The Apocalypse Troll

"All right." Morris drew a deep breath. "The Asheville area's in chaos. The highways going east and north are crowded with people trying to get out of the way, the bad guys are headed in to turn it into a battlefield, and the local authorities don't know who they can trust. Martial law's been declared, but Governor Farnam's balking at using paratroopers. He wants airlift for other Guard units, military police, civilian SWAT teams-anything but airborne." The commander laughed harshly. "Hard to blame him. He's afraid of casualties; the Eighty-Second's not exactly trained in crowd control."

"Crowd control may be the last thing he needs," Aston muttered.

"But he doesn't know that, and we can't tell him."

"All right. Cut to the bottom line, Mordecai."

"The way it looks, the first airlift-outside Guardsmen, airborne, or whatever-should be coming into Asheville Airport in four or five hours ... by which time, the first wave of Kluxers and Nazis will have been there for hours, and the maniacs from the other side will be arriving, too."

"Shit," Aston said again, then looked at Ludmilla. "All right, there's no time for you to fly around looking for him, Milla. If he's behind this, the only way to stop it is to stop him. Fast."

"I agree," she said softly.

"Mordecai," Aston said into the phone, "tell Anson we're going in."

"Now, Dick? Into the middle of all that?"

"Right now," Aston said grimly. "We don't know what he's up to, but a lot of people are going to get killed, whatever it is, and for all we know, this is the start of his big push. We've got to hit him before he really starts to roll." He smiled savagely. "It may even work to our advantage. With so much going on, the confusion should help cover us."

"All right," Morris said slowly. "We've got the air support worked out at this end. How soon should we alert it?"

"Now. We'll brief the men and be in the air within three hours."

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Deputy Holden Mitchell rechecked the loads in his Ithaca Model 37 shotgun. He'd bought it with his own money rather than use the Remington 870s the rest of the Department were issued-and he hadn't added the disco

Mitchell glanced sideways at his partner. Allen Farmer's face showed little sign of his thoughts, but Mitchell recognized the tightness around his eyes. He'd been a little leery when they first teamed him with a black man, but not now. Not until today, anyway. There'd always been a certain unspoken tension between them-an awareness of differences. It hadn't kept them from respecting one another and forming a firm friendship, but it was always there. Privately, Mitchell had resented Allen's unspoken assumption that anyone he met was a racist until proved otherwise. He'd never let it get out of hand, but Mitchell had known it was there.

And today, Holden Mitchell thought bitterly, he finally understood exactly why Allen thought that way.

A state cruiser screeched to a stop behind them, and a pair of state troopers trotted up to the two county cars parked nose-to-nose across the south-bound lanes of US 23. The north-bound lanes were blocked by a logging truck Mitchell had commandeered earlier in the day.

"What's going on back there?" Mitchell demanded of the senior trooper.

"Mars Hill's okay-for now," the trooper replied tersely. "But there's trouble in Asheville. Rumor is some of the Guard units started shooting at each other."

"Shit." Mitchell spat tobacco juice onto the pavement and squinted into the breeze blowing out of the north. What was keeping the bastards? "You all we get?"

" 'Fraid so, Deputy-till the Guard gets straightened out, anyway." The trooper was sweating, but his voice was level. "And I can't say I like this position a hell of a lot."

"You an' me both, Corporal, but the idea's to keep them away from the junction of Nineteen and Twenty-Three." He shrugged.

"Yeah." The trooper wiped his mouth and stiffened as the sound of engines came down the highway. "They told me you're the boss. How do you want to handle this?"

"Well, I'll tell you, Corporal, I'm s'posed to stop 'em, and I figure I'll just flag the bastards down-with this." Mitchell twitched the Ithaca, and the trooper gave him a thin smile.

"I can live with that," he said.

The Troll gave a mental shudder of pleasure as he tasted blood at last. The uniformed idiots who'd tried to block his hate-maddened humans had paid for their stupidity, and he had discovered something unexpected. The ecstasy of killing was even stronger this way, for he experienced it not just once but again and again, through each open mind.

He felt himself reaching out, fragmenting and coalescing, caught up in his own firestorm. It fed him, strengthened him ... and woke a bottomless craving for more destruction. He rode with his killers, waving the bloody jacket of a county deputy and cheering.

They topped a rise, and there was another roadblock before them.

Mitchell saw the lead vehicle start down the evening-shadowed slot of the highway cutting. It was a van, crowded with people, and there were pickups and sedans behind it. He swallowed as he counted the odds, but he felt strangely disinclined to run from the rabble sweeping towards him.

"All right, boys," he said calmly, "spread out and get under cover."

The others obeyed with alacrity, and he noticed that the senior trooper carried an M16-the old A1 model rather than the A2 with its limitation to three-shot bursts-not a shotgun.

"Let 'em come in a little closer," Mitchell told himself softly. "Just a little closer."

The Troll fed the humans' frenzy, fa

"Now!" Mitchell shouted, and triggered his first round into the van. He heard Farmer's shotgun echoing his own, smelled the gunsmoke, and saw shattered safety glass sparkle through the sunset light like bloody rock salt. The corporal was firing semi-auto, deliberately, picking his targets, and the windshield of the pickup behind the van exploded. Klansmen and Nazis boiled out, and Mitchell stroked the slide with deadly smooth speed. Screams and shrieks answered as the Troll's minions were cut down by the merciless fire, and the M16 went to full auto. Writhing bodies and dead men littered the asphalt while others scrambled as far as the side of the cutting before they were shot down, and others crouched behind their vehicles, returning fire.

The Troll writhed in fury as his column recoiled. They were only humans, but they were his. Their pain and death was sweet, but not as sweet as the taste of their killing. He lashed them with his hate, whipping them forward.

"They're coming over us, Dispatch!" Mitchell yelled into his radio. "Where the fuck is the Guard?!" His cruiser sat flat on its rims, riddled with fire, and the State Patrol car belched inky-black smoke and flame. One trooper was dead, but the corporal was bellied down in a culvert, and his M16's flash suppressor glowed incandescent as it spewed fire into the mob.