Norman Spinrad - The Iron Dream

Feric then fired his submachine gun directly into the nearest formation of Warriors, cutting down a brace of the creatures. At this signal, the tank cannon opened up. A barrage of high explosive shells crashed amidst the enemy dreadnaughts in a tight pattern, sending a dense pillar of orange fire and black smoke into the air, followed by a heavy clattering rain of sharp metal fragments. Before the flame and smoke had even began to disperse, another massed barrage rocked the Zind dreadnaughts, then another, and yet again another.

In the place where the eight Zind command dreadnaughts had been was naught but a steaming crater filled with shards of smoking metal and bits of bloody protoplasm.

The effect of this destruction on the formations of Warriors who had been defending the dreadnaughts was nothing short of astonishing. The synchronized disciplined formations instantly dissolved; giant brainless Warriors began milling about crazily in every conceivable direction.

Some of the creatures fired their rifles wildly in the air; others simply tossed their weapons away. Many of these suddenly decorticated lumps of muscle began to urinate aimlessly, spattering their fellows. All sorts of disgusting grunts, shrieks, and howls rent the air. The whole mass of creatures around the smoking crater as well as great sections of the Zind horde in the general vicinity were reduced to nothing more than a brainless herd of rioting animals; the Doms controlling this entire section of the horde must have been housed in the dreadnaughts along with the Zind high command. With the destruction of these dreadnaughts, the Zind horde was bereft of overall command, and this particular fighting section was converted into nothing more than randomly twitching muscles.

The cannon and machine guns of the SS mowed down these decorticated former slaves of the Doms like fish in a barrel as Feric led his troops in a zigzag course through the herd of leaderiess and essentially helpless Warriors across the valley floor and up onto the southern ridgeline out of the chaos below. Uncountable thousands of the Zind slaves were dispatched; yet thousands more could have been slain had Feric’s tactics called for anything less than continuous disorienting speed.

Instead, Feric led his force east along the ridgeline for a few miles, then down into the valley again, hitting the horde that much closer to Lumb. The Helder troops concentrated their attacks on the war-wagons drawn along by the huge Pullers, for each time one of these mobile firing platforms was blasted to bits, one more formation of Warriors went berserk, throwing their weapons away, firing wildly into the air, attacking their fellows aimlessly, urinating and defecating all over each other like a vast pen of crazed swine. There was no doubt that the controlling Doms were located on the war-wagons; each such Dom slain rendered a thousand Warriors militarily useless.

Again and again and again, Feric led his men in sweeps across the Zind horde, each swing bringing the SS force closer to Lumb and the bridge over the Roul, each traversing of the valley cutting a broad path of massive destruction through the Zind horde.

By the time the eastern outskirts of Lumb were visible, the entire rear echelon of the Zind horde had been thrown into chaos. Tens of thousands of Warriors had been slain, and tens of thousands more, deprived of their Dom masters, had been converted from efficient cogs in a great protoplasmic killing machine into an altogether disgusting self-destructive mass of brainless muscle. Like some great decapitated reptile thrashing about in its maddened and interminable death throes, these huge herds of brawny literally brainless giants twitched and jerked about aimlessly, shooting, kicking, urinating, biting, defecating, and striking out entirely at random, slaughtering hundreds of their own number in the process, and as a bonus making it thoroughly impossible for those formations still under Dominator control to operate effectively.

As Feric drove his motorcycle down the wide avenue that led through the thoroughly flattened ruins of east Lumb, the scene he led his troops into was one of nightmare chaos.

The Zind horde had advanced through the city along a wide front. The crude stone-and-wattle buildings had been ripped to pieces and quite literally pulverized; not an artifact was left standing, and the rubble that clogged the rude mud streets was hardly recognizable as the ruins of buildings. The Warriors slew everything in their path and every inch of the city was littered with the decomposing corpses of every conceivable breed of mutant and mongrel, all stinking to high heaven. Apparently the proximity of so many rogue Warriors made it nearly impossible for the remaining Doms to retain tight control of their creatures, for tens of thousands of the grimy giants coursed and surged throughout this ghastly carnage heap, smashing into each other in mindless raging panic, firing into the air, grunting, clubbing at each other or piles of corpses with their truncheons, urinating on themselves, shrieking, spewing oceans of drool from their tiny lipless mouths.

It was a vista that caused the gorge to rise in Feric’s throat and the blood to pound in his veins. “This is the future the Dominators seek for the world!” he shouted to Best. “A cesspool planet peopled by naught but drooling mindless monstrosities which the Doms and the Doms alone control! I swear by my Great Truncheon and the Swastika that I shall not rest until their scourge is expunged forever from the face of the earth!”

Gunning his engine, Peric led the SS column down the avenue, an irresistible juggernaut of cannon, machine-gun bullets and truncheons, every last Helder fired to transcendent heroism by utter racial revulsion for the crazed and debased perversions of what was once human germ plasm that rioted and drooled and urinated obscenely all around them. Cutting everything in their path to ribbons, the Helder troops plunged toward the immense pall of fire and smoke that hung over western Lumb. Even at this distance, the roar of the cannon and the immense staccato clattering of thousands of machine guns that came from the great battle on the other side of the river was deafening.

A lone pontoon bridge spanned the body-choked Roul and as Feric hove into sight of this basically primitive structure, the scene was one of utter pandemonium. A formation of Warriors surrounding a war-wagon was marching across the bridge in perfect synchronized unison; apparently these Warriors, confined as they were to the narrow territory of the bridge bed, were not infected by the general panic and disintegration which Feric and his SS shock troops had inflicted upon their fellows. However, the entire east bank of the Roul was absolutely packed with masses of shrieking, murderous, uncontrolled ten-foot giants. Great presses of these rogue Warriors sought to smash their way past the disciplined troops on the bridge, perhaps out of residual fealty to forgotten psychic commands, perhaps purely as a result of the mathematical laws of random motion. Whatever the reason, rogue Warriors swirled around the bridgehead in great numbers, wrecking havoc with the dominated formation attempting to join the battle on the west bank.

Peric instantly realized that the tanks could not be used to blast a path through the Warriors on the bridge, for even a single misplaced cannon shell might sever this sole link with the west bank of the Roul and leave his force stranded here in this vast pit of twitching decorticated filth.

He therefore drew the Great Truncheon of Held and signaled with it to his troops. The lead square of tanks fell back, then the tanks supporting the spearhead of elite motorcycle SS, so that the vanguard of the strike force behind Feric and Best was now composed entirely of black motorcycles reddened with gore, driven by the most heroic specimens of true humanity, their scarlet cloaks streaming in the wind of passage, their faces visages of fanatic determination, their truncheons drawn. This band of heroes would cut a path through the monstrosities on the bridge with naked steel and iron determination, Howling a battle cry, Feric led this solid phalanx of SS men straight into the herd of grunting, drooling, rioting giants clogging the entrance to the bridge. With a swipe of the Steel Commander, he decapitated a slavering, red-eyed Warrior, finishing the mighty stroke by smashing right through the barrel-like thighs of two more of the creatures, who fell in agony in an ocean of their own blood.