. If we stop moving, we die.”

“Surely you could pack up and move somewhere else. To greener, more hospitable pastures.”

“And fall under the bootheel of another baron?” Ferdinando said. “Never. The hard land where we were born has made us who we are. And we are proud of it.”

“And in the name of that pride you swear allegiance to the Impaler?”

“Call him whatever you like. He’s a hero to his people.”

“Perhaps so, but what about the poor souls he has forced to fight and die for him, whose villes he has ransacked?”

“Wait until you see the baron in battle. Wait until you see the effect he has on every person in this army. Malosh has no equal in valor or in daring. His example as a warrior raises everyone up.”