Sunspot

by James Axler

  So, in exchange for payment, Steel Eyes was to provide the weapon, the chemical warheads and the expertise to lay the rounds on target.

  Nuevaville had an ample treasury of precious metals, predark relics, stored food, joy juice, weapons, ammunition and wag parts. All collected as tolls or in trade for other goods and services.

  The price Magus had demanded of him was steep. The precious metal gold was a common currency in many parts of Deathlands. He wanted half the gold and a quarter of everything else. But Haldane knew it was worth the cost to end the stalemate. He didn’t ask his people to approve spending of their treasure. He didn’t have to.

  No fool, Haldane had refused to part with so much as a grain of wheat until he was satisfied that Magus could do exactly what he claimed. Which meant test firing the blaster on a practice range and seeing the crew in action. Because the plan was to proceed directly to Sunspot from the test site, it also meant that the dark deed would be done, the ville obliterated, before payment actually changed hands. Haldane wasn’t surprised that Steel Eyes agreed to those terms. After all, the good baron had a reputation for honesty and fair dealing, even among the bottom-feeding scabs of the hellscape.

  The long ride gave Haldane plenty of time to consider the unfathomability of Magus’s true motives. The mechanized creature could have had all of the treasure if he’d used the chem shells on Nuevaville. Perhaps he couldn’t enter a poisoned ville because his troops didn’t have chem weapons suits? Perhaps he had no way to decontaminate the spoils? Or mebbe the real payoff for him was the monstrous act of mass murder itself? Or its anticipated, long-term consequences? A more prosperous barony for Haldane meant better pickings for Magus in the future. Steel Eyes always sided with those who had the best chance of turning a profit.

  Because of the bad road and heavy vehicles, it took the better part of a day to reach the site of the predark ville of Akela, the rendezvous point with the blaster team. There wasn’t much left of the ville—a five-acre patch of pocked-and-cratered asphalt that had been a box-store parking lot, concrete foundation pads sprouting rebar and PVC stubble. A rusted-out water tower toppled over on its side, the holding tank split and emptied. A few telephone and power poles still stood, canted over, draping sagging, rotten wires.

  Waiting in the middle of the ruined parking lot was another olive-drab six-by-six. Hitched to its rear bumper was a long, two-wheeled, tarp-wrapped trailer. When the convoy pulled up and stopped, men jumped out of the cab and rear of the truck.

  Haldane bailed from the Humvee and walked down the row of wags to join his troops. As they stared at the additional potential adversaries, they looked nervous. Nervous men and automatic weapons were a bad combination.

  “Easy, now,” he told them in a low, confidential tone. “Keep your safeties on and your fingers off the triggers. We’ve got nothing to worry about, yet. Just watch me and stay alert.”

  Then the door to the hulking landship opened. Magus descended to the tarmac and started walking toward the covered trailer. It was horror in motion. The creature lurched forward, swinging its arms, its still-human muscles wedded imperfectly to stainless-steel bones. Despite the convulsive gait, it glided on buttery-smooth, Teflon-coated ball and socket joints.

  At a wave of his half-metal hand, the blaster crew began unstrapping and uncovering the steely gray, D-30 Lyagushka. Cannon revealed, they disconnected the lunette under its muzzle brake from the six-by-six’s rear bumper hitch. Lowering the blaster’s central emplacement jack, they raised the wheels high enough to clear the three trail legs. Then they spread the two outer trails at 120-degree angles on either side.

  “Where is the practice target?” Haldane asked as the crew rotated the mount, turning the barrel to the north.

  “You can’t see it from here with the naked eye,” Magus said. He signaled one of the blaster crew. “Give him a scope.”

  The man handed the baron a spotting scope and faced him in the right direction, pointing out the target over his shoulder.

  It was a skeleton of a shack. More of a utility shed, really, squatting on the desert plain. Once it had been connected to the electric grid, but the power poles leading up to it were all blown down. The heat waves rising off the sand made it difficult to see, even with predark optics.

  “How far away is it?” Haldane asked.

  “Eight point three miles,” the crewman said.

  Haldane lowered the scope. “You’re going to practice with real chem warheads?”

  “No, of course not,” Magus told him. “To lock in the range and the direction and amount of wind drift on the battlefield, the gunners fire a series of smoke rounds. They should be sufficient to convince you that I can do what I say.”

  At his command, the eight-man crew loaded a projectile and adjusted the aim. Then they clapped their hands over their ears.

  Anticipating the blast, Haldane did the same.

  Magus, on the other hand, simply reached up and turned his off.

  Steel Eyes signaled and the gunner jerked the lanyard. With a rocking boom, the Lyagushka jumped on its trails, belching flame and smoke. The 122 mm round squealed as it sailed away.

  Haldane raised the spotting scope to his eye and reacquired the target. Seconds later a puff of white smoke erupted downrange, followed by a rolling thunderclap. The impact was about two hundred yards short of the shack and one hundred yards to the left.

  Through the lens, Haldane saw a family of mutie jackrabbits hightailing it across the scrub. They had seen enough.

  The crew readjusted for distance and windage, reloaded the gun and fired off another round. This time the smoke puff was one hundred yards too long but directly in line with the shack.

  Their third shot landed within thirty feet of the ruined shed, pelting it with rock and wreathing it in dense cottony smoke.

  The elapsed time from first to last shot was about four minutes.

  “You can do that to Sunspot?” Haldane said.

  “Sunspot is much bigger, so it will be even easier to hit,” Magus said.

  “Piece of cake,” the gunner confirmed, grinning up at his half man–half machine master. “And nobody’s going to be shooting back at us from eight miles away.”

  “Did you notice how my crew used the wind drift to make the smoke sweep over the target?” Magus asked. “They’ll do the same thing with the nerve gas.”

  “How many rounds will it take?” the baron said.

  “To saturate a ville of that size with CW agent, it’ll take a dozen of the binary munitions, give or take a few depending on the wind’s speed and direction.”

  “And once that’s done?”

  “Every red-blooded living thing inside the Sunspot berm will be dead,” Magus said.

  Haldane couldn’t help but ask the awful question. “How badly will they suffer?”

  “Charming of you to be so considerate of your intended victims, Baron,” Magus said.

  The observation wasn’t meant as a compliment.

  “If we used the liquid lewisite instead of sarin,” Magus continued, “their agony would be much prolonged. The blister agent causes immediate burning pain in the chest and eyes, temporary blindness, and after a latency period of a few hours causes severe inflammation of the lungs leading to death. On the other hand, high doses of sarin gas chill relatively quickly, if not painlessly. The nerve agent disrupts the normal functioning of the body’s muscles. They go into spasm or cease to operate altogether. Unlike lewisite, its victims once poisoned don’t move very far. They collapse, go into convulsions, then total paralysis sets in, which causes suffocation. Salting the earth and water around Sunspot with liquid sarin will make it uninhabitable for many years to come. Anyone who comes within a mile of the ruins and takes a deep breath or touches the ground will get a fatal dose. A permanent solution to your quandary is what you wanted. That’s what you’ve got.”

  “Yes, so it would appear.”

  “And you’re ready to pay the price?”

  “I�
�ll pay what we agreed on, after the job is done.”

  Magus stared at him in silence for a long moment. It was difficult for Haldane to say whether what passed over that godawful mouth of his was a smile. What lips remained to him turned up at the corners as guy wires slipped through Teflon grommets, coiling somewhere under steel skin onto tiny hidden spools. “Just to make sure you don’t change your mind after Sunspot falls, I’ve brought along an inducement.”

  “I won’t change my mind.”

  “Nonetheless….” Magus gestured at the landship, steel fingers beckoning impatiently.

  The side door opened again and the blond-dreadlocked henchman stepped out, carrying a beige fiberglass box in both arms. The box was a cube two-and-a-half-feet wide, deep and high. At one end was a steel-barred door. The baron had no experience with predark pet carriers, but he could see there was something good-size moving around inside.

  As the henchman approached, he saw the small pale fingers clutching at the bars, and behind the locked door, a small, familiar face.

  Haldane swung his scattergun up in two-handed grip, bracing himself for sustained rapid fire.

  His soldiers shouldered their assault rifles.

  Magus’s men reacted, raising their weapons, as well.

  It was a standoff, unwinnable by Haldane, and winnable only at great cost to Steel Eyes.

  “I think we can agree that the boy is in good health,” Magus said. “If you want to keep him that way, you and your men should lower your blasters. No way can you chill all of us before we chill him. You need to calm down, Baron. You need to think it through. The child is just a good faith guarantee, a deposit on the full amount. You pay me and you get your deposit back. You withhold payment and I will take him apart just to see what makes him tick.”

  Chapter Eight

  For Krysty, the third straight day of march was by far the most difficult. There was an unfamiliar leadenness in her legs, and the inside of her head felt like it had been scoured with coarse sand. It wasn’t just the starvation rations, or the hard terrain, or breathing through a filthy handkerchief, or the distance they had covered. For two nights running, she and Jak had sat back-to-back with weapons drawn, unable to sleep a wink because of the threat the swampie bastards presented. Even now, every time they glanced over their shoulders at her, their faces bruised and battered, she could see it in their eyes.

  They wanted a chance to even the score.

  And more.

  Jak gently nudged her with an elbow, breaking her train of thought. He pointed to the left, to a hilltop to the east. A pair of dark riders had crested the rounded beige summit and were racing down the slope toward the front of the column.

  The albino pulled his bandanna off his face. “Scouts back,” he announced, showing muddy teeth.

  Somewhere out of sight up ahead, Malosh the Impaler called a halt to the advance.

  The long line of marchers stood in silence while the dust settled and the midday sun beat down on them relentlessly. Though they were stopped, no water barrels were opened, no dippers were passed around. The baron was hell-bent on conserving as much of the accumulated resources as possible. If he didn’t need to drink, nobody drank.

  The cannon fodder unit was standing behind them. Doc slouched about thirty feet away. Krysty watched him peel the long scarf from over his nose and mouth. He didn’t shake it out; he wadded it up in his hand while he gasped for air. Under the coating of dust, Doc didn’t look at all well. In his too long life the reluctant time traveler had suffered much, both emotionally and physically. The whitecoats’ cruel meddling had permanently damaged his brain, creating an intermittent short circuit, a debilitation triggered by stress, by a sound, a sight, a smell, or by Gaia knew what else. From long experience, Krysty knew how to read the signs in his gaunt face and in his body language. If Doc was indeed starting to withdraw into the morass of jumbled memories, of insensate anger, of incalculable loss, there was nothing she or anyone else could do to stop it.

  She couldn’t see past the carts and the backs of the horses to locate Ryan, J.B. or Mildred.

  The six companions were in a unique predicament. Though separated, they had all their weapons and ammo. They weren’t bound or hobbled. They were free to move within certain limits, even to regroup if they could manage it quickly enough. But if they regrouped and opened fire with their weapons, they would have been blown apart by a hundred blasters.

  It was very hard to do nothing.

  To just wait.

  Above everything else, the companions valued their freedom. They controlled their own destinies, lived by their own code. They wouldn’t be enslaved by anyone or anything. Because Krysty shared that inner core of iron, she would never give up hope while her heart still beat. She was confident that their moment would come. Perhaps in the chaos of a pitched battle or during a lull in a long siege. They had to be ready for it.

  She turned her attention to the ranks of dogs and dog handlers waiting in front of her. The hounds were nearly three feet tall at the shoulder, and they looked even taller in comparison to the sawed-off swampies. Their smooth, short coats were brindle-colored. White blazes marked their huge heads and thick necks. She guessed the animals weighed somewhere between 150 and 200 pounds. They were lean and well-muscled. Their pointed ears were bent and notched from blows and teeth. There were dark, crescent bite scars on their muzzles and on the sides and tops of their heads; some were missing their skinny tails.

  From what she’d witnessed over the past two days, the relationship between swampies and hounds was not love-hate. It was pure hate. The dogs had either been captured from wild packs or bred and trained to bring out their savage instincts. She had seen hounds suddenly wheel and turn on their handlers, knocking them to the ground and, with a born chiller’s hard focus, going straight for the throat.

  Most of the swampies showed evidence of these attacks. They had lost chunks of their faces, earlobes, fingers. When a dog pulled down its handler, the other swampies worked together to quickly bring the animal under control. They pounded on its head with their clubs and worked the ends of the cudgels between the grinding jaws to pry them apart.

  Krysty caught movement up the line. The scouts were riding down the edge of the formation, in her direction. Both were tall, skeletally thin black men. One wore a leather earflap hat lined with sheep fleece. The other had a shaved head and crude metal wristlets strapped to his massive forearms. Their scruffy brown ponies looked too short to carry them. They stopped their mounts in front of Korb.

  “We spotted a Haldane long-range foot patrol,” the man with the earflap hat told Korb. “They’re a half mile and a couple of ridges over to the west. Baron says we got to take them out before they see our dust. We’re only about ten miles from Sunspot now, so he wants as little shooting as we can get away with. He says we got to use the swampies and the dogs on them. Pick a half dozen of your other muties as backup.”

  Without hesitation Korb chose Krysty and Jak. “I’m taking you two along because you showed me you’re not afraid to fight,” he told Krysty. “But I don’t want any extra trouble. You better keep Not Mutie on a short leash. Otherwise neither one of you will be coming back.”

  Jak turned his ruby eyes on Korb. Whatever the albino was thinking, whatever he was planning, it was hidden deep beneath those bloodred pools.

  “You don’t have to worry about us,” Krysty said. “We know how to follow orders.”

  “This way,” Earflaps said, waving the muties after him as he turned his horse. At a gallop he and his partner retraced their route up the hill.

  The eager hounds dragged their swampie handlers by their neck chains. Krysty, Jak and the other four muties ran after them, winding around and through the patches of low scrub.

  Krysty glanced over her shoulder and saw the column hadn’t moved. Malosh didn’t want to raise any more dust and perhaps give away his position and numbers.

  When they crested the first hill, the riders were already down the
other side and climbing the next rise. It was up and down on a dead run for the next fifteen minutes. The horsemen lost them after the third hill, but the chewed-up earth of their tracks was impossible to miss. Krysty was amazed that the dogs didn’t bark or howl as they followed the trail. It was as if they somehow understood that the tactical situation required stealth, speed and silence.

  Topping yet another hill, they saw the riders waiting for them in a ravine below. There has to be water down there, Krysty thought. Deep water. The notch of land between the summits was crowded with stunted green trees and brush. A perfect ambush site. As the dogs and muties ran down to them, the scouts dismounted.

  “They’ll be coming along the top of that hill,” Earflap said, pointing to the crest on the other side of the tangle. “Take cover in the brush and wait until they pass by.”

  The scouts opened a gap in the vegetation with machetes, then they led their horses down into the canopied gully, tying them to bushes.

  Everyone else followed.

  It was very dark beneath the dense undergrowth. And very hot. Along with the others, Krysty and Jak crawled on hands and knees to the far side of the gulch. Muties and dogs lay on their bellies, softly panting.

  “Are you going to capture the patrol and make them fight for Malosh?” Krysty asked Korb.

  “No, we can’t trust ’em to chill their own,” Korb told her. “They gotta die. Die real quietlike.”

  Minutes passed. Krysty lay there, drenched in sweat. The dust trapped under the canopy tickled her nose and made her want to sneeze. Then a soft murmuring sound caught her attention. It was Meconium whispering intently into his hound’s torn ear, and as he did so, he was staring daggers at Jak and her. The beast seemed to be taking it all in, its eyes narrowed to slits, its nose, jowls, tongue and fangs dripping.

  “Shh,” Earflap hissed.

  Through the screen of foliage, Krysty saw eight armed men working their way single file along the ridgetop. Every one of them looked warily down into the ravine. None saw the concealed enemy.