Chapter Three

Baron Lundquist Zeal thrust his bare foot under Doc Tanner’s nose. The old man stared at the appendage, which in the past two months had countless times booted him around the perimeter of that very room. Staring at the symbol and the instrument of his oppression, Doc felt suddenly giddy. He also felt a powerful urge to open his mouth and apply his strong, white, even teeth to said foot, to bite off one of the toes that had made his life such a torment and misery. He could almost feel the bone breaking between his incisors. Dry and crisp.

“What are you waiting for?” Zeal demanded. “Kiss it, you worthless old bastard!”

Doc didn’t look up into the baron’s face. To do such a thing was to commit an act of insubordination. Insubordination was punishable by a prolonged and agonizing kick-fest played upon his backside and rib cage. Nor did Doc bite the foot that subjugated him; that was something that would’ve gotten him instantly killed. Instead, the Oxford University-educated doctor of philosophy puckered up his lips and planted a single kiss on the proffered toes. As he drew back, he stifled the urge to gag at the pervasive odor, which wasn’t unlike an overripe Stilton cheese. Gagging was another crime against the baron’s person. In the presence of Zeal’s exposed foot, anything but total adoration was punishable by a sound and prolonged beating.

“I think the geezer is getting to like it,” Levi Shabazz commented. “Pretty soon, he’ll be licking your feet like a squirmy bitch dog.”

As far as the humbly kneeling Theophilus Tanner was concerned, Zeal and Shabazz represented the twin poles, the positive and negative, the yin and yang of evil. Shabazz was big and brutish, a bullying braggart. He had a great sprouting black beard and dense black hair, which was coiled in a thick braid at the back of his head. He was a ham-fisted animal with a single remarkable gift: he had a surprisingly inventive mind for torture.

Baron Zeal, on the other hand, was tall and slightly built, with an overlarge head, narrow shoulders and long, spindly legs. His naturally skeletal appearance was made even more horrifying by his reliance on eye shadow and rouge, which he used in liberal quantities. The baron’s power came not from physical strength, which he largely lacked. He relied instead on his cunning, absolutely ruthless brain and a genius for manipulation and unlawful acquisition. He used greedy thugs like Shabazz to accomplish his ends, playing them like hand puppets.

“Is he right, Tanner?” the baron asked, wriggling his toes under the old man’s nose. “Are you having fun yet?”

Doc mumbled something into the floor.

“Speak up!”

“Forgive me, noble sir,” Doc croaked, “but I am overjoyed to the point of speechlessness.”

Which made Zeal and Shabazz explode with laughter.

Doc suffered their taunts with a lowered head. He was caught in a nightmare from which he couldn’t wake. Or perhaps more precisely, caught in an unending series of different nightmares. Like boxes within boxes, when he escaped one horror, he found himself trapped in an even more unpleasant circumstance. Of late, he had endured an unbroken string of keepers, inquisitors, torturers. Some had appeared in the guise of science, a discipline in which the university had well grounded him. Others were more like Levi Shabazz, with no guise at all, something to which his matching, splinted little fingers could attest.

Though Doc didn’t look physically older than seventy, chronologically he was more than two hundred years old, having been born on Valentine’s Day of 1860. The nightmare had begun when he had been forcibly kidnapped, ripped bodily from the bosom of his family, and, without so much as a by-your-leave, pulled forward in time to the year 1998.

Doc arrived in the future with his keen mind intact, retained his understanding of the philosophy of science, which he discovered hadn’t changed substantially since the time of Newton and Descartes. Science as philosophy involved the asking of carefully worded questions. Doc’s habit of answering his captors’ questions with questions of his own proved most annoying to them. Their supposedly objective scientific interrogations often took the form of violent arguments and ended with Doc locked up in solitary confinement.

Doc was familiar with the type of investigator Operation Chronos recruited. Similar persons—arrogant, insensitive, cruel, convinced of the righteousness of their cause—had existed in his own time. Such a mind-set, it seemed, was an affliction of the well-educated, as well as the ignorant. In the end, the whitecoats tired of his truculence and, to be rid of him, with as much care and consideration as they had shown when they had plucked him from the bosom of his family, they hurled him further forward in time, to the postholocaust future and the hell on earth called Deathlands.

How could a life packed with such promise, such joy, devolve so suddenly into an existence as cursed as this? he asked himself. How could God—or Fate—be so cruel? To show a man the bliss of happy children, of a generous woman’s love, of satisfying work only to snatch it all away in an eye blink? Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner knew he should have died two centuries earlier. Died with his dear wife by his side, and long before his precious children. Instead, he was here, on his knees.

A sudden blow from Zeal’s heel to the top of Doc’s head snapped him from his reverie of grief.

“Let’s hear it!” the baron shouted at him.

It was time for the jester to earn his keep.

“In a universe of wretched feet,” Doc intoned, apparently from the heart, “of abject, unworthy, bunion-bound dogs that stumble from here to there, misshapen, spavined, graceless, I find no counterpart to the exquisite sculptures now before me. Hewn by some now nameless Grecian master. No doubt inspired by a holy vision to construct from perfect alabaster the feet of Apollo. Heavenly baron,” he concluded tearfully, “would that with my humble tongue your Gemini deities bathe.”

Shabazz guffawed. “Where does he come up with all that shit?” he said in delight.

“Enough!” Zeal said, jerking his foot from under Doc’s nose before the old man could apply the promised tongue. “I think you’re right, Shabazz,” he said. “I think the old triple stupe’s gone and fallen in love with my foot.”

The baron put his shoe back on. Like its mate, it was a red satin pump with a four-inch heel. The man’s taste in footwear had struck Doc as strange when he’d first arrived at Virtue Lake, but he had quickly grown used to seeing the baron clunk about his big house in predark women’s high-fashion shoes.

“He’ll be trying to hump it next,” Shabazz said. “Now, that would be comical.”

“Now, old man, let’s have the song about Spearpoint,” Zeal demanded.

It was the one entertainment that the baron never tired of. Perhaps because it was less a ballad than an inventory of projected spoils.

Doc rose slowly and took a deep, gathering breath. When he had first fallen into the hands of these twin demons, he had been in a terribly confused state. Unsure of whom or what he was talking to, he knew only that he was in pain, and he had made certain unfortunate admissions about where he had come from and how he had traveled from there to Virtue Lake. The admissions had prompted Zeal and Shabazz to spend the next week or so torturing him to get the full truth. So many times had he been forced to recite the same series of facts that as a survival mechanism his brain had formed them into a kind of mnemonic sequence. He could recall the details without thinking about them, even in his sleep, or when otherwise thoroughly confused. Doc closed his eyes and began. “Those who brought on Armageddon planted a seed a century ago, in the months before their science turned God’s glorious green earth into a ball of dust. Perhaps they had had a premonition of what was to come, a middle-of-the-night awakening, drenched in cold sweat? Perhaps it was a decision based on mathematical probabilities. Perhaps it was nothing more than a make-work, social-welfare project. Whatever the cause, the men and women in power took this precious seed and pressed it deep in the largest cave they could find. Where it still awaits the nourishing light of day. On this secret, sleeping spindle, the future enemies of freedom were to be skewered. Friends, I give you Spearpoint, the locus of the rebirth of the United States of America

“

Doc took another deep breath before starting on the stockpile’s inventory. Zeal didn’t like pauses in that part of the recitation. “A thousand transport wags, with spare parts. A thousand armored wags with Cat tracks, cannons and electrically fired machine guns. An ocean of fuel and lubricating oil. Enough 5.56 mm automatic rifles and 9 mm pistols and ammunition to equip an army of fifty thousand and keep it in the field for a decade. Food, water and emergency medical supplies for the troops. Automated manufacturing plants and agricultural stations, which combined can feed, clothe and house up to a million people. A fully self-contained and nuclear-powered biosphere with EM blast-shielded electronics and computer systems, all staged and ready to link with any and all artificial satellites still in orbit. And if none are available, the capacity to launch its own surveillance satellites at the touch of a button. This same system can target and launch stored intercontinental ballistic missiles with multiple thermonuclear warheads.”

At the end of the speech, there was silence. Doc steeled himself and prepared to do the whole thing over again, from the top. Then Zeal and Shabazz applauded.

“Very nice, I must say,” the baron told Doc. “You put some real feeling into it this time. Especially the part about the arsenal. Shabazz, just think what we could do with all those war wags and blasters. We could roll over this place like a plague of locusts, taking whatever we want and burning the rest to the ground.”

“Yeah. Rebuild America, my ass.”

“And I’ve always wanted to nuke the shit out of something,” Zeal confided to the bearlike trader.