第36节

Clay called up The Lady and requested additional firepower to be sent

down-river to cover the fall-back. The North Side had earlier

signalled that they were under heavy attack and had broken off in

mid-transmission. Clay had tried repeatedly to renew contact but his

radio messages had remained unanswered.

The MCall Bears who had overrun and killed the two eight-man squads

holding the line upstream did not have time to figure out how the

Tracker's 'long sharp iron' worked. Without Mr Snow's help, it was

unlikely they would have managed it in a week. To the warriors, the

three~ barrelled air rifles were nothing more than odd-shaped clubs.

The machetes, however, were a real prize. The belts and scabbards were

quickly stripped from the fallen linemen and clipped around the waists

of their proud new owners - of which Motor-Head was one.

The screaming charge down the debris-littered river bed was accompanied

by the eerie howling noise made by wind-whips.

Perforated strips of wood tied to short sticks which, when whirled at

great speed, emitted a variety of chilling tones; others made harsh,

dry clicking noises like cicadas.

To the raw wet-feet in the combat squads, the first sight of the M'Call

Bears with their bizarrely-clad, striped and spotted malformed bodies

the legacy of generations of mutant genes - was like a vision of

hell.

A gut-shrivelling eruption of primal savagery allied to mindless brute

strength. A seemingly unstoppable threat to everything the Amtrak

Federation stood for. The horror was increased, etched deeper upon the

psyche by the sight of the severed heads of their comrades, still

encased in their helmets, bobbing on the end of stakes above the

advancing throng.

There was a fleeting moment when time stood still, when the brain

froze, then the months of rigorous training, the years of

indoctrination from cradle to combat academy came on stream,

transmitting red-alert signals to brain, eye, limb and trigger-finger;

sending adrenalin surging through the system to line the stomach with

steel; flooding the heart with cold, implacable hatred. What the

linemen saw then were deranged travesties of humankind; the despoilers

of the blue-sky world, whose poisonous presence filled the air with

lingering death. Nobody faltered. Nobody flinched. Wet-foot and

trail-hand gave vent simultaneously to an exultant rebel yell and

charged forward into battle.

Deafened by the buzz of chainsaws and the noisy clatter of a small,

tracked excavator, Barber and the sixty-strong party working under the

rear wagons did not hear the chilling battle sounds made by the

advancing Mutes. The first warning they had that fighting was about to

engulf The Lady was an over-the-shoulder glimpse of Colonel Moore's

linemen charging down the ramps of the wagons on either side of the

flight section. The next sign that things weren't going too well was

the reappearance, on the river bank, of Captain Clay and what was left

of his perimeter force. Clay's squads had been obliged to fall back

over open ground harassed by sporadic fire coming from both front and

rear as Mute crossbow men, positioned behind the main force fired at

them from the cover of the river bed. Barber kept levering away at the

flood debris clogging the drive motors but, like the rest of his men,

he found it difficult to concentrate when it became apparent that the

four squads which had doubled downstream were covering the retreat of

the force despatched earlier. His concentration was further diminished

when the driver of the excavator was blown out of his seat by a bolt

that went in under his right armpit and came out between the collarbone

and shoulder blade on the other side. Barber threw down his crowbar,

grabbed his rifle and took cover behind one of the huge, steel-clad

wheels.

The rest of the damage-control party did likewise.

Buck McDonnell ran under the length of the train to where Barber knelt

and dr