Feric slammed on his brakes and brought his cycle to a screaming dirt-flying halt a scant twenty yards from the thing; at these close quarters, the rotten-fish stench of the monster was nearly overpowering. Even as Feric brought up his cycle, the amoeboid mound of primal protoplasm began to flow toward him. No wonder the Wolacks shunned this place!
But craven Wolacks were one thing and true men quite another. Feric drew his submachine gun from its scabbard and leveled it at the creature. He pressed home the trigger, holding it down for sustained fire, and his weapon spurted a screaming hail of machine-gun bullets directly into the pustulant thing; a second stream of bullets from close behind him told him that the quick-witted Best had followed his lead.
The bullets struck the pulsating flesh of the amoeboid creature like a series of small explosions, sending gouts of translucent green slime flying into the air. A horrid series of sustained shrieks came from the thing as scores of huge sucking mouths cried out in mindless agony. A viscous green liquid flowed copiously from the wounds. The creature writhed insanely as Feric and Best continued to pepper its slimy surface with machine-gun bullets.
Then the tanks which had halted close behind Feric's cycle opened fire. Four cannon shells whistled overhead, plowed into the creature at point-blank range, then exploded with a mighty roar, sending smoke and slime into the air in a titanic blast of destruction.
When the smoke had cleared, there was nothing blocking the column's advance but a few steaming puddles of thin green liquid.
Feric and Best beamed triumphantly at each other. "So much for the trolls of the lower Roul!" Feric shouted.
"Hardly proper target practice for modem Helder weaponry," Best said. "I hope we see proper action soon, my Commander!"
"Don't worry Best, we'll reach the Zind horde soon enough now." So saying, Feric drew the Steel Commander, waved it aloft, and led the column onward through the jungle and out onto the roadbed of the ancient bridge 152
which was suspended from great steel cables hung from stone towers anchored far below the muddy waters of the Roul.
Halfway across, Feric heard machine-gun fire behind him and the booming of cannon. Glancing back, he saw that several more of the putrid horrors had emerged from the jungle to harry the column. The cannon of the tanks and the machine guns of the SS made short and bloody work of these monstrosities.
When the rear of the column was safely on the eastern side of the river, Feric called a short halt and formed his tanks into an impromptu artillery battery. Under Feric's direction, the tanks fired high explosive shells into the towers of the ancient bridge, smashing them to pieces and dropping the center of the bridge bed into the reeking waters of the Roul.
As an afterthought, Feric had the tankers reload their cannon with incendiary shells and drop a full barrage on the jungle itself, so that when the column got underway again, swinging south toward its rendezvous with the rear of the Zind horde, it left a billowing pillar of orange fire lighting up the horizon behind it where the obscene spawn of the radiation pocket had been.
Evidence of a great battle presented itself more than fifty miles out of Lumb. Great rivers of refugees poured northward and westward like insects fleeing the crushing of their nest as the column raced southward toward the capital about twenty miles east of the Roul and roughly parallel to its bank. Mongrels and mutants of every sordid description swarmed northward along the major road to Lumb, making it impassable to the Helder shock troops. It would have been possible to clear a path through this unsavory mob by sheer force, but hardly worth the delay, for even at this distance a pall of smoke occasionally enlivened with flashes of fire hung on the southern horizon while the rumble of far-off artillery could be heard, sure evidence that Waffing's force was already in contact with the enemy, since the Wolacks had no such firepower, and Zind would hardly employ cannon on such scale against so puny an enemy.
Feric therefore led the SS column south across the sickly fields themselves, avoiding the rabble-choked road two miles to the east, for it was absolutely essential to 153
arrive on the scene before the entire Zind horde had crossed the river. For once the Dom's creatures completed the crossing, the advantage would be lost, Waffing's army overrun, and the SS column trapped far behind the lines in Zind-conquered territory.
