by Ryder Stacy
Chen looked over at Rock and gave him the hand signal for ready. All of Rock’s fighting team—McCaughlin, Detroit, Archer, Chen, and the others, had learned a number of hidden communication techniques, including hand signals for the deaf and the old International Morse Code. These had saved Rockson’s life twice already. He signaled back yes, and then added, Keep an eye on these two. Both of the warriors turned their gaze to Terry Shriver and smiled. With her pith helmet, khaki skirt, bag of cameras and lenses on one side of her saddle and fruit and bread on the other in a big wicker bag, she made quite a sight. So it was going to be a picnic, after all. At least both of them looked to be in fairly good shape. Everyone in Century City had to be above average just to have survived this long.
Terry mounted up with one even jump onto her large brown hybrid, which was nearly as wide as a table and had thick leathery skin with just a thin, matty layer of hair to protect it and give warmth. Dean Keppel had donned standard freefighting camouflage slacks and jacket and the same thick-soled black boots that Rock wore. He seemed to be having a bit of trouble getting seated.
“Haven’t been riding too much lately, Mr. Rockson,” the university president said with a chagrined look. Used to being the expert, the one with all the answers, it was going to be quite an adjustment for him to not know what the hell he was doing. He felt stupid, like a child, for the first time in many years. His foot had somehow become twisted in the stirrup and he was stuck in midair, one leg raised at an abnormally high angle.
“Here, like this, sir,” Rock said, still calling the headmaster, by whom he himself had been taught when he had first showed up in the city as a teenager, “sir,” with a respectful tone. Old habits die hard. Rock caught the dean’s other leg and lifted him with a quick motion. Keppel flew up into the saddle and almost over the other side, hanging onto the saddle horn for dear life. At last he righted himself, looked around with a satisfied smile, and announced to all, “Well, I guess I’ve got the hang of it now.”
Rock quickly gave both of his compatriots a lesson in the supplies on the ’brids—including the Liberator automatic rifle and the small grenade pack located in a long leather case that ran alongside the saddle and down the steed’s back.
“We’re all going to have to pull together on this one,” Rock said as sternly as possible to his old mentor and Terry. “You’re going to use these guns somewhere along the line, I guarantee you that.” He pulled out his Liberator from atop his Palomino hybrid and demonstrated its usage—rapid fire, quick change of the fifteen cartridge clip, and sighting. Terry made faces, as if she found the whole “gun thing” somehow distasteful, while Dean Keppel tried hard to learn but somehow kept pointing the muzzle at his ’brid’s ear and asking, “What do you call that—the trigger?”
“Let’s head out,” Rock said, exasperated. “We can learn about weapons while we’re riding.” The four delegates rode down the long, stone-walled tunnel that was one of Century City’s main thoroughfares to the outside world. A farewell committee of about fifty of their closest friends and relatives stood at the mouth of the final exit and made their emotional goodbyes. Rona grabbed Rock and closed her arms around him as if she would never let go. Chen’s young wife, Chun-Li, stood in front of the Chinese warrior, gazing deep into his dark eyes.
“Come back to me, my love,” she said softly, her long midnight-black silky hair falling nearly to her slim waist. At last the camouflage tarp was pulled aside, and then the steel-cable mesh fence, painted and twisted so as to resemble a close growth of vines, was opened. Rockson led the party, Chen taking up the rear, dressed in his toe-to-neck black ninja suit and kung fu shoes. Within the puffy sleeves of his jacket were hidden weapons, knives, star-knives, potions, smoke pellets . . . the man was a machine of hidden death.
The Rocky Mountain night quickly filled their ears with the buzzings and chirpings of a thousand nocturnal animals and insects. The gates of Century City slid slowly back with a low whine. Rock turned around in his saddle to look from about a hundred yards away. Amazing—just the side of a mountain. Even after all these years, he couldn’t see a trace of a seam or anything unnatural.
His big palomino hybrid whinnied and shied away from something that moved near its feet in the bushes.
“Easy, boy,” Rock said, patting the massive head, “easy Snorter.” The palomino had been Rock’s steed for years. It was unusually smart, coming at a whistle, capable of tremendous speed when necessary, unusual for the big creatures, and it had an uncanny knack for locating water even in the midst of absolute nothingness. The ’brid had even saved Rock’s life once when he fell, poisoned from a forest of thorns, dragging him off into the shade and standing guard over him for nearly two days. Rockson had thought the hybrid lost when he had made his assault on Pavlov City and had had to leave the animal on a nearby cliff. But lo and behold, when the Doomsday Warrior finally made his way back to Century City nearly a month later, there was Snorter, as calm as could be, eating synthograss by the ton and looking at Rock with a what-took-you-so-long expression. He stroked the steed’s golden white mane, which hung down from its neck nearly halfway to the ground.
Within minutes the mountain that stood above Century City faded into the distance as they headed down through thick forest into the lower hills to the north. The night was fantastically alive, with a virtual chorus of eyes glowing, hidden creatures. Rock’s heart sang along with the songs of the birds and the owls, the songs of the ferrets and the foxes and the coons, all moving in the dance of life and death in a symbiotic harmony. Every time he came out, the land around Century City seemed richer. It was as if it had taken the land a full century to absorb and digest the shock of the nuclear war. She had assimilated the poison deep down in the rocks, and now she could begin growing again.
Many of the forest creatures had developed the chameleonlike trait of being able to change their coloration from day to night to blend in. Their surface shades would slowly alter, fine tuning to the amount of light being sent down from above. Mother Nature, in her infinite wisdom and compassion for life on earth—as much as mankind had tried to destroy it—was nurturing these favorable mutations, giving the animals new ways of defending themselves, of surviving.
God knows we hardly deserve a second chance, Rock thought, as he moved up and down in the saddle. The humans of the century before had certainly made a mess of things. The Reds had made the first strike, but the mood of paranoia, of fingers-on-the-trigger waiting for the slightest noise from the other side, had been set in motion by both sides for many years before the Great War.
“It’s such a shame that so much beauty was lost, perhaps forever,” Terry Shriver said, as if reading Rock’s mind. “I wish everyone hadn’t been so damned stupid. It was like giving babies matches to play with.”
“Still, they did set it off,” Rockson said from his ’brid at the lead of the party, lost in the weaving shadows of the quarter-moon night. “The Reds,” he continued, with a deep bitterness in his voice. “Perhaps somehow mankind would have muddled its way through if they hadn’t gotten so damned greedy. There’s no pleasure in hating the Reds as we—I—do. I understand that we are all humans, all living on a small and fragile piece of dirt and water called Planet Earth. But I must hate them for now. For what they’ve done to our land. For what they did to my family. And because I must kill them. As surely and unashamedly as one would kill a swarm of megapedes if they invaded your bedroom.”
Terry shuddered at the mention of megapedes. She had only distantly seen the dark, slimy things, nearly two feet long, with uncountable numbers of moving little stalks of feet, searching, looking for any sort of food—even human, if they could get their poison into the prey, slow it down enough so they could be latched on to and little pieces of flesh ripped out again and again until their hunger had been satisfied. No—Terry didn’t want to think about them at all.
“Oh, please, could we change the subject?” she said, with a little laugh of disdain. She shifted uncomfortabl
y in her saddle, riding side-saddle, nearly seven feet above the ground. “Must we always talk about war and death and little monstrosities? Come, let’s make this a good expedition, a friendly expedition—a happy expedition.” Rockson blanched. The woman was a joke. How she had made herself so powerful, so influential, in Century City was beyond him.
“Now, Mr. Rockson,” she said loudly, totally overriding the sounds of the night. “Do tell me what kind of flowers are those over there?” she bellowed out, leaning halfway off of her ’brid and nearly falling off. Animals scurried, startled by her sudden bark. Rock leaned around to look at her as she pointed excitedly to a large grove of flesh-colored flowers, each a foot in diameter, looking like some sort of large seashell opened wide to collect the black rays of the night. She caught his eye and smiled sweetly, her overly made-up face pancaked quite white, her lips bright red.
“It’s a moonbreeder,” Rock said, playing with her. He wasn’t used to playing nature guide for domineering politicos. “Opens up at night, collects some sort of ray from space—or so head biologist Sharpe believes. Also eats mice, small rodents, and even rabbits, as I myself have seen several times. During the full moon the plants breed. They actually sing to one another, very high-pitched, to attract a mate. When two of them sing the same time, they detach from their stalks, roll to the ground, and breed.”
“Breed?” Terry asked, a little too shrilly.
“Yeah, you know—fuck,” Rock answered coolly. He couldn’t resist playing with her. From behind him he heard the sharp intake of her breath. “Once I was sleeping near a grove of them and the damned things started making quite a racket. So I just sat up and watched them. They fell off by the dozens and hit the ground, rolling toward their selected mates, singing louder and louder as if they were really happy about the whole damn thing. Then they made contact and extended tendrils around each other, then the male extended a long fleshy pseudopod and—”
“That will be quite enough, Mr. Rockson, if you please,” Terry Shriver said curtly, cutting Rock’s anatomy lesson off in midsentence. Chen laughed from the rear. He had been with Rock on many missions, had seen the Doomsday Warrior command the trust and total respect to the point of worship of the toughest and most hardened fighters. But here a middle-aged pancaked blonde had told Rock in no uncertain terms to shut up. Chen wished the other men of the Rock squad could see this. Maybe the trip would be more interesting than he had thought.
“What about those,” Ms. Shriver, who always stressed the s on the word Ms. when she said her name, as if it was a bumblebee buzzing its way toward honey, asked. She pointed to a different sort of growth—a shining silver cactuslike plant that seemed to come right out of the solid rock of a large fallen boulder. There were hundreds of them poking out like soft quills of a porcupine.
“Oh those, you don’t want to know about those,” Rockson said with a loud laugh, twisting around on the great steed beneath him. “What do they look like?”
She glanced back at the plants and blushed even through the pancake. “Is that all you men think about?” Ms. Shriver asked coldly.
“Not us men,” Dean Keppel piped in from behind her, still trying desperately to stay atop his bouncing saddle. “Nature—it’s what nature thinks about. Haven’t you ever read Darwin, my good woman?” The two of them were adversaries, albeit friendly ones, who had debated numerous issues as two of the foremost speakers and lecturers in Century City. “Sexual selection—survival of the fittest—all that stuff,” Dean Keppel continued. “Those who—you’ll pardon the expression—‘screw’ are the ones who procreate. Virgins become extinct.”
“Why—why—I—” Ms. Shriver sputtered, unable to find the words. The three men chuckled, which only made her fume more. She kicked her ’brid and the creature obligingly lurched forward with a jolt and headed up the narrow trail at a slow gallop. She let out a yowl of terror as she sped past Rockson.
“Help me, oh God, please help me,” she screamed, hanging on to the reins and grabbing huge tufts of golden hair from the ’brid’s mane. Rock sat calmly and smiled at her as she flew by.
“Aren’t you going to rescue her?” Dean Keppel exclaimed from behind, now more terrified than ever of his own hybrid after seeing Ms. Shriver take off.
“She’ll have to learn how to ride. Might as well do it now,” Rockson said laconically. “This ain’t no picnic.”
Ten
They moved through the night like some sort of intergalactic mist, blue, hazy, skimming along the radioactive sands of the open wastelands. They were and were not. Each was itself and the others. There was a circle between them, a circle of unbroken energy that hummed and crackled with life. They felt all that the others felt, saw all that the others saw. Their lives were inextricably linked together, closer than any man and woman or mother and child. They had lived each other’s lives from the moment they were born—had joined the circle. All that they had ever known, all that they thought, their pleasures and pains, their genetic ancestral memories—all were common ground for the People, known to the rest of mankind as the Glowers.
The People were out tonight. Far from their homeland. There was an evil about to be committed, a blasphemy yet again perpetrated on the People and the substance of America. The People knew it. They knew all that had happened and all that would happen. Created from some unknown force, perhaps an entirely new species unlike any other that had ever existed, the Glowers had evolved over the last century into more of a configuration of energy patterns than flesh and blood. They still had bodies, if one could call fleshless hulks with their entire musculature and organ systems on the outside, clearly pumping and undulating—a body. Their brain tissue fissured and twisted in thought and communication. It was as if nature had played a trick on these mutant creatures, putting everything that had been inside human beings on the outside—even their souls. Their virtually opened flesh crackled with a sheen of blue electricity, circling them, sliding endlessly across them, dulling and brightening again as they moved and spoke. Their touch, the merest touch of that blue energy to any living thing, meant instant death. Yet in all their years they had never killed an American—only the Red troops, and even then only when the Russians had foolishly attacked an encampment of Glowers.
But that had been years before. The Reds had quickly learned that the Glowers meant death to all who came near. Bullets couldn’t harm them, nor flame, nor gas, nor any of the vast weaponry that the Russians had heaped upon them in the middle of the postwar century. The blue energy circling their bodies stopped anything from coming in from the outside world. Any weapon or nay flesh. They couldn’t even touch one another. Physically, at least. Thus their psychic communication had developed to an intense degree. Nor could they eat. Food would vaporize at their touch. But somehow their evolution into such a high-energy state had also altered their energy-absorption system, so that they took in all their sustenance from the rays of the highly radioactive soil all around them—for their home was in the most devastated part of the country, possibly the “hottest” land on earth.
The Glowers, of all creatures on the planet, thrived on that which killed life. Just walking across the megarad ground on which they lived gave them their food, their energy supply. None of them ate. They neither procreated nor died. They existed, pure beings, in the here and now.
They had felt the Evil growing, in the large circles when all the People joined and they merged into the Perfect One. They had begun feeling the Evil a year before. Had sensed it, and then followed it with their hearts. The freefighters, they knew, were about to hold perhaps their most important meeting ever. The Glowers knew the outer world, knew of the battles between the Free Cities and the Russians. They had never interfered. Theirs was not the way of death. They were the new evolution into a more perfect state of harmony with all things.
Yet . . . even those who had evolved with the very concept of noninterference with humans as the tenet of their spiritual philosophy could stand by no longer. Times were changi
ng. That was part of the Evil. But the Evil could be stopped and the Good could be released. That was the Way. The freefighters were trying to recreate the spirit of America at a convention they were holding in the north lands. The Glowers knew where it was, they knew all who were coming—even the Rockson. And they knew that the Russians had planted a spy in the very midst of the convention. A man who right now was transmitting coded messages back to his KGB bosses in Denver. To Colonel Killov, the man who was so despised that they could feel the very fear of him emanate from the seventy-five million slave workers in the Red fortress factories. The Glowers knew that the chance for America to reclaim itself, to be restored to a more perfect harmony, was doomed—unless . . .
The People ripped through the night on their shadowy craft, skimming across the glowing wastelands that no human being had ever seen. Land where the earth actually moved and writhed like a snake in pain, so wounded had it been by the bombs. The Glowers lived in this worst of deathlands, in the hottest of the killing radiations. When the Reds had sent over their flaming spears of death, raining down by the thousands, turning green to black, and red to black and blue to black, they had unwittingly set in motion forces that would now come back to fight them, to challenge them, to help destroy them. The Glowers.