by James Axler
The fighters followed him and the horse into the Welcome Center. Malosh figured that the basement was deep enough and strong enough to withstand high-explosive shelling. In addition, the Welcome Center’s entrances and exits could be either blocked or defended against all comers. The building’s narrow entrance would force the attacking worms into tight bunches, which were made to order for autofire to grind into pulp.
“Get the fodder out of here!” he shouted to his fighters as they swept into the building.
There was room for a horse, but not fodder.
The troopers started shoving the terrified unarmed men and women out the front doors. The sponges had already cleared out most of the Haldane garrison’s corpses; the place still reeked of burned Comp B and spilled guts.
Malosh didn’t try to lead his horse down the steep staircase. He left it in the reception area. Before he headed for the basement, he ordered five of his men to remain at the front doors.
“Whatever you do, keep the worms out,” he told them. “Defend the entrance.”
As he dashed down the hall toward the stairway, the fighters opened fire.
WHEN THE FIRST smoke round exploded, Young Crad and Bezoar lay prostrate behind the tarp-load of body parts they had been carrying. They were pinned down by the intense cross fire between the ville folk and Malosh’s forces. Neither of the swineherds understood the significance of the plume of white smoke. But they couldn’t miss its consequence. The wild blasterfight abruptly stopped and the ville folk headed for cover.
Bezoar started to get up, but Young Crad snatched hold of his arm and held him down. “Not safe.”
“We gotta find someplace to hide,” Bezoar said, shaking off his hand.
“Hide from what?” Young Crad said.
Then they heard the second shell plummeting down on them.
“Oh, shit,” the elder swineherd moaned.
The round exploded on the berm top to their left, near the gate. Thick white smoke boiled up from the hole. The breeze sent wisps of it rolling over them.
Bezoar pushed to his feet. As he turned toward the Welcome Center he saw Malosh, his horse and his troopers retreating through the ruined entryway, then there was movement along the entire gorge side of the berm. Black, shiny creatures topped the crest, climbing over one another’s backs in their eagerness.
“Oh, no,” Young Crad gasped.
“You know what they are?”
“Bad. Oh, lordy. Bad.”
That was already evident. The tide of scagworms tore into the dead fighters sprawled along the inside of the slope. There were lots of bodies and they were still warm. Thus occupied, the mutie predators didn’t bother to chase down the living. Yet.
“Come on!” Bezoar cried, grabbing his young friend by the hand. They hiphopped across the compound to the corner of the Welcome Center, then turned into the building’s entrance where five AKs awaited them.
“Let us in! Please!” the elder swineherd begged his fellow Malosh conscriptees.
For his trouble, Bezoar was shot twice in the gut. He fell back into Young Crad’s arms, moaning and clutching his stomach. As Crad pulled him out of the line of fire, the entrance guards all cut loose, sending a withering message to anyone else thinking of rushing the stronghold.
The young swineherd leaned his friend back against the side of the building. When he looked up, he saw that the scagworms were animating the berm top’s corpses. In their feeding frenzy, they made arms quiver, chests heave. Headless bodies appeared to be crawling down the slope.
Bezoar squeezed Young Crad’s hand triple-hard. Under his grizzly beard, his face was dead pale.
A third meteor descended on Sunspot.
The shell landed in the western corner of the compound. It exploded with the same muffled whump, but the burst of smoke was different. It was much more dense, and not white, but sickly yellow-green. Pushed by the prevailing breeze, it rained a superfine, sticky mist over everything.
The fodder and the swampies caught out of doors froze in place as the mist enveloped them.
Those closest to the groundburst clutched their throats, staggered a step or two, then toppled onto their faces in the dirt. Their legs kicked spastically, going nowhere. The swampies farther away clawed at their eyes, choking on their own vomit. The hellhounds fell to the ground, frothing at the mouth and nose, and biting through their own limbs. Even the mutie worms weren’t immune. They lashed and squirmed in place, digging their own shallow graves in the compound’s packed earth.
If Young Crad was baffled by the mass die-off, Bezoar understood what was happening. That the yellow-green smoke was toxic.
“Don’t breathe in, just run!” were the elder swineherd’s final words of advice.
When the callused fingers relaxed their grip on his hand, Young Crad knew his friend was gone. And that he was alone. Utterly alone. He sucked down the deepest, biggest breath he could manage and took off along the berm, running as fast as he could for the west gate. The sticky mist swirled around him, dotted his pumping arms and sweating face. He blinked it out of his eyes.
Don’t breathe! Don’t breathe! he told himself, even though his lungs had already started to burn.
Halfway to the gate, his vision began to blur. His eyes and nose streamed tears and mucous. His throat felt like it was closing up. He wanted to cough, but he gritted his teeth and swallowed. Three steps later he couldn’t hold it back. He hacked and gasped, spewing copious fluids. Then his stomach lurched and he projectile vomited. Staggering forward like a marathon runner stretching for the finish tape, he reached the rear bumper of the foot gate.
As his fingers touched it, he collapsed.
IN THE TORCHLIT BASEMENT stronghold of the Welcome Center, Baron Malosh listened as another dull explosion burst overhead. He was tensed, waiting for the earthshaking rumble of HE, but it never came.
Two more soft, widely separated booms followed.
Then nothing.
After a while, his men started giving him puzzled looks.
“Just wait. Wait,” he told them.
It was very quiet in the cellar. Quiet on the floor above, as well. The men guarding the entrance had stopped shooting.
Malosh got his first inkling of the nature of the attack when the people around him began to fall ill. They first complained of headache, eye pain, constricted breathing. When they began to wheeze, he knew.
They had been gassed.
The chemical weapons were heavier than air. The invisible gases were designed to sink to the lowest point, to wipe out anyone hiding in a below-ground shelter. In this case, that was the basement.
The troopers getting sick the quickest were those whose skins were the most exposed. Men without shirts or hats.
Malosh was well covered except for the upper half of his face, so less of his surface area was exposed to neurotoxins. To stay below ground was certain death. Clamping a gloved hand over the mesh of his mask, he bolted from the stronghold and ran up the steps to the ground floor. Some of the less effected troopers tried to follow him. They fell along the way as their legs gave out, on the basement floor or on the stairs.
The baron found his treasured horse in convulsions on the reception room floor; the entrance guards were likewise down, shitting and pissing themselves. They had received a higher immediate dose. Malosh burst out of the doorway, his hand still covering the mask hole.
Sunlight filtered through gauzy yellow-green clouds. Poison gas still hissed and boiled from the impact craters in the compound.
The baron shielded his eyes from the falling mist with his other hand. He ran headlong into the breeze, stumbling over the corpses of humans, muties and scagworms. He knew he’d been dosed, though perhaps less than fatally. His head had started to throb, the pain centered in the middle of his eyes. He had to get upwind of the toxins to have any hope of surviving. He couldn’t scale the berm because his legs were already starting to feel weak. The closest exit was the foot gate.
He reached it wi
thout drawing another breath, but as he stepped over the body lying in front of the back bumper, something seized his left ankle in an iron grip. He looked down and saw the body wasn’t dead. One of his own fodder, a barrel-chested droolie, had him by the foot.
Malosh didn’t ask to be let go. He didn’t order the dying man to release him. He started mule-kicking the stupe in the face, breaking out his teeth with the heel of his boot. He managed a half dozen stomps before his kicks weakened and his knees bucked. He sat hard beside the bloody-faced fodder.
Even though the dying fingers let go of his ankle, he couldn’t get up from the ground.
He had to breathe, and did so, but little or no air came through his constricted airway. Above the edge of the leather mask, his face was slowly turning blue.
Malosh ripped off the mask, gasping.
Under it there was no hideous battle scar.
No putrid decay from rad cancer.
No mutated mandibles.
Framed by the pasty patch of skin from nose to chin were a pair of baby lips. A tiny rosebud of a mouth. Feminine, infantile, and ridiculous in his wide face and masculine jaw. Most unbaronlike. Who would take orders from a mouth like that? A mouth perpetually pursed to suckle at its mother’s bulging teat? Who would march at its command into the jaws of death? Not even an idiot. Malosh had concealed his genetic flaw with black leather and brutal skewerings. They were diversions, slight of hand.
There was no one left alive to see the truth.
No one left to snicker and laugh. To mock him.
Nor would there ever be.
As he died sitting in his own shit, the circle of death came full. Every structure, every inch of the grounds was painted in yellow-green toxin. In the finest of fine mists, it had penetrated deep into the Welcome Center, filling the basement with a lethal concentration of fumes. There lay a jumble of corpses, their faces blue and bloodied in their struggles with death and with one another.
In the end those closest to the shellburst got off the easiest. They were poleaxed by the poison. Those who soaked it up more slowly suffered all the torments of hell.
The sarin gas barrage attacked and chilled every living thing within the perimeter of Sunspot ville. It did so by inhibiting the production of an enzyme vital to all neural systems. Without this enzyme, nerve function ceased. Smooth muscles stopped reacting.
The oncoming wave of scagworms turned back from the flanks of the berm as members of their species slid dead on their backs down the slope, spreading death by contact. Sensing their mortal danger, the worms on the gorge below cut a wide path around Sunspot.
Even the ville’s ubiquitous horseflies were dead; they fell from the air bouncing on the ground like tiny black BBs.
Everything that Sunspot had ever been, everything that it had ever hoped to be was left to rot.
Forever.
Chapter Thirty
Ryan was the last through the door hacked into the side of the cargo container. It took a second for his eye to adjust to the dim light. At the far end of the steel box, a woodstove on a platform had been swung aside, revealing a hole in the floor. The two boys disappeared down it, followed by Isabel, Doc, Krysty, Jak and Mildred. J.B. squashed down his hat and jumped in after Mildred.
Ryan looked down into the opening and saw the floor of the tunnel about four feet below, lit by flickering torches. He hopped through the hole, turned and pulled the stove platform back over the hole to cover their retreat.
After a four-or five-foot crawl, the floor of the passage dropped away from the ceiling, and he could stand upright. There was no wood-or metal-beam bracing of the tunnel walls or roof. The passage was a fissure cracked in the naked rock. Ahead he could see J.B. vanishing around a turn. As he started after him, he heard the dull pop of a second smoke round, and he knew that Haldane had the range.
The tunnel angled down.
But not down far enough to suit Ryan.
It opened onto a low-ceilinged chamber where the entire ville appeared to be waiting. Thanks to torches set in the stone walls, he could see weapons, ammo canisters and shoulder-to-shoulder men, women and children.
“You can’t stay here,” Ryan told them. “If the ground overhead takes a direct hit of high explosive, this room will cave in.”
“We’re just fine here,” Isabel said. “There’s twenty feet of solid rock above us.”
“And it’s all going to come down on your heads,” Ryan insisted. “You have to evacuate the tunnels. Get out at the bottom of the ridge, and let Haldane finish off Malosh.”
“We’re not leaving,” Isabel said. “We need to be here when Haldane tries to retake the ville. We’ve got a big surprise for him.”
The ville folk nodded in the flickering light, their assault rifles in hand.
“What about the worms?” Doc said.
“I told you we know how to handle them.”
Then they heard another soft boom from above.
“Is that a third smoke round?” Mildred said, grimacing. “Why would they need a third?”
“Mebbe the breeze is shifting topside, and they had to bust another smoke bomb to nail down the zero,” J.B. said.
“Come with us now,” Doc entreated the head woman. He tried to take her hands in his, but she stepped back out of his reach. “Please, Isabel. Before it is too late.”
“Goodbye again, Theo,” she said.
Doc shook his head, a profound sadness in his eyes.
“Do what you want, but we’re leaving,” Ryan told the ville folk. “Just point us in the right direction.”
“You’ll get lost for sure,” one of the blond boys said. “You need somebody to show you the way out. We’ll do it. We said we’d do it.”
“No, you won’t,” a woman stated emphatically.
Ryan assumed she was their mother or a close blood relative. She had the same color eyes and hair.
“You stay here where you’ll be safe,” she told the boys, “and I’ll take them myself.”
The woman slung an AK, grabbed a torch and led them out a side passage. Jak and Ryan took torches, as well.
The chosen tunnel began to descend at a steep angle almost immediately. In places it narrowed so much they had to turn sideways to squeeze past the opposing walls. As they reached a hairpin turn an even softer boom came from above.
“What’s going on up there? That’s still not HE,” Mildred said.
“Keep moving,” Ryan said.
Ahead, the corridor ceiling necked down. They had to crawl on hands and knees to pass through the gap. It was hot in the passage and getting hotter the deeper they went. Sweat peeled down the sides of Ryan’s face and trickled along his scalp. The air was noticeably stale.
The reason for this soon became clear. Thirty feet farther on, the passage was completely blocked off by a floor-to-ceiling pile of rocks.
Their guide immediately started pulling stones off the pile and tossing them aside. “We’ve got to reopen the tunnel wide enough to squeeze through,” she said.
“Why is it sealed off?” Krysty said.
“Scagworms were using it to get at our livestock,” she said.
The companions pitched in, and in a matter of minutes they had opened a two-and-a-half-foot-diameter hole at the top of the pile, near the tunnel roof. At once they could feel a breeze on their faces.
“Gaia, that’s fresh air,” Krysty said.
“We should be close to the exit at the bottom of the ridge, then,” Mildred said.
The guide climbed up the pile and squirmed through the opening, torch first.
One by one, the companions followed.
On the other side of the barrier, the arm’s-width passage descended in a steep, straight incline. The flow of air was much stronger. Almost a wind.
“Hold it,” their guide said. “Listen…”
When they stopped, over the hiss of their torches they could hear sounds from the tunnel below.
Scrabbling sounds.
The sounds of t
ens of thousands of crisp claw feet scraping over bare rock, and coming fast.
“Pull back!” the guide cried, turning uphill.
“No, we’d never make it,” Ryan told her as he stuck his torch in a crack. “They’d pull us down from behind. We’ve got to hold them off here, or die trying. Jak, plant your torch. Everybody, weapons up. This isn’t gonna be pretty.”
“I’m going back to the ville,” the guide said, pushing past Ryan and heading up the tunnel. “I’m sealing up the hole after I get through it. If you want to go ahead, you’re on your own.”
The scrabbling sound grew louder and louder, and as it did there were other, intermittent noises, like bolt cutters snapping shut.
J.B. stepped in front of the others, his Uzi held level in both hands. The passage was so narrow that only one person could fire at a time.
When the scagworms came, they didn’t just run along the tunnel floor. They scampered across the walls and ceiling, too.
J.B. opened fire the second he saw their shiny helmet heads. The roar of his machine pistol was deafening in the cave. Gooshey guts, like hot vanilla pudding, splattered the walls and misted his glasses as the worms distintegrated under the 9 mm hail. Their bodies dropped from the ceiling and walls, tumbling onto their dead fellows on the cave floor.
J.B. emptied his Uzi in short order. He let it fall on its neck lanyard and swung up his 12-gauge pump. Serious boom time. He fired and cycled, fired and cycled, blowing the scagworms apart.
When that blaster came up empty, too, he spun away, letting Ryan take the lead. The worms seemed endless, J.B. hadn’t made a dent in them. Ryan didn’t think, he shot. He picked off the four-inch-wide targets as fast as they appeared. Even so, their bodies were falling closer and closer to him. In the flickering light, the heaps of dying scagworms writhed and thrashed.
When Ryan’s slide locked back, he stepped aside for Doc, who raised his LeMat and discharged the shotgun barrel. The flash lit up the tunnel for thirty feet. Switching to his revolver cylinder, Doc popped off the weapon’s .44-caliber lead balls.
Not one scagworm got past him, but there were more where they came from.