Soon Feric was once more at the head of a tightly massed formation of motorcycle SS shock troops roaring eastward across Wolack with precision and dash. The tanks fanned out about this column as outriders protecting either flank. About half a mile behind and slightly to the south were Waffing's regular army troops, obscured by a huge dust cloud. Behind them, the Wolack border fortifications were naught but smoking ruins.
"What a fine beginning to the campaign, my Command-147
er!" Best called out. "An utterly devastating victory!" His face was almost feverish with the manly thrill of having fought his first real battle.
"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 148
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.
