by Ryder Stacy
“Quick, man, grab some fire,” Rock yelled to Archer as more of the plant-things came swinging in from other trees to eat what their fellow Venus flytrap had been unable to hold onto. The two freefighters swung their flaming torches in quick circles around them, trying to keep the predatory flora at bay. The meat-eating plants moved slow, about five miles an hour, but there were nearly two dozen red-leaved jaws trying to get them and already the men were growing tired, as each darting red mouth came out of the darkness trying to reach them.
“This ain’t going to work,” Rock yelled. “We’ll tire or we’ll slip—and either way they’ll get us.” Archer glanced over at his mentor with blazing eyes, hoping he would come up with something. He always had—until now. “We’ve got to make a circle of fire—a defensive perimeter—around us.” Rock rushed over to the huge freefighter. “All right, we’ll stand back-to-back and edge over to that dead tree there. Grab as much wood as you can—big pieces. You got me?”
“Yeesss, Rooockson—get wooood,” Archer growled back. The two men moved slowly so as not to slip on ice-covered low grass and weeds. The branches moved unerringly toward them from above, homing in like guided missiles. Rockson couldn’t see any eyes on the things—they must use some sort of primitive radar. One of the veiny, six-foot flora made a swoop with its wide-opened petals but Rock thrust the flaming end of his stick right into its center and it shot backwards emitting an almost inaudible high-pitched scream. They grabbed as much wood as they could from the rotting tree, snapping off the dry branches until they were loaded down. Swirling the flames all around them, making streaks of fire in the dark night air, they headed back toward the fire. The entire clearing was now surrounded by the man-eaters, coming in from every angle, moving faster in some kind of feeding frenzy. Rock threw his entire load on the flames which caught ablaze within seconds. Archer dumped his and soon the fire was roaring, sending up a hurricane of white-hot embers far into the clouded heavens.
“Kick it around,” Rock screamed above the snapping and crackling of the flames. “Make a circle of fire around us.” He could see by the light in Archer’s eyes that he understood. The two freefighters kicked the burning branches and logs out into the clearing until they had formed a loosely circular ring of lapping flames. They stood in the center of it, waiting.
The carniverous flytraps came forward from all sides but stopped just behind the fire. Even ten, twenty feet up, the heat was too intense for them. A few tried to dart forward and through the waves of murky heat, but jerked back as their green veins quickly heated up and began popping, spitting out a swampy green pus. It was a standoff as the flesh-traps whipped desperately around just outside the fiery perimeter. But in the war of predator and prey, the standoff goes to the victim—the winner in this battle of the endless, violent foodchain.
Other creatures were not so lucky. Sensing a small herd of mountain elk nearby the blooms pulled back and were still. Several of the leaders of the herd, three big males with two-yard-long staghorns capable of goring a sabre-toothed lion to death, edged forward about twenty yards from the fire. They sniffed cautiously, their black noses testing the air to see if the fire was moving, if it was a threat to them.
Like rattlers striking, three of the red things opened their spiked jaws wide and dropped down onto the elk. They fell onto the animals’ back ends avoiding the horns which could even rip through their foot-thick outer red-fleshed leaves. The veined petals snapped shut and the elk were doomed. They tried to run, their front legs tearing at the earth like windmills. But it was all to no avail. Unable to use their back legs which were now held firmly in place by the closing red leaves, or their steel-hard horns, the creatures were pulled deeper into the meat-eating plants and slowly digested as the lips of the blooms moved up their prey inch by inch, at last engulfing them whole.
Rock and Archer watched in mesmerized horror, knowing how close they had been to a similar ghastly fate. The other elk, hearing the death cries of their leaders, stormed off through the forest, trampling small bushes beneath their strong brown-furred legs. The three flowers that had eaten pulled back up to their trees as if satisfied, for the moment. But the rest of the army of carniverous flytraps were hungry. They waited at the edge of the circle of fire, flailing around like whips, searching for some way through the wall of heat.
With a few more quick forays out into the clearing for wood, swinging torches in front of them for protection, the two freefighters managed to keep the perimeter burning through the night, frustrating the man-eating plants’ every effort. At last the dawn sun crept into the gray sky on burning red legs. The heavens slowly brightened, the writhing shadows of night slipped back into their daytime hiding places. As if the very nurturing rays of the star that gave life to the earth was death to them, the carniverous blooms retreated, pulling back to their trees, as their flexible branches hauled them in. They closed their petals tight and seemed to shrink slightly, growing a darker, almost purplish color. Then they were still.
Rockson and Archer looked at one another, the few slivers of the pale sun cutting through the high-flying green strontium clouds lighting their faces with a corpselike hue.
“We made it—goddamn it,” Rock half whispered to Archer who stood, bleary-eyed on trembling legs, still waving his burning torch in slow uneven circles around him. “Come on, let’s get the hell out of here,” Rock said, grabbing his emergency pack from the ground and strapping it back around his waist. “I don’t want to be around when these vegetables wake up again.” The two freefighters moved swiftly from the grove of predatory trees. Rock knew he would never look on the flora of the world the same way again. Nothing was what it appeared to be in the post-nuclear world. Every flower, every insect, every shimmering pool of water held incalculable danger and death.
They walked slowly through the barren rolling hills, dotted on the lower slopes by firs rising proudly toward the sky. They half stumbled as they walked, as they hadn’t slept for days now. Rock knew there would be time for that later. Sleep was a luxury in the game of survival. Archer appeared much more exhausted than Rock, his eyes nearly closed, walking through sheer motor function, his body taking over on automatic control. The big freefighter lurched forward with just the hint of a smile on his bearded face. Rockson knew he must be dreaming of the old days—his mountain youth when he hunted the wild deer and pheasant of the lush countryside where the Doomsday Warrior had originally found him, saving the near-mute from a suffocation in a pool of quicksand.
The game was plentiful around them as they headed south through the low bushlands of the northern United States. Black-faced squirrels, horned field mice, an occasional porcupine with its quivering armor of icepick quills, all moved around them, scampering for cover as they heard the noisy humans approach. Rock knew they were somewhere in what had been Wisconsin with a good thousand miles to go before they reached Century City. Hardly a reassuring prospect, but then Rock had been through these long, perilous treks before, many times. In a strange way he relished them. No complexities of Century City social life, no political machinations with the city council and the military staff. Just he and Archer and the elements. For Rockson was a creation of the new world. He was defined, chipped into shape, by its constant attempts at taking back the life it had given him. His strength, his abilities all rose to their peak by the sheer opposition of a cruel Darwinian ecosystem. It is through opposition, even the squaring off against death itself, that men raise to their heights. “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger,” as the adage of Nietzsche goes. Those who couldn’t meet the challenge went under—fodder for teeth and claws. But the Doomsday Warrior welcomed the enemy—always. It made him feel fully alive. As a glowing ember sparks to life when blown upon, the stronger the wind the higher the flame, so Ted Rockson grew in strength, in power, according to the nature of his adversaries.
Rock walked sure-footedly across the increasingly lush terrain, his eyes swinging back and forth like search-and-destroy radar, waiting, sear
ching for the next thing that would try to take him down. He was weaponless now except for the empty .45 that hung at his waist, and picked up a five-foot-long stick which he found on the ground, straight as a spear and green with the oozing sap of life recently gone. He tested the shaft as he walked—it would do. They had gone for about an hour, stopping just to drink some water from a running stream when Rock realized it was growing darker by the second. The big storm clouds galloping across the purple-hazed sky were dropping lower now. The air was thick with a cold moisture and the Doomsday Warrior knew it would be only minutes before they released their load of frozen water. He searched ahead for shelter—but there was none. The land was flat with but occasional banks of trees sheltering together against the harsh winds for survival. He silently prayed that it wasn’t the acidic black snow he had experienced once before. Snow that killed, that ate all that it fell upon with wet teeth, dissolving flesh that shrieked in agony until all that remained of it was puddles of steaming bone.
He felt something wet on his face and looked up. Snowflakes—by the uncountable billions falling from the sky. But these were white. A gift of beauty not a murderous foe. Archer seemed to wake up from his semi-comatose state as the flakes landed around his mouth and eyes. His expression brightened and he grunted approvingly at the descending sheets of white. The flakes were huge, nearly three inches wide, crystalline symetries of infinite complexity and perfection. Rockson remembered dimly something from his youth—that no two flakes were exactly the same. Each was a world unto itself, a sculpture by a god who seemed to revel in giving mankind glimpses of beauty amidst the constant devastation. Rock wondered if the beauty was sent to lead mankind on. To give him a vision beyond the destruction and the death. One could never lose sight of that beauty—it was a gift and a prophecy, that perhaps one day all of the earth could be that way: harmonious, shimmering and unalterably mysterious.
The two freefighters felt energized by the snowfall. As the earth became blanketed with a pure white, their hair and clothes were coated with the wet flakes. They could barely see more than ten yards ahead but Rock’s sense of direction was unerring and they continued straight on. The wind had died down and the temperature was just at the freezing point so their constant motion kept them from getting too cold. They walked for about twenty minutes when Rock heard a low guttural growl through the thick flakes. He paused, motioning for Archer to stop too. They listened through the dampening pillars of snow. It was hard to discern anything but the soft whisper of the slow avalanche from the heavens. He had just started forward again when the sound came a second time. This time louder and the growl was now a roar. He knew instantly—it was a cat of some sort, from the sharp hissing sound. They suddenly heard another and then another of the heart-stopping sounds. They were surrounded.
The two freefighters backed off, each hefting his weapon. Rock lifted the branch in his hands, pointing it straight ahead ready to impale whatever appeared from out of the white haze. Archer swung his crossbow around and prepared to fire his last arrow. The two men stood side by side, ready to take on the world. Dim shapes became slowly discernible at the very edge of their vision. Low-slung, edging forward with the careless slinking grace of big cats. Their forms were suddenly visible—panthers—sleek and black as shining coal. They looked beautiful etched against the pure white of the ground . . . and deadly. The freefighters gulped as they saw that there were nearly a dozen of the predators surrounding them, moving ever closer, watching through flaring yellow eyes for any attempt at escape.
“I think this might be it, pal,” Rock whispered over to Archer as they slowly backed away, one foot at a time, leaving deep prints in the already inch-thick covering. The largest of the panthers came forward, opening its jaws to reveal curved ivory fangs that could rip a man’s arm off with a single bite. It stared right at them and let loose with a blood-curdling roar, the scream of the hungry, of the king of the foodchain. A creature that had never known fear in all its days but instead created it in those that it stalked. The cats closed in from all sides moving in a perfect flanking attack formation with the instinctive strategy of any army of killers. The leader, a good six-feet long and a yard high at the shoulders, came straight for Rockson and tensed its front legs as it prepared to strike. The Doomsday Warrior relaxed his arms, ready to smash the thing the moment it leaped. One, he knew he could take. Two, maybe—but beyond that . . .
Suddenly a voice rang out from the impenetrable whiteness behind the black panthers. “Eeeeyie kreega kara!” The cats stopped dead in their tracks, moving neither forward nor backward. They kept the freefighters trapped in a cage of black furry hide. More shapes appeared from the blinding funnels of snow. Rockson could hardly believe his eyes. Seven women—pale skinned, beautiful and nearly naked but for loincloths made of the shining fur of their predatory pets. The women walked up to the two men, staying just behind the panthers. Their large firm breasts and their waist-long manes of jet-black hair were tinged with snow, but they neither shivered nor seemed in the slightest bit cold. Around their white throats were necklaces of gold and precious stones—and the curved fangs of the panthers that apparently did their bidding.
The cat closest to Rockson prepared to attack, opening its salivating jaws wide, coiling low on its forward legs.
“Kreega, na kreega,” one of the women screamed, jumping forward and slapping the cat on the side of the face. The panther let out a whimper and slunk back, crouching low, its tail dropping down in submission. The woman walked right up to Rockson, stopping a foot away from him, and stared at him with a strange lustful expression. She was one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen, with pale soft skin as smooth and white as alabaster. Her body was near perfection, muscled and lean with a slim waist and hemispheric breasts. Her flowing black hair adorned with claws and teeth dropped behind her, just covering her smooth buttocks. She looked the two men up and down as if appraising a slab of meat she was about to eat. Her mouth opened, revealing pearly white teeth.
“Donnez-moi votres weapones!” Rockson stared at her in incomprehension. “Donnez! Donnez!” she yelled out, pointing to Rock’s staff and the crossbow held tightly in Archer’s hands. Hesitant to turn over their only weapons, they stood there motionless until the female warrior motioned the cats to come forward again. The freefighters quickly handed the implements to the two women who stepped forward. The leader of the women whistled twice and the panthers backed off, sitting down at the sides of the female warriors. The women scratched their heads and spoke softly to them, making the big cats relax from their attack state.
Another woman stepped forward from out of the blinding snowstorm. Rockson hadn’t noticed her, partially because she had blended in so well with her white surroundings. She was an albino. The palest, chalkiest white Rock had ever seen. If the other women were pale, this one was without any color, almost ghostlike with her translucent skin. Her hair was like bleached wheat and fell like a waterfall down her back to her waist. She looked at Rockson with pink eyes, taking him in—all of him. It was like looking into a vacuum, a vacuum of lust and rage.
“Les hommes sont moi,” the albino spat out to the leader.
“Non, Ishtar, ne pas vous. Pour le tribe, le Kreega,” the leader shot back, her face red with fury. The other female warriors looked on with concern, as the panthers grew restless. Rock could sense some sort of internal power struggle between the two women for leadership of the tribe—and possession of him and Archer. But the albino backed down, drifting back into the blowing storm with a single motion and disappearing among the flakes.
Their hands and ankles were quickly bound with thick leather thongs. The women smiled, glancing at one another with quick leering looks as they tied the knots. Rock realized the entire party was eyeing them both with a ravenous hunger. He wondered if they were about to be saved from the panthers only to meet the same fate from the tribe of Amazons. He had encountered cannibals several times over the years. But never ones as beautiful as these.
Three
“Me—Reina,” the leader of the women warriors said as she led Rockson by a rope tether attached to his wrist bonds. “We—Kreega.”
“Kreega,” Rock stammered as she pulled him through the snow at a speed he could hardly keep pace with. She seemed to have the strength and agility of a cat. Her long lithe body in front of him though was all female, and abundantly so. Despite his tiredness and the throbbing pain in his lower back from a wound he had received in Moscow, he watched intently as her thin loincloth bounced around and occasionally blew aside in the wind.
Archer ran as fast as his large body could travel, pulled by three of the Kreega and surrounded on both sides by the panthers. He stumbled through the snow behind his female keepers grumbling loudly, casting half intelligible aspersions on their ancestry.
At last they came to a thick woods, with towering black-leaved trees creating a canopy of cover. Once inside, the snows were stopped far above by the myriad leaves and branches. It was also an instantaneous hothouse as a junglelike atmosphere was created by the rising moisture of the closely packed trees. Here, they moved more slowly as the dense undergrowth made movement difficult, catching hands and feet in vines and thornbushes. But Reina apparently knew her way. She followed almost invisible trails through the tangling growth. It quickly grew dark as they pushed further in, the light from far off and above only dimly trickling down through the maze of plant life. In almost utter blackness they headed on, Reina moving at a good pace, pulling Rock along right behind her. Every few seconds she would look back at him with wide eyes filled with undisguised desire.