Feric had no concept of how long the battle had gone on. He drove his motorcycle forward into the boiling chaos of the totally panicked Zind horde slaying everything before him with the Great Truncheon. His black leather uniform was virtually dyed red with gore; blood ran down the silvery shaft of the Steel Commander soak-ing his right hand in rich camelian ichor. Yet he felt no sense of time's passage nor hint of waning strength. The Warriors before him existed to be slain, and he slew them; these were the only parameters of the universe of battle through which he moved.
Finally, there were clearly more dead Warriors strewn over the landscape than live ones milling about; soon Feric was dispatching the foul creatures one by one instead of in bunches because live targets for his mighty weapon were few and far between.
Peric spied two Warriors a few yards before him standing on a pile of their fallen fellows and half-heartedly belaboring each other with their huge truncheons. He drove his motorcycle toward this brace of giants, and swung the Great Truncheon of Held toward their heads for the kill. But before his weapon could strike home, one of the creatures suddenly shrieked and fell with its brains dashed out; Feric had to content himself with dispatching the other.
And quite suddenly, there before him stood the ponderous figure of Lar Waning, his field-gray uniform stained with blood, holding a large truncheon liberally caked with gore.
Feric brought his cycle to a screaming halt in front of the beaming Waffing and dismounted. A moment later Best pulled up at his side. The three men stood together silently for a moment as SS men in black leather greeted army troops in field-gray. The jaws of the trap had come together—the horde of Zind had been destroyed.
It was the ebullient Waffing who broke the solemn silence. "We've done it!" he exclaimed. "Heldon is saved!
This is the greatest moment in the history of the world!"
"No my dear Waning," Feric corrected him, "the greatest moment in the history of the world will be that 166
moment in which the last Dominator takes his last breath.
Rejoice at a battle well won, but don't mistake it for the end of the war."
Waning nodded, and the three men stood there in the setting sun regarding the late battlefield. Between the point at which they stood and the river Roul was a vast stretch of countryside completely carpeted with bodies of the enemy and the ruins of his equipment. SS and army mop-up squads were beginning to move about this huge midden; occasionally bursts of sharp gunfire fractured the solemn silence. The rich red rays of the setting sun seemed to form halos around the figures of Feric and his two paladins and bathed the triumphant battlefield in heavenly fire.
11
With the hordes of Zind temporarily confined behind the Roul, the building of the New Heldon proceeded at a pace that could only be called breathtaking. The victory of Lumb had buoyed the spirits of the Holder race, while the realization that it was only a matter of time before the Dominators would once more unleash their ghastly minions against sacred human soil moved them to incredible feats of fanatic self-sacrifice and unprecedented energy.
The Classification Camp program was the finest example of the qualities that the New Order embodied. Nothing pleased Feric more than to tour these Camps, for here the patriotic fervor sweeping the country was given its highest and most concrete expression.
It was therefore with a sense of keen anticipation that Feric entered the main gate of Heldon's newest Classification Camp near the northern margin of the Emerald Wood for an informal inspection conducted by Bors Remler himself. By his side, the SS Commandant fairly radiated patriotic fervor, and Feric reflected that not even Waning
—who had worked wonders with the army and the armaments industry—had performed feats on a par with those 167
of Rentier and the SS during these two months of feverish activity.
PhysicaBy, the Camp was a modest enough construct An oblong perimeter of electrified barbed wire surrounded a large processing shed and row after row of plain wooden barracks, the whole presided over by machine-gun towers at each corner. The barracks were spacious enough to accommodate perhaps ten thousand Helder at any given time; it was a measure of the superhuman efficiency of the SS that Remler had promised a complete turnover of the population in each of the three dozen Camps every five days, and thus far had if anything bettered this projected performance.
