An instant after the fence came down, an even more astonishing thing happened. A half dozen, shiny black flying machines swept low around the base of the mountain, clustered in tight attack formation.
Flying machines hadn’t been seen in that part of Deathlands since skydark.
Understandably, Baron Doyal was caught unprepared. He had fortified and stocked the casino compound to hold off a ground siege of many months. But this was no siege. This was a rout.
When concentrated machine gun, small arms and mortar fire had no effect on the oncoming vehicles and aircraft, when the beams of light began to slice and drop sec men with uncanny accuracy, the only course left was a full retreat. Doyal and his troops scrambled to the cover of the casino building. Which, as it turned out, was no cover at all. As he squinted through the swirling smoke and dust, Doyal dimly saw two legged black monsters marching through the entrance. Tall, with big, round heads, and limbs and torsos segmented like insects, they advanced in a straight line, ignoring the flurries of bullets that zinged at them. Their longblasters returned fire with narrow beams of whistling emerald light,
Unable to defend themselves, the baron’s sec men were surrendering en masse, throwing aside their useless weapons and themselves belly down on the rubble.
“We can’t stay here!” Doyal’s second in command shouted at him.
The baron turned toward the man crouched on his right. Capo Waslick’s right eye was nearly swollen shut, his cheek grossly bloated and as shiny as a balloon. The ear on that side of his face had vanished, replaced by an angry scorch.
“We’ve got to get out now!” Waslick said, and shoved him so hard that he dropped the shotgun.
Moving on rubbery knees, the baron hurried over the unspeakable carnage of the lobby, past the mingled pieces of the living and the dead, through an archway that led toward the kitchens at the rear of the building.
The escape tunnel was hidden behind a massive floor to ceiling pantry shelf. Its secret door was balanced to open at a touch, even when the shelf was loaded with goods. The underground corridor beyond had been built in the predark days, by the casino’s original, Native American owners.
Eleven thousand foot Mount Deseret had shielded this small corner of the Skull Valley Indian Reservation from the brunt of the three-warhead airburst that had turned Salt Lake City into a hardened glob of thermoglass and the Great Salt Lake into a cloud of superheated vapor, which had flash-cooked every living thing between the predark cities of Ogden and Provo.
The native peoples of the Skull Valley reservation had vanished in the same blinding instant as the Great Salt Lake. Their shapes were still visible on a few of the exposed boulders, permanently burned into the rock by an initial energy pulse brighter than ten thousand suns. The only artifacts of their culture that had survived doomsday were the concrete pads scattered over the valley floor, pads that had once underlayed shoddy, government provided housing and, of course, the Mount Deseret Casino Resort.
When the tremendous weight of water was suddenly lifted from the lake basin to the north, it set violent geologic forces in motion. For decades afterward, strong earthquakes shook the area. The shifting of plates of subsurface rock caused pure springs to bubble up from the slopes of Mount Deseret. The Slake City side of the mountain remained barren, its soil poisoned by radiation, but the more protected Skull Valley side soon supported lush stands of trees and wide meadows.
Sixty years after skydark, the first resettlers moved into the resort complex. Before long, a small community had grown up around the sweetwater stream formed by the confluence of nukecaust-created springs. With uncontaminated water and land at their disposal, the settlers began cultivating crops for profit. They used remnants of Highways 80 and 15 to build their trade routes.
Charlie Doyal was neither farmer nor merchant. His talents lay in his unique “people skills.” He had moved into Skull Valley at the head of a band of heavily armed, no-mercy blackhearts. With brutality and intimidation, he had quickly turned the disorganized squatters into his agricultural slaves and crowned himself baron. After taking over the outlets for beans and corn that the farmers had established, Doyal changed the nature of the business. Instead of selling com for food, he boiled it down for its sugar, which he used to distill a highly alcoholic beverage. In Deathlands, where any escape from the hardship and terror of daily life was greatly prized, his joy juice was a high demand, high profit item.