Sunspot

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“I’ve seen how he raises people up,” Doc said. “He has no equal in brutality, either.”

“That is a means to an end,” Ferdinando said. “Three die and fifty join us.”

“You are saying he takes no pleasure from those ghastly public spectacles?”

“I have fought under Malosh for two years. Because of that mask he wears I’ve never seen him smile. I don’t know what gives him pleasure. I only know I will die for him because of what he has done for his people, for my kin.”

“No matter what he has done to everyone else.”

Ferdinando smiled. “Mark my words, when the time comes you will die for him, too. And gladly.”

“I will die,” Doc said, “but not for the likes of him.”

Clutching his miserable meal, Doc found Bezoar and Young Crad huddled close to one of the campfires. The elder swineherd comforted the younger, who sobbed bitterly into his palms.

“She’s in a much better place,” Bezoar assured his friend. After a minute he limped over to Doc.

“Poor boy’s brokenhearted,” Bezoar said.

“If you ask me, his attachment to that dead beast seems inordinate,” Doc remarked.

“The feeling was mutual,” Bezoar said. “That black-and-white hog followed him everywhere he went. They ate cheek to cheek, nose to nose at the same trough. She sat at his feet. She slept beside him in the straw. This is their first night apart since the day she was weaned.”

A phrase from Victorian times popped into Tanner’s mind. “The love that dare not speak its name.”

A florid euphemism that originally referred to another sort of socially—and Biblically—condemned behavior. Perhaps he was overreacting.

Bezoar slammed the door on that happy possibility.

Shaking his grizzled head, the crippled swineherd shared the boy’s sad secret. “When it come to getting some of the biscuit,” he said, “Young Crad was shit out of luck. None of the norm women in Redbone ville would take him between their legs. And he never earned enough jack to rent out a gaudy slut. Even the ville’s female triple-stupe droolies turned up their noses at him. His piggie dear wasn’t nearly so picky.”

Doc Tanner shuddered as deeply suppressed, horrific memories swept over him. Shortly after he’d first arrived in the hellscape, he’d been captured by Baron Jordan Teague and tortured by Cort Strasser, the baron’s head sec man. Strasser, of the skull-like face and skin like tightly stretched parchment, had driven Doc into the baron’s pig sties, and at blasterpoint, before an audience of hooting sec men, forced him to have sexual congress with the sows. The ordeal severely tested Doc’s staying power; Strasser wouldn’t let him leave the pens until he had serviced every single pig. And whenever the mood struck him, Strasser sent Doc back for more.

In the process, the Oxford-educated doctor of philosophy and science, a man of elevated sensibilities, of moral values, had been brought lower than low. A hundred times he had considered suicide. He had already survived kidnap and torture by the whitecoats, the loss of his family; his brain had been scrambled by consecutive temporal leaps. Despite all he’d suffered, his will to live was indomitable. He was only thankful that his beloved Emily and his dear children couldn’t witness his utter degradation.

Even years later, the sight of a curly tail made his skin crawl.

The idea that Young Crad might have willingly engaged in similar activity made Doc’s head reel. Dropping his dinner to the dirt, he turned away from the fire, clapping his hands over his ears to muffle the swineherd’s cries of anguish.

Chapter Seven

Baron Haldane sat in one of the sunken rear seats of one of Magus’s Humvees with his Remington sawed-off resting across his lap. It was slow going on what was left of the main predark east-west road, old Interstate 10. Haldane reckoned he would have made better time on horseback. The ancient roadbed was split and heaved up in places, and missing altogether in others, which made it impassable for the larger wags. The nimble Humvees scouted out a safe route for the heavier vehicles, sometimes on the highway, sometimes off. The convoy made wide detours around the soft spots, the deep craters and the boulders. Even so, Magus’s vast landship got stuck. Time and again, it had to be towed out of hole of its own making.

Despite all the stoppages and delays, Steel Eyes hadn’t showed his face once.

The baron’s three companions in the Humvee were the lowest form of Deathlands road trash. They stank of rancid body oils, spilled beer and diesel fuel. The driver wore a pair of yellow-tinted goggles, the other two wore cracked, wraparound dark sunglasses. All three sported greasy do-rags. The driver’s brown hair was braided into a long ponytail.

To break the monotony of the snail’s pace journey and to satisfy his own curiosity about the mysteries of Magus, Haldane asked them how they had been recruited into his service.

The front-seat passenger turned to glare at the baron. “None of your fucking business,” he sibilated through the two-inch gap of his absent, top front teeth.

The man in the seat beside Haldane wasn’t so touchy about his privacy. His teeth were intact, but mossy-green; the skin of his face was peppered with hundreds of deep pockmarks packed with grime. “I passed out dead drunk in a Siana gaudy,” he said, “and I woke up the next day in the back of a six-by-six with some other hungover coldhearts. Truck crew never said nothing about Magus. They fed us good and we did what we was told to the people we was told to do it to. Had nice new blasters to use on them, too. I didn’t know it all belonged to Magus until a week later when he showed up. By that time, I didn’t care.”

“Old Steel Eyes saved my skin,” the driver said over his shoulder. “I was all set to be hanged from a lamp post. That’s how they do the deed over in Kanscity. See, I got caught chillin’ this dirt farmer and his family. I didn’t plan no blood bath, I was just tryin’ to get my leg over on the little daughter. Dumb farmer heard her yellin’ for help after I got in the groove, then it all went to shit in a hurry. Him shooting at me, me shooting back at him. The other kin came a runnin’. By the time it was over, I’d done all five of them. I didn’t get far before the neighbors ran me down. Ville folk sold my life to Magus for ten gallons of prime joy juice.”

“Do you get a good wage?” Haldane asked.

“Let’s say he don’t pay in cash, as such,” the driver said.

“What does he pay you in, as such?”

“Why are you talking to him?” the front seat guy said. “He don’t need to know any of this shit.”

The driver waved off the protest. “It depends,” he answered. “We get a share of whatever’s on the table. Sometimes it’s ammo, sometimes it’s jolt, sometimes it’s something tender and warm.”

“Apple pie,” said the road trash next to Haldane.

From the salacious look that twisted his filthy mug he wasn’t referring to a home-baked dessert.

“Only pie on this job is gonna be miles away and stone dead by the time we’re done,” the front passenger grumbled.

“A waste of recreational opportunities,” the driver said.

“The women of Sunspot don’t know what they’re missing,” the toothless scum whistled.

Actually, they did know.

When Baron Haldane had control of the ville he kept the raping of the population by his troops to a bare minimum. He punished offenders severely, with public lashings. But when Malosh ruled Sunspot, it was another story. And it wasn’t only the women who got reamed.

“How many fighters has Magus got?” he asked.

“Who knows?” the driver said “He’s got some here, some there, from what I hear. All doing different things for different reasons.”

“Where’s his seat of power?”

“More like, does he even have one,” the pockmarked man said.

“If you’re looking for a stationary target,” the driver said, “in case things go sour on this deal, you’re shit out of luck. Magus is mighty tight-lipped about such things.”

“Jaws like a steel trap,” the toothless man said.

A remark that made the road scum laugh out loud.

“Only thing the Magus ever let us grunts in on is his retirement plan,” the driver said.

“Yeah,” the front passenger chimed in. “Early retirement for coldhearts who talk too much.”

“Or ask too many fucking questions,” the man next to Haldane said.

Threat taken, the baron looked out the dusty side window. He hadn’t come on the road trip unescorted. He had brought ten members of the Nuevaville defense force with him. Fully armed, they rode in the back of one of the six-by-sixes. They weren’t along just for his personal protection. Before he initiated an all-out chemical attack on Sunspot, he planned to send some of them ahead to warn the garrison stationed there. His troops had to pull back from the ville and be miles away from ground zero before the gas assault commenced. Baron Haldane was determined to do everything he could to prevent the chilling of his own people.

The baron-for-life was at a disadvantage in the deal with Magus. He didn’t know how to load, aim or fire the Soviet-made artillery piece. No one else in his barony did, either. In point of fact, no one had ever even seen a cannon that powerful. According to Magus, it took eight trained men to operate the gun.

So, in exchange for payment, Steel Eyes was to provide the weapon, the chemical warheads and the expertise to lay the rounds on target.

Nuevaville had an ample treasury of precious metals, predark relics, stored food, joy juice, weapons, ammunition and wag parts. All collected as tolls or in trade for other goods and services.

The price Magus had demanded of him was steep. The precious metal gold was a common currency in many parts of Deathlands. He wanted half the gold and a quarter of everything else. But Haldane knew it was worth the cost to end the stalemate. He didn’t ask his people to approve spending of their treasure. He didn’t have to.