by Ryder Stacy
“Yeah,” Detroit laughed as he juggled two grenades in the air. The others couldn’t stand it when he did that. But the pins were still in. Besides, no one had ever seen him drop one. “We can open a Wasteland Soul-Food Franchise out here.”
Rockson grinned as each man wisecracked a line or two, keeping up spirits. But his mind was elsewhere on his missing men. He felt like a general who has taken his men into the thick of battle and then just left them there to survive or die on their own. At least McCaughlin and Sheransky were with them, though. The two were among the toughest of his elite Rock team, and had a lot of experience in combat, and were smart as whips in survival skills.
“They’ll make it,” Chen spoke up. “If any group of men can—they will. After all, they’re not like children,” the Chinese martial arts master went on. “They’re Freefighters, all are volunteers for this mission. Relax, Rock, it’s not going to help any of us, especially you, if you just get all spaced out and stop looking where you’re going. Then you’ll croak, and whatever chance we have of salvaging this whole operation will be put even deeper in the hole. We all know what the odds are out here.”
“I hear you,” Rock replied softly.
“But most of all,” Detroit said, “there ain’t shit we can do about it right now.”
“ARRCHHEEER HUUUNGRRYYY,” the mountain man exclaimed, sitting down with him. He pointed to his mouth and stomach, and made a strange, ugly face. As if he had saved them all, and he damn well deserved something now. They all chuckled and the mood changed dramatically.
“I think I’ve got something for ya, big fella,” Detroit said, reaching around in one of the pockets of his combat jacket. “Well, what have we here?” He pulled out some synth-crackers and a six-inch-long strip of some salted snake McCaughlin had cooked up that morning. “Just saving it for lunch.” He handed it out to Archer, who grabbed it so hard and fast that the black Freefighter ripped his hand back as if a pit bull were going after it. The giant was not the subtlest of men, and slammed the proffered treasure down into his mouth in two quick bites. Then he looked around for some more, his face dropping into something of a forlorn expression as he saw that was it. He slid back down the cactus wall and sat there with his arms folded across his grizzly-sized chest. He grumbled and mumbled weird grunting noises to himself, casting occasional angry eyes at the others. They all pulled back a few inches.
“We’ll wait until this damn storm is over—or nearly—and then try to find the men,” Rock mumbled, thinking out loud. “Might as well take a snooze. We’re sure as hell not going anywhere right away.”
Within twenty minutes, listening to the now almost smooth roar of the sand particles roaring by on both sides of the cactus mound, they were in half-dozes. Except for Rockson. No matter what he did, or any of them said, he kept seeing the rest of the expedition buried up to their necks, screaming as their mouths went under the sand. Then, under the spell of the storm’s roar, soothing if you weren’t out in it, Rock’s head slipped down against his chest.
When he awoke, it was morning. The sand was still blowing but it had dropped to only about a quarter of its previous power. The others were already up. Well, most were sitting up straight with their eyes open, anyway. Chen stood in front of them about six feet off doing his Tai-Chi-Chuan exercises. Slowly lifting one foot then the next, turning in tight little circles. He moved with perfect motion, every movement the same speed as the others, his breath totally united with his body, hands. Though they’d all seen Century City’s foremost martial arts instructor practice before, what never ceased to amaze them was the sheer perfection of it.
Rockson stood up, stretched and walked to the edge of the cactus windbreak and peered around the edge, shielding his eyes so they wouldn’t take a fistful of dust. It was a lot better. They could definitely move out now.
“Time to split, gang,” Rockson said, turning back and quickly doing a few stretches and deep knee bends to get the blood going again. The others slowly stood up, everything cracking, joints creaking as if they were about to pop out of their sockets. There was something about sitting or lying in one place for about fifteen hours that did wonders for the body’s suppleness, or rather the lack of it.
“What do you have in mind, Rock?” Chen asked as he stopped his exercise, breathed out and then turned toward the Doomsday Warrior.
“Well, we can only hope for the best and assume that Sheransky and McCaughlin found some kind of shelter too. We’ll stay together and head north. Do a slow circumnavigation of this whole area in a northerly direction, since that’s the direction we were all heading. Any other ideas?”
The others looked at each other and all shook their heads “no” slowly, “Sounds as good as anything I could come up with,” Chen said softly.
“Ditto,” Detroit added. Archer just looked around, hoping that a synthburger and a big malted milk might just dig their way up through the sands and jump into his hamhock-sized hands. He was clearly getting into a pretty foul mood, not having eaten for a lot longer than he could remember. They all stayed a few feet away. They loaded up the ’brids who had been standing side by side at the end of the cactus windbreak in a kind of meditative trance for the last twenty-four hours. They came right out of it when the men slapped them on the rumps and seemed anxious to get the hell out of there and out into the real world.
They mounted up on the ’brids now as the sandstorm dropped to just a sprinkling. The hybrids were very cautious at first. But once they saw that things were a hell of a lot better than they’d been before, they relaxed and even grew a little frisky. Rockson took the lead and headed them on by compass-direction. He used the binocs compass, still not trusting the damn thing, but at least knowing it had worked before. They headed in a north-northeasterly direction as the dark curtains above slowly cleared and they could actually see more and more of the world around them. Then Rock took them back around to the west again, making circles maybe a half-mile wide. He didn’t want to leave the area until he was sure.
But nothing but sand. After nearly two hours of the searching, Chen thought he saw something several hundred yards to their right. They all went galloping over, their hearts beating fast and almost exploding as they drew close and saw a mound of something covered by the sand. Rock was off his ’brid first and down on the ground. There were definitely shapes under the sand and he dug frantically, not wanting to see what he was about to uncover. The others joined him as well and on their hands and knees they scraped away at the mound.
Suddenly Archer reached something hard, and uncovering another foot of sand, he grabbed hold of a horn. It was one of the bison horns! Almost at the same moment Chen reached the horn of another of the big beasts. They dug for another minute just to make sure, and then stood up, sweating hard.
“Well, it ain’t our men,” Detroit said. “And they are only dumb animals—but still, it’s sad. Must have gotten caught alone, completely lost their way.”
“There’ve got to be at least thirty of them down there. A veritable landfill of bison,” Chen said with a kind of awe.
“This is how dinosaurs got trapped,” Rockson said with his solemn respect for all living things, even when they were no longer living.
They stared at the five heads they had uncovered, the eyes covered with sand, the big pink tongues sticking out nearly a foot. They must have been asphyxiated when the grains of sand began inexorably to have their way over the poor beasts.
“I pray this isn’t how our men went out,” Rockson half-whispered, wishing he hadn’t even said the words the moment they came out of his mouth. None of them replied. They mounted up again and headed off. By now the storm had completely disappeared, working its way south toward the swamplands they had just had the pleasure of spending a short holiday in. The air suddenly felt much lighter, as if a thunderstorm had just passed. And they took deep breaths as they rode along, the ’brids, all of them, breathing the sweet oxygen in as if it was some kind of cooling mentholated gas.
> They rode in a northerly direction, slowly making the turns bigger and bigger until they must have moved a good ten miles in this manner without seeing a hell of a lot other than a few dead animals, the sand sliding out of their open mouths. And Rock, although he hated to admit it, just couldn’t see how the rest of the team could have made it. But he quickly banished such thoughts from his mind, gritted his teeth, and pushed Snorter a little harder.
Nothing. They couldn’t find a trace of the missing team. Not a print in the still slightly shifting sands, not a piece of supply or one of a man’s old socks somehow slipped from his pack. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack in this vast ocean of sand. You could drop a whale or two out here and never find them again.
They must have gone another ten miles, still circling slowly to the east and west as Rock had hunches about the Freefighters’ whereabouts, when they came to a sloping stretch of land that ran ahead perhaps four or five miles. And suddenly the Freefighters stopped in their tracks.
Standing there about a mile off, like some monument to the very clouds streaming by above, was a gargantuan structure.
It looked like a stadium; some sort of bulbous, huge, concrete stadium. Rockson knew about stadiums from poring over Century City’s archives many times since he had arrived there. And this must have been one of the biggest. It was absolutely gigantic. In the books he’d read, in the photographic representations, one didn’t even begin to get the immensity of this son-of-a-bitch. It was ovular-shaped with a plastic top of some kind in blue and orange stripes, now faded considerably by the weather after a century.
You could see the huge interweaving steel struts everywhere, and could understand in a flash basically just how the thing had been built, understand the engineering behind it all. From prairie floor to top of roof, it must have risen a thousand feet.
Deroit whistled as they all stood there looking as if they’d seen a living god. It made a man feel a little small, to say the least. Particularly when none of the Freefighters had been around when these things had dotted the land. There couldn’t be a hell of a lot of them left; most centers of civilization had been blasted away by the screaming nukes, dropping all over America. This one must have been made damn well. Every wall appeared whole from where they were standing.
“What do you think?” asked Chen, a tone of awe which Rock had rarely heard caught in his throat, as not a man could tear his eyes away. Archer just kept shaking his head in awe. The man had spent 90 percent of his life in the wilds; his only mental comparison of the shape of the structure was an egg. An immense steel egg, that looked as if it could take cannon shells and come out the winner. But whatever lived inside that egg had to be equally huge, so the mountain man reasoned. And when he saw Rockson slowly slip Snorter into low gear, Archer’s rough face took on an expression of sheer horror.
“NOOOOOOOO GGOOOOOOO!” the huge near-mute growled out. The others looked at him, first with surprise as he hadn’t spoken for a while, and then with a kind of compassion. The big man, who had stared down just about everything out here, was clearly feeling some emotions he didn’t like.
“I don’t think he wants to go to that fucker, whatever the hell it is,” Detroit said to Rockson.
“Well, that’s where we’re headed. We got missing men to find.”
Seventeen
As they drew closer, checking out the place a little slowly since they had no idea what to expect, Rockson found himself responding on a more primitive level of fear—like what Archer was apparently still under. He didn’t really believe it contained some huge pterodactyl with wingspans of a hundred feet and lots of starving infant primeval birds just waiting for the next meal. But still, there was a sense about the place that he could hardly even put his finger on, but nevertheless sent goosebumps coursing up and down his flesh. It was something to do with just how majestic it was, or with the fact that it was out in the middle of nowhere as if waiting to grab hold of the unwary traveler. And perhaps, more than all that—it was old. Millions of men, women, children had tramped through the massive gates and doors that he could now begin to see as they got within a mile of it. He could almost sense them still, running and screaming to catch the sport teams that had played inside.
They came right up to what appeared to be one of the main doors, although the large, arched openings seemed to spread around the entire domed stadium. Rock rubbed his eyes. He could see guards, seated in old, rickety chairs. The uniformed old men looked up, with neither great curiosity nor the lack of it. Apparently, they must have had some visitors here at least once in a while. Rock wondered if he was hallucinating.
“Howdy,” one of the oldest guards said, standing up from his wicker chair. The four guards looked a little peculiar, to say the least. Their faces and bodies appeared normal enough—but the uniforms were sort of like blue suits with thick broad ties, and wide-brimed straw hats. It made them all look like hicks from the 1920s era. By their sides were huge shields, but when Rockson looked a little closer he could see that they were actually immense campaign buttons, with faded images of politicians. Slogans appeared on them, around the edges, on the bottom of the shields:
VOTE FOR MICHAELSON.
SPINNER—HE’S OUR MAN.
CRANSTON, HE BELIEVES
IN THE WORKING MAN.
Lying alongside the shields were huge needle-like swords. The needle-swords were clearly weapons, the Freefighters could see, but so far the guards weren’t going after them. Still, Rock kept his hand near his shotpistol just in case.
“You’ve gotten here just in time for the Annual Convening—what delegation are you from?” the blue-blazered man asked with a big smile, tilting his straw hat back.
“Well, the—the—” Rockson stuttered for a few seconds, not knowing what the hell he was supposed to answer. He knew that saying the wrong thing to one of these men might mean a fight. What seemed nonsensical and absurd, Rockson had discovered in the past, could yet be important. The wrong answers could be construed as insults to people’s cultures. “Colorado!” he blurted out suddenly, as his mutant senses spoke for him. The Doomsday Warrior also had discovered, years before, when you don’t have the slightest idea what to say—tell the truth.
“Ah, Colorado! A fine and illustrious state! It has produced many illustrious delegates,” the guard went on, with a broad grin. “Yep, I’ve seen more than a few of your people come and go over the years—and damn good men, all of them. I’ll tell you that.”
The man seemed to love to talk, and Rockson took advantage of that. “What’s your name?” Rock asked.
“Name’s Simpkins. Assistant Internal Security, Sub-Secretarial.” He grinned like a country boy eating ice cream. “These here,” he went on, pointing around at his fellow guards, or whatever the hell they were, “are Sub-Junior-Underassistants. But Handelman is a Facilitator. Everything is broken down into ranks here. It makes life so much easier when everyone knows just who and what they and their functions are. Don’t you agree?”
“Oh, no question about that, no question at all! Tell me,” the Doomsday Warrior went on slowly, not bringing attention to the fact that he didn’t know what the hell was going on. He didn’t want any of these straw-hatters to know that. “We were, of course, given a certain amount of information back in Colorado—but what exactly is happening here these days? My information is years old. Can you, er—fill me in?”
“Well, I’ll be glad to do that!” As the others looked fairly bored, returning to the chairs, Simpkins spoke pridefully to Rock: “This is the Great Caucus Dome—and we, of course, are the Caucus people. You’ll see in a minute when you’re given the tour. This here is the Republam Convention. We have delegates from around this whole section of the country. Think we’re up to almost three thousand Caucus people, in all. Few stragglers still a’comin’.”
“But what exactly do you all do?” Rock went on, trying to act nonchalant. “I mean, what’s the function here?”
“Well, you know that it
goes back to before the war. Our ancestors were holding an Annual Republam Party convention to pick choices for state political office—you know all that! We had rented this huge dome for two weeks—and then the war. Somehow this immense dome survived the holocaust,” Simpkins went on, “though according to our notes and compu-secretarials which survived from back there, a huge radioactive cloud virtually covered the place. Our great-great-grandparents managed to survive, by shutting all the vents and water supply off for a month. And that was enough. And we’ve been here ever since, carrying out our orders. Which is why we’re so popular. You know that.”
The man looked suspicious now. “Everyone does his bit!”
“And those bits are?” Rockson asked, a little nervously, knowing that was something he should know, having ridden a thousand miles to get here.
“Rules, votes, caucuses, many important functions,” Simpkins went on, with pride, and also the beginnings of a little more than just mild suspicion toward Rockson, who seemed to know very little about what was going on. “Why, today is the beginning of our annual Rules Committee elections. Nearly a hundred posts to fill! I find it one of the more exciting times of the year. You all are privileged to be here right now. And then, next week, is the election of Caucus Captains. It’s a busy time of year.” The man pulled back on his red suspenders which Rock saw that he had on inside the jacket.
“Sounds thrilling,” Rock said, glancing around to make sure his own men weren’t drifting off. This Caucus fellow seemed to be a fool in a way, but the Doomsday Warrior could see that within that happy-go-lucky fool’s exterior he had a brain that was quite observant. But then, if the man were descended from former politicians, that wasn’t too much of a surprise. The one thing that Rockson wasn’t even beginning to understand was just what the hell these people did. Vote for whom? Caucus for what? He didn’t get into that right now. He could see that Simpkins was getting a little more curious about the Freefighters, and had some questions himself.