Norman Spinrad - The Iron Dream

At his side. Best beat a huge Warrior to its knees with a rapid series of truncheon blows, then dispatched the creature with a swipe that broke its spine. All around, the SS men layed out scores of the creatures with fire and precision; scarcely a truncheon blow was aimed that did not hit its mark with telling effect.

The SS troop fought its way through the melee, slaying hundreds of the foul creatures and finally throwing the rest into a terrorized panic, so that howling, slavering giants ran madly from the fray in all directions, scattering out of the path of the Helder troops, and clearing the way for Feric and his men to fall upon the rear of the marching formation on the bridge itself.

Before the Dominator on the war-wagon could begin the clumsy maneuver of turning his troops about in this confined space, Feric himself had already attacked the exposed backs of, a score of Warriors, smashing their heads open with the Steel Commander, while the SS, their battle fervor raised to fever pitch by the sight of their leader’s heroic efforts, pulped heads, crushed legs, and otherwise dispatched hundreds of the creatures, clearing the first fifty yards of the bridge and allowing the vanguard of tanks and motorcycles behind the spearhead to enter upon it.

By the time the Warrior formation had been turned to confront the onrushing Helder, Feric and his men had fought their way nearly to the great creaking wooden wheels of the war-wagon. A great wall of Warriors pressed literally shoulder to shoulder barred further advance with a deadly threshing machine of giant truncheons. With a final sweep of the Great Truncheon, Peric lopped the arms off a dozen of the creatures, sending their truncheons flying, and their tiny drooling mouths to shrieking.

He then drew his submachine gun and fired a long burst at the mutants atop the flatbed of the war-wagon; from this vantage, it was impossible to tell which was the Dom, so all must be speedily slain. Six of the Zind soldiers were instantly ripped apart by Feric’s blast; then Best opened up, and all around him the SS men hammered away at the creatures atop the war-wagon with their blazing submachine guns.

After only a few moments of this withering fire, the last denizen of the war-wagon was a riddled corpse, and chaos overtook the Zind slaves on the bridge. The huge, nearly armless Pullers drawing the war-wagon vented great howls into the air and began running in diverse directions still leashed to the battle cart, which began to totter and weave as it was yanked every which way at once. As for the remaining Warriors on the bridge, they were thrown into the same crazed state as their fellows east of the Roul, thrashing about in all directions, smashing at each other, grunting, urinating, heaving, and shoving their fellows and themselves off the bridge and into the carnage-filled river.

It was child’s play for Feric and his men to hack their way through this twitching mass of effectively decapitated muscle; the task was made that much easier when the bulk of the Pullers suddenly chanced to run in the same direction, dragging the war-wagon and themselves over the edge of the bridge and down into the depths of the Roul with a gigantic splash. The great sound alone seemed to add to the panic, and scores of Warriors actually leapt off the bridge into the river, where their rudimentary brains proved quite unequal to the task of swimming.

Led by Feric and his SS elite guard, the Helder column brushed aside all residual opposition and roared across the bridge to join the climactic battle on the west bank of the Roul. Five tanks were the last to cross, and when their treads were firmly on the soil of the west bank, they swiveled their turrets to the rear, and with three quick barrages blew the bridge to bits, stranding the decimated rear half of the Zind horde behind the wide watery barrier of the river.

As for the rest of the horde, it was now trapped between Waffing’s men to the west and Feric’s to the east, halved in size, cut off from relief, and surrounded.

Waffing’s troops were dug in along a wide front in the flattened suburbs of western Lumb. From behind the cover of trenches and rude earthen embankments, thousands of Helder troops sent a continuous hail of bullets at the waves of Warriors that the Zind horde ceaselessly launched against their positions. From far behind the lines, the old Helder steam dreadnaughts lobbed high explosives onto the horde without fear of retaliation from the shorter ranged mortars of the Zind war-wagons. Thick clouds of acrid smoke obscured the air for miles along this front, and the din was nothing short of terrific.

By the time Feric’s force approached the Zind rear echelon from behind, the horde, by sheer force of numbers, had established forward positions no more than a hundred yards from Waffing’s front trenches, quite literally behind a huge embankment of dead Warriors, and directly in the face of withering machine-gun fire. As Feric watched from the crest of a rise, rank after rank of Warriors marched forward firing their rifles in synchronized mass volleys. Almost immediately, these creatures were torn to pieces by the Helder machine guns, but they were just as rapidly replaced by yet another rank of robotized ten-foot giants. Each new surge of Warriors brought the horde a foot or two closer to the Helder lines, though at enormous cost in manpower. The horde moved forward by a process of slow erosion, as imperceptibly, but as irresistibly, as a glacier moves down a mountain.

The vast horde that stretched before Feric marched steadily westward, endless rank after rank, straight into the barrels of Waffing’s guns. Feric grinned wolfishly at Best. “The last thing the Doms expect is an attack from the rear!” he exclaimed. “We’ll crush them between us like the insects they are!”

Peric waved the Steel Commander thrice overhead, and the SS shock troops went into terminal battle formation: thousands of motorcycles spread out along a broad front on either side of’Feric, with the tanks evenly interspersed amidst this forward wall.

Feric swung the Great Truncheon down through the air, gunned his motorcycle engine and led this grand troop of men and metal down the rise and across the charred and broken ruins of Lumb straight for the rear of the Zind horde. As the SS force swept forward, the tank cannon fired barrage after barrage into the ranks of the enemy, concentrating their fire on the war-wagons, blowing scores of them sky-high in a few short minutes, so that by the time the motorcycles and tanks actually reached the horde, dozens of Warrior formations had already been converted into mobs of drooling, panicked animals.

Feric fell on a score of Warriors from the rear, smashing their skulls from behind with a heroic blow of the Great Truncheon. Amazingly enough, the ranks of ten-foot giants continued to march forward toward Waffing’s line, ignoring the SS motorcyclists and tanks even as this force tore them to pieces. The motorcycle SS mowed down rank after rank of Warriors with their machine guns without encountering resistance. Best cut down a score of the creatures with a single burst of his submachine gun, a look of utter incredulity on his face.

By the time the remaining Dominators managed to turn their rear echelons around to cope with the SS attack, Feric had led his men deep into the horde, inflicting incredible carnage on the enemy; moreover, so many war-wagons had been destroyed and Dominators slain that there were more rogue Warriors thrashing about insanely than there were disciplined troops. The Zind advance toward Waffing’s positions fell apart in a mad melee of thrashing, shrieking, defecating animalism.

Seeing this and therefore knowing that Feric’s men had arrived on the scene, every last man in Waffing’s army erupted from the trenches and stormed forward in all-out do-or-die charge.