by James Axler
The time traveler and the droolie sat on the shoulder of the highway with their backs to the sun. To establish some rapport, and put a temporary end to the soft but shrill whistling, Doc initiated a conversation.
“Have you ever been to Sunspot?” he said.
Young Crad shook his head. “Never been nowhere.”
“This is your first adventure away from home?”
“My first adventure,” Crad repeated. The small eyes in his baby face twinkled, rather too brightly under the circumstances.
“You realize you mustn’t say a word about Baron Malosh or his army once we’re inside the ville gates? If you do, we’ll both be chilled by Haldane’s troops.”
Young Crad gave him a blank look.
“And if we die in Sunspot,” Doc continued earnestly, “Malosh will chill your friend Bezoar and my friends, too. He will make them suffer first.”
The swineherd scratched his smooth chin, his eyes as devoid of understanding as two shiny marbles.
Although Young Crad was an integral part of Doc’s cover, it was clear he couldn’t count on him for anything else.
“Let me do all the talking, then. Don’t say anything.”
“I talk good, but people don’t hear me right.”
“That’s why I want you to stay quiet the whole time.”
“People back in Redbone always made fun of me,” Crad went on. “Just because I get along with pigs.”
If “getting along” meant horn-dogging them every chance you got, Doc thought but did not say.
“Pigs are my friends.”
Doc couldn’t help himself. He said, “More than just friends, from what I’ve gathered.”
“Piggie dear loved me. I loved her. Why is that bad?”
“People consider such a ‘love’ unspeakable.”
“So?”
“I can assure you the vast majority of human beings shares that opinion. A vast majority can make your life miserable.”
“I live in a pigpen,” Crad said. “I sleep in a pigpen. I eat in a pigpen, out of the pig trough. Only Bezoar ever had a nice word for me. My life could be worse?”
He had a point, Doc decided. “What did Bezoar say about your facility with swine?”
Young Crad chuckled at the memory. “Sometimes he liked to watch.”
In the Victorian era, from whence Doc Tanner had been ripped, such behavior wasn’t just fodder for shame, but for hard criminal punishment. He knew from his Oxford studies that in medieval times, both the unfortunate animal and its abuser would have been hanged by the neck until dead. Thus bred-in-the-bone depravity was wrung from the gene pool.
If only temporarily.
Because of his lack of interest in females of his own species, and their presumed unanimous revulsion at the sight of him, the chances were astronomically remote that Young Crad would ever sire another human being. That, and the fact that the mission required him to remain alive was all that kept Doc from putting a .44-caliber ball through his forehead.
As they resumed the steady, gentle climb, the earmarks of battle were everywhere. A maze of neck-deep fighting trenches had been dug in the sandy soil, scorched here and there by overlapping gren blasts, surrounded by uncoiled rolls of barbed and razor wire. The long-established, attack-and-retreat route was deserted.
Near the entrance to the gorge, perched on its rim, Doc saw a crude berm of dirt and eroded concrete. On the highest point of land, overlooking and controlling the floor of the gorge was Sunspot ville.
Just beyond the predark turnoff to the Welcome Center, the interstate was gapped and impassable to wags. A hundred-yard section of the roadway looked as if it had been blown out of the ground with high explosives. The resulting pits and chasms were filled with standing water. The piles of above-ground debris—earth, rock, concrete, rebar—formed an obstacle course that had to be run under the gunsights of the ville. Doc picked out what looked like three cannon or machine-gun emplacements spaced along this side of the berm.
Travel through the highway gorge by foot or wag required a detour through Sunspot and out the other side. Wayfarers who wished to proceed had to mount the rutted dirt road leading from the interstate exit to the berm gates above, walking in the crossed fire paths of a pair of hard-sited M-60 machine guns.
This Doc and Young Crad did at a measured pace.
As they neared the fifteen-foot-high berm walls, Doc saw that one of the gates was moveable. It consisted of a sideways parked tractor trailer that could be hauled aside by a mule team or by human beings. This was the gate for wags and livestock. The gate for foot traffic stood next to it. It was made of an old yellow school bus parked perpendicular to the berm, half buried under rubble, with its front end sticking out. The hood, fenders and grille of the bus were peppered with bullet holes. The engine block protected the sentries who manned it from blasterfire.
“Hold it right there!” someone inside the vehicle shouted.
A pair of AK-47 sights poked out over the dashboard and through the glassless windshield.
“Remember, let me do the talking,” Doc whispered to Crad. “Raise your hands in the air. Keep them up in the air until we get to the gate.”
“What do you want?” the sentry cried.
“We are just simple travelers,” Doc said. “Do not shoot. We are coming closer so we don’t have to yell.”
As Doc and Crad approached the front door of the bus, two Haldane sec men stood. The men were in their midtwenties, both darkly tanned. One was shirtless and had a narrow, hairless chest. The other was more muscular and wore a sleeveless, coyote skin vest, fur side in.
“Where did you come from?” No Shirt demanded.
“Rado territory,” Doc replied.
“Long ways off.”
“Plenty of hard walking,” Doc agreed. “Not a particularly popular route, either. We haven’t seen another living soul for better than two weeks.”
“Any sign of Baron Malosh?” Coyote Skin asked.
“No sign of anybody, as I said.”
“You and your friend come by yourselves?”
“Yes, it’s just him and me.”
“You two don’t look related,” No Shirt said.
“We’re not. He’s young and I’m old. I’m smart and he isn’t. We make up for each other’s failings.”
“Show us your blasters,” Coyote Skin ordered, tightening his grip on his AK and bracing his legs.
“Young Crad doesn’t have a weapon,” Doc told them. “I can’t trust him with one. He’s a triple stupe, I’m sorry to say. Given a blaster, he might shoot off his own head.”
Doc unholstered his massive Civil War relic and handed it, butt first, to the guards.
“It’s got two barrels,” No Shirt remarked as he examined the weapon.
“What do you call that thing?” Coyote Skin asked Doc.
“It’s a LeMat,” Doc replied. “Named after its inventor, Jean Alexandre François LeMat. As you can see, it’s a combination pistol and shotgun. The revolver cylinder rotates around the shotgun barrel.”
“Was this LeMat a plumber by trade?” No Shirt said, hefting the blaster on his palm. “Was he on jolt? It isn’t even centerfire, is it?”
“No, it’s a percussion weapon.”
No Shirt handed the blaster to his colleague. “What rad-blasted ash dump did you dig this piece of junk out of?” Coyote Skin asked. “Nuking hell, old man, why don’t you get yourself a real blaster?”
“I assure you, that one does the job adequately.”
“How fast can you reload it?” No Shirt asked. “And how many times can you reload it before you have to tear it down and soak all the parts? You should try something that shoots smokeless powder and cased centerfire cartridges.”
“Mebbe he’s as dim as his pal?” Coyote Skin suggested as he handed Doc back his pistol.
“Mebbe he uses the butt end to pound nails?” No Shirt suggested.
“With your kind permission we would like to enter the ville,” Doc
said, holstering his weapon.
“Why should we let you in?” No Shirt asked.
“We saw evidence of a large scavenger at work below here,” Doc told him. “There were a number of freshly opened and emptied graves along the highway. We would prefer not to spend the night outside the berm.”
“Even critters need to eat.”
“Better you than us, old man.”
Doc turned his back on the bus and out of sight of the guards, dug into the small leather pouch Malosh had given him. He removed two small, crude bits of gold, each probably cut from a melted gob of wedding rings and wristwatches scrounged from some nearby ground zero. He handed over the nuggets.
The men tested the yellow metal with their teeth and found it to their liking.
“You’re good to go,” No Shirt said.
“Enjoy your visit,” Coyote Skin added, moving aside to let them step up into the aisle of the bus.
Doc led the way. All the seats had been stripped. The intact side windows were blacked out, their outer surfaces blocked by heaped dirt and rock, but the rear, emergency exit of the bus was wide open.
Doc hopped down off the back bumper, into a flat field lined with semitrailers and SeaLand cargo containers. A pall of greasy woodsmoke hung in the air. Tractor wags without doors or wheels, and rusting, immobile Winnebagos and Trailways buses surrounded the only permanent structure, which was the predark Welcome Center. As with the bus gate in the berm, bullet holes in profusion decorated the sides of every dwelling.
Because he had seen similar buildings along other interstates, Doc knew what the Welcome Center was all about. When the world was still intact, it was a place for tourists to pick up brochures and educate themselves on the state’s various attractions and points of interest. In this case, the state was New Mexico. The plate-glass windows of the Welcome Center were gone, replaced with sheets of metal and pieces of scavenged plywood. The curved sidewalk and the double-doored entrance, which had once invited legions of curious travelers, were guarded by two men with assault rifles. The Haldane garrison was housed within, Doc assumed. A gibbet made of a predark, portable basketball stanchion, complete with empty noose, stood ominously out front.
Looking at the surround of hammered earth, and the riddled, decaying structures, Doc wondered how many times the place had traded occupying armies. Each time it had lost a little more of its humanity, until it was simply a hilltop junkyard under an unforgiving blue sky.
Young Crad hopped down from the bumper. He kept his mouth shut, as ordered.
As they advanced, Doc noticed the cultivated fields behind the Welcome Center. On closer inspection, he saw they were just truck gardens. The crops were far too small to support the number of people milling about in the enclosure.
Doc could easily pick the sec men from the rest of Sunspot’s inhabitants. They were armed; the ville folk weren’t. To come up with a force-strength figure for Malosh, he was going to have to count blasters.
He was up to eleven when a group of unarmed people confronted him. The women outnumbered the men by three to one.
“What’s your business here, mister?” demanded a tall, blond-haired woman.
“I have no business, as such,” Doc said, struck by the unusual color of her eyes, which were pale violet. “I’m just traveling with my friend, here. We’re looking for a safe place to spend the night.”
“Your friend could use a wash,” the woman said, crinkling up her nose. She had tiny wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, and there were a few strands of white mixed in with her yellow hair.
“He could use several,” Doc said.
“You still have your blaster,” she said. “Are you a Haldane man?”
Doc admired the resolve in her face, her wide mouth and firm chin. She was truly a handsome woman. “I’m nobody’s man,” he told her. “The guards at the gate found my sidearm less than terrifying. That’s why they didn’t take it from me, I imagine.”
“It does look like it might blow up in your hand.”
“Looks can be deceiving.”
“So they can. Are you harmless?”
Doc smiled, displaying his remarkably excellent teeth. “When called upon to be.”
“Are you a spy for Malosh the Impaler?”
“I am no one’s spy,” Doc lied. “Why do you persist in questioning my allegiance?”
“Because,” the woman said, “you are either with us or you’re against us. Either aligned with one or the other baron, or with the people of this ville. We have learned there’s no difference between our occupiers. One is just as bad as the other.”
“But surely Malosh has a reputation…”
“Deserved, no doubt,” she said. “But he doesn’t torture or abuse us. He doesn’t dare. When he has control of Sunspot, he depends on our labor, our food and our water. Whether it’s Malosh or Haldane in charge, it doesn’t matter to us. Both barons rob us, and the sec men of both chill us every time they attack.”
“Why do you stay here, then?” Doc said.
“It’s our home. We don’t have anywhere else to go. But even if we wanted to leave, we couldn’t. Malosh and Haldane would never let us. They need us here to farm, to maintain the ville. If we were gone, they’d have to move their own people into the chill zone and risk their lives. Neither baron is willing to do that because their populations are too small to be stretched that far. If we were gone, the armies would have to carry enough supplies to last them through their campaigns. And without long convoys of wags and overstocked storehouses, that just isn’t possible.”
“You are caught in a terrible dilemma,” Doc said.
“Our community is slowly dying under the weight of it,” she said. “When our members get chilled, they can’t be replaced. As you can see, most of our menfolk are gone.”
It occurred to Doc that no one else had spoken a word. The others had all deferred to this lovely woman. She was in fact the leader of the tragic little hamlet.
“I have jack,” Doc told her. “May I purchase some food and drink, and acquire lodgings for the night?”
“Jack’s no good here anymore,” she said. “We’ve got nothing left to sell. Water’s free. The only thing nukeday ever did for us was to open up the sweet springs over behind the Welcome Center. You can’t buy food here, but you can come along with us and catch your own dinner if you like.”
“Much obliged, madam.”
“Call me Isabel.”
“I am Theophilus Tanner. Please call me Doc for short. And this is Young Crad.”
Isabel sized up the hulking, odoriferous man. Her evaluation only took a few seconds, but evidently included an IQ test. “If the dimmie’s hungry, bring him along, too,” she said.
Chapter Eleven
Baron Haldane’s kidneys ached, his butt ached, his neck ached. For the better part of two-and-a-half days, he had been a pebble trapped inside the constantly shaken tin can that was Magus’s Humvee. The military SUV lurched and bucked, breaking its own trail across the hardpan, throwing its occupants this way and that, slamming them against the doors, the full length, central console, the head liner, compressing their spines as the seat springs bottomed out over and over again.
With the artillery piece in tow, Magus’s convoy had virtually crept along. The first day they covered fewer than forty miles. This from ten hours of running time and eight hours of breakdowns, backtracking and retrieving stuck wags from potholes. Once they crossed the predark interstate and headed due south, the going got even slower.
In Haldane’s opinion, traveling on horseback or even on foot would have been preferable; they could have dragged the gun carriage behind a mule team and made more speed. But the baron had no say in the matter.
To avoid being spotted by Malosh’s army, the convoy had made a wide detour to the south of Sunspot. Their snail’s pace kept the dust clouds to a minimum. There was no way to keep out of sight of the ville because it stood on a prominent high point, the gorge rim, and had a panoramic view.
One thing was certain—when the convoy could see the gorge rim ville, the gorge rim ville could see them. There was no cover for the big wags among the low hills and broad stretches of flatland. The baron knew his hilltop garrison would do nothing but watch them creep by. A group of wags as large and well-armed as this one could defend itself against anything but an all-out attack. Because of the distance involved, engaging the convoy would mean leaving Sunspot unprotected for an extended period of time. His men would follow orders, stand their ground and wait.
There was another reason for the detour, as Magus’s chief gunner had explained. The prevailing winds swept through the narrow gorge from the west. To prevent the deadly gas from blowing back on the artillery position, a healthy tail or crosswind was absolutely necessary. Something a southerly approach provided.
By nightfall, if all went well, the weapon would be in firing position, seven or eight miles from the target. The sarin gas barrage would commence the next day, after Haldane’s garrison had been withdrawn and Malosh’s army had reoccupied the ville. Shelling Sunspot with gas while the masked baron and his raiders were caught inside its berm would end the threat from the west for the foreseeable future.
But at what price?
Haldane had entered into the deal with deep moral misgivings. To protect his people and their offspring, he had sold his soul to the devil.
And in the process placed his own beloved child in the devil’s half-steel hands.
Could he trust Magus to let his son go once the murderous deed was done and the jack was duly paid?
It was a question he couldn’t answer without help. And help was forthcoming.
The ponytailed driver caught his eye and noted his dour expression in the rearview mirror. “Did you really think you could do business with Magus and not come out holding the shit bag?” he said. “Baron, you are a major disappointment.”