The organized slaughter became a boiling chaos, as the outnumbered Killers reacted, unshipped morningstars, began dispatching still-bound Sangrans, fought off men wielding knives and captured morningstars and hammers. Braziers were overturned, spilling boiling oil on Killers and Animals alike, crosses were toppled, some still bearing their bleeding victims. The arena floor was a great melee of furious, formless combat, a tangle of bodies and weapons and flowing oil, a writhing pit of hundreds, thousands of disjointed individual slaughters.
In the stands, Animals were howling with glee, Brothers were staring down wide-eyed in silent shock, and the Killers…
Killers, in uniforms and mufti alike, bolted to their feet, rifles in hand, their battle chant on their foaming lips. The two great sections of black-clad and semi-naked Killers surrounding the Pavilion were on their feet screaming. Then Fraden heard a single shot ring out.
Instantly, the entire far end of the Stadium came alive in thousands of flashes of gunfire. The roar was deafening as the Killers in the stands began to fire volley after furious volley down into the chaos on the arena floor.
Below, scores of bodies, Killers and Animals, were blasted off their feet by a tremendous hail of bullets. A great cloud of dust went up as bullets ripped into the packed earth that formed the arena floor. The air became filled with splinters as thousands of errant shots smashed into the forest of wooden crosses.
The Killers kept firing. The gunfire became a single, earth-shaking roar, a peal of continuous staccato thunder; a great pall of acrid smoke hung over the far end of the Stadium. Volley after volley struck the men on the arena floor, a continuous storm of death, a cloudburst of lead. Killers and Animals were no longer fighting each other—they were milling about crazily, trying to find cover behind the twitching bodies that were falling all around them…
Fraden could see Moro, obscured by the gunsmoke, bellowing something through his bullhorn. But the Killers were beyond his control now, beyond anyone’s control, not even Moro could stop them from—
The Fraden saw what Moro was doing. He could not stop the Killers, but he could direct some of their fury. The sections of Killers nearest the Pavilion were turning, bringing their guns to bear in his direction…
He grabbed Sophia, pulled her down under him, dove behind the screen of herogyn-heads, rolled the two of them half-under the bench, saw Vanderling hit the floor beside him, crawl back under the bench, clutching his snipgun futilely.
Bullets began to whine overhead, ping off the concrete of the Stadium, tear into the standing herogyn-heads who began to go down, firing wildly across the breadth of the arena at the Killers. Bodies fell in front of them, behind, to all sides…
Moro had made his move. While the bulk of the Killers were still firing madly down into the arena, he had gained enough control of some of them to order them to slaughter the ’heads and the hated men they guarded.
Fraden glanced at Vanderling, prone beside him.
“Any minute now,” Vanderling muttered. “Any minute…” A bullet whistled off the concrete inches from his head, a herogyn-head behind him screamed as he caught the ricochet. Where in hell are our men? Fraden wondered. How much longer—?
A great roar went up, a roar that could be beard above the massed gunfire. The direction of the rifle shots seemed to change; they were no longer whining overhead, and there seemed to be a new concentration of gunfire directly below. The ’heads were no longer failing all around them; they were screaming, cheering.
Cautiously, Fraden stood up and looked down into the arena.
The big arena gate had been smashed from its moorings. Below him, the near end of the arena was a solid mass of men in green loincloths and sweatbands, soldiers of the People’s Army pouring into the arena, firing their rifles as they came, an irresistible tide of men surging across the packed earth toward the Pavilion-end of the Stadium, smashing down row after row of crosses with the sheer weight of their bodies as they advanced, pushing Killers and Animals toward the far end of the arena before them.
And still they came, pouring forth in a packed crush of flesh from the arena gate, and in moments the arena floor was half-filled with them. More surged, into the arena, more and more and more, twenty thousand men filling the entire arena, firing up at the sections of Killers, wall after wall after wall of deadly lead.
The Animals in the stands were chanting again, wildly, shrilly, but now it was a new litany, their litany: “BART! BART! BART! BART! BART!”
The Killers in the stands were still on their feet, firing down into the arena, volley after volley, even as the bullets tore into them. The whole forward front of guerrillas, thousands of men, went down. But the rest kept firing. It wasn’t a battle; it was a mutual slaughter as two great solid masses of Killers and guerrillas, firing at point-blank range, lacking the barest semblance of cover, stood their ground and mauled each other, decimated each other’s ranks, trading volley for unthinkably deadly volley. But the outcome was never in doubt. Killers and guerrillas went down by the thousands, but for every guerrilla that fell, three more burst into the arena through the broken gate, an endless tide of men.
There was mindless panic in the Pavilion, as thousands of Brothers, women, slaves rushed for the single exit all at once. The Pavilion was a clawing, kicking, turgid mass of screaming, terrified humanity, a feral dogfight for the exit that let no one escape, a choked, self-destructive, monstrous clot of fighting bodies that sealed the doom of the Brotherhood of Pain.
For now, even under the fearsome fire that rained on them from the Killers in the stands, the herogyn-heads among the guerrillas had marshaled some small semblance of control, and hundreds, thousands of soldiers began firing straight into the Pavilion itself, volley after volley.
At any moment, hundreds of guerrillas were hit and fell, but still they poured into the arena, a massive jam of armed men firing furiously into the tightly packed Pavilion. Now they were all firing into the Pavilion, thousands of bullets a second.
Bodies flew into the air like flopping fish, burst apart in gouts of blood, as wave after wave of bullets tore into them, terrible fists of lead smashing into flesh, wood, concrete, at supersonic speed. The air above was a maelstrom of flying concrete chips, wood splinters, fragments of bone, bloody pieces of flesh. In seconds, the Pavilion was a garbage heap of broken bodies, shattered tables, clay shards. Even as the ceaseless, continuous rain of bullets ripped them to shreds, the Brothers, and their retainers tore at each other, slaughtered their own fellows in a fruitless fight for the body-clogged exit. The Brotherhood of Pain was dying as it had lived, a clawing, murderous tangle of human beasts.
It was over in moments. The Pavilion was a vast abattoir, an offal-heap of inert shattered bodies, cracked concrete, splintered furniture, and all was covered with a thick, congealing patina of bright red blood. Here and there a ruined thing twitched, sending droplets of red flying, was slammed back by a hail of bullets.
Fraden gagged, even as he realized that it was over, that every Brother had died, that now the planet was his…
Then he saw a figure, a lone gross figure moving in the Pavilion, scuttling like a crab on its belly from body to pulped body, swimming in blood, using the corpses as cover, zigzagging toward the exit.
It was Moro. Moro, his face a mask of bleeding meat, a steady river of blood leaking out from under his tattered black robe.
Moro crawled from behind a body, and a bullet caught him in the shoulder. He reared up slightly in pain, and more bullets hit him. He screamed, a sound lost in the gunfire, threw up his arms in anguish. Scores of bullets tattooed his exposed arms, a tremendous fusillade that flipped him upward and backward, like a thumb flipping a card, exposing his back.
The bullets that hit his back lifted him clear off his feet like a monstrous metallic fist. His body seemed to float in space for a moment, borne aloft on a wall of lead.
Then the Prophet of Pain tumbled backward, a ruined doll, flopped over on his belly, and was still.
>
The Animals in the stands began to jump up and down, writhe convulsively like crazed marionettes. And the Killers in the stands, seeing their masters gone, all discipline, the last vestige of their sanity gone with them, surged down out of the stands, smashing the fence enclosing the arena to flinders with the crush of their bodies, guns flung aside, morningstars waving, thousands of voices screaming “KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL!” through bleeding, foaming lips.
The Killers charged straight into a barrage of bullets, a fire so concentrated that the entire first wave of them was thrown, backward into the stands, bleeding pulps. But the thousands of Killers higher in the stands threw the bodies back as missiles, pushed forward, an avalanche of flesh against a wall of bullets. Killers tumbled into the arena already packed to bursting with guerrillas, dead Killers, maimed Killers, fighting Killers.
Swinging morningstars, kicking, biting, the Killers half-ran, half-fell into the great mass of guerrillas. But like animalcules enveloped by some great amoeba, the remnants of the Killers of Sangre were engulfed by the great horde of guerrillas in the arena. Pushing the bodies of fallen comrades before them like so much driftwood, they tore into the guerrillas with morningstars, boots, teeth.
But it was like fighting the sea. Of the six thousand Killers who had been in the stands, not two thousand had survived those first furious minutes of carnage, not a thousand reached the arena floor alive. Those who reached the enemy to tear at him in mindless, fearless fury were outnumbered ten or twenty to one.
They disappeared like raindrops into the sea, and all that was visible were hundreds of clots of writhing guerrillas pulling down Killers by the sheer weight of their bodies, here and there a morningstar raised above the melee coated with red blood and gray, pulpy brains. Though the fighting would go on till the last Killer was a bloody smear on the arena floor, the battle was over. The Killers were finished.
Fraden hugged Sophia to him, nauseated, exhilarated, victorious, disgusted, all at once as the battle, now decided, continued to rage below him.
“End of the line, Bart!” the voice of Willem Vanderling said behind him.
Fraden whirled, found himself staring into the muzzle of Vanderling’s snipgun. Vanderling grinned. Herogyn-heads turned to face them, brought their rifles around uncertainly.
“Hero!” Vanderling crowed. “Genius! Thanks for the free ride, Bart. Thanks for the planet. It’s my planet, now, mine!” He gestured down toward the arena floor.
“Down there, Bart,” he said. “That’s where you’re going. Let the Killers rip you to pieces, or maybe our own slobs. Either way, you’ll make a nice martyr, you and Little Miss Bigmouth. Your choice, Bart, down there or I slice you to bits on the spot!”
Fraden stared straight at Vanderling. Poor Willem! he thought. A twinge of pity went through him. Enough killing for one day!
“Don’t be a fool,” he said. “Give it up. Forget it. I can still use you. I don’t want to kill you, Willem.”
Vanderling laughed. “You’ve got it a little ass-backward, don’t you?” he said.
Fraden smiled, a slow, confident smile as Vanderling moved the muzzle of the snipgun closer to his gut, the muzzle of the deactivated snipgun. Another minute or so, he thought, and the mob’ll be here, my mob. Willem’s harmless whether he knows it or not, but I’ve got to stall those ’heads.
Fraden sighed, spoke to the ’heads. “Arrest Marshal Vanderling,” he said. “He’s a traitor.”
“Coo! it, boys,” Vanderling said. “I’m in charge now, and that means unlimited herogyn for all!”
The herogyn-heads cheered, trained their rifles on Fraden.
Any second now… Fraden thought.
“Try anything,” he said, “and you’re all dead men.” He laughed. “Play it safe. Let Willem do his own dirty work. Better forget it, Willem, while you have the chance. That thing you’re holding’s got a dead energy-pack.”
Vanderling’s face fell. “You’re not conning me that easy…” he said uncertainly.
Fraden laughed. “Even you can’t be so stupid as to think I’d gamble my life on trusting a snake like you,” he said.
“Shoot him!” Vanderling screamed. “Shoot him!”
The ’heads trained their guns on Fraden’s belly, their fingers tightened on the triggers. Yet they hesitated.
Fraden stared them down, read their eyes. They were Willem’s creatures, all right, but they knew who it was they were about to kill. If there was any foul-up, if the Animals in the stands clearly saw them kill Fraden, Fraden the Hero, Fraden the President, they would be torn to pieces. Why didn’t the off-worlder use his terrible weapon? Why was the President smiling? What did he know that made him laugh in the face of death?
“Shoot him! Shoot him!” Vanderling repeated shrilly.
The herogyn-heads hesitated.
They hesitated just long enough.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Abruptly, as if some fault deep within the earth below had suddenly slipped, the entire Stadium began to quiver. Drowning out the screams from the waning battle in the arena, the howls of the Animals in the stands, came a sound like the sea, storm-tossed, pounding a great cliff of unyielding metal, millions of tons of wind-whipped water rhythmically slapping a great wall of steel: “BART! BART! BART! BART! BART! BART!” A deep sound, a sharp sound, a sound so powerful that its shock wave could all but be felt by the skin.
In the stands across the arena from where Fraden stood, the focus of a circle of guns, a huge explosion seemed to take place. An explosion of people. From every entrance portal, they erupted, a tide of Sadians so tremendous that the crush of their bodies tore away the concrete frames of the portals like so much rotten balsa wood, Thousands upon thousands of men, women, small children, brandishing knives, cleavers, clubs, spears, torches burnt into the stands like some piebald chemical foam released suddenly from under extreme pressure, filling the far section of the stands in moments, so many that the Stadium shook, that concrete and steel beams seemed to creak under their weight.
And more Sadians surged through the broken arena gate, a solid tide of men, women and children that ripped the entire section of fence by the gate aside like matchsticks, pushed the churning melee of Killers and guerrillas toward the far end of the arena, casually, irresistibly, like a breaker washing driftwood and old seaweed before it on a mountain of heaving foam. The Sadians who had entered through the stands poured down the aisles, over the benches, across the bodies of the less swift and down’ into the arena, until the whole near half of the Stadium was covered with a carpet of human beings from upper lip to arena floor like some wretched beast being eaten alive by a horde of soldier ants. And every one of them, tens upon tens of thousands, screaming, “BART! BART! BART! BART! BART! BART!”
Vanderling’s jaw fell, his eyes went wide with terror, he stared around hopelessly like a rat in a trap.
In that instant of utter shock, Bart Fraden moved. As Vanderling took his eyes off him for the briefest of moments, Fraden lunged forward, drove his right fist deep into Vanderling’s gut with the weight of his entire body behind the blow.
Vanderling grunted, doubled over, clutched at his stomach, dropped the snipgun. Fraden grabbed it, slapped Vanderling erect with the back of his left hand, jammed the muzzle of the snipgun into his gut.
“Want to bet your life that I wasn’t lying?” he said to Vanderling. He turned to face the armed circle of herogyn-heads.
“Drop your guns and run!” he barked. “Those are my people! Listen to ’em! Run or you’re all dead men! Drop your guns and get out of here, or I turn you over to them and they eat you alive!”
The ’heads glanced around at the sea of chanting Sadians below, at the tide of people waving knives and clubs and torches and spears converging on them from the left, shouting Fraden’s name as they poured toward them across the splintering benches. To a man, they broke and ran for the exit, some flinging their rifles aside, others still clutching them grimly.
Fraden scooped
up a rifle, discarded the useless snipgun, planted the point of the rifle in Vanderling’s back. “Wrong guess again!” he shouted at Vanderling, then half-turned to face the arena.
Killers, the few that remained, were scrabbling up over the railing of the Pavilion before a solid wall of screaming Sadians who now all but filled the arena floor. The Sadians threw knives, cleavers, spears at the fleeing Killers, and scores fell back into the mob, blades, spearshafts sticking out of their backs, to be torn to pieces by hands and teeth and nails. The Sadians filled the arena now, waving knives, shards of shattered crosses, flaming torches, blood-dripping limbs still festooned with shreds of black cloth.
“God!” Fraden muttered, scarcely believing his eyes. They were going totally ape! But it was all over! The Brotherhood was finished, Willem was helpless—they had to be stopped!
For the Sadians were attacking everything that moved. Killers and guerrillas alike were being torn to bloody fragments by cleavers and nails and teeth, and all the while, like one crazed organism, tens of thousands of throats were chanting his name with one mighty voice.
Fraden pulled Sophia to him with one hand, kept the rifle at Vanderling’s back with the other, jumped to the top of the bench, elevated the rifle to cover Vanderling’s head, put his free arm on Sophia’s shoulder as she stood ashen-faced to the left and below him.
He fired four quick shots into the air—and Vanderling winced as the gun went off inches from his head.
Fraden stared down into the boiling sea of mad, feral faces. Thousands of them, a small fraction but thousands, had heard the shots, were looking up at him, nudging their neighbors, and in a minute or two the fighting died out, the chanting waned, as tens of thousands of Sadians stared up at their liberator, while thousands more continued to pour into the Stadium in a never-ending stream.
Still covering Vanderling, Fraden raised his left arm, cupped his hand to his mouth. The chanting became a guttural, low, powerful rumble, the closest possible thing to silence in that crazed sea of humanity as they saw their hero trying to speak to them.
The Men in the Jungle Page 27