He drew the Great Truncheon of Held, pointed the gleaming fist that was its headball in a northeasterly direc-149
tion, 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 150
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 inde-pendent life.
"What a cesspool of genetic garbage!" he muttered aloud.
Best's reply was a sudden wordless cry of terror.
Fifty yards up ahead, Feric saw something which nearly caused him to retch, and made his blood go cold. Blocking the road ahead was a gigantic mound of formless protoplasm, a pulsating amoeba of greenish translucent flesh perhaps ten feet high and wider than the roadbed. The surface of this enormous lump of living slime seethed with scores of huge lipless sucking mouths filled with rows of knifelike teeth; from each obscene orifice projected a long 151
tubular writhing red tongue. The oozing surface of the monstrosity swarmed with hundreds of powerful-looking tentacles as well. From the mouths came a ghastly pucker-ing wet sound and a stomach-turning high-pitched keening.
