Norman Spinrad - The Iron Dream

“So much for the army of Wolack!” Feric answered, not wanting to take the edge off Best’s mood. But he knew only too well that the Wolacks had only served to blood these untested Helder troops, and give them a chance to experience their own manhood, heroism, and skill. The real battle was hundreds of miles away with the Warriors of Zind, and those baleful creatures would not break and run like a gaggle of craven Wolacks.

But Peric heard the incredible massed symphony of engines behind him, saw rank after rank of shiny black motorcycles, swift tanks, and motorized infantry dashing across the plain behind him like a grand parade, and he could sense the fire and elation and hot blood of his troops as a palpable force.

Let the Warriors of Zind fight to the death! Let them throw their full might against the army of Heldon! All the more thoroughly would this corps. of heroes grind their obscene warped protoplasm into a thin slime of squamous jelly soiling the dust!

As the Heldon strike force drove deeper into Wolack, Feric noticed that the nature of the countryside was gradually changing. The grass was becoming patchy and taking on an unwholesome blue-gray undertone. The occasional pigs and cattle that the columns routed as they swept through the fields became ever more genetically twisted, many of them encumbered by trailing vestigial limbs, all with purplish or greenish mottling of the hide, some with the primitive stubs of secondary heads bursting like buboes from the bases of their necks.

“What a horrid country this is!” Best called out as he rode close by Feric’s side. “Perhaps we should set it all to the torch, my Commander.”

“It would do no good. Best,” Feric said. “No fire we could set would burn out the poison of the Fire of the Ancients.”

Indeed, the countryside was rapidly becoming a putrid sinkhole of residual radiation and genetic contamination.

Mutated crows cawed overhead through their grossly deformed pink beaks,,their eyes bursting out of their sockets like the orbs of deep-sea fish. In the distance here and there, Feric spied the first patches of radiation jungle: great twisted mazes of purplish, reddish, and bluish vegetation, caricatures of grass the size of small trees, tangles of outsized vines like poisonous serpents, giant bloated cancerous flowers. Lurking in these pus pockets of radiation were creatures that defied description: wild dogs that dragged their intestines behind them in translucent sacs, multiheaded swine, featherless birds covered with running sores that oozed noxious venom, all manner of mutated vermin that bred ever-more-revolting variations from generation to generation.

Occasionally, the head of the column would flush cowering Wolack peasants from their holes. These loathsome mutants were exactly the sort one would expect in such debased environs. There was not a one of them who did not display some gross departure from the true human genotype. Blueskins, Parrotfaces, Toadmen, dwarfs, and all the usual mutations abounded. Several of the frog-skinned monstrosities were sighted; without exception, these slime-oozing creatures were run down and slain by the SS, for their sight was a particularly strong affront to true human eyes. As for the bulk of the Wolack peasantry, these were for the most part allowed to flee every which way before the Helder army; only those too dull-witted or physically warped to make proper way for the column felt the weight of Helder truncheons. The Classification Camps that the occupation forces would set up would deal with these wretches in due course.

All in all, the most vexing aspect of the march eastward thus far was the gorge building up in the back of Feric’s throat as he drove deeper into the contaminated reaches of the Wolack fens. Of resistance there was none, and only the occasional running down of a particularly vile mutant gave the troops any opportunity to maintain their fighting edge. The column neither avoided the reeking wattle villages nor sought them out; straight east, the army roared, and any obstruction was smashed to pieces and set to the torch.

After this relentless advance had continued for several hours and nearly two hundred miles without major incident, Feric decided that it was time for the SS troop to veer off and begin its northeasterly sweep.

He drew the Great Truncheon of Held, pointed the gleaming fist that was its headball in a northeasterly direction, then guided his motorcycle off on this heading. Without pause, the column of black motorcycles and tanks followed him up over a rise and off across the lowland fens of the Roul delta.

“At this rate, we should reach the Roul within a day,” he called over to Best. “There’s an ancient bridge about two hundred miles downstream from Lumb that freakishly survived the Time of Fire. There we can cross the river undetected.”

Best’s face creased in puzzlement. “Surely Zind will fortify such a key position, my Commander?” he said confusedly.

Feric grinned. “The bridge is supposedly infested by monsters too vile and terrible for even the Warriors of Zind to face with equanimity,” he said. “Because of these so-called trolls, the area is devoid of sapient habitation.”

At the sight of Best’s alarm at this information, Feric broke into good-naturedly laughter. “Don’t worry, Best,” he said. “There isn’t a protoplasmic creature in existence that’s immune to the submachine guns of the SS!”

At this. Best himself grinned broadly.

The dash across the Roul delta could not exactly be described as a pleasant scenic tour, but it was without serious incident, since these lowlands were much more sparsely inhabitated than the rest of Woiack; the reputation of the area among the Wolacks was unsavory, even ominous.

Feric could well understand why even low creatures like Wolacks would choose to leave territory like this unsettled. Here the residual radiation was obviously quite high, for patches of radiation jungle were everywhere, many of them merging with each other to form nightmare forests of considerable extent. Even the mighty column of motorcycles with its flankers of powerful tanks avoided these vicinities at Feric’s direction; not out of fear of the monstrosities lurking within, but because of the dangerously high radiation level that such pus-pockets of mangled chromosomes denoted.

“Over there, my Commander!” Best called out, pointing to the east. The twin towers of the ancient bridge were clearly visible on the horizon.

With motions of the Steel Commander, Feric redeployed his troops in order to properly deal with whatever might bar the way across the bridge. Four fanks were brought to the head of the column where they formed a box around the motorcycles of Feric and Best. The other tanks were brought in closer to the column into tight formations to protect against attack from the sides or rear.

An ancient roadway began about two miles from the bridge, leading through the fens and onto the bridge itself; as Peric led the column along this crumbling track, he saw that the entrance to the bridge itself was surrounded by foul radiation jungle. Creepers, vines, and bloated shrubbery in ghastly bluish and purplish hues grew about the bridgehead in fetid profusion; only the concrete roadbed itself was free of the densly tangled mutated underbrush.

Feric gunned his engine slightly and signaled to the tank drivers beside him; the head of the column sped up to nearly fifty miles an hour, opening up a gap of a hundred yards between itself and the column of motorcycles. Feric drew a few yards ahead of the tanks with Best’s cycle close behind, unsheathed the Steel Commander, and plunged his motorcycle into the narrow canyon between the densely tangled walls of cancerous radiation jungle.

At once he was immersed in a world of slithering, cluttering putrescence. Multiheaded snakes hung from slime-encrusted trees. Large featherless birds with prehensile beaks hopped heavily from branch to branch uttering guttural liquid croaks. Something large and crazed shrieked horribly to itself in the depths of the jungle. Here and there, Feric made out huge nebulous shapes moving about behind the twisted boles of the unwholesome trees: vast expanses of wet green hide, moving masses of blood-red pulpiness, things like gigantic abdominal organs imbued with independent life.