Startled, he slipped off the ledge and fell, going into a dive as he tried to angle for the river. Baron John Henderson slammed headfirst onto the cracked pavement of Green Cove ville, missing the rushing waters of the cool river by less than a yard. Death was instantaneous. He was one of the lucky ones.
WITH ALL OF HIS MIGHT, Seaton threw the spear across the fiery war room and hit the last keg of black powder, cracking it apart a split second before the raging fire got through the wood. Instantly, the black powder flared brighter than the sun, producing volumes of acrid smoke, but the deadly explosion was avoided.
“Follow me!” DuQuene shouted, heading for the doorway and holding the map table as a shield. With slugs slapping into the tabletop, the baron backed out of the war room, herding the rest of the sec men to safety.
Reaching the next room, Seaton slammed the dividing door shut and threw the bolt, sealing the fire on the other side. The sec men sighed in relief, then started to rub vigorously at their faces.
“I want Henderson found and skinned alive!” Baron DuQuene railed furiously, casting the table aside. “I’m going to make him watch as I eat his balls for breakfast! We’ll get wild muties to fuck him after we stitch his mouth shut!”
He waited for the expected response, but the others were too busy scratching themselves. Suddenly crying out, the men began to tear at their faces, weeping and waving their hands as if the very air were attacking them. They started to bump into one another and to twitch uncontrollably, shouting obscenities and clawing bloody gouges in their skin.
Rubbing at his slightly itchy forearms, DuQuene could only stare in bafflement at the convulsing people. His men was acting as if they had gone blind! Watching in horrid fascination, the baron slowly came to comprehend that the analogy was correct. They were blind, but how? Something in the smoke? Had Henderson poisoned the food? If so, then why wasn’t he affected?
This was when DuQuene noticed the antique steel army helmet on his head was becoming uncomfortably hot. He started to remove it before realizing the metal had to be somehow protecting him from whatever was happening. There were more helmets in the war room, but the flames were licking at the ceiling, bullets discharging constantly. Return was impossible.
Accepting that, DuQuene picked up the battered table and plowed a path through the screaming people to reach the door to the stairs, only to find a snarling Seaton clawing at the locked door, trying to dig his way through. Without a qualm, the baron shot the man and left him dying on the floor to be trampled by the others while he slipped through and locked the door behind him. There was no sense allowing the others to get in the way of his escape. Blind, they were dead already as far as he was concerned.
Heading quickly down the stairs, DuQuene heard the alarm bell ringing over the blasterfire from above. What the hell was going on in his ville? Was this some sort of an attack? Maybe Nathan Cawdor heard of his intent to attack Front Royal and was melting Green Cove first. Damn the man! Not even an offer to surrender first! The man would pay for that with his life.
On the ground floor, he found only chaos in the barracks, the sec men stabbing and shooting one another for no sane reason. It was literally a blind panic. Faintly from the dungeon below, DuQuene could hear the prisoners begging for help and he dismissed them all without a thought. If he couldn’t help his sec men, why should he care about thieves and murderers?
The smell of his singeing hair was beginning to choke the man, the antique army helmet becoming almost too hot to touch. But DuQuene accepted the pain and watched the armed mob chilling one another as the men fought to escape through wide open doorways. Covered in blood, one man simply clawed at his faced until the flesh was in tatters, endlessly yelling that this was all a dream and couldn’t be happening. DuQuene leveled his blaster at the beleaguered soul, then decided it was stupe to waste a round on a walking corpse.
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