Doomsday Warrior 07 - American Defiance (7 page)

“I hope to hell I haven’t sent him to his death,” thought Magrundy as he slipped off into a dark sleep.

They tore across the plains, the kid on top of an immense wild black stallion. Half maverick, half mutant—it was one of the largest steeds around and fast as the wind. The dog, a mutant Ridgeback, raced alongside. It was a huge animal, a good two hundred pounds, taller than the Great Danes of pre-War years. Indeed, it was said that all the Ridgebacks in the area had originally been created from the mating of a rad-mutated Great Dane and a wolf, back in the last century.

They came to a series of low hills with groves of black-barked trees and rode into them, the air growing cool and dark around them.

The Ridgeback’s fur suddenly rose. He froze. “What is it, boy? What?” asked Billy.

Suddenly from out of the gathering darkness sprang three pairs of the reddest eyes that the kid had ever seen. Woodswolves, snarling and edging closer to them. There were others, too, waiting out there. The kid ripped out his shotgun and fired into the darkness. He was suddenly knocked to the ground—a double row of Mutawolf teeth sank deep into his left shoulder. The wolf let go and went for Billy’s throat. The boy pressed the barrel of his gun into the hard chest and fired.

The dead wolf was so heavy that the kid had a hard time pushing it off himself. His dog had torn another beast into bloody pieces, and had leapt into the darkness, pursuing the others who cut and run.

“Greg! Greg!” the kid yelled into the night. Minutes later, the dog returned. He was bloodied and torn. A row of teeth marks grooved the dog’s steel collar.

“And you never liked that steel collar. Well, boy, I’ll bet you like it now.” The anti-wolf collar, designed to protect the jugular vein, had saved the dog’s life.

They rode on for hours, the kid avoiding any forested areas where they could be trapped. With the wild hybrid horse beneath his legs, going at full speed across the evening landscape, nothing could stop him. The moon rose, clear and calm as a luminous pearl in a sea of velvet blackness, lighting the increasingly steep hills that turned into mountains as they hit the upper Rockies. They rode through the night, Billy’s heart beating with excitement at the danger and importance of the mission.

The sun was just beginning to sink its teeth into the star-spotted skin of dawn when Greg again snarled and looked up at his master with pleading, anxious eyes. Billy reined in his horse and pulled out his shotgun again. The Ridgeback could smell something a half-mile away—and it wouldn’t have growled and stopped unless something were headed toward them.

The kid wanted with all his heart to go on, to get to Century City to pass on his vital message. But he knew that patience was essential out here. Only a fool barged on into the unknown.

Within a few minutes they came by—a Red patrol, six men—Soviet army, luckily, and not the KGB. They were dressed sloppily, their rifles hanging haphazardly from their shoulders. Their jeep groaned from the burden of carrying all six and its load of lumpy, heavily packed leather bags. Turquoise and other tradables, Billy thought. These troops were out at night doing some raiding up and down the road, taking for themselves what the scattered American settlers couldn’t defend. Perhaps their commander, wherever they came from—probably Fort Dzersk, a hundred miles east—gave them some percentage of whatever they looted. The stuff would be shipped out and fetch a good price back in the Soviet Empire. The soldiers and their commander would amass a nice little nest egg from their unpleasant service in radioactive America.

The kid was itching to hit the trigger and blast the bastards. Who knew how many these six pigs had murdered for that loot. But he waited, the Ridgeback silent at his side, alert, until they passed. Then he headed on.

Six

“R
ock, Rock!” Rath yelled down the corridor of the Archives Room, where the Doomsday Warrior and his companions were in the midst of recovering all the historical files and books they could salvage. “A message for you—urgent!”

Rockson got up off his knees; he had been gluing together an ancient document from the era of the original Founding Fathers that one of Century City’s scouting expeditions had found nearly submerged in the rubble. He dusted himself off and headed down the corridor toward the outer hall where people were scurrying by.

“So, where’s the message?” asked Rockson, holding his hands out to Rath.

The Intelligence Chief grinned and pointed to a filthy, sweat-covered boy who was breathing hard, a wild look in his eyes. “Won’t tell this ‘important message’ to anyone but you, Rock. I sorta suspect it’s just a way of meeting his idol—but we’ll see.” Rath folded his arms, leaned back against the wall, and waited.

“You Mr. Rockson?” the kid asked, wide-eyed. The Doomsday Warrior was indeed his hero.

“Yeah, kid, I sure am,” Rock said, grinning down at the tiny package of courage and grit. “Now, what’s so important that you’d get so dirty and tired to come here?”

“I’m with the Pony Express, sir, Mr. Rockson. My father was away and so—when one of the men up near where I live came to our place and told me the message—well, I just had to deliver it.” Billy took a deep breath and began again, giving a monotone recital of the message Magrudy had had him memorize. “The President, Mr. Charles Langford, and his daughter, Kim, have been caught by the Reds, Mr. Rockson. Taken to Fort Svetlanya.”

“When?” Rockson asked, leaning forward, grasping the kid by the shoulders.

“About two days before I left to come here—so figure about four days—something like that.”

“Jesus Christ,” Rockson said, raising his steel frame to its full six foot two inches, his face white with rage and fear. “We’ve got to get a fighting force together immediately and rescue them.”

He looked Rath square in the eyes. “Look, man, you know there’s no time to go through a lengthy debate in the City Council about whether or not to send out a rescue team. So as Commander of the City’s military forces, I hereby declare this an Emergency Military Response, Priority One, and command ten men and supplies to leave within two hours.”

“You could be heading for trouble on this one,” Rath said, fixing a hard stare on the Doomsday Warrior’s face. “Any military response is, at least in principle, supposed to go through the Military Committee.”

“I’ll take full responsibility,” Rockson said. “Hours, minutes could be crucial in a situation like this. They won’t kill them right away—there’s too much knowledge to be gained. They’ll be careful with them—as soon as they realize what they’ve got.”

He turned back toward Billy, who was looking around the super-modern walls, lighting, awed by the speed and efficiency with which everything moved around him—and by Rockson. The Rockson himself, standing just feet away. It was all like a dream. “Rath, take care of this kid here. You did good—real good, boy,” Rock said, resting his hand on the child’s shoulder. “Any man in this city would be proud to have someone like you fighting alongside him—and that includes me.”

The Doomsday Warrior turned and headed down the corridor. He rushed down the sloping fiberglass-and-cement ramp toward the lower levels. Already he was planning just who to bring, method of travel, route. And how to attack Svetlanya—he’d have to see if any plans for that particular Red Fortress had been gathered by the Intelligence Forces. There was always so much to do before the Freefighting Strike Force was sent out. And this time, it all had to be done in hours. But he could handle it. As he walked down the ramps into the sub-basement of the world that had been carved into the mountain, his eyes grew bright, sparkling with a violent energy—one blue, one violet star, threatening to nova on the Red Galaxies surrounding him. They’d need heavy armaments and explosives. For there was no question about it—rivers of blood were about to flow.

Seven

T
he moon swooped up into the dark violet sky like a thing alive—searching, hunting as it sent down its burning waves of white. Tonight it looked so pure, untouchable against the radioactively glowing upper atmosphere of the earth, streaked with endlessly orbiting webs of green and pink that had come from the isotopes released by the atomic war of the last century.

Ted Rockson, high atop his golden-maned hybrid, surveyed the heavens with a cynical eye. Behind him the rest of the expeditionary attack force rode in silence, each ’brid about ten feet behind the next. Beautiful, Rock thought to himself, staring up at the perfect harmony of the moon and the stars, the rose-tinged clouds that floated over it all. It created for a second a vision of ultimate beauty, a Japanese print spread out across the epic heavens, made for his eyes only. “Beautiful,” Rockson mumbled to himself, spitting to the side of the leaf-covered trail down which the squad was slowly headed. Beautiful until you knew, as Shecter’s astronomy team had discovered, that those heavens, those high clouds were filled with radioactive elements, atoms whose super-hot nuclei would transmit rays of death for thousands, tens of thousands of years.

Rockson shifted in his saddle and patted the big mutant horse on the side. It seemed a little frisky, uncomfortable tonight. They knew—all the ’brids knew when they were going out on a mission. Sometimes, when his partial telepathic powers were particularly receptive, Rockson could sense the thoughts of the big steeds—their simple needs, their devotion to Man, their strength. But not tonight. Tonight Rock’s head felt sealed tight as a coffin. The faces of Kim and the President kept getting in the way of the stars above him. Faces suddenly covered with blood, faces screaming as the Red Mindbreakers dug ever deeper with their laser probes—melting flesh, memory, being.

He gritted his teeth together, grinding them with a dull crunching sound. The Reds couldn’t have done it so fast. Their bureaucracy would slow things down. The Russian military machine was a great fat sleeping bear—deadly when fully aroused, but slow as molasses in rising from its lethargy. As much as the Doomsday Warrior had ever prayed—he prayed. He liked to think that he could pretty much handle things
his
way. But tonight he looked up at the skies, looked past the strontium clouds, past the bands of orange, writhing like luminescent snakes far above, looked on past the moon, beyond even the stars. He looked and searched and felt with all his heart for a God that he wasn’t even sure existed, and begged him to spare Kim’s and Langford’s lives.

They rode through the cool night at a slow, even gait, letting the hybrids set their own pace. They’d have to go slowly until they got out of the steep parts of the mountain range, but Rock didn’t want to be out on a ledge ten thousand feet up when the sun came up. The Russian unmanned spy drones had become more and more prevalent since the disastrous Red defeat at Forrester Valley. They continued to scour the mountains for survivors, unsure just how much damage they had inflicted on the Freefighting forces.

At last they hit the lower hills to the north, and the ’brids were able to pick up a little speed through the sloping fields of daisies, sunflowers, and puffs. Detroit came up to the lead, edging his smaller ’brid near Rock’s. His sharp, trained fighting eyes constantly scoured the terrain ahead. He had been out with Rockson on many missions—each somehow more dangerous than the one before. And each they had survived, often against overwhelming odds. But they were all mortal, mortal as any dumb slob lying with his guts hanging out of his belly in a gulley somewhere. And the near loss of his arm had made Detroit acutely aware of that fact.

“Starting to get a little old for this sort of thing,” the black Freefighter said with a thin grin as he glanced over at Rockson, bouncing atop the wide mutant steed.

“Never too old for a good battle,” Rock replied, though neither man could really see the other now that the moon had dropped like a corpse wrapped in dirty linen into the grave of night’s black soil. “How’s the arm?” Rock asked, glancing over at the muscular arms that were both raised, holding the reins.

“I swear it’s better than ever,” Detroit raised it, twisting it around in all directions. “I was having some muscle aches in the elbow—spasms—before it got cut. Now—nothing. Feels great. I been working out my pitching and grenade-throwing and I’m already up to my old stats. Fastballs at 95 mph. Grenades heaved over three hundred feet.” Detroit, besides being armed with the Liberator automatic rifle that Century City manufactured and shipped out to other Free cities as well, always carried nearly two dozen grenades in bandoliers across his chest. Grenades armed to explode, send out waves of burning phosphorous or stun gas. The ebony Freefighter was a one-man army with a portable arsenal. The two rode on in silence for a while, both enjoying the cool dew-scented breezes of early morning and the first choruses of waking birds, calling out their indignant high-pitched greetings to one another.

“Seriously, Rock,” Detroit said, turning again after a long period of thought. “Do you ever wonder where it will all end? I mean the war—the fighting, the endless bloodshed.”

Rock was just as thoughtful for a few seconds, and then he answered softly, “No.”

“ ’Cause ya know, while I was lying in the hospital bed, I had a lot of time to think. And when a man has too much time, I don’t know, maybe he gets to thinking about things he really shouldn’t. It ain’t a question of being afraid or anything like that. Even death—I been ready for his .45 into my brain for a long, long time. It’s just that—sometimes I wonder about settling down, having a wife, family. The whole thing. Have a kid who looks like me—take him fishing, teach him to play ball. Am I going crazy, Rock? I mean, these are myths right from my past. It’s like racial American memories, nightmares, right?” He looked at Rockson with a kind of desperation the Doomsday Warrior had never seen in the bull-shouldered fighter before.

Rockson allowed himself a deep exhalation, glancing up at the ocean of sky slowly changing from black to darkest purple, and turned back to Detroit, whose features were slowly coming into view as the edge of the sun just broke a ridge of pines ahead. “We’ve got a curse on us—me and you,” the Doomsday Warrior said solemnly to his right-hand man. “The curse of the Warrior. The curse of all those men who have had to spend their lives fighting, destroying, living in the very fires of hell. We can’t be like other men, my friend. Even though we might want to with all our hearts.
Our
nightmares are those of softness, and gentle caresses—the ties that bind. The nightmares of ten thousand bloody corpses—those we can live with, easily.”