by Ryder Stacy
As the two Freefighters walked off, small green scaled bodies peered cautiously from a hole between two large boulders. Hearing nothing, they grew bolder and dashed out. The young of the dead thing. Replicas in miniature of every aspect of her hideous being, down to their own small curved saber teeth, only inches long, that protruded from their light golden-haired faces. They walked over to the puddle of scales and lizard insides that had given birth to them and flicked their blue forked tongues in and out, tasting the air. Somewhere, mixed in with the stench of blood and death, was a familiar odor—but the raw sensation of so much meat and puddles of blood like sweet wine lying before them in a smorgasbord was too much to resist. Six of the little beasts, the largest only two feet long and about fifty pounds, dug into the bloody swamp. They opened their jaws wide, running them along the blood-soaked dirt, collecting everything before them like a vacuum cleaner. Back and forth they went, sucking in the reptile pudding, swallowing gallons of the stuff. The ate until they couldn’t move and then collapsed near each other, forming a little circle. They fell asleep, ugly heads resting on equally ugly bodies, wondering dimly in their peanut-sized brains when the Feeder would return. But their dark red dreams quickly overtook any budding thoughts as they lost consciousness, lying in the fly-covered slop that had once been their mother.
Two
The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. But not in the Colorado Rockies. The snow-covered peaks rose high into the pinkish-tinged sky as if trying to spear one of the dark cumulus clouds that swam by, making straight line walking impossible. A soft green blanket of fir trees covered the slopes, their branches filled with the odd life forms of Post-Nuke America. Hummingbirds with razor-sharp beaks, three-winged owls with long curved talons, hordes of chattering squirrels with mottled black-and-white-dotted fur and spiked tails, armor-plated skunks, single-horned elk with straight spikes rising up eight feet from their skulls—bringing back to life the long-dead mythical unicorn. Everywhere in these mountains life abounded in all its bizarre variety as the earth’s damaged ecology tried to create a new balance, a new harmony among its mutated species.
Down these steep sharp-pebbled slopes, moving along narrow trails barely wide enough for an ant, two humans marched slowly, followed by their pack team of twenty hybrids. From the towering peaks high above them, they looked like little more than insects. Mere dots hardly discernible in the panoramic range of granite mountains that stretched off in every direction, competing with the heavens above for room to stretch their raised stone arms.
Only when one soared closer, as if looking through the eyes of a hawk swooping down from its cloud-shrouded nest, did one see the face of the man who led the team. There was something about the face, something different from other men. Perhaps the eyes. Eyes in which one could see no fear. Not a trace, not a glimmer. Eyes that had loved and knew love, but now as they surveyed the trail, the thousand-foot drop below, and the sky above, were as clear and cold as a panther’s, a snake’s. Eyes of pure perception unclouded by the neuroses, the fears, the trembling nightmares of twentieth-century man. For those alive in 2089 A.D. lived the nightmare. Every second it threatened to strike out of nowhere. One had to be able to react with the speed of a striking snake, the strength of a cat, to live.
As Ted Rockson walked along, carefully placing one foot in front of the other, letting his weight sink, never faltering, down the winding 45-degree trail—he was the world. He existed in a state of perfect harmony with it, sensing, reflecting every branch that snapped above him, every scurry of chameleon lizard into its hole in the mountainside, every nuance and subtle shading of life and motion around him. He was a mirror of existence—in a state of perfect warrior enlightenment.
“Rock, I’m getting tired,” Rona shouted from about twenty yards behind on the trail, where she took up the rear of the hybrid horse team. The ’brids frantically tried to keep their balance on the narrow trail, piled high as they were with the freshly killed carcasses of elk and deer. They bayed constantly in whining horn-like choruses, protesting their labors. “And these damned ’brids,” she continued, “are shouting up such a storm back here they’re spraying me with their goddamned spittle. When the hell do we stop?” she whined, joining in the bray of the beasts.
Rockson was wrenched from his mental communion with the mountain and its life forms by the female Freefighter’s disgruntled words. He had tremendous respect for her as a fighter—he had seen her wade right into the thick of it with Red troops and send them flying. Her years of martial arts training with Chen, the instructor of fighting arts back in Century City, had made her the equal of most men—if not their better. Except for Rockson. Whatever move she tried on him, whatever clever trick she had thought up—somehow he just wasn’t there when she attacked. Maybe that was why she loved him. And though he thought that perhaps sometimes he might love her, her frequent lapses into childish histrionics, particularly in the middle of the most impossible situations, made him want to put her right over his knee and spank some sense into her. The Post-Nuke world was not a place to play games in, or sink into infantilism.
“Rona,” the Doomsday Warrior said with sarcasm dripping from his lips, “great idea. Why don’t we just stop here and camp for the night? This foot-and-a-half-wide trail is plenty of room to set up some tents, tether the ’brids, and cook up a—”
“Oh shut up, Mr. Know-It-Fucking-All,” Rona yelled loudly, slamming her hands against her hips in a fury of frustration. The sound merely pushed the team of hybrid horses into increased paroxysms of fear and panic. The animal—and human—howls continued nonstop for nearly an hour, until they reached the bottom of the mountain and hit a relatively flat plateau that stretched on for several miles.
“There—happy?” Rockson asked, stopping the lead ’brid and turning to face Rona, who continued to walk right past him, her eyes cold, her sweet lips locked into a vise of feminine indignation.
“I see, the silent treatment,” Rock said with a laugh, checking the ridges ahead for signs of the first of Century City’s I.D. markings. “Well, do me a favor,” he called out to her as she strode haughtily past him, “keep it up. As they used to say in the old days—about children—you should be seen but not heard.” Even from yards away Rock could see his words had raised her hackles. Her shoulders tightened up, her hands clenched into tight fists. But she had to learn. God only knew how she had survived all these years, tramping through forests and mountains, talking a mile a minute, complaining, stopping to admire the view. Every creature, every predator, every Red soldier waiting in ambush could hear her approach for miles. She was a walking, talking advertisement for a quick meal.
As if the beasts of the field had read his mind, Rockson heard a sudden scream from ahead where Rona had disappeared around a grove of trees. He dropped the tether of the lead ’brid and put his hand on its long face for a second, making it stay. The others pulled up just behind it and came to a stop, quickly lowering their shaggy black and brown heads, searching for choice morsels to munch on. The Doomsday Warrior rushed forward in long, even strides. He exhaled as he rounded the grove, relaxing his body for combat, and whipped out the .12-gauge death dealer from its long holster at his side. But the moment he laid eyes on the danger that menaced Rona, his face broke into a wide grin. Some sort of moose creature, with immense horns big enough for a man to sit in, was approaching the yelling woman with a quizzical expression on its face. Rockson knew the thing was a herbivore with teeth that could only grind down vegetation, not chew flesh. He slowed to a walk as Rona looked over at him, yelling.
“Kill it, Rock, kill it before it gets me!” She slashed her large hunting knife at the forest animal that stood a good eight feet at the shoulder. But her activities only aroused the moose’s curiosity. It lowered its head and seemed to try to scoop her up in one of the wide shovels on its dark brown furred skull.
“Okay, fellow, enough’s enough,” Rockson said, lowering his shotpistol. He fired several yards i
n front of it. The moose jerked backward at the sound and bolted, hightailing it off into the thick woods a quarter-mile off.
“About time,” Rona barked at Rockson as she put the glistening grooved knife back in its leather sheath.
“The first thing my father ever taught me, Rona,” the Doomsday Warrior said softly, not trying to needle her further—but trying to make her really hear him, “was never leave the house without some heavy firepower strapped on. Even to take a leak. Why, where I grew up, you’d go to the outhouse in the morning and there’d be a snar-lizard or a plains dog sitting right there inside the darned thing, shielding itself from the night. Woulda lost more than just my pants—if I wasn’t real careful.”
Rona laughed in spite of herself. “All right, tough guy, I get the message. I made an ass of myself—and I paid.”
“Oh, I don’t think that old fleabitten thing was going to do much damage. Maybe a few bites—but even a dumb moose is genetically programmed to know what he’s chewing—which is more than you can say for most humans.” They headed back to the ’brids, who were grazing happily, grateful for the momentary rest. Rona couldn’t look at Rockson but kept her eyes on the ground as he tried to make friendly conversation. She knew she had been a bitch lately. And she knew why—though she didn’t want to admit it, even to herself. Whenever they spent this much time together, she always found herself falling more and more in love with him. With a man whose only destiny was to fight, whose whole life was devoted to kicking the ass of the Russian bear all the way back to Moscow. And now she knew he had met another woman—Kim Langford, the daughter of the newly elected President of the Re-United States of America. Rockson had told her their second night out on the hunting trip, after they had made love twice.
“Do you love me?” Rona had asked as softly as a leaf dropping, staring up into the sky, following a funnel of fiery sparks with her eyes. There had been a long silence. Then, for the first time ever, he had answered.
“Yes.”
So now, he loved both of them. Two women—one man. Something would have to give. And it wouldn’t be her. Rockson was the only man she had ever met who could handle her. She was too wild, to animalistic, too passionate—and too damned tough—for the run-of-the-mill fellow. She had chewed men up and spat them out like so many M&M’s in her earlier days. Wrapped them around her little finger, spun them a few times, and sent them flying off with dumb looks and broken hearts. Until Rockson. Then she had known what it was like to pine after someone, to think of him endlessly, lying in bed night after night, his face burning down from the very ceiling. With the Doomsday Warrior, she had known all the bittersweet ways of love. For her, there could be no other. But of him she was not sure.
It took them just half a day more to reach the outer edge of Century City’s defensive perimeters. They were challenged by the hidden guards and allowed through after answering with the codewords for the week, “Donald gave flowers to Daisy.” Rock still felt a lump in his throat as they approached the recently bombed subterranean world that had been his home for years. Thank God the bomb hadn’t actually detonated on the mountain itself. It had gone off instead over a thousand feet up, and it had been a small-yield N-bomb, not a big one, which Rock knew Vassily had outlawed—for the moment—from being used anywhere in the world. Even Russian bureaucrats could see that the ecology of the planet had been so fucked up by the thousands of atomic weapons detonated in the war that the slightest bit more could send the world right off into never-never land. The newest black hole in space.
Still, it had done plenty of damage. Even the smallest of atomic devices unleashes the fires of hell.
They headed through a series of camouflage nets strung up in the pine forest around the base of Carson Mountain, beneath which the city lay, and then down a newly dug, hard-dirt-packed ramp into a dimly lit cavern. The old main entrance had been covered over with a thousand tons of rock and dirt. It would never again know the light of day. But one of the larger emergency egresses had been quickly expanded, and within days had been taking a major flow of traffic. Rockson had helped with digging out, once he had recovered from the wounds he had received fighting off the assassination team sent to kill him. It had been painful digging out the dead, their bodies already rotting into a grotesque misshapen stew beneath the tons of debris. So much of Century City had been destroyed, the inhabitants had found themselves teary-eyed for days. The main thoroughfare had been heavily damaged, the walls on two sides collapsing in. Hydroponics, which had supplied nearly 75% of the city’s nutritional needs, had been swept away in the tidal wave of nutrient-filled fluids that had exploded from the cracked cases. The Library and Archives section had been covered with dust and a layer of rubble—but, miraculously, almost all of the records were saved, brought out, and carefully dusted and cleaned. The commissary, gymnasium, many of the living quarters—were all destroyed, ripped apart like the cracked, heaving ground after an earthquake.
But Rockson could see, as he and Rona handed their ’brids over to the food processing workers who began unloading the piles of meat, that the heart, the soul of the city was still as alive as ever. Everywhere, the place was a beehive of activity—repair crews headed off in all directions with cement, wood, even whole steel beams they rolled along by hand on dollies to replace caved-in sections.
Already the place was beginning to take on at least a semblance of its old self. All the debris had been cleared out of Lincoln Plaza, in just the time Rock and Rona had been out hunting. And with the evidence of the blast gone, and the bodies and broken hearts all carted off into the bottomless caverns that dropped into the dozing volcano beneath Mt. Ice, the place was beginning to look like home. The statue of Lincoln posing proudly in the very center of the square—a forum for public speakers, entertainment, and Saturday-night dances—had had its right arm torn off in the blast, but craftsmen had already welded the pieces back on.
The Doomsday Warrior didn’t have time right now to make a thorough tour of the place and see where his services could be best used. There were two people he had to visit first.
“Rona, I’ll see you—later,” he said quietly, knowing she was feeling a lot of emotion.
“Sure, Rock, later,” the red-headed female Freefighter said coolly with a dry laugh. She tossed her head, the fiery red hair whipping around, burning in the argon lights above as if it were on fire. He headed into a Decon Chamber just inside the security point and removed his hunting clothes, fatigues made at the clothing factory of Century City for recirculation after they had been thoroughly degermed and deradiated. Naked, the Doomsday Warrior stepped into the semitransparent enclosed glass chamber. The door shut with a whooshing sound, followed by a sudden intake of air as the atmosphere Rock had brought with him from the outside world was sucked away and instantly replaced with Century City’s own tri-filtered air.
“Please remove your clothes,” a pleasant female voice said from a hidden speaker above him.
“I already have,” Rock answered in a bored voice, having gone through the procedure countless times.
“Good,” the voice replied. “Stage One will begin.” A soft gong followed and then purple lights played on the floor and ceiling. A shower of water cascaded down from inset sprinklers, washing Rockson with a mixture of suds and disinfectants. The water was shot down under high pressure, giving the whole body a not unpleasurable, tickling, streaming sensation. After twenty seconds he was rinsed with pure water.
“Stage Two,” the voice intoned as brilliant purple lights played over his body, creating bizarre waves of color. He kept his eyes closed, seeing the color through his lids. All personnel were required to wear dark polarized glasses for the procedure, but Rockson knew that his mutant eyes could handle the energy spectrum. His retinas were not the same as those of the Homo Sapiens. Rockson could stare into the face of the sun without burning them.
“Stage Three.” A deep humming noise built up beneath his feet, growing in intensity until it filled the chamber with
a physical presence. Rockson could feel the million-times-a-second vibration caused by the deep sound waves hold his body in a blurring grip. The subsonic waves were literally shaking loose any bits of virus or ensconced germ that were trying to take root in the Freefighter’s skin. At last it was over and the door opened again with a flash.
“Thank you,” the voice said.
“Yeah, thanks, lady,” Rock answered the speaker as he stepped out. “I hope it was as good for you as it was for me.” He put on the set of carefully folded civvies that had been automatically deposited on a table next to the chamber. The lightweight white cotton shirt and pants felt good, cool against his skin after a week of thorn-and-sweat-filled fatigues covered with the blood of a hundred slaughtered animals.
None of the mini-elevators that Century City had been installing over the last several weeks were yet working, so Rock headed up the cleared ramp system to Level 4 and the hospital. The place had never been so filled. Cots were everywhere, side by side, even along the halls. The staff of the hospital, as well-trained and hard-working as they were, had been in no way equipped for the magnitude of injuries that the bomb blast had caused and was continuing to create. The worst were the burn victims, their skin slowly coming off, layer after layer, like a diseased bloody onion. There was little that could be done for them other than shoot them full of antibiotics and pain killers and pray that their systems could slowly repair the burnt parts. Gamma rays, which the neutron bomb had released, burn with an insidious pain deep into the body, disrupting the cells, stabbing into their nuclei and destroying the subatomic brains that regulate them. The body melts from the inside out, the very substance of the flesh turning into a pinkish gruel that flows out of the eyes and nose and ears—and any other opening that it can find.