The Iron Dream (23 page)

With motions of the Steel Commander, Feric redeployed his troops in order to properly deal with whatever 150

might bar the way across the bridge. Four fanks were brought to the head of the column where they formed a box around the motorcycles of Feric and Best. The other tanks were brought in closer to the column into tight formations to protect against attack from the sides or rear.

An ancient roadway began about two miles from the bridge, leading through the fens and onto the bridge itself; as Peric led the column along this crumbling track, he saw that the entrance to the bridge itself was surrounded by foul radiation jungle. Creepers, vines, and bloated shrubbery in ghastly bluish and purplish hues grew about the bridgehead in fetid profusion; only the concrete roadbed itself was free of the densly tangled mutated underbrush.

Feric gunned his engine slightly and signaled to the tank drivers beside him; the head of the column sped up to nearly fifty miles an hour, opening up a gap of a hundred yards between itself and the column of motorcycles. Feric drew a few yards ahead of the tanks with Best's cycle close behind, unsheathed the Steel Commander, and plunged his motorcycle into the narrow canyon between the densely tangled walls of cancerous radiation jungle.

At once he was immersed in a world of slithering, cluttering putrescence. Multiheaded snakes hung from slime-encrusted trees. Large featherless birds with prehensile beaks hopped heavily from branch to branch uttering guttural liquid croaks. Something large and crazed shrieked horribly to itself in the depths of the jungle. Here and there, Feric made out huge nebulous shapes moving about behind the twisted boles of the unwholesome trees: vast expanses of wet green hide, moving masses of blood-red pulpiness, things like gigantic abdominal organs imbued with independent life.

"What a cesspool of genetic garbage!" he muttered aloud.

Best's reply was a sudden wordless cry of terror.

Fifty yards up ahead, Feric saw something which nearly caused him to retch, and made his blood go cold. Blocking the road ahead was a gigantic mound of formless protoplasm, a pulsating amoeba of greenish translucent flesh perhaps ten feet high and wider than the roadbed. The surface of this enormous lump of living slime seethed with scores of huge lipless sucking mouths filled with rows of knifelike teeth; from each obscene orifice projected a long 151

tubular writhing red tongue. The oozing surface of the monstrosity swarmed with hundreds of powerful-looking tentacles as well. From the mouths came a ghastly puckering wet sound and a stomach-turning high-pitched keening.

Feric slammed on his brakes and brought his cycle to a screaming dirt-flying halt a scant twenty yards from the thing; at these close quarters, the rotten-fish stench of the monster was nearly overpowering. Even as Feric brought up his cycle, the amoeboid mound of primal protoplasm began to flow toward him. No wonder the Wolacks shunned this place!

But craven Wolacks were one thing and true men quite another. Feric drew his submachine gun from its scabbard and leveled it at the creature. He pressed home the trigger, holding it down for sustained fire, and his weapon spurted a screaming hail of machine-gun bullets directly into the pustulant thing; a second stream of bullets from close behind him told him that the quick-witted Best had followed his lead.

The bullets struck the pulsating flesh of the amoeboid creature like a series of small explosions, sending gouts of translucent green slime flying into the air. A horrid series of sustained shrieks came from the thing as scores of huge sucking mouths cried out in mindless agony. A viscous green liquid flowed copiously from the wounds. The creature writhed insanely as Feric and Best continued to pepper its slimy surface with machine-gun bullets.

Then the tanks which had halted close behind Feric's cycle opened fire. Four cannon shells whistled overhead, plowed into the creature at point-blank range, then exploded with a mighty roar, sending smoke and slime into the air in a titanic blast of destruction.

When the smoke had cleared, there was nothing blocking the column's advance but a few steaming puddles of thin green liquid.

Feric and Best beamed triumphantly at each other. "So much for the trolls of the lower Roul!" Feric shouted.

"Hardly proper target practice for modem Helder weaponry," Best said. "I hope we see proper action soon, my Commander!"

"Don't worry Best, we'll reach the Zind horde soon enough now." So saying, Feric drew the Steel Commander, waved it aloft, and led the column onward through the jungle and out onto the roadbed of the ancient bridge 152

which was suspended from great steel cables hung from stone towers anchored far below the muddy waters of the Roul.

Halfway across, Feric heard machine-gun fire behind him and the booming of cannon. Glancing back, he saw that several more of the putrid horrors had emerged from the jungle to harry the column. The cannon of the tanks and the machine guns of the SS made short and bloody work of these monstrosities.

When the rear of the column was safely on the eastern side of the river, Feric called a short halt and formed his tanks into an impromptu artillery battery. Under Feric's direction, the tanks fired high explosive shells into the towers of the ancient bridge, smashing them to pieces and dropping the center of the bridge bed into the reeking waters of the Roul.

As an afterthought, Feric had the tankers reload their cannon with incendiary shells and drop a full barrage on the jungle itself, so that when the column got underway again, swinging south toward its rendezvous with the rear of the Zind horde, it left a billowing pillar of orange fire lighting up the horizon behind it where the obscene spawn of the radiation pocket had been.

Evidence of a great battle presented itself more than fifty miles out of Lumb. Great rivers of refugees poured northward and westward like insects fleeing the crushing of their nest as the column raced southward toward the capital about twenty miles east of the Roul and roughly parallel to its bank. Mongrels and mutants of every sordid description swarmed northward along the major road to Lumb, making it impassable to the Helder shock troops. It would have been possible to clear a path through this unsavory mob by sheer force, but hardly worth the delay, for even at this distance a pall of smoke occasionally enlivened with flashes of fire hung on the southern horizon while the rumble of far-off artillery could be heard, sure evidence that Waffing's force was already in contact with the enemy, since the Wolacks had no such firepower, and Zind would hardly employ cannon on such scale against so puny an enemy.

Feric therefore led the SS column south across the sickly fields themselves, avoiding the rabble-choked road two miles to the east, for it was absolutely essential to 153

arrive on the scene before the entire Zind horde had crossed the river. For once the Dom's creatures completed the crossing, the advantage would be lost, Waffing's army overrun, and the SS column trapped far behind the lines in Zind-conquered territory.

Soon the far-off rumble of artillery became a nearby thunder, and continuous flashes of fire could be seen to the south, clearly on the western bank of the Roul; in addition, an incredible crackle of massed machine-gun fire was audible as counterpoint to the artillery duel. Waffing's forces were fighting the Warriors of Zind in western Lumb; the only question now was how much of the horde remained on the eastern side of the river. On this might very well depend the history of the world and the survival of the true human genotype.

As the column neared the outskirts of Lumb, the tide of refugees trickled away to nothing and everything in sight had been trampled utterly flat; sure sign that the horde of Zind had passed this way, and not long ago by the look of things, either.

Feric therefore whipped his forces into final battle array. He and Best of course formed the point of the formation, backed up by the hundred-man elite motorcycle SS

bodyguard enclosed in a square of four tanks. Behind this spearhead was a wide solid line of tanks serving as a shield for the main formation of motorcycle SS shock troops.

More tanks guarded either flank of this tightly packed formation of iron men and steel machines. No Zind filth would be able to violate the integrity of such an impenetrable force!

Feric unsheathed his submachine gun and rested it in its firing rack. Glancing at Best, who had also put his weapon in position, he shouted: "Now you'll have all the action anyone could want. Best!" As Feric opened his throttle all the way, Best replied with a boyish grin and a mighty

"Hail Jaggar!" which triggered off a spontaneous mass salutation from the ranks as the great SS force surged forward in a final dash into battle at nearly sixty miles an hour.

Feric led his troops over fields and hills strewn with bits and pieces of dead Wolacks who had been partially de-voured by the nauseating scavengers of Zind. The mighty motorized shock force crested a final rise and Feric beheld 154

the long valley that led to Lumb, choked with the hosts of Zind.

Ludolf Best cried out in horror at his first sight of the Warriors of Zind. The entire valley floor was covered with vast formations of these monstrosities and the creatures themselves were enough to daunt even the staunchest hero. Each of these specially bred protoplasmic killing machines was a hideous caricature of the human form: fully ten feet tall with incredibly massive chests, arms, and thighs, and tiny heads barely large enough to serve as mounts for their tiny red eyes, button ears, and lipless drooling mouths. These pinheaded creatures were entirely naked save for rude leather belts from which hung truncheons of immense size and weight and were liberally caked with dung, ordure, and all manner of filth. Most horrifying of all, each formation of perhaps five hundred of the creatures marched along in perfect synchronization with each other, down to the swing of their tree-trunk arms and the rifles in their hands as if they were interchangeable cogs in some vast fleshly machine.

Seeing Best's dismay, Feric called out to him. "Mindless robots, all of them! All muscle and literally no brain!"

For his part, Peric was far from daunted by this sight, for it meant that perhaps half the horde was still on this side of the Roul—his desperate plan was working! Moreover, he knew that this vast horde of Warriors was entirely dependent on the Dominators who controlled the formations; each synchronized formation was in fact the dominance group of a single Dom. In combat, the Warriors possessed but rudimentary wills of their own. Spaced throughout the horde at more or less regular intervals were huge war-wagons, flatbed carts pulled by teams of gigantic mutants that were all enormous thighs and buttocks, with withered upper torsos and virtually no arms or heads. The beds of these war-wagons were packed with ordinary mutants who served as mortar-crews and machine gunners, but it was a good bet that the controlling Doms were hidden m the rabble atop these carts. Further, it was quite probable that the eight heavy lumbering steam dreadnoughts near the rear of the horde housed the master Dominators of the entire horde—trust a Dom to secrete his cowardly carcass in the most secure place possible! If these master Dominators could be slain, the 155

entire horde might be thrown into leaderless uncontrolled confusion.

Uttering a fierce battle cry, Feric led the SS battle formation straight down the slope at the nearest formation of Warriors at better than forty miles an hour. Feric held down the trigger of his submachine gun, sending a long burst of leaden death into the ranks of the enemy, and at this signal, every tank cannon let fly with high explosive shells, so that the first warning given to the horde was when a thousand Warriors were suddenly blown to steaming bloody fragments by a rapid series of explosions.

A moment later, Feric led his spearhead of tanks and motorcycles into this bloody gaping hole in the enemy flank. Once more the Helder tanks fired a massed barrage, now at point-blank range, and the entire wall of naked, hairy, sour-smelling flesh before Feric flew apart in a hail of dirt and meat, showering him with gore and filth as he gunned his motorcycle forward. Only now did the cannon of the Zind steam dreadnaughts open fire, lobbing a ragged barrage into the rear of the Helder column. Several score Helder machines were blasted apart by the explosions, but the precision of the SS formations never wavered for an instant.

As for the minions of Zind, the surprise, incredible Speed, and withering concentrated firepower of the Helder attack left them milling about in confusion and disarray.

The dreadnaughts continued to lob shells into the Helder ranks, and at this range even the filth that served the Dominators as gunners could hardly help dropping their loads on target, inflicting telling losses on the Helder troops. But whereas the formations of Warriors continued to march brainlessly toward Lumb and had yet to put up a coherent defense in the face of the rapid-fire Helder tank cannon, the SS shock troop retained its iron discipline in the face of the point-blank Zind barrage.

Feric led his spearhead force at breakneck speed into the path in the enemy ranks opened up by the artillery, leading his "men straight for the command dreadnaughts.

Finally, the Dominators controlling this section of the horde apparently recovered from their initial shock, for suddenly and with an eerie superhuman precision, thousands of the giant Warriors executed precise ninety-degree turns and ran at top speed straight into the face of the Helder tank barrage, swinging their massive truncheons 156

like enormous scythes. Wave after wave of the naked Warriors was blown to pieces, but so vast was the horde, so bottomless the Dom's supply of cannon fodder, that thousands upon thousands of the creatures fell upon the Helder forces from all directions, hurtling straight through the massed cannon and machine-gun fire by sheer force of numbers.

Peric suddenly found his advance barred by a solid line of ten-foot, massively muscled, filth-caked monstrosities, swinging huge rude truncheons through the air in apparently random strokes, red eyes blazing mindlessly and drool flecking their chins as they came at him at top speed on legs as thick as marble columns. Feric drew the Great Truncheon of Held and met them head-on, swinging the mystic weapon before him in great juggernaut sweeps.