Chapter Twenty-Five

Doc was hauled through the war wag’s doorway by the scruff of his neck and hurled to the asphalt outside. Before he could even groan, he was jerked back up to his feet. Semidazed, he blinked into the gaudily smeared, thoroughly deranged eyes of Lundquist Zeal.

Ahead of them, all of Shabazz’s crew and the baron’s accompanying sec men were standing beside the largest of the wags, which was stopped about thirty feet from the line of white rocks across the road. Farther up the road was the dead end, the flat, apparently natural cliff face that concealed the entrance to Spearpoint, the stockpile of stockpiles.

For Doc, it was the moment of truth.

“Move along,” Zeal said as he twisted him around and delivered a sharp slap to the back of his head. The blow sent him staggering toward the waiting Shabazz, who had seen enough of the Mist to know better than to step over the line of rocks prematurely.

“Well?” the baron demanded of Doc. “Where’s your fearsome fog? Let’s see you deal with it.”

Doc was counting on the fact that to a certain extent Zeal and Shabazz had to trust him. They knew nothing of the entrance to the stockpile, where exactly it was or how its mechanism operated. He had planned his farewell speech to them accordingly.

“When I cross the border of rocks,” he said, “Cerberus will appear out of nowhere.”

“And then you will cage it?”

“Yes, I will make it retreat. But I must lock the cage door or you will not be protected.”

“And you do that with the stones?”

“Yes, but I must also operate the controls at the doorway.”

“I don’t see any doorway over there. No controls, either.”

“They will both appear, I assure you.”

“How do we know he won’t just duck inside and then sic the mist on us?” Shabazz said to the baron.

“Because every one of our shooters is going to have a blaster aimed at the back of his head,” Zeal replied. “If he tries anything, we will smoke him.”

Doc turned to look the baron in the face. Bleeding red lipstick was like a vast bruise around the grim slit of the man’s mouth. “There’s no need for that,” the old man assured him with all the sincerity he could muster. “You can trust me.”

Zeal laughed. “And you can trust me. Proceed!”

As Doc stepped over the line of rocks, he knew two things. First, that the moment the doors to Spearpoint opened, he would be cut down from behind by the guns massed behind him. Second, that he had no intention of waiting around for that to happen.

Between Doc and the cliff face, the fog appeared out of thin air, a wisp at first that billowed, expanding in all directions with tendrils like the tops of storm-tossed waves. At the core of the swelling mass was the crackling, yellowish light of electrical discharge.

Doc stopped in his tracks.

It is just a device, he told himself, nothing more.

But looking into it was like staring into the very heart of chaos. Wild energies flared. Negative. Destructive. Overwhelming. And the static charge they gave off made every hair on his entire body stand on end. Snow and sleet whipped from its churning face. Hailstones bounced on the asphalt. The smell of ozone tingled in his nostrils. An angry smell.

Behind him, Doc’s enemies, his torturers, sucked in and held their respective breaths. They, too, felt the power of the thing they faced.

Doc had observed the identical instrument elsewhere; it was a standard feature of the other important redoubts he had traveled through. A construct, so the whitecoats had told him, of certain gaseous molecules. Manmade molecules. It was an automaton of vapor. As such, it had a limited reach, and could only exist within a few dozen yards of its generating source. But within that narrow zone, it was the ultimate authority.

It was easy to see why such a creature had been developed. The fog was a guard dog that never had to be fed or watered, that would never die, or grow old, that would always respond to a certain set of preprogrammed parameters of incursion. Violate its territory and you were its meat. Had anyone considered that this inanimate hound of hell might remain on duty for more than a century? The predark whitecoats had apparently overdesigned their defensive systems, as they had seemed to overdesign everything else—except, of course, a way to avert Armageddon.

Doc clicked the gray spheres together in his hand, and as he did so, he felt a steady hum build. The hum peaked and turned into a series of powerful pulsations that throbbed up his forearm all the way to his shoulder and neck.

The fog knew its master.

With angry, electric fire snapping in its belly, the cloud mass drew back into itself.

As Doc advanced, it retreated farther, growing smaller and smaller in volume.

No audible commands were necessary. The spheres did what they did by their proximity to the vapor. The energy field they generated corralled it, contained it, compressed it.

The last ghostly wisp slipped out of sight, as if through a hairline crack in space. Then the way was clear.

In nine strides Doc reached the cliff face, which was either the backstop of his firing squad, or the avenue of his escape. It depended on timing, and, of course, luck.

The outer doors to all of the government redoubts were locked by a cunningly concealed keypad. The spheres had nothing to do with making the numerical keypad appear or with keeping the fog penned up; those had been bald-faced lies meant to keep the pirates behind the line of rocks. One only had to feel around for the keypad’s release mechanism set in the living rock, which Doc quickly did. With his back to the baron and his crew, hiding what he was doing from them with his body, the old man punched in the access code.

Something inside the cliff face clanked, loud, metallic, heavy. Then some machinery whirred and the rock began to move, sliding to the left. Even as it did so, he knew the massive, five-foot-thick, nukeblast-proof, titanium-steel inner door was opening to the right. When the two edges passed each other, Doc dived headfirst between the spreading gap. He landed on his belly on the polished concrete floor and instantly rolled to the left, out of the doorway.

A fraction of a second later, a barrage of automatic-weapons fire screamed down the access tunnel, sparking off the floor, walls and ceiling.

Doc was already on his feet, darting to the keypad set in the inner wall. When he tapped in the reverse of the numbers he keyed on the outside pad, the doors started closing at once.

Over the clatter of blasterfire, the bullets whining through the narrowing gap in the doors, he heard shouts. They were cut off when the doors slammed shut with an echoing crash. As the doors closed, a bank of lights came on over his head. The blasterfire continued for a few seconds more, but it sounded as if it were a mile or two away.

Doc didn’t hesitate. He clicked the orbs together in his hand. As the oddly pleasant pulsations rippled up his arm, he said, “They’re all yours, beastie.”

EVEN THOUGH Baron Zeal had cried out a warning as the old man hurled himself through the opening, even though every man jack of his and Shabazz’s crews fired at him, they had apparently missed the old bastard.

When he saw Doc rolling out of sight, he shouted, “Get him!” And gave Shabazz a hard shove in the middle of the back. “Don’t let him close the doors!”

Shabazz, in turn, shoved his crew members ahead of him before advancing across the line of rocks. Vernel and the baron’s sec men rushed after them.

Again, it was too little too late. Before Shabazz or any of the others could close the gap, the rock face slid shut, which left them all standing in the middle of Cerberus’s pen.

What happened next, happened so quickly that it froze Zeal in place. At the same instant that the first wisp of mist appeared, there was a flash and a rocking thunder crack, and someone in the center of the pack flew apart, as if a high explosive charge had been placed inside his belly. A puff of gore mist, then chunks: decapitated head, severed arms, ribs, backbone, hurtling in all directions.

Before any of the pirates or sec men could recover, the mist had doubled in size and doubled again. The men who were the fastest of foot, those who had made it almost all the way to the cliff face, were swallowed up by it. Their screams weren’t. Chain lightning sizzled and cracked in the depths of the boiling cloud.

Shabazz and the others turned and ran from the advancing face of the mist. Like a tidal wave it came. Only insubstantial as smoke. Sleet and hailstones pelted their backs as they fled; this while blazing sunshine bathed their blood-drained faces.

The beast took them as it found them. In ones. In twos. In fives.

And it found them quickly.

There was no end to its appetite, and the more it ate, the more savage it became. Tendrils of mist tangled running legs. Torsos burst apart like frag grens, showering those fleeing in front with splinters of bone and ruptured bowel. As Zeal found his legs and began to turn, to step over the line of rocks to safety, he saw it take Levi Shabazz. The trader’s beard was wrapped over his shoulder as he dashed, eyes enormous with terror, arms and legs driving for all he was worth. It came down over his face like a veil. Or a hood. There was a cry, shrill, like a woman’s, then the hidden skull detonated with a wet, muffled pop and the wall of mist swallowed the rest of him before it could fall to the ground.

Vernel, the last man to step across the border of stones, was the only one who really had a chance. He lunged desperately for safety with tendrils sweeping at his heels.

The baron felt a cold touch against his back, and he smelled snow. Before he could take another step, there was a crackling snap and he went flying. It was as if something had taken hold of his ankle and flipped him heels over head, something possessed of such awesome power that he couldn’t even conceive of it. He landed on his back beside the big war wag, almost thirty feet away. The impact knocked the wind out of him. For a terrible moment, he couldn’t breathe, and he couldn’t move. He heard the sound of an angry animal tearing at the air, trying to get at him. Zeal lay back on the asphalt and made himself breathe in little sips. The first full breath he took felt as if he were turning his lungs inside out. When he looked around, he saw Vernel, still alive, sitting dazed, near the front bumper. Up the road, on the other side of the stones, there was nothing left. Not a scrap of man or of clothing. Not so much as a drop of blood on the asphalt.

What could do that? Zeal thought, his mind reeling. A god? Perhaps the inbreds were right to worship it.

They were welcome to it.

The baron struggled to his feet. As he did so, he realized that something was very wrong with his left leg. There was no feeling in it from hip to foot. It had gone to sleep. Towing it behind him, he pulled himself along the flank of the MCP, and from there to the open door of the second wag in line. He climbed up and into the corridor, and was about to slam the door behind him when Vernel appeared outside and caught his arm.

It was faster to haul the man inside than to fight to keep him out. Zeal’s only desire was to get back to his ville and his compound. Whether Spearpoint was here or not, it was out of reach. At least for now, and probably forever.

The baron dragged himself into the driver’s seat and started up the engines. Screeching the gears, he did a series of frantic K-turns, bashing the wag’s rear end into the cliff wall, scraping past the third wag in line to get the vehicle pointed downhill. Once he had an open path, he floored the accelerator and raced down the winding road, for home and safety.