One last quintet of dive-bombers plummeted through the air, dropped their loads in the midst of a formation of naked brawny Warriors, swooped above the resultant explosions, and then rejoined their comrades winging back to the bases in Heldon. One of the final bombs landed squarely upon one of the remaining war-wagons, blowing it and the Dom on it to scattered atoms. Immediately, the surrounding tight formation of Warriors broke ranks and began running around in individual random circles, collid-ing with each other at every turn, hitting each other with aimless rifle fire, defecating, drooling, thrashing, and grunting.
As the vast armada of black-and-red Helder tanks surged down into the valley, cannon were leveled at point-blank range, and a massed barrage of high-explosive shells blew thousands of the brainless giants into the air to return to earth as a red rain of bone and gore. Two more devasting fusillades were fired; then Feric led his troops straight into a boiling cloud of gunpowder, dust, rubble, and flesh. Machine guns opened up with a shattering clatter, and flamethrowers spurted rivers of clinging fiery petrol at the enemy.
201
Feric homed the firing stud of his machine gun and held it there as the mighty weapon bucked and screamed in his grip like a thing alive. There was no point in aiming at anything in this roiling chaos. The tank was inundated in a vast sea of huge naked creatures with tiny, virtually faceless heads and limbs like tree trunks. These monstrosities fired their rifles wildly, clubbed at everything within reach with great truncheons, clawed blindly at their fellows or even the armor plate of the tanks, spitting and mewling. It was like plunging into a vast nest of enraged vipers.
The wall of Helder tanks pressed forward into this huge herd of mindless rampaging filth-caked protoplasm behind a river of flame and a gigantic drumfire of machine guns.
Warriors burned like tallow candles, screaming, urinating, and setting their own comrades aflame in their death throes, filling the air with the oversweet stench of roasting flesh. Like scythed grain, the putrid creatures fell before the massed machine guns of the tanks, and were ground to a thin bloody gruel beneath the steel treads of the Helder juggernaut.
Within five minutes, Feric's tank had gained the crest of the far ridgeline, with the huge phalanx of tanks close behind. In their wake was a vast steaming ditch filled with the crushed, mangled, and burnt bodies of ten thousand Warriors, nothing more than an immense smear of blood and flesh ground into the shell-pocked landscape. For the endless wave of motorcycle troops that roared along in the van of the tanks, there was no mopping up to speak of to be done. The ten thousand Zind Warriors guarding the border with Malax had been reduced to a carnage heap of pulverized bone and reeking gore by the overwhelming might of Helder air power and armor.
Best turned to Feric, his blue eyes shining. "My Commander," he said, "this is the greatest moment of my life.
To have fought at your side in this grand and glorious battle!"
Feric clapped the lad on the shoulder. "This is nothing compared to what lies ahead," he said. Nevertheless, his soul vibrated with joy at the thought of the manner in which the host of the Swastika had swept at last into Zind: on the heels of glorious and total triumph.
The countryside of Zind was a landscape of nightmare.
Vast putrid patches of purplish radiation jungle which 202
sprawled across the land like formless amoeboid carcinomas alternated with scabbings of scoured rock and bleak poisoned earth upon which not even the rankest mutated travesty of vegetation would grow. Here and there were fields of gray grass or scraggly rows of some crop mutated beyond all decent recognition clawing its way desperately through the surrounding matrix of seared wasteland and pestilent jungle.
These pathetic farms were presided over by the same sort of motley rabble that had made up the extinct Wolack and Borgravian peasantry—Blueskins, Parrotfaces, assorted crooked dwarfs, spindly giants, half—men with hides that seemed pure cancer, Toadmen; the usual revolting assortment of mutants. However, the slaves of Zind, unlike the countryside rabble in the conquered territories, stood their ground pointlessly, trying to hold off the Helder juggernaut with scythes, clubs, rocks, and an occasional firearm. No doubt each farmstead was enmeshed in the dominance pattern of the local Dom; the mutant rabble flung itself under the treads of the tanks by psychic order, not by choice. All to no avail, for every bit of farmland and radiation jungle in range of the huge army was purified with flame; the Helder force drove deep into the western farmlands of central Zind leaving a wake of fire ten miles wide and scores of miles long blazing like the shaft of some immense flaming arrow behind its sharp point of steel.
