Jack L. Chalker Dancing Gods 2 Demons of Dancing gods

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thrashed in an unsuccessful attempt to quench the spreading fires that covered
it.
Suddenly the kraken vanished. For a moment, all was si-
lence again. Then there was a roar from the castle roof, and
Ruddygore spun around to face an enormous dragon that reared back and shot
hot, smoky flame at him. Boquillas was fighting fire with fire.
Ruddygore flung back his right arm as if about to throw something, but when he
brought it forward, an enormous stream of water rose out of the lake and
struck the dragon full force in the mouth. Suddenly the fat sorcerer was
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standing right on the castle wall, holding and guiding a gigantic pressurized
hose that quenched the dragon's flame.
The dragon, its flame so easily extinguished while Rud-
dygore's fires had been unquenchable, roared defiance and leaped upon the man
below, but suddenly the man wasn't there.
The dragon missed and plunged over the edge of the castle wall, but there was
no sound of an object striking the water.
Both men again stood facing each other on the outer wall, neither actually
hurt, but Boquillas' fine robes looked slightly singed.
"It's called napalm," Ruddygore told him. "Just one of technology's little
gifts to mankind."
But Boquillas was no longer there. Instead, the whole castle shimmered and
seemed to change into a terrible, menacing jungle of carnivorous vines and
animated plants. The transition was so swift that Ruddygore found himself
suddenly held by strong tentaclelike vines that tightened and pulled in all
direc-
tions toward gaping plant jaws. The abrupt change had ob-
viously surprised him, and he showed real pain and discomfort, but only for a
moment.
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There was a sound like a thunderclap, and down from the sky rained a
suffocating, yellowish cloud of gas. It quickly covered all the plants and the
sorcerer himself; but at its first touch, the vines recoiled and the gaping
mouths of the huge plants seemed to scream in dreadful agony. The jungle was
suddenly in frantic, insane movement, screaming and tearing itself to bits as
it died. The more it writhed, the more it opened its wounds to the yellowish
powders.
Freed, Ruddygore, although slightly injured, did not pause.
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DEMONS Of THE DANCING GODS
"Now smell the world of the perfect future! Breathe it and weep!" he cried.
The air changed, and the stars and moon were blacked out. All around was a
dense, wet fog that choked anything it touched, a fog filled with the metal
particulates from a billion smokestacks and the noxious fumes of a hundred
chemical and power plants. It was the condensation of all that had been pumped
into the air by mankind's progress through the centuries, and it was more
horrible than any monster of
Husaquahr.
Again Boquillas was disoriented by the tactic, which was more terrible and
incomprehensible to him than anything he had known. He tried to fight his way
out of it, to rise above it, but it was so dense and so horrible that he could
not seem to find a break in it.
Suddenly the way was clear, and he made for it, but it was not a pleasant
clearing. Although the pretty farms and fields appeared lush and green and the
little town looked both alien and very familiar with its small cottages and
dirt main streets, it was a scene of total terror. Two armies, it seemed, were
going at each other, but not in any formal way. The entire pastoral vista was
one of pure carnage and disorganization, and men were falling from bullets so
thick in the air that the entire countryside seemed infested with some sort of
locust. When any man showed even a part of himself, though, those locusts
struck and tore gaping wounds open, causing terrible pain and agony. Men fell
by the hundreds, by the thousands, in an impersonal carnage that turned the
little creek that ran through the fields and then through the town into a
river of blood.
Antietam Creek had become Bloody Lane.
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Just as abruptly, the scene changed, yet somehow stayed the same. It was a
horrible wasteland now, any trace of what it might have been before having
been long obliterated. Shells burst in the air in an almost constant barrage
of concussion and shrapnel, while men huddled in long trenches and died every
time they tried to advance en masse just a few yards from those holes...
Then the sky was filled with a shattering roar as machines of destruction flew
over in so dense a formation that the city below seemed blocked from sunlight.
Most of the people were below, in shelters against the rain of bombs, but
nothing could
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JACK L. CHALKER
227
protect them from this onslaught of explosions that created a firestorm above,
rather than on the surface, sucking out the oxygen and killing them, men,
women, children, old and young, dogs and cats, soldiers and bankers and
janitors, as they huddled in their shelters... [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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