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 in-terminable 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 160
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 161
link with the west bank of the Roul and leave his force stranded here in this vast pit of twitching decorticated filth.
