by Ryder Stacy
Evolution never forgets, and time brings . . . revenge.
Eleven
The first few days out were very hard on Dean Keppel. He tried to act as if everything was fine, but Rock could see that the man was suffering severely from the constant riding, the thin, harsh air, and the sun—always the sun beating down on them like a sledgehammer. Ms. Shriver also was in obvious discomfort. She rode high in the air on her ’brid, her gluteus maximus muscles apparently not reacting well to the endless bumping and shifting of the saddle. But to her credit she didn’t complain—not a word. Rock had to give her that. His respect for her grew just a notch. They’d toughen up. They’d have to. There could be no stopping out here, no resting for more than a few minutes at a time. Every drop of water was precious, every shadow could mean death.
There were a thousand rules to staying alive out here. Rockson knew them all. Somehow he’d have to keep his charges alive. He mentioned to Chen that they were hitting some rough territory ahead and to keep a very close eye on the pair.
“I think between the two of us we should be able to make a safe delivery,” the Chinese freefighter laughed. “I’ll keep my lasso ready in case one of them heads off a cliff.” He patted the coiled rope on the side of the saddle. Among his numerous weapons, Chen was also quite adept at roping—having watched films of old rodeos they had dug up, plus some instruction from one ol’ timer who had actually been in a rodeo when he was very young.
Rockson kept the lead, not traveling at quite the pace he would have if it had just been himself and Chen, but still moving along at a good pace. There were many of the electric storm clouds that seemed to coalesce over wide open spaces—churning, immense black and brown thunderheads that were filled constantly with hundreds of lightning bolts. Rock had seen this type of clouds suddenly descend and shoot out their lethal bolts at everything around them—trees, animals, people. But these seemed quite high up and the electric aura created by the phenomenon prohibited the use of spydrones, enabling the party to travel across the open spaces throughout the day. The four of them would be a real catch. And Rockson didn’t want to think about what they’d do to Keppel and Shriver, who hadn’t received any painblock training at all.
They rode for hours at a time, stopping for fifteen minutes and then moving on, in cycles that seemed to stretch on endlessly. On the fourth day out they began entering a strange new terrain—the ground became nearly orange in color, the hue of a bright pumpkin. Rock took out his radmeter, but it didn’t register very high. They moved onto the soft, porous dirt, the ’brids whinnying and skittish as they found it hard to get a good foothold. Nearly everything in this zone of land was the same color—bushes, trees, even several small squirrellike creatures they got a glimpse of, flying from tree to tree, using two tails to steer them. The orange zone lasted for about twenty miles and then they hit more low, jagged hills—these obviously created by the debris thrown up from a nearby nuke blast. Thousands, millions of small rocks had almost melted into one another, forming a surface that was sharp on the top and fused together into a solid mass just an inch deep. The hybrids had more hard going as the sharp stones cut into their hooves, themselves virtually steel hard. They pranced and tried to find smooth surfaces to come down on, without much luck.
Here nothing seemed to live. They were in a wasteland of black and gray fist-sized stones. It was as if the entire planet were made of this razor-sharp rock, as it stretched on in every direction. The rads were quite a bit higher here, going into the twenties on the meter, which was calibrated to go up to a hundred. Most of the freefighters had taken over the top dose numerous times and seemed none the worse for wear. Rock himself had been exposed to such high doses that he should surely be dead—but he wasn’t. Part of the genetic structure of the evolving Homo Mutatiens species was very high resistance to radiation. Even Dean Keppel and Ms. Shriver, though not able to take the doses the freefighters could, had radiation-shielding cells in their flesh. Otherwise such a journey would have been unthinkable.
The Reds had never evolved such radiation resistance. Since their invasion of the United States, they had stayed as much as possible inside their Fortress Cities, with Slave Labor Sectors, factories, and military defenses built within one immense walled structure, capable in some cases of holding as many as half a million people. Within their own quarters they had movies, special kitchens, and whorehouses staffed with the prettiest of the young slave girls, so the army had no particular reason or inclination to settle the “wilds,” as they referred to them. When they went out, it was in convoys, wearing full-body radiation suits and breathing through oxygen masks. Thus, paradoxically, though the Reds had taken over America, the army that came to conquer her had itself grown soft, lazy, while the freefighters had been bred stronger and tougher than any human who had ever existed. America—a virtual laboratory of super speeded-up evolution. Rockson was at the vanguard of that new evolution, and his powers and abilities had only begun to be known—even to himself.
On the fifth day out they saw what appeared to be an immense bomb crater’s rim-wall, which stood as tall and fierce as the day it was created. They could see it from miles away like some sort of totem to the God of Death, taking up more and more of the horizon as they drew close.
“Must be one of the Super Bombs the Reds sent over,” Rock said over his shoulder to the others behind him.
“Super Bomb?” Ms. Shriver asked curiously.
“Yeah, supposedly they had secretly stockpiled twenty Super Bombs—in the hundred-megaton class. Most destructive weapon ever seen on the face of this earth. The idea—at least what I can gather from my readings in the history section of the Century City library—was that the Reds figured if there was ever an entire army they had to take out somewhere they could just drop one of these babies. A conventional nuke, even one of your big boys, like, say, a ten meg, will only kill for a range of about eight to ten miles, but an advancing army is more likely to take up to fifty, spread out, with flanking actions and all. So the hundred meg was designed to actually destroy an entire nation’s army—maybe five hundred thousand to one million men.”
“That’s horrifying, Mr. Rockson,” Ms. Shriver said, putting her hand over her thin red mouth.
“But, apparently, when they had the First Strike they decided to throw in the kitchen sink, too, so they sent these babies over. God knows where the others landed, but this looks like it did major rearranging.” They moved at a medium pace forward until they came right up to the high sloped wall of the blast crater.
Dean Keppel looked straight up in the air at the structure. “I swear it goes up into the darn clouds,” he said, with a whistle.
“We must climb that?” Ms. Shriver asked, looking incredulously at Rockson. Her costume was already disintegrating in the dust and the rain of the journey. Her pith helmet had vanished two days before into the waiting and gurgling sands of a quicksand bog. Her right shoe—a sort of mix of desert boot and high heel—had become hopelessly lodged between two rocks when she went climbing to fetch some flowers. Rock had fashioned her a new pair of foot coverings from some thick hide. When he had first been thrust out into the wilderness in midwinter, still a child, he had done the same thing—only that time he had killed the deer with just a knife. It had gored him with its single horn coming out from the center of its head, but he had won. He had cut out the innards, eaten them, and then slept inside the body to keep warm that night, a small fire in front of the blood-smelling corpse.
With her new foot gear and her saddle soreness gone, Ms. Shriver had become a little more relaxed. Dean Keppel’s chest had been giving him problems, and Rockson was getting a little concerned. The last time Rock had seen Keppel cough, the handkerchief he held to his lips came off red.
The four delegates from Century City looked up at the ominous crater wall for a long time before Rockson finally said, “Okay, let’s climb it. We can reach the summit before nightfall and camp there.” They headed up, the hybrids slowly and surefo
otedly making their way up the sharply slanted wall. It took them a good three hours to get to the summit, the ’brids very carefully picking out a route up the bomb crater. Their riders swayed back and forth and held on tight, grasping their arms around the creatures’ wide necks. Somehow they made it, though Dean Keppel and Ms. Shriver looked a shade of swamp-green after a while.
Rockson got to the top first, and the palomino ambled out onto a wide plateau, several hundred feet across. Rock first looked back to see how the others were doing. Ms. Shriver was still a good quarter-mile below with Dean Keppel, and Chen was keeping watch on any falling delegates. Rock took a quick scan of the land behind them—small hills of the bomb-melted rocks. Then the orange zone, then hills and more hills. From up top the ravaged terrain took on an eerie beauty, creating a mosaic of shapes and color like some huge abstract painting. The known was behind, the unknown lay ahead. Rock made a clicking sound with his lips and the ’brid spun around and headed to the other side of the crater lip. Not a thing grew on the charcoallike dirt, not the tiniest weed, not the smallest insect. The crater was cursed, Rock could feel the negative energy of the place—probably composed of atomized flesh and vaporized homes and trees and . . . he felt the anguish and evil that lay beneath the sky-high crater. His mind and body were totally attuned to the environment and what was in it. Sometimes he saw too much.
The Doomsay Warrior stopped the palomino at the very edge of the inside crater wall. “Whooa, Snorter,” he commanded as the ’brid seemed momentarily confused by the deep drop ahead. He pulled the reins back sharply and tightened his legs around the hybrid’s wide midsection. The great mount responded instantly to Rock’s commands and stopped dead in its tracks, looking out over the great shining plain below.
Rock whistled and took out his field glasses to view the endless alabaster white desert ahead. It took up the whole horizon, every direction as far as his binoculars could see. White—a brilliant, blinding, saturating white. Rock had never seen anything that looked so smooth, so perfect, without a dot of color to mar the whiteness, without a rise to break the absolute flatness. There was an almost hypnotic pulsation to the entire terrain, as if it was throbbing, beating deep inside, though Rockson was sure it was some sort of optical illusion created by the sun’s bouncing off the whiteness like a mirror. It was hard to believe the vast stretch of land was natural, it had such a precision, an evenness to it, flatness calibrated to the millimeter. He aimed the radmeter down the long, curving slope of the inside wall, this side not nearly as steep as the outside wall—medium count, up to the forties already, and he knew when they got to the bottom it would go a lot higher. But there was no turning back, they had only one way to go—straight north.
The others joined him within a few minutes, huffing and puffing near collapse. Dean Keppel and Ms. Shriver virtually fell off their ’brids and lay on their backs on the grainy black sand of the crater plateau. They needed rest—the ’brids too. The big steeds were breathing hard, their nostrils flaring, their lips spitting out white foam. The sun would be setting soon, anyway.
“All right, let’s set up camp,” Rock said, much to the relief of the two on the ground. “We’ll need tents tonight. Up here there’s not much protection if a storm should come.” Far off in the distance, like mountains in the sky, Rockson saw a migration of immense dark clouds that he didn’t like the looks of at all. He had the party set up two tents, curved like little balls, nylon with alumisynth collapsible frames. The pegs had to be set very deep because of the porosity of the ground, but they struck some sort of hard surface after about eighteen inches.
They had a quick but delicious meal created by “master” chef Ted Rockson himself. Dried deer-chunks sautéed in dandelion with cactus juice. He prepared it in a small wok Chen had produced from his saddlebag. It was Rock’s turn to cook. He didn’t like the chore and feared the results, yet he made the most of it.
They sat around the campfire eating the delicacy from metal cups. At first hesitant, his companions now ate with gusto. Even Ms. Shriver had to say “Simply scrumptious, young man.”
“Oh, it’s nothing,” the pleased-with-himself Rock said with a grin. “You should try my cactus needle in sand sauce. Made it a few times when we ran out of everything and were in the middle of nowhere. Chen’s had it—he’ll tell you.”
“The best,” the Chinese Warrior said, between bites. “Makes being lost in the desert with no supplies, no directions, and no water, a real treat. I recommend it highly.” The ’brids watched their human masters eat and licked their own thick lips in anticipation. But they would have to wait. Their bodies were constructed to go up to ten days without food, three or four without water. They’d survive, but it didn’t mean they wouldn’t get hungry.
Rock had been right in his premonition of a storm. They had barely bedded down, Chen and Rock in one of the ball tents, Keppel and Ms. Shriver in the other, when the winds picked up, gusting and blowing at the seemingly fragile little balls of nylon and super-light alloy. Within minutes the monstrous clouds hit into them with a vengeance, pouring down rain by the bucket, unleashing gale force winds. From inside it sounded as if a herd of plains buffalo were trampling on their thin fabric roof just feet above their heads. Rock and Chen had been through it before. They knew that the tents could take it. They had been designed in one of Shecter’s field equipment labs to take winds of up to a hundred eighty miles per hour. They both listened to the fury of an enraged Nature, and, from their years of training, were actually able to fall asleep in the midst of the titanic blowout. In the other tent six feet away, Ms. Shriver and Dean Keppel were not faring quite as well. Every bolt of lightning made them both jump, every explosive gust that shook their nylon walls made them cringe. They talked to each other to try to stay calm—about anything—pretending, wishing they were back in Century City having an afternoon tea at one of the restaurants.
But somehow when morning dumbly rolled over and opened its rain-clogged eyes—everyone was still alive. They zipped open the doors to their flimsy but powerful mini-tents and stumbled out onto the crater plateau. Ms. Shriver and Dean Keppel were groggy-eyed and weary, but extremely happy just to be alive. They talked all morning, recounting their long night. Terror turns to adventure once it’s over—they’d have some great stories to tell their stodgy colleagues back home.
They loaded up the ’brids and started cautiously down the inner crater wall. The going was better down than it had been up, and as they headed down the slope the angle of descent grew easier. After only about an hour and a half, Rock’s palomino reached the very bottom and started out onto the extraordinarily flat terrain. The whiteness was even more pronounced now that they were right on it. With the sun beating down from almost directly overhead, it was like a mirror beneath their feet, blinding. The ground was hard, and the hybrid’s hooves clattered across it with sharp cracks. Behind him, the other three edged carefully forward. Everyone was tense, even the mounts, who sensed that this was not the usual ground beneath their feet. The surfaces appeared to be solid, in fact flawless—without a crack or a seam—but it had a very strange texture to it. Hard but brittle, so brittle it felt as if it might crack like a piece of glass. Rock leaned over in the saddle and looked closely at the almost translucent surface as the ’brid moved slowly ahead, obviously having trouble with its footing on the smooth surface. Could the blast of the Super Bomb, perhaps another on the other side—have actually melted the earth for hundreds of square miles and then fused it into some kind of crystalline structure—melted it into an atomic glass? Not a blade of grass, not a creature stirred, not even . . .
The Doomsday Warrior took out the radmeter and held the collector toward the strange surface. Hot, and moving up all the time—the needle was edging into the seventies and the red zone of the meter, meaning “Watch Out.” Rock hoped they could get across it fairly quickly. He didn’t want to be responsible for either of his charges ending up with cancer in a year. The hybrids moved very cautiously, as if e
ach step they took had to be felt out before they put their full weight down. Rock sensed that the palomino was growing increasingly nervous, lifting its big head around from time to time and staring at its master with apple-sized brown eyes, as if asking, are you sure this is where you want me to go?
A lone hawk hovered far overhead, circling on the constant updraft of hot air from the superheated convection oven of the mirrorlike surface. From above the party of travelers looked hardly bigger than ants. A trail of insignificant dots heading, the hawk knew, off to death—as all creatures did that entered this plain. It would have bones to pick clean. Soon. Soon.
The Free Americans had gone for about two miles without incident when the first vibrations started. It was almost like a humming sound—and for the sheerest second, Rockson thought perhaps one of the party was playing a harmonica—the high frequency whir of the base note. Then it grew deeper and louder, much louder. A subsonic tone rumbled through their bones, gripping them, shaking men and hybrids with an overpowering vibration. It felt as if their very bones were about to be torn loose from their containing ligaments. The ’brids tossed their heads in fear and reared backwards, trying to get away from the unseen enemy.
Then, just as suddenly, the vibrations stopped. The ’brids calmed down and everyone caught their collective breath.
“What the hell was that?” Chen asked, his face ashen. It was the only time Rockson had seen the master with even a trace of fear in his warrior face. Men, beasts he could handle. But that sound—of the very gods screaming—it had shaken him.
“I think it was a minor tremor of some kind,” Rock started. “I just hope—” Before he could get another word out the vibrations began again, only this time the earth shook with them. The quake hit instantaneously and with full force. Everything vibrated, as if in some absurd dance. The freefighters’ arms and heads jerked around like marionettes. They were helpless—totally controlled by the increasingly powerful waves of the earthquake. Dean Keppel’s ’brid stumbled down onto its front knees, and the dean flew from his mount and crashed onto the rock-hard smooth ground.