Sunspot (21 page)

It never occurred to the baron to call off the sarin bombardment. For one thing, he knew Magus wouldn’t have honored such a request. For another, if he had done so, his troops would have died in vain. And the Malosh problem would have still existed.

Everything that the baron held dear lay in the hands of Magus. The future of his son. The future of his people.

And Magus couldn’t be trusted.

Haldane had a plan, but it was born of desperation.

As soon as the gas rounds were away, Magus had to die.

Haldane had already decided that he would do the honors on Steel Eyes, personally, while his sec men held off the road trash. Before Magus could detonate the plastic explosive, he’d blow the titanium hip and shoulder joints apart with his 12-gauge shotgun, turning the half man, half machine into a quadraplegic. Then he’d drive a wag back and forth over the head until the body stopped thrashing.

As Ryan and Mildred charged the side of the wag gate trailer, they fired at the defenders crouching behind the wheels and bellying down beneath the undercarriage. Bullets from the SIG and the ZKR sprayed across the double front wheels, blowing out the tires. As they flattened, that end of trailer dropped violently onto its rims.

No way could they stop to take more careful aim.

Answering starburst muzzle-flashes winked at them from the deep shade and the solid cover of the trailer’s steel wheels. Slugs freight-trained past their ears and kicked up the dirt in front of them. They were taking heavy fire from autorifles positioned at the corners of the Welcome Center, as well.

But they didn’t change course, and they didn’t slow down.

That would have been suicide.

The chaos of battle swirled around them like a touched-down tornado. People and dogs running in all directions. Blasterfire rattling on every side. Grens popping off, shooting out clouds of boiling smoke. In the blur of surrounding movement it was impossible to tell friend from foe. There were a hundred simultaneous threats. Ryan and Mildred had on their battle blinders, which reduced the world to a finite goal in tight focus. There was cover and safety under the trailer, if they could drive out the current occupants. With everything they had, they went for it.

Two of the wag gate’s defenders broke under the pressure. They squirted out from under the front of the trailer and sprinted along the berm in the direction of the Welcome Center.

Ryan and Mildred let them go. They were no longer an immediate threat. And there were still Haldane fighters shooting from under the semi.

With his fedora jammed way down on his head and a wild look in his spectacle-magnified eyes, J.B. came at the trailer from the rear. Having emptied his Uzi, he switched to the M-4000 on the run and fired from the hip. The pump gun bucked hard in his hands. He cycled out the empty hull, and fired again. Cycled and fired. Cycled and fired. His shot patterns spread wide under the trailer, raising clouds of dust. The Haldane fighters hiding behind the wheels to avoid Mildred’s and Ryan’s blasterfire couldn’t hide from his volleys of Number Two pellets.

Shrieking with pain, the troopers stopped shooting.

The clatter of their blasters was replaced by concentrated autofire at the foot gate fifty feet farther on. Bullets from outside the berm skipped through the yellow wag’s open rear doors and plowed into the ground. In hail of lead, a pair of bodies fell halfway out of the school bus, headfirst, arms hanging down, blood pouring from open mouths.

Ryan skidded to a stop beside the trailer’s wheel. Ducking, he peered around the ruined tires. Over the sights of the SIG, he saw the last of the wag guards sprinting away from the trailer and down the path that led to the Interstate.

In their haste, the wag gate troopers had left empty assault rifles and spent mags on the ground. They had also left their blood.

J.B. scrambled under the trailer’s rear bumper, crawling on all fours, keeping his head low to keep from bumping it on the undercarriage.

Mildred scooted in behind Ryan as he moved to the path side of the trailer. One look told him that Malosh had brought the cannon fodder into play.

“Bastards ran,” Mildred said, puffing hard as she reloaded her Czech wheel gun.

“Not far enough,” Ryan said. He replaced the mag in his SIG.

Blasterfire chattered outside the berm. It continued until someone shouted to call it off.

Ryan couldn’t see who had been shot, but he could guess.

Then the rest of the wag guards dashed into view, chased by a howling mob. Haldane’s men tried to fight back, tried to run, but for once the oldies and the crippies had the advantage. For once they had hold of the clean end of the stick. The defenders could still move faster than they could, but they had no place to go. The mob closed in with cudgels, rocks and boot heels. Haldane’s troopers disappeared in mass of moving bodies, bobbing heads and stomping feet.

Ryan and Mildred advanced to the front of the trailer while J.B. finished reloading his weapons.

On the one-eyed man’s signal they moved out from under the gate, running along the inside of the berm, to the protection of the back end of the school bus.

Bullets from the Welcome Center slammed the opposite side of the bus and sparked off the berm’s rocks. The dead arms drooping from the bus’s rear opening shuddered as bullets thumped and gnawed the bodies inside.

It was the only direction fire was coming from.

The machine guns had stopped shooting, presumably because the remaining gun posts at the center and east end of berm had been abandoned. The survivors of Haldane’s force had pulled back, retreating to make their stand inside the most solid structure in the ville.

The cannon fodder spilled out from under the wag gate, red-faced and triumphant from their stomp fest. Behind the first wave, a tall figure in black appeared. Baron Malosh held an AK-47 in either hand. At his command, the bullet sponges crossed the stretch of open ground, limping and hopping for the first row of Sunspot’s shelters. Slugs from the corners of the Welcome Center chopped down the fodder on either side of the baron. Sawed by blasterfire, the droolies and cripples were spun down hard to their knees, or hurled aside. The Impaler reached cover untouched by lead. Not all of his companions were so lucky. Easily one-third of the expendable had been expended. They lay facedown in the dirt behind him.

Ryan scanned the battlefield. Some of the hellhounds were running loose, in three-or four-dog packs. Others were dead, either shot or blown apart by gren blasts. There were wounded ones, too. Along the edge of the ville garden a dog with a broken spine pulled itself along with its front legs; its back legs dragged uselessly behind. Malosh’s norm fighters had moved around the other side of the ville, along edge of berm, coming at the Welcome Center through the rows of makeshift shelters. Swampies waited with them at the edge of the shacks. No ville folk were visible. Ryan figured they were hiding in their shacks, trying to keep from being chilled in a cross fire.

The Impaler and his men led the attack in two prongs, a pincer movement closing in on Welcome Center, raining twin streams of small-arms fire on the building.

Haldane fighters shot back from behind the garden’s concrete compost bins, trying to protect the retreat of their comrades.

Grens arced through the air, lobbed from behind an immobile Winnebago into the middle of the garden. They thunderclapped, sending shrap, soil and greenery flying in all directions. When the Comp B smoke cleared, the rings of leveled foliage revealed corpses sprawled facedown between the rows. Some were torn apart. Either before the fact by dogs or by the string of gren explosions.

Following up on the frag grens, Malosh and his fighters poured concentrated fire on the Welcome Center, chipping out chunks of the concrete blocks and the planters out front, driving the defenders back behind their shooting positions.

With no cover between the bus and the center’s entryway, Ryan, Mildred and J.B. couldn’t advance on the target. They held their fire and watched the battle unfold.

Backed by the full-auto assault, Malosh’s norms rushed for a corner of the garden, firing as they went. Haldane’s men abandoned the compost bins, pulling back to the concrete planters.

The attackers pressed on, dashing through the garden rows to the just vacated compost bins. From that position, the Impaler’s men started chucking more grens, blind tossing them over the roof and corner of the Welcome Center. The first couple bounced on the concrete path and rolled away toward the berm, exploding with solid whacks but without consequence.

The third gren landed smack in the middle of one of the long concrete planters. The four fighters hiding behind it turned to run for the protection of the Welcome Center entryway. The gren blew up before they got there. The rocking explosion lifted and slammed three of them against the concrete block wall. The fourth man was bowled over from behind by a yard-long chunk of flying concrete.

The deadly blast triggered the defenders’ final retreat. As the last of Haldane’s soldiers disappeared inside the doorway, Malosh and his combined forces charged the building, shouting and hollering.

Ryan searched the rampaging mob for Krysty and Jak. In vain. There was no sign of Doc, either.

A
S
K
RYSTY AND
J
AK USHERED
the boys down the lane, screams from behind made them turn to look over their shoulders.

Two swampie females were kneeling in the road beside the corpse of Meconium, grieving their head mutie’s loss with balled fists and shrieks of outrage.

Mebbe Meconium had been their father, Krysty thought. Or their brother. Or the father of their children.

Or all of the above.

The thing about swampies, they stuck together. Inside and outside of the bedroom, which was one reason why Malosh hadn’t given them blasters. The cussed little bastards were likely to turn them on the first non-swampie they came across.

When Krysty saw the females whip a pair of found AK-47s out from under the folds of their loose-waisted, ground-dragging skirts, she had no doubt who they were intending to shoot.

The other thing about swampies was that they lived for revenge.

“Gonna get you for what you done to him, Snowball!” one of the females cried as she clumsily shouldered the predark assault rifle.

The second she pulled the trigger it became obvious that she hadn’t been trained in the art of firing a full-auto blaster. The furious, staccato kick of the predark rifle clearly took her by surprise, and as the muzzle climbed higher and higher with every discharging round, despite the considerable moorings of her big feet and her massive behind, she went down on her butt, firing straight up in the air.

Before she could recover, Jak calmly shot her through the face.

The Magnum round jerked her head back and sent her long hair flying forward. A glistening puff of red burst from the rear of her skull. Cranial shrap and blenderized brains scattered behind her, and she flopped onto her back, a bag of cooling flesh.

Her sister swampie somehow managed to find her own blaster’s selector switch. Squinting down the AK’s sights, she fired a single shot at Krysty. The rifle’s recoil jolted her upper body backward. She shot again before the recoil wave subsided.

And again.

The slugs banged into the corrugated steel wall of a cargo container. Each one higher and wider of their target.

Krysty aimed and fired her revolver twice, hitting the swampie in the chest and stomach, doubling her over. The swampie dropped the AK and, holding in her guts with one hand, whipped out a nick-bladed filleting knife with the other. “I’m gonna stick you good with this,” she promised, wheezing with pain. “Then I’m gonna twist it around.”

Boom!

Jak’s Magnum blaster knocked the swampie ragdoll sideways, cartwheeled her and slammed her into the ground. In the process, her long skirts were thrown up over her head.

“Now there’s an unhappy sight,” Krysty said.

Jak frowned and pointedly looked away.

The dead swampie female shunned underwear.

The two boys were riveted by the splayed, dimpled thighs and vast buttocks. With that central plume of porcupine-stiff hair, it was something out of a carny show.

Krysty grabbed them by the shoulders and shook them to break the terrible spell.

“We have to keep moving, or we’re all gonna get chilled,” she told them. “Is there some place safe we can leave you?”

The boys stared at each other, gravely weighing whether they should give up such an important secret to virtual strangers. In this case, the strangers had saved their lives more than once.

“This way,” one of them said.

Krysty and Jak followed as they took off up the lane. The boys stopped at a rust-orange cargo container and pushed open a crookedly hanging door, which was nothing more than a rectangle of metal cut from the wall and hinged with concentric loops of baling wire.

Inside, the light came from a series of holes hacked high in the back wall and a torch burning in a crude stanchion. The pallets on floor were jammed edge to edge. There was no telling how many people slept in the enclosure. It smelled of torch smoke and layers of unwashed humanity.

A curtain of black plastic covered part of one end of the narrow metal room. The children headed straight for it. Pulling back the plastic, they revealed what looked like an indoor toilet. A three-holer seat made of a wooden plank formed the top of the holding box below. A plastic bucket hanging from the wall was half filled with corn cobs.

The boys gripped either end of the plank seat and started to lift it to one side.

“Wait!” Krysty said. “What are you doing?”

“It’s okay,” one of the boys assured her. “It’s not real.”

Jak snatched the torch off the wall. Leaning forward, he sniffed the air above the three holer. “Not shitter,” was his assessment.

“What’s down there, then?” Krysty asked the boys.

“It’s an entrance to the tunnels.”

“Tunnels?”

“Well, there’re more like caves, really,” the boy said. “They’re natural. We didn’t dig them out. They run all under the ground of the ville. There must be miles and miles of them all down through the ridge. That’s where everybody from the ville is hiding. It’s where we always go when the coldhearts come. When the fighting’s over we come out.”