Sunspot (25 page)

Easing a Hummer’s front passenger door open, Cuzo slipped inside, across the seats. He reached under the dashboard for the ignition wires. Yanking down a bundle of brightly colored spaghetti, he slashed through it with his sheath knife several times, cutting it into short, useless pieces. Elapsed time, twenty-five seconds.

As Haldane stood guard for Cuzo, the landship’s blond-dreadlocked caretaker stepped out of nowhere, appearing right in his face. Before the man could yell a warning, the baron jammed the muzzle of his Remington sawed-off hard against his chest. The sound of the contact gunshot was drowned out by the earthshaking boom of the second smoke round’s launching.

The force of the shot lifted the sec man off his feet and hurled him backward. He hit the ground limp and lifeless; four inches of his spine had been blown out his back.

The yank-and-slash sabotage of three Humvees took a little more than two minutes, and was accomplished without raising an alarm. Haldane crouched on the passenger side of one of the still-operational SUVs while Cuzo crawled in behind the steering wheel.

In the middle of the wag circle, the gunner was finishing his final calculations. He made a show of kissing the nose of the sarin projectile before it was rammed into the Lyagushka’s breech.

Through the Humvee’s grimy side window windshield, the baron saw Cuzo reach for the ignition switch.

Baron Malosh stiffened when he heard the noise coming from the south. He couldn’t believe his ears. It got louder and louder until it drowned out the seesawing autofire, until it was screaming down on Sunspot like a meteor.

The screaming ended with a sudden bright flash and a hollow whump in the middle of the garden. Limp foliage and clods of dirt flew in all directions. From the blast crater a broad pillar of smoke drifted upward, angling over the east end of the berm, spiraling into the blue sky.

A targeting round.

Malosh was momentarily stunned. The use of predark artillery in the hellscape was as rare as the proverbial thirteen-year-old virgin. Even though such weapons existed in the arsenals cached in hidden stockpiles, no more than a handful of Deathlanders understood how to use them. Like so many other elements of whitecoat science, ballistics was a semi-lost art. Artillery wasn’t favored in post-Apocalypse warfare because the stationary targets, isolated villes, weren’t so well defended that they required bombardment. And at the first sign of a shelling, the human targets could usually run away.

In this case, that wasn’t possible.

There was no time to run. Nowhere to run.

As the second smoke round exploded, hitting the top of the berm near the western gate, the baron knew the ville had been effectively bracketed. Moreover, he and his fighters were sandwiched between cannon fire and the waves of chill-crazed muties slithering up the side of the gorge.

The artillery was Haldane. It had to be.

The bastard had trapped him good.

“Get inside!” he roared at his men as he grabbed the reins of his stallion.

The fighters followed him and the horse into the Welcome Center. Malosh figured that the basement was deep enough and strong enough to withstand high-explosive shelling. In addition, the Welcome Center’s entrances and exits could be either blocked or defended against all comers. The building’s narrow entrance would force the attacking worms into tight bunches, which were made to order for autofire to grind into pulp.

“Get the fodder out of here!” he shouted to his fighters as they swept into the building.

There was room for a horse, but not fodder.

The troopers started shoving the terrified unarmed men and women out the front doors. The sponges had already cleared out most of the Haldane garrison’s corpses; the place still reeked of burned Comp B and spilled guts.

Malosh didn’t try to lead his horse down the steep staircase. He left it in the reception area. Before he headed for the basement, he ordered five of his men to remain at the front doors.

“Whatever you do, keep the worms out,” he told them. “Defend the entrance.”

As he dashed down the hall toward the stairway, the fighters opened fire.

W
HEN THE FIRST
smoke round exploded, Young Crad and Bezoar lay prostrate behind the tarp-load of body parts they had been carrying. They were pinned down by the intense cross fire between the ville folk and Malosh’s forces. Neither of the swineherds understood the significance of the plume of white smoke. But they couldn’t miss its consequence. The wild blasterfight abruptly stopped and the ville folk headed for cover.

Bezoar started to get up, but Young Crad snatched hold of his arm and held him down. “Not safe.”

“We gotta find someplace to hide,” Bezoar said, shaking off his hand.

“Hide from what?” Young Crad said.

Then they heard the second shell plummeting down on them.

“Oh, shit,” the elder swineherd moaned.

The round exploded on the berm top to their left, near the gate. Thick white smoke boiled up from the hole. The breeze sent wisps of it rolling over them.

Bezoar pushed to his feet. As he turned toward the Welcome Center he saw Malosh, his horse and his troopers retreating through the ruined entryway, then there was movement along the entire gorge side of the berm. Black, shiny creatures topped the crest, climbing over one another’s backs in their eagerness.

“Oh, no,” Young Crad gasped.

“You know what they are?”

“Bad. Oh, lordy. Bad.”

That was already evident. The tide of scagworms tore into the dead fighters sprawled along the inside of the slope. There were lots of bodies and they were still warm. Thus occupied, the mutie predators didn’t bother to chase down the living. Yet.

“Come on!” Bezoar cried, grabbing his young friend by the hand. They hiphopped across the compound to the corner of the Welcome Center, then turned into the building’s entrance where five AKs awaited them.

“Let us in! Please!” the elder swineherd begged his fellow Malosh conscriptees.

For his trouble, Bezoar was shot twice in the gut. He fell back into Young Crad’s arms, moaning and clutching his stomach. As Crad pulled him out of the line of fire, the entrance guards all cut loose, sending a withering message to anyone else thinking of rushing the stronghold.

The young swineherd leaned his friend back against the side of the building. When he looked up, he saw that the scagworms were animating the berm top’s corpses. In their feeding frenzy, they made arms quiver, chests heave. Headless bodies appeared to be crawling down the slope.

Bezoar squeezed Young Crad’s hand triple-hard. Under his grizzly beard, his face was dead pale.

A third meteor descended on Sunspot.

The shell landed in the western corner of the compound. It exploded with the same muffled whump, but the burst of smoke was different. It was much more dense, and not white, but sickly yellow-green. Pushed by the prevailing breeze, it rained a superfine, sticky mist over everything.

The fodder and the swampies caught out of doors froze in place as the mist enveloped them.

Those closest to the groundburst clutched their throats, staggered a step or two, then toppled onto their faces in the dirt. Their legs kicked spastically, going nowhere. The swampies farther away clawed at their eyes, choking on their own vomit. The hellhounds fell to the ground, frothing at the mouth and nose, and biting through their own limbs. Even the mutie worms weren’t immune. They lashed and squirmed in place, digging their own shallow graves in the compound’s packed earth.

If Young Crad was baffled by the mass die-off, Bezoar understood what was happening. That the yellow-green smoke was toxic.

“Don’t breathe in, just run!” were the elder swineherd’s final words of advice.

When the callused fingers relaxed their grip on his hand, Young Crad knew his friend was gone. And that he was alone. Utterly alone. He sucked down the deepest, biggest breath he could manage and took off along the berm, running as fast as he could for the west gate. The sticky mist swirled around him, dotted his pumping arms and sweating face. He blinked it out of his eyes.

Don’t breathe! Don’t breathe! he told himself, even though his lungs had already started to burn.

Halfway to the gate, his vision began to blur. His eyes and nose streamed tears and mucous. His throat felt like it was closing up. He wanted to cough, but he gritted his teeth and swallowed. Three steps later he couldn’t hold it back. He hacked and gasped, spewing copious fluids. Then his stomach lurched and he projectile vomited. Staggering forward like a marathon runner stretching for the finish tape, he reached the rear bumper of the foot gate.

As his fingers touched it, he collapsed.

I
N THE TORCHLIT BASEMENT
stronghold of the Welcome Center, Baron Malosh listened as another dull explosion burst overhead. He was tensed, waiting for the earthshaking rumble of HE, but it never came.

Two more soft, widely separated booms followed.

Then nothing.

After a while, his men started giving him puzzled looks.

“Just wait. Wait,” he told them.

It was very quiet in the cellar. Quiet on the floor above, as well. The men guarding the entrance had stopped shooting.

Malosh got his first inkling of the nature of the attack when the people around him began to fall ill. They first complained of headache, eye pain, constricted breathing. When they began to wheeze, he knew.

They had been gassed.

The chemical weapons were heavier than air. The invisible gases were designed to sink to the lowest point, to wipe out anyone hiding in a below-ground shelter. In this case, that was the basement.

The troopers getting sick the quickest were those whose skins were the most exposed. Men without shirts or hats.

Malosh was well covered except for the upper half of his face, so less of his surface area was exposed to neurotoxins. To stay below ground was certain death. Clamping a gloved hand over the mesh of his mask, he bolted from the stronghold and ran up the steps to the ground floor. Some of the less effected troopers tried to follow him. They fell along the way as their legs gave out, on the basement floor or on the stairs.

The baron found his treasured horse in convulsions on the reception room floor; the entrance guards were likewise down, shitting and pissing themselves. They had received a higher immediate dose. Malosh burst out of the doorway, his hand still covering the mask hole.

Sunlight filtered through gauzy yellow-green clouds. Poison gas still hissed and boiled from the impact craters in the compound.

The baron shielded his eyes from the falling mist with his other hand. He ran headlong into the breeze, stumbling over the corpses of humans, muties and scagworms. He knew he’d been dosed, though perhaps less than fatally. His head had started to throb, the pain centered in the middle of his eyes. He had to get upwind of the toxins to have any hope of surviving. He couldn’t scale the berm because his legs were already starting to feel weak. The closest exit was the foot gate.

He reached it without drawing another breath, but as he stepped over the body lying in front of the back bumper, something seized his left ankle in an iron grip. He looked down and saw the body wasn’t dead. One of his own fodder, a barrel-chested droolie, had him by the foot.

Malosh didn’t ask to be let go. He didn’t order the dying man to release him. He started mule-kicking the stupe in the face, breaking out his teeth with the heel of his boot. He managed a half dozen stomps before his kicks weakened and his knees bucked. He sat hard beside the bloody-faced fodder.

Even though the dying fingers let go of his ankle, he couldn’t get up from the ground.

He had to breathe, and did so, but little or no air came through his constricted airway. Above the edge of the leather mask, his face was slowly turning blue.

Malosh ripped off the mask, gasping.

Under it there was no hideous battle scar.

No putrid decay from rad cancer.

No mutated mandibles.

Framed by the pasty patch of skin from nose to chin were a pair of baby lips. A tiny rosebud of a mouth. Feminine, infantile, and ridiculous in his wide face and masculine jaw. Most unbaronlike. Who would take orders from a mouth like that? A mouth perpetually pursed to suckle at its mother’s bulging teat? Who would march at its command into the jaws of death? Not even an idiot. Malosh had concealed his genetic flaw with black leather and brutal skewerings. They were diversions, slight of hand.

There was no one left alive to see the truth.

No one left to snicker and laugh. To mock him.

Nor would there ever be.

As he died sitting in his own shit, the circle of death came full. Every structure, every inch of the grounds was painted in yellow-green toxin. In the finest of fine mists, it had penetrated deep into the Welcome Center, filling the basement with a lethal concentration of fumes. There lay a jumble of corpses, their faces blue and bloodied in their struggles with death and with one another.

In the end those closest to the shellburst got off the easiest. They were poleaxed by the poison. Those who soaked it up more slowly suffered all the torments of hell.

The sarin gas barrage attacked and chilled every living thing within the perimeter of Sunspot ville. It did so by inhibiting the production of an enzyme vital to all neural systems. Without this enzyme, nerve function ceased. Smooth muscles stopped reacting.

The oncoming wave of scagworms turned back from the flanks of the berm as members of their species slid dead on their backs down the slope, spreading death by contact. Sensing their mortal danger, the worms on the gorge below cut a wide path around Sunspot.

Even the ville’s ubiquitous horseflies were dead; they fell from the air bouncing on the ground like tiny black BBs.

Everything that Sunspot had ever been, everything that it had ever hoped to be was left to rot.

Forever.