by Ryder Stacy
“Tell me, did they hurt them?” Rock asked the storeman.
“No, didn’t hurt ’em—not at all. In fact, they was treatin’ ’em with kid gloves. It was more like—like they was savin’ em.”
“Which way?” Rock asked.
“Dead west, Mr. Rockson, as the sun sets,” Jehoseph replied. Rockson rose suddenly and started for the door.
“Where you goin’, Mr. Rockson?” the storekeeper asked hysterically. “We’re gettin’ meat and food for you.”
“They’re out there—every second could mean their lives,” Rock said, without pausing a step. He headed out the ramshackle door and down the trail. Mt. Ed grabbed a big hock of pork that the wife was just bringing in and chewed furiously on it as he tore after the Doomsday Warrior, who was already a few hundred feet down the trail.
“Wait, Rockson. Wait—I’m comin’.” The bearsized trapper ran and hopped after the freefighter, his blunderbusses knocking together with loud cracks behind his back.
Twenty-One
Colonel Killov swallowed another euphorium tablet, staring out into the night from his darkened eightieth-floor suite. He could swear he saw a dull red glow far to the north—the afterglow of the enhanced radiation devices that had been dropped on the convention. No, of course—it couldn’t be. It was much too far—but the deed had been done. The colonel rarely allowed himself to feel satisfaction—it made one too relaxed, off guard. But tonight he felt good. The collective leadership of all the freefighting forces—Langford—and even, according to his spy—Ted Rockson. All dead. The KGB commander’s corpselike cheeks almost flushed with excitement. The long, jagged scar that ran down his sunken right cheek courtesy of Rockson was throbbing a purple-red.
He turned and walked back to his boomerang-shaped black marble desk and seated himself. He took the dolls from his “Special” drawer and placed them atop the table. He moved slowly, savoring every moment of what he was about to do. He put them in the order of his hatred—Rockson, then Zhabnov, Vassily, Rahallah, Langford. The amazingly lifelike flesh-colored dolls stared back at him, twelve inches of inanimate matter looking up into the eyes of a madman. He would “play” with President Langford later—but first, the one he really wanted—Rockson. He reached a skeletal hand forward and gripped the Rockson doll around the neck, pulling it near his face. He put his batlike eyes, tiny black dots set back in sunken sockets, an inch from the Rock doll’s face, sending out thoughts of purest hate.
“You see, you lose, Rockson. I win. My will to power is stronger than yours. It is always that way—read Nietzche—oh no, you can’t now, can you?” The colonel laughed a terrifying, soundless laugh, letting his head fall back and his mouth open in a twisted smile. He commanded his throat, his lips to laugh—but they couldn’t. The darkness of his soul had destroyed his ability to perform such lighthearted gestures long ago.
He held the doll at arm’s length and with his other hand flicked his cigarette lighter on. He aimed the jet of flame at Rockson’s head and held it there, the fire licking at the plastic face, the freefighting army fatigues and the hunting boots. Slowly the fleshtic began melting, giving off a foul odor. First the lips dripping into a grotesque frown, then the eyes falling from the skull, hanging down on long red threads. The real hair on the head sizzled and puffed up in a flash as the entire doll caught fire. Killov set the blazing fetish down on a metal tray, where it burned madly, the head drooping to one side and then falling, a blazing ball, onto the tray. The arms came next, both sliding out of their sockets at the same instant, the hands curling back in pseudo agony. The fire cast eerie shadows across the KGB leader’s face as it consumed the doll entirely. Within a minute there was nothing but a bubbling pool of multicolored plastic sending up a fog of toxic smoke.
Killov leaned back in his swivel chair, taking yet another pill. He washed it down with vegetable juice, the one bit of advice he’d heeded from his personal physician. Rockson dead. This would take care of all those slave scum in the Fortress Cities who wrote their little slogans on the wall—“THE ULTIMATE AMERICAN LIVES,” “TED ROCKSON WAS HERE!” No longer. Now there is nothing there—nothing to free you from your death labor.
Suddenly a pain ripped into his gut like a knife cutting through his intestines. A wave of fear and nausea swept through his emaciated body. What if—What if—he’s not dead? The Blackshirt commander loosened his collar, pushing the red skull-and-crossbone pins to the side. He ripped the phone from the receiver and screamed into it, nearly ripping the ears off the private operator who handled his calls only—twenty-four hours a day.
“Northern Sector Headquarters—General Mishkin!” Within a few seconds a groggy voice answered at the other end.
“Who the hell is this,” Mishkin asked, annoyed. “It’s three in the morn—”
“This is Killov,” the colonel said in a deathly whisper.
“Oh, sir,” the voice at the other end said, instantly awake and fully alert. “I-I-I’m sorry sir, I thought it—”
“Never mind, fool,” Killov cut him off. “I want the remains of Ted Rockson delivered to my labs here in Denver within forty-eight hours. Spare no effort. My planes dropped two neutron devices at Grid seven point three. Ted Rockson was among those killed. I want his remains—do you hear me? I don’t care what you have to do—but find them and bring them to me. Teeth, fingers, papers—anything so he can be positively identified. Do you understand?” the colonel asked, his voice cold as death itself.
“Yes, Your Eminence. Immediately. I shall have Priority One search begin tonight. It shall be done,” Mishkin said crisply, wondering how in hell he would scrape the goddamned ashes of Rockson out of an atomic bomb blast.
Killov replaced the receiver, trying to calm himself down. “Of course, he is dead. But who was it? That myth of the ancients? Jesus—he was believed to have risen from the dead and caused all sorts of problems. Better to have the remains—better—” The euphorium was wearing off again. He sagged in his chair, his heart pounding unevenly. He took a sip of the vegetable juice, almost gagging. Relax . . . got to . . . relax.
The Blackshirt leader fell into a nightmare-filled pit. A dream of Ted Rockson coming at him with a flamethrower. And he was a doll and he was burning. The Killov doll was on fire, his face melting, his skull burning up. And the other dolls were moving jerkily and laughing at him. They danced around him as he begged for mercy. But there was no mercy, no mercy, no mercy . . .
Twenty-Two
They headed into the unknown lands where the Glowers dwelled. Two men—one a giant of a mountain man, the other molded from granite rock, from the squeezing forces of life in America 2089 A.D. The Doomsday Warrior had only one thought in his mind—Kim—and the image of her burned through his brain like a branding iron. He was worried about the president, as well—he knew that the death of Langford could set the freefighters back another century. But his heart cried out for Kim. Never had he wanted or needed anyone so much. He had never had to worry about the fate of others. The Rock team he cared about—every damn beautiful one of them. But they must die. They would all die—every man knew that. But Kim—she didn’t deserve to die. She was—too beautiful. Woe be to any man, Russian or Glower who harmed a hair on her head.
“Slow down, Rock,” Mt. Ed kept having to yell as the Doomsday Warrior forged ahead at a near trot. They marched through the night, passing through the lower hills, all alive and growing with wild flowers of rainbows of color. The wind slowly sent waves of hallucinogenic ripplings—a million purples and yellows and oranges, winding and interweaving their multipetaled fingers around the two men, lost in a spectrum of purest beauty.
The cool night air was alive with swarms of bugs, moths, darning needles as large as bottles, buzzing out their whirring drone like squadrons of dive-bombers. They didn’t take much interest in the two passing humans, setting their sights on the honeydew of the cupped flowers and the smaller insects that lived among them. Even the most beautiful of settings was a bloody battlegroun
d if you were small enough to see it. Sometimes Rock wondered if the entire universe wasn’t like that—a world within a world within a world—and all of them violent and murderous, all of them filled with creatures killing one another blindly with speed and madness, never ceasing, never resting. The stars ate the stars and the bugs ate the little bugs and man killed man and all’s right with the universe.
By morning’s bleary red-eyed sun they reached the start of the vast prairie, with nuke craters spreading off in all directions. Rock didn’t stop, but just kept forging ahead, lost in his own private hell.
“For a small guy, you’re pretty tough, Rockson,” the mountain man said from behind, his immense rifles still clanking away at one another behind his back like out-of-rhythm drumbeats. Rockson had to laugh. At six foot three and two hundred thirty-five pounds of pure steel muscle, he was usually the largest man in any group. Yet to Mt. Ed he appeared diminutive. A seven-foot-plus vantage point did wonders for one’s perspective.
The sun blasted down onto the two of them like the Laser eyes of the gods. It burned everything beneath it on the high-rad desert floor, raising the ground to a hundred twenty-five degrees. Both men erected small aluminized coverings over their heads—gizmos that Mt. Ed had brought along—balanced on small sticks on each side of their backpacks. These worked wonders in sending back much of the sun’s searing heat. Still, it was tough going. Everywhere lay the bleached bones of animals long dead. Huge skulls with horns as long as five feet—twisted, gnarled, straight as an arrow—horns of mutant elk and buffalo who had survived the war but couldn’t survive the heat from the lack of moisture and atmospheric covering. At one site they passed thousands of bones of very large creatures, bigger than elephants, with one immense tusk in the middle of the head and claws on the ends of their feet. How many creatures had been spawned by the radiation of the war and already become extinct, Rock wondered. And no one would ever know—an entire cycle, birth, evolution, and death of a species in just years. Nature was working on a jag, speeding up her once harmonious processes a million times.
As they were passing out of the bone graveyard there was the sound of a drone spyplane from behind them, the familiar, mosquitolike buzz closing in. There was nowhere to run or hide. The red cigar-shaped pilotless plane with video cameras mounted in front and beneath came over them within seconds and dropped down for a closer look. Mt. Ed reached around for one of his always loaded blunderbusses, and, moving amazingly fast for a man of his size, he sighted up the intruder and blasted away. The drone took a direct hit midsides from the big load of lead and jerked violently a few feet to the side. It wavered in the air, as if unsure whether to stay aloft or crash. It decided on the latter, dropping suddenly to the prairie floor some hundred feet below, with a loud, whistling sound. It struck the hard dirt and exploded into a drape of flame that reached nearly fifty feet in the air.
Mt. Ed looked on with satisfaction. “Got that one, hey Rock,” he said, cleaning out the muzzle of his mini-cannon with a long sweep.
“It might have had enough time to transmit our pictures back to control headquarters. We’ll find out soon enough,” Rock answered. He checked the Liberator he had found, burnt around the edges from the blast, but functional, pulling the fifty-round clip out for a second and slamming it back to make sure it was linking. Then opened the strap on the holster of his scorched .45. He was ready—come hell or high water—he was ready.
They had gone only another mile or so when they heard another airborne sound—this one louder, much bigger. Rock turned around and shaded his eyes with his palms. Transport—a big Soyuz II. Rock had heard the sound before.
“Get ready,” he said to Mt. Ed, “we got company coming—and plenty of it.” Within seconds the giant cargo plane, one of the largest in the Red fleet, was over them. It circled in a wide sweep and the bomb bay doors opened.
Suddenly shapes were dropping from the bottom—commandos on parakites. The nylon glider kites with twelve-foot wingspans filled the sky like a swarm of bloodthirsty bats. There must have been forty of them, Red Airborne troops, with olive green jumpsuits on, balanced in their hang gliders on aluminasynth crossbars. They circled above, catching the currents as they adjusted to the wind, yelling frantically back and forth to one another through wireless mikes around their throats. They checked their .55mm machine guns, which were mounted on the front end of the engineless craft, making sure the long cartridge belts weren’t jammed. Then they closed in for the kill, forty black-and-gray wings dropping down like hawks.
With their commander—identifiable by the white lightning bolts beneath his parakite—leading the charge, the attack squadron came in on a tight circle in waves of three about twenty feet apart. As they swooped down to about fifty feet from the ground, they opened up with the .55mms, sending a slicing hail of death onto the two fleeing rebels below. Then they swooped off again, angling sharply to the right and around for another attack as the succeeding waves came in blazing every few seconds.
Rockson had been overwhelmed by Red troops in the past—but this time the odds seemed almost insurmountable. Yet he had to live. There was no way in hell these flying death troops were going to stop him from reaching Kim. He looked desperately around for the smallest trace of cover. There—about two hundred feet to the right—there was some sort of drop in the ground. Mt. Ed had unloaded the biggest of his four rifle cannons. He carefully sighted up on the second wave, which was soaring in guns blazing, sending a storm of whistling hot lead into the hard-packed sand, closer and closer to the two rebels. The mountain man waited, waited, and then blasted up in the air with a roar that nearly deafened Rock. The half-pound of shot spread out as it tore up, searching for flesh, for blood, to bathe in. The three parakite gunners of the second wave almost had the two bandits below in their sights—suddenly they were hit with a wall of lead—two of them taking it right in their faces, faces that dissolved into blood and the underlying bone and muscle—sloppy messes that screamed as their parakites plummeted to the earth below. The third man, a second before so proud and sure in his black leather mask, felt a burning pain in his guts. He reached a hand down and it went right into his stomach, so that he felt his own intestines pulsing beneath his fingers. He gagged, spewing vomit through the air as he lost control of his craft. It lifted slightly and spun around like a bird with a broken wing and slammed into the third wave of the gunners, entangling its wings with two of their craft. All of them fell, screaming, to the ground below.
The moment Mt. Ed’s shot had made contact, Rock grabbed the big man by the shoulder.
“Gotta run, man—this way.” Rockson pointed toward the cover. The two of them tore off—Rockson a good deal faster than the bear of a man—but he kept pace as Mt. Ed lumbered after him. Rock put the Liberator he had found on auto and trotted backwards, spraying the sky behind them with a deadly salute of death. The bullets tore a good three hundred feet and into the third and fourth waves, which were confused by the entanglement of the first two groups ahead of them. They swerved out of the way to avoid hitting the spiraling mass of men and kites, breaking their ranks. Rock’s bullets caught one of them just beneath the eye, taking out a good portion of brain as it exited out the back. The dead Red pulled back on his tail control, sending the kite straight up and then over. It slammed into the fifth wave coming down from above, once again entangling, dooming, destroying. The parakite commander, who had been the vanguard of the attack, had swung a wide circle around and was now viewing the proceedings with disgust. He began screaming over his throat mike at the rest of the men to pull up and avoid the killing entanglement at the front. “There is plenty of time—just don’t lose control. We have them.” He gritted his teeth, cocked the machine gun, and came in himself, fingers resting on the trigger.
Somehow Rock and Mt. Ed made it to the ditch and dove in, covering themselves with the high-rad sand—time to worry about that later—if they lived. They were in an ancient creekbed, long since dried up, about three feet deep, the b
ottom lined with perfectly smooth pebbles and an occasional shell from days gone by.
“We’ve got a defensible position from here,” Rock yelled out to the mountain man above the din of the approaching streams of machine-gun bullets.
“Yah, Rock—we’ll just pick ’em off from here,” Mt. Ed said, taking all four brainbusters from behind his back and leaning them side by side along the sandy rise. Rock didn’t tell him how desperate their situation really was as he ripped his Liberator from around his shoulder and rested it on the edge. Well, he’d soon find out if the gods still held him in their favor.
The parakiters regrouped under the barking orders of their commander and came in again, this time spaced more widely apart so one good shot wouldn’t entangle a whole wave. They flew in three abreast, their guns burping death in three straight lines that came right at the two rebels. Rock and Mt. Ed returned the fire unflinching. The white-hot slugs passed each other in midair and raced on to see who would make target acquisition first. Rock felt a searing pain in his left shoulder as a Red shell passed cleanly through. The three plowing lines of murder ate into the dirt all around them and then passed on. But the Americans’ greetings became a little more intimate with Russian flesh. Three of Rock’s blood presents hit the lead man, turning his chest into a jigsaw puzzle of splintered bone painted red. He screamed and dropped from the sky like a meteor. Mt. Ed’s volley, enough lead to kill an elephant, tore through the right-hand kite and its rider, mixing the two together in a pudding of blood and fabric. He veered sharply to the left, slamming into the third man in the line, the wing tip of the kite piercing the man’s stomach. The kites, wrapped in an embrace of death, spun slowly from the sky like a leaf gliding delicately down. Like a leaf spewing blood and guts—and screams.
“We’re doing great,” Mt. Ed whooped. “This is more fun that shootin’ coons in the moonlight.” But Rock knew they had a long way to go. There were at least thirty of the Red force left—a lot more killing needed to be done. Another wave came in from high up. Three dark parakites, wings filled with the hot air of the afternoon, screaming out a greeting of .55mm shells. Again Rock and Mt. Ed sighted up and let loose with their own barrage of hello—American style. Rock’s slugs traced a course right into the groin of the left-flanking man. He threw his hands down to cover the pain, letting go of the controls, and quickly veered off to the right, another bird out of action. The mountain man’s wall of lead got the proverbial two birds with one stone—as his spinning lead ripped through the steering mechanisms of the nylon craft. Both commandos screamed in horror as they realized they had no control. Flailing wildly, like birds who’ve suddenly lost the use of their wings, the two deathcraft whipped end over end nearly a hundred feet to the dirt, where broken bodies flopped not quite dead in their own oozing blood.