The Iron Dream (22 page)

The wan morning sun was obscured behind a leaden sky as Feric sat on his motorcycle at the head of his SS

division watching his timepiece tick off the last few moments to zero hour. Beside him. Best's face glowed with youthful excitement as he waited for the moment to start his motorcycle.

"Do you think the Wdacks will resist our advance?"

Best asked hopefully.

"Hardly, Best," Feric replied. "The Wolack army is nothing but a mutant rabble to begin with and I expect it's got more than its hands full in the east."

Nevertheless, since time and speed were of the essence, it would be best to stun Wolack into utter helplessness at the outset. Cannon set up in a hollow five miles from the border would pulverize the Wolack border fortifications before the army and the SS reached the border. The two 144

columns would then pour into Wolack side by side, smashing any resistance that might arise. Only when all Wolack had been thrown into utter panic would Feric lead the SS

off to the northeast.

Behind Feric and Best was the hundred-man SS elite guard, their black motorcycles and matching leather glistening, their submachine guns freshly oiled, their truncheons hanging near their hands and ready for action. Behind this elite force were a dozen tanks, then the rest of the motorcycle SS, the other light tanks, and behind this massed SS contingent, Waffing's regular army force, stretching out to the western horizon farther than the eye could see.

"What a grand spectacle!" Feric exclaimed.

Best nodded. "Before the week is out, the nominators will get a taste of the might of the Swastika, my Commander!" he replied enthusiastically.

As the last few seconds ran out, Feric unsheathed the Great Truncheon of Held, and thrust the gleaming shaft high into the air. At this signal, the air was filled with the ear-shattering sound of thousands of motorcycle engines as the steel stallions were fired into life. This roar was backed a moment later by a low gut-thrumming chord that seemed to shake the hills as the engines of all the massed trucks and tanks and steam dreadnaughts began to idle.

Feric felt the racial will of all Heldon pounding through his flesh in the vibrations that filled the very air with power. His will merged with the mass will of the men he was about to lead into battle; he was the army, they were his, and together they were Heldon.

Then, with a glance at Best, Feric swept the Steel Commander down through the air. From miles away, Feric heard the sudden thunder of cannon, as he gunned his engine, and the host of Heldon surged forward.

A mighty sustained roar filled Feric's mind; his body thrummed with the power of the engine he straddled as he led his army at breakneck speed across the rolling green hills toward the Wolack border. Cannon shells whistled overhead, the earth shook to the rumble of wheels and treads, and a great cloud of gas fumes and dust boiled into the air. The sounds and smells, the gigantic power and dashing speed, took his breath away and set his heart soaring. Glancing at Best beside him, Feric saw that he, too, was carried away by the glory of the moment; they 145

exchanged comradely smiles as the tanks behind them began firing their cannon.

Feric led his great army up one last hill, crested the rise, and beheld the Wolack border. A barbed-wire fence demarked the Heldon side of the border with machine-gun towers at regular intervals; then there was a half-mile strip of no-man's land and a line of crude stone Wolack pillboxes set about three hundred yards apart. The Helder positions had been evacuated, and great gaps cut in the fence. As for the line of Wolack fortifications, many of these had taken direct hits from the cannon and were naught but steaming, rubble-strewn craters. Others were partially destroyed, with the smashed bodies of Wolacks strewn about the ruined stonework.

Even over the din of the engines, Feric could hear the great cheer that went up from his troops as they saw the fortifications of the Wolacks before them. As one last barrage of cannon shells exploded in a neat line amidst the Wolack pillboxes, sending great fountains of gray stone, brown earth, and red flesh into the air, Feric gunned his engine, and roared down the hill through a gap in the barbed wire, and across the border into Wolack, with Best's motorcycle humming along at his heels. Immediately behind came the SS elite guard, swinging their truncheons and bellowing a hoarse battle cry. Then the squadron of tanks spread out, and their heavy steel treads crashed through the wire. Thousands of motorcycle SS shock troops crossed into no-man's land along a wide front in their van.

As Peric led the vanguard of his troops across no-man's land toward the Wolack lines, the SS motorcyclists fanned out to form a long skirmish line on either side of his motorcycle. At hundred-yard intervals, this forward wall of heroes was reinforced by tanks blasting away with their

'machine guns and cannon. Behind the shield of this SS

phalanx came the trucks of the motorized regular infantry, backed up by the great lumbering steam dreadnaughts which sent hails of mortar shells crashing into the Wolack fortifications.

Soon the forward line of SS reached the Wolacks. Feric himself drew up on a partially demolished pillbox, from which scuttled about half-a-dozen Wolacks—a hunchbacked dwarf, a Parrotface, a brace of Toadmen, and other assorted monstrosities—all fleeing mindlessly from the fray like the craven dogs they were. Swiftly, Feric 146

chased down a Parrotface and dashed out its reeking brains with one heroic swipe of the Great Truncheon.

Beside him, Best, his blue eyes glowing with patriotic fervor, came upon a dwarf and dispatched the creature with a quick hail of truncheon blows.

Suddenly Feric spied a gross froglike mutant with wet leprous skin training a rusty rifle at Best's head. Instantly, he opened his throttle and rammed the front wheel of his motorcycle into the monstrosity at forty miles an hour, slamming the creature aside with a scream and a shower of viscous purple blood. He spun the cycle about his heel, roared back, and smashed the creature's skull with his truncheon, for good measure.

Best paused long enough to utter an emotional "Thank you, my Commanderi" Then the lad plunged back into the heat of battle.

All around Feric, the SS men were splitting open the skulls of the Wolacks and driving them madly in all directions. A fear-crazed Blueskin ran blindly at Feric's cycle with a truncheon in his hand; Feric decapitated the creature with a swipe of the Steel Commander, the head rolling under his wheels, while the body stumbled on a few paces before expiring. It was no proper battle, it was a rout! These Wolacks milled about aimlessly like insane cattle; they were all cowards and weaklings who had no taste for honorable combat!

Feric raised the Great Truncheon of Held high in the air, its silvery shaft emblazoned with the honorable blood of battle, and raced his motorcycle forward beyond the ruined fortifications, leading the SS vanguard deeper into Wolack. There was no point wasting precious time dispatching aU of these creatures; the occupation forces that would follow the motorized columns into Wolack before the sun had set would be more than adequate to mop up this pathetic rabble.

Soon Feric was once more at the head of a tightly massed formation of motorcycle SS shock troops roaring eastward across Wolack with precision and dash. The tanks fanned out about this column as outriders protecting either flank. About half a mile behind and slightly to the south were Waffing's regular army troops, obscured by a huge dust cloud. Behind them, the Wolack border fortifications were naught but smoking ruins.

"What a fine beginning to the campaign, my Command-147

er!" Best called out. "An utterly devastating victory!" His face was almost feverish with the manly thrill of having fought his first real battle.

"So much for the army of Wolack!" Feric answered, not wanting to take the edge off Best's mood. But he knew only too well that the Wolacks had only served to blood these untested Helder troops, and give them a chance to experience their own manhood, heroism, and skill. The real battle was hundreds of miles away with the Warriors of Zind, and those baleful creatures would not break and run like a gaggle of craven Wolacks.

But Peric heard the incredible massed symphony of engines behind him, saw rank after rank of shiny black motorcycles, swift tanks, and motorized infantry dashing across the plain behind him like a grand parade, and he could sense the fire and elation and hot blood of his troops as a palpable force.

Let the Warriors of Zind fight to the death! Let them throw their full might against the army of Heldon! All the more thoroughly would this corps. of heroes grind their obscene warped protoplasm into a thin slime of squamous jelly soiling the dust!

As the Heldon strike force drove deeper into Wolack, Feric noticed that the nature of the countryside was gradually changing. The grass was becoming patchy and taking on an unwholesome blue-gray undertone. The occasional pigs and cattle that the columns routed as they swept through the fields became ever more genetically twisted, many of them encumbered by trailing vestigial limbs, all with purplish or greenish mottling of the hide, some with the primitive stubs of secondary heads bursting like buboes from the bases of their necks.

"What a horrid country this is!" Best called out as he rode close by Feric's side. "Perhaps we should set it all to the torch, my Commander."

"It would do no good. Best," Feric said. "No fire we could set would burn out the poison of the Fire of the Ancients."

Indeed, the countryside was rapidly becoming a putrid sinkhole of residual radiation and genetic contamination.

Mutated crows cawed overhead through their grossly deformed pink beaks,,their eyes bursting out of their sockets like the orbs of deep-sea fish. In the distance here and 148

there, Feric spied the first patches of radiation jungle: great twisted mazes of purplish, reddish, and bluish vegetation, caricatures of grass the size of small trees, tangles of outsized vines like poisonous serpents, giant bloated cancerous flowers. Lurking in these pus pockets of radiation were creatures that defied description: wild dogs that dragged their intestines behind them in translucent sacs, multiheaded swine, featherless birds covered with running sores that oozed noxious venom, all manner of mutated vermin that bred ever-more-revolting variations from generation to generation.

Occasionally, the head of the column would flush cowering Wolack peasants from their holes. These loathsome mutants were exactly the sort one would expect in such debased environs. There was not a one of them who did not display some gross departure from the true human genotype. Blueskins, Parrotfaces, Toadmen, dwarfs, and all the usual mutations abounded. Several of the frog-skinned monstrosities were sighted; without exception, these slime-oozing creatures were run down and slain by the SS, for their sight was a particularly strong affront to true human eyes. As for the bulk of the Wolack peasantry, these were for the most part allowed to flee every which way before the Helder army; only those too dull-witted or physically warped to make proper way for the column felt the weight of Helder truncheons. The Classification Camps that the occupation forces would set up would deal with these wretches in due course.

All in all, the most vexing aspect of the march eastward thus far was the gorge building up in the back of Feric's throat as he drove deeper into the contaminated reaches of the Wolack fens. Of resistance there was none, and only the occasional running down of a particularly vile mutant gave the troops any opportunity to maintain their fighting edge. The column neither avoided the reeking wattle villages nor sought them out; straight east, the army roared, and any obstruction was smashed to pieces and set to the torch.

After this relentless advance had continued for several hours and nearly two hundred miles without major incident, Feric decided that it was time for the SS troop to veer off and begin its northeasterly sweep.

He drew the Great Truncheon of Held, pointed the gleaming fist that was its headball in a northeasterly direc-149

tion, then guided his motorcycle off on this heading. Without pause, the column of black motorcycles and tanks followed him up over a rise and off across the lowland fens of the Roul delta.

"At this rate, we should reach the Roul within a day,"

he called over to Best. 'There's an ancient bridge about two hundred miles downstream from Lumb that freakishly survived the Time of Fire. There we can cross the river undetected."

Best's face creased in puzzlement. "Surely Zind will fortify such a key position, my Commander?" he said confusedly.

Feric grinned. "The bridge is supposedly infested by monsters too vile and terrible for even the Warriors of Zind to face with equanimity," he said. "Because of these so-called trolls, the area is devoid of sapient habitation."

At the sight of Best's alarm at this information, Feric broke into good-naturedly laughter. "Don't worry, Best,"

he said. "There isn't a protoplasmic creature in existence that's immune to the submachine guns of the SS!"

At this. Best himself grinned broadly.

The dash across the Roul delta could not exactly be described as a pleasant scenic tour, but it was without serious incident, since these lowlands were much more sparsely inhabitated than the rest of Woiack; the reputation of the area among the Wolacks was unsavory, even ominous.

Feric could well understand why even low creatures like Wolacks would choose to leave territory like this unsettled. Here the residual radiation was obviously quite high, for patches of radiation jungle were everywhere, many of them merging with each other to form nightmare forests of considerable extent. Even the mighty column of motorcycles with its flankers of powerful tanks avoided these vicinities at Feric's direction; not out of fear of the monstrosities lurking within, but because of the dangerously high radiation level that such pus-pockets of mangled chromosomes denoted.

"Over there, my Commander!" Best called out, pointing to the east. The twin towers of the ancient bridge were clearly visible on the horizon.