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  The hounds could surely smell their quarry’s scent, but they made no noise. Not even a whimper. They had stopped breathing.

  The scouts waited until the patrol had vanished over the crest of the hill, then they waved the entire force forward, through the curtain of brush and up the slope. They climbed in a ragged skirmish line, as silent as the dead. Only after they had topped the hill, coming upon the hapless eight from behind, did the swampies turn loose the dogs of war.

  At the snarling, growling sound, Haldane’s men whirled. Their jaws dropped at the sight of the madly charging beasts. They froze. Before they could bring their blasters to bear, the hounds were in their midst, lunging with bared fangs. They fired their pistols at extreme close range, but jostled by the animals and one another, they missed their targets.

  Two members of the patrol broke and ran down the hill. The man in the lead half turned and frantically, blindly, fired his revolver to the rear, hoping to hit something. Hit something, he did. He shot the man running behind him in the groin, sending him crashing to his knees, then his face. In a second, hounds were tearing into them both.

  The six others weighed in with steel-shod rifle butts, and fighting back-to-back, held off the canine onslaught for a minute or two. Then the dogs caught one of them by the leg and dragged him down, and the defensive formation fell apart. The hounds leaped on the backs of the others and sank in their teeth, savagely shaking their heads, pulling the men to the ground by their shoulders, their arms, their necks.

  The swampies leaned on their clubs and the scouts held their machetes at port arms while the pack of beasts did the dirty work.

  There were many more hounds than victims. Dogs took hold of flailing arms and legs and digging in their paws, pulled against one another. The men caught in the awful the tug of war tried to poke out the eyes of their attackers and clawed at the scarred muzzles. In vain. Spread-eagled on the ground, their bellies were fully exposed. While they screamed, hounds tore into their midsections. And once the animals had opened horrible, gaping wounds, they began yarding out living guts.

  Muzzles dripping with blood, the dogs fought one another for the hot goodies. It was competitive eating at its most grotesque. The hounds wolfed so quickly they couldn’t keep their meals down. Gagging, they puked up the gray coils, only to gobble them again, even faster.

  “Pull off the dogs, for nuke sake!” Korb yelled at the idle swampies. “They’re gonna choke themselves to death.”

  The stumpy bastards laid into the hounds with their clubs, pounding them into submission. After they had rechained the dogs, they hauled them back from the carnage and tethered them to stakes.

  Only one member of the Haldane patrol was still alive. And unhappily so. Eyes bugging out in terror and excruciating pain, he thrashed on the ground, trying to shove his ruined guts back into his stomach cavity with blood-slick hands. He stuffed dirt and rocks into himself, as well. Realizing the futility of his effort, he looked up at the muties, desperate for someone to put an end to his suffering.

  “You got it, friend,” Krysty said, drawing her Smith & Wesson from its holster.

  Before she could fire the coup de grâce, Korb’s hand deflected the barrel upward.

  “No more blastershots,” he said.

  Beside her, the little albino’s hand moved in a blur. Something sizzled through the air. Like magic, a dark star of razor-sharp steel appeared at the side of the wounded man’s throat. As blood poured from his neatly severed jugular, he closed his eyes, grimaced once and died.

  “Dangerous little fucker, aren’t you?” Korb said to Jak.

  The albino didn’t deny it.

  Meanwhile the swampies gleefully fell upon the corpses, stripping them of their weapons and valuables. Then they confiscated and scarfed down their enemies’ field rations. They left the torn bodies sprawled on the barren hillside for the buzzards.

  After they recrossed the tangled ravine, the scouts climbed on their horses and rode east. With Korb leading the way, the muties headed back for the main column at a leisurely pace and in no particular order of march. Chained dogs walked in front of and behind Krysty and Jak. The animals’ appetite for violence was apparently sated. They were no longer dragging their handlers forward. The companions still eyed them warily. And as it turned out, for good reason.

  “Hey,” a familiar voice called from behind.

  Krysty and Jak both turned to see Meconium grinning at them. The hound at the end of the chain leash he held had its ears pricked up. The dense muscles on its shoulders were bunched into knots, and the short hair along its spine stood up in a bristling ruff.

  “Oops,” the swampie said as he let go of the chain.

  The huge brindled dog bounded forward, snarling.

  Instead of going for Jak, who was most likely the intended target, for reasons of its own the animal zeroed in on Krysty. She dodged the massive jaws as they snapped shut, then twisted away, pulling her .38 pistol from its holster. Jak drew his revolver, too, and tried to sight on the beast, but it and Krysty were moving too fast, circling, feinting, retreating. He couldn’t fire for fear of hitting her, either straight on or with a .357 Magnum round through and through.

  “Call it off!” Krysty cried as she sidestepped another headlong lunge.

  “My dog’s friendly,” Meconium protested. “It won’t bite.”

  The swampies found that assertion most humorous.

  “Collect that rad-blasted thing before someone gets hurt,” Korb ordered Meconium.

  The head swampie moved in slow motion to obey.

  As Krysty dodged, the dog snatched hold of the edge of her coat sleeve, and with a savage twist of its head, drove her to her knees. Jak darted in and instead of shooting the animal in the head, brought the butt of his Python crashing down on top of its skull. The locked jaws opened and Krysty broke free. Jak took aim, but before he could shoot the redhead was back in the line of fire. As the animal shook off the blow, she drop-kicked it on the point of the chin, snapping its nose straight up. The hound’s eyelids closed and it flopped onto its chest, teetering from side to side. For a second it looked like it was going to topple over. Then it recovered and sprang up, madder than ever.

  “Call it off!”

  “But it likes you.”

  Krysty cocked her .38 and pointed it at the crouching beast.

  “It just wants to be friends.”

  “Call it off, you stumpy bastard.”

  “Call it off yourself, Snake Hair,” Meconium said.

  “You got it,” Krysty replied.

  As the dog once again launched itself at her, she rammed the muzzle of the Smith & Wesson into its gaping mouth and pulled the trigger. The resounding crack of the report was muffled by flesh and bone. Krysty pivoted to let the thing fly past her.

  It landed hard, its legs buckling under it. The back of its skull was a smoking red ruin. As its muscles jerked, its bowels loosed explosively.

  The other hounds went berserk, barking, howling, their legs driving, dragging their handlers along as they attempted to get at her and tear her apart. She backed away, blaster in hand.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” Korb said.

  Chapter Nine

  Ryan watched Krysty and Jak leave with the dog pack and vanish over the rise.

  “Can’t trust swampies,” Mildred said ruefully.

  “Stab their mothers in the back for a line of jolt,” J.B. agreed.

  “If their mothers don’t stab them first,” Ryan said. “Krysty and Jak still have their weapons. They’ll be all right. They’ll lay low and do what they need to do to survive.”

  “We can’t do anything to help them under these circumstances, anyway,” Mildred said, looking around at all the blasters that would come to bear if they tried to make a fuss.

  Ryan figured they’d be cut down by autofire before the good doctor could empty her revolver’s 6-shot cylinder.

  At the head of the line of troops, Malosh and his captains had dismounte
d. The officers hunkered down around their baron, looking over his shoulder while he drew diagrams in the dirt with a pointy stick.

  “I’m going to do a little recce,” Ryan said.

  “Want some backup?” J.B. asked.

  “No. This is a solo. Wait here.”

  The one-eyed man slipped through the milling ranks of the fighters, over to where the horses were tethered. While he patted a horse on the rump, he strained to make out what the baron and his men were so intently discussing.

  Baron Malosh looked up from the dirt and caught him staring. Malosh knew at once that he was trying to listen in on their conversation. “Come over here, mercie,” he said, waving him forward with a gloved hand. “Don’t be shy. Join the parlay.”

  Clandestine recce no longer an option, Ryan walked over and stared at the diagram scratched in the dirt.

  “Sunspot?” he said.

  “That’s right,” the baron replied.

  “Our position?”

  “We’re about here,” Malosh told him, jabbing the dirt outside the diagram with his stick. “There’s a thousand-foot elevation gain between us and the ville. It sits in a shallow man-made gorge, blasted out of the bedrock to make way for the road.”

  In close proximity, in bright sunlight, Ryan could have counted every yellow-headed pimple on his high forehead. But he didn’t. He wondered what was hidden under the leather mask that covered nose, mouth, cheeks, chin. Some hideous deformity of birth? Some gross disfigurement of battle? Or of ravening disease?

  The baron’s four captains stared with rapt attention at their commander. Their respect for his generalship was obvious, and absolute. And it wasn’t based on fear. More like hero worship. Though the officers didn’t appear to be sadistic lackeys, reveling in their master’s excesses, they had taken the Redbone impalings in stride. And presumably all the others that had come before. The skewerings sickened Ryan to the core, but he could see that like the costume the baron wore, they were meant to create particular effects. To mystify, to horrify, to awe.

  Malosh was as much a showman as he was a fighter.

  The two previous nights, Ryan had kept careful watch on the baron’s tent, looking for any signs of weakness the companions might exploit. There had been no female fighters lined up outside, dragged in one by one, and offered up for his sexual pleasure. There had been no drunken revels. No jolt parties.

  Counter to Malosh’s campfire legend, he was neither a serial rapist nor a debaucher.

  Or mebbe he was just saving himself for Sunspot?

  That was a distinct possibility.

  “My forces have waged three wars against Sunspot ville in as many years,” Malosh told him.

  “I take it you lost?”

  “On the contrary, we won every battle, and we held the ville for extended periods, only to be eventually driven out by a counterattack from Baron Haldane. His men are in command there now.”

  “If the ville has been overrun six times, there couldn’t be much left in the way of spoils to interest you.”

  Malosh arched a sore-laden eyebrow.

  “So Sunspot must have a different kind of value,” Ryan said. “Something that can’t be taken away or destroyed by either side. It’s a staging point for your attacks deep into Haldane’s territory, isn’t it?”

  The baron’s black eyes glittered. “Good guess, mercie.”

  “With so much experience, you must know how to retake the place from Haldane.”

  “Even though the terrain is unchanged,” Malosh said, “what worked once may not work again. There are just three possible courses of action. A full-frontal assault, right up the gut. Or an encircling maneuver, followed by infiltration and a coordinated surprise attack. Or failing surprise, a prolonged siege. Siege is the least desirable choice because it would reduce Sunspot’s stockpile of supplies, which would be useful in our campaign. And a siege would also give Haldane time to send reinforcements. The key elements are the size of the force Haldane has stationed in the ville and new defenses, if any, since our last visit. That’s what will determine the final battle plan.”

  One of the captains spoke up. “Shall we send a few of the fighters into the ville to gather intel on Haldane’s garrison?”

  “Fighters would never get back alive,” Malosh said. “Haldane’s men would suspect them at once because of their appearance. No, our spies must be nonthreatening. At first or second glance, they must seem nothing but harmless fools.” The baron tossed aside the stick, stood and clapped the dirt from his gloves. “Bring the cannon fodder forward,” he said. “Let’s have a look at them.”

  After a minute or two the fighters parted ranks to let the human shields pass.

  Doc walked within ten feet of Ryan. Urged forward by a man in a baseball cap carrying a battered 12-gauge pump, he smiled a quiet, ready-for-anything smile.

  Malosh assembled the human sponges then began sizing up each in turn.

  He stopped in front of Young Crad, taking in the odd baby face and stout adult body. “Do you have a name?” he asked.

  Crad nodded.

  “Well?”

  “Well, what?” Crad said.

  “Do you have a name?”

  Crad nodded again. From his desperate expression, he didn’t understand where the conversation was going. Or why. He did understand that his life depended upon his reply.

  “Well?” Malosh snarled, leaning closer.

  The swineherd drew his head as far back as he could without moving his feet. He swallowed hard a couple of times, then helplessly repeated himself, “Well what?”

  “He’s just flustered, Baron,” Bezoar interjected. “He gets flustered easy. He’s called Young Crad.”

  “A droolie by any other name,” was Malosh’s comment. “He’ll do for this mission.”

  The baron looked Bezoar up and down for a second in silence, then moved on to the next man in the row.

  “Ah, the pants-wetting geezer,” Malosh said to Doc Tanner.

  “Up in years, I certainly am, Baron,” Tanner said. “But I assure you I have thus far avoided the humiliation of senile incontinence.”

  Malosh laughed. “A well-spoken, pants-wetting geezer. You’ll counterbalance the tongue-tied young numbskull perfectly.”

  “In what regard may I ask, sir?”

  “Every idiot must have a loving caretaker. You and the foul-smelling one are going to enter Sunspot ville on foot by the main gate. You’re going to count the opposition force garrisoned there, and return to me with the number. It’s a very simple assignment. And looking and acting as you do, you shouldn’t have any trouble getting past the gate. Or back out again.”

  Young Crad gave Doc a delighted grin.

  “Go south until you hit old Highway 10,” Malosh told Doc. “Then turn east and start up the grade. You can’t miss it.” The baron turned to his chief of cannon fodder. “Ferdinando, give them a few cold potatoes to take along. And a little jack in case they have to bribe anyone.”

  As the man hurried off to do his bidding, Malosh gave the newly appointed spies a warning. “If you’re thinking this is your big chance to just walk away from my army, or that you can give our position to the enemy in return for safety or profit, remember you still have friends on this side. Friends I can hurt in interesting ways. You have until tomorrow at this time to return with the information.”

  Chapter Ten

  Doc heard a distant flurry of blasterfire as he and Young Crad topped the first hill due south. The shooting stopped as quickly as it began. If the hellhounds made any noise as they tore into the Haldane patrol, he couldn’t make it out.

  With Doc slightly in the lead, they crested and descended a series of low, rolling hills, putting the army of Malosh behind them. The monotonous desert landscape stretched on for as far as he could see. The baking sun was almost directly overhead. Doc kept track of what little shadow he cast to make sure they were headed in the right direction.

  After a long silence, he heard another distant guns
hot.

  A single coup de grâce, Doc reckoned. The dogs hadn’t left much for the muties to mercy chill.

  A half a pace behind him and three yards to the right, Young Crad moved without speaking. The swineherd whistled, tunelessly, mournfully and very irritatingly through his front teeth. He seemed completely unaware of or unconcerned about the danger they faced. Doc walked well upwind and maintained a constant distance from his droolie charge.

  It took the better part of an hour to reach the old interstate. Before them a low four-lane bridge that had once spanned the wash they were following had fallen to blocks of rubble. The jewel of predark commerce stood sadly ruined, vast stretches reduced to their component grains of sand. Having never seen it in its heyday, Doc could only imagine the volume of freight, the motorized traffic flowing back and forth from sea to shining sea.

  Gone.

  And in all likelihood, forever.

  They paralleled the route of the highway, turning east as the baron had instructed. Tiny yellow and white daisies sprouted along the shaded cracks in the ancient roadbed. Here and there on the shoulders of the interstate were signs of previous travelers and long-finished battles: abandoned campfire pits and wags, the latter burned out, bullet-hole-riddled hulks. There were graves, too. Many graves. Though the mounds of beige earth had been protected with heavy stones and chunks of concrete, something had pulled the obstacles aside and then dug down.

  Doc looked inside a few of the shallow, oblong holes. He found no bones in the bottom, just strips of dirty rags. He didn’t bother looking in any of the others.

  Ahead, a dropped vehicle overpass blocked their path. On the ground in front of the massive pile of cracked concrete and bent rebar were huge, green-painted steel signs. The chem rain and sandblasted grit had nearly erased the words. After a few moments of study, Doc decided it read, “Welcome Center 3 miles Sunspot Exit.”

  When they rounded the far side of the overpass, he could see the gradual rise of the land in front of them, and in the distance the old highway ascended and disappeared through a hilltop gorge. They climbed for a while, then Doc said, “Let’s stop for a rest.”