Doomsday Warrior 12 - Death American Style (2 page)

Dhul Qarnain sang out, his voice as strong as the wind,

“Praise be to Allah, Lord of the creation

The Compassionate, the Merciful

King of Judgement Day!

You alone we worship, and to you alone

We pray for help.

Guide us to the straight path

The path of those whom you have favored

Not of those who have incurred your wrath

Nor of those who have gone astray.”

Dhul Qarnain stood up from the white sands, his red robe snapping in the wind like a red flame reaching up to burn the sky.

“Hear me, my warriors. Our time has come. The day is near when the sky shall be ripped asunder, when the stars shall scatter and the oceans roll together; when the graves are hurled about. Each soul shall know what it has done and what it has failed to do.”

His voice was deep and beautiful, and seemed to carry effortlessly across the parched sands. Each man clearly heard every word as if it were being said just to him. They trembled, almost in ecstacy, beneath their new warriors’ robes.

“When the sun ceases to shine, when the heaven’s fall and the mountains are blown away. When the seas are set afire, when Hell burns fiercely, then each soul shall know what it has done.

“My brave warriors,” he smiled, his teeth sparkling in the moonlight that flooded down onto the desert, “when you meet the unbelievers in the battlefield, strike off their heads, and when you have laid them low, turn your face to the next battle. Those brave men who are slain in the War of Allah will not perish, but will fly to Paradise.

“This is the Paradise that the righteous have been promised. There shall flow in it rivers of unpolluted water and rivers of milk forever fresh. Rivers of delectable nectar and rivers of clearest honey. You shall eat therein of every fruit and receive forgiveness from Allah. You shall dwell in the gardens of Eden, reclining upon soft couches. You shall be decked with bracelets of gold and arrayed in garments of fine green silk and rich brocade. Allah will make your faces shine with joy. You shall never again feel scorching heat or biting cold. Trees will spread their shade around you and fruits will hang in clusters over you. This is your reward.

“You shall be served with silver dishes and beakers as large as goblets, and cups brim-full with ginger-flavored water from the Fount of Selsabil. You shall be attended by dark-eyed angels graced with eternal youth, with teeth like sprinkled pearls.”

He lifted his arms to the heavens and cried out in a booming voice. “Do not fear death, my warriors. When you gaze out upon Paradise you will behold a kingdom blissful and glorious. Praise be to Allah.”

The men shouted as a single man, their voices rising high into the cool night air. “Praise be to Allah!”

Qarnain let his arms drop limply to his sides, his head bowed slightly forward. But Killov did not bow. His head held high, his eyes fixed straight ahead as if looking into eternity, he watched, just watched the Servants.

It had been the most beautiful moment of their lives. The men’s eyes glowed with a fanatical brilliance like the piercing moon under which they had lain for the last year, as if the cool white rays of the dead world had infused their bodies with a power beyond the mortal man’s—a magic strength that made them invulnerable and superhuman. They were with Allah now. He would cradle them in His arms. They were His children, His flesh, His warriors, ready to fight the Holy War. Ready for—nay,
seeking
death. A martyr’s death. The holiest of the holy, giving their blood in His name. They could feel His spirit in them now. It pulsed through their veins, hot and powerful. They were immortal and without fear.

And Killov was satisfied. These men could do the job.

Now the desert was far behind; it seemed a dream, a memory from some distant childhood. Another place, another world that was swallowed up whole by the raging walls of seawater that swelled around the tanker, threatening, always threatening to pull her down into the dark bowels of the sea.

The Servants of Death walked the long, flat deck of the
Dhul Hajja,
Kalashnikov rifles slung around their shoulders, their faces stung by the salty spray. They stared out at the black waves and the cold cloud-cracked sky streaked with jagged lines of rain. Sheets of light and darkness battled back and forth in the sky like armies at war.

The sun tried to rise, advancing relentlessly, until brightness seemed almost to take hold. But the raging clouds clawed their way back until they covered over, and took prisoner, her white rays.

The light and the darkness battled through the long day, fighting, fighting for men’s souls. For now the ship was coming, and IT was the darkness, and Death.

The men on board watched the elements war in the sky until at last the sun fell wounded and sank into the boiling cauldron of the sea. The black hand of night fell over the tanker and pushed her on, on toward America.

Two

“G
od
, it’s big,” Rona Wallender exclaimed to the muscular, tan man who lay by her side at the top of the hill.

“It’s nine feet if it’s an inch,” Ted Rockson said, watching the creature with his field glasses—one of the newest of Shecter’s science boy’s gadgets. The binoculars autofocused on whatever moved, so that even if the user didn’t know what the hell he was doing, the binocs would zoom in on the enemy, even if hidden in the bush or forest. But it wasn’t exactly an enemy that the glasses had just telescoped up to, at least not a human enemy. The image of the creature some two hundred yards away, just coming out from the shadows of a Rocky Mountain forest, filled Rockson’s view—a redhide grizzly, one of the biggest and nastiest he’d ever seen. This one looked like an old male—a rogue. They got real mean when they got old—got all cranky, running through the woods swiping down whole trees, killing any damned thing that got within reach. Rockson had seen one lay waste to the whole side of a mountain years before. The thing had run wild like a drunken psychopath on the rampage. It was hard to believe a living creature—and not a bomb—had done all the damage that it had by the time it was through.

“Let me take a look, my binocs aren’t clear,” Rona protested. Her hand reached over and half ripped the glasses away from Rock’s grasp. He looked around annoyed at the red-haired woman who had been his lover—and fellow Freefighter—for years. Rona Wallender. Damn it, why did he love her—and hate her—so? She was such a bitch at times—and such a lovely, beautiful, soft woman at others. Rock let out a little angry snort but she took no note of it, already swinging the glasses back and forth across the opposite slope, searching for the immense carnivore. Her buttocks and thighs pressed tight against her frayed army khakis, circa late 2080’s. Rockson half felt like grabbing her, right there on the spot . . . Even though all they’d been doing was making love through the long cold nights for a week now, out here in the most beautiful parts of the Rockies. The stars so clear, the wildlife abundant and the vegetation thick and lush; flowers dotting the slopes everywhere in rainbows of petaled beauty. Somehow this part of the Rocky Mountain Range had been left untouched, relatively so anyway, by most of the nuclear devastation that had swept across America a century before. It was Ted Rockson’s favorite place on earth.

“Oh Rock, its teeth—they’re huge,” Rona half squealed. She tossed her head and her flaming red hair spun around behind her shoulders like the burning mane of some wild and untameable creature, just like the one she was staring at. She gulped hard twice, and then looked back again, her elbows resting on the thick grass that swirled around them like the edges of a Van Gogh painting. “Are we really going to go after—that?” she asked, unsure now of the mission that for days she had been boasting to Rockson would be a snap. Even though she had never seen a redhide grizzly up close, just pictures of them back at Century City. But a picture does not a reality make. For here, on the mountain, she could see it, and hear it’s low growling like the thunder from cannons far off—and smell it, a dank, almost foul smell that filled the nose like a shot of ammonia. It was thick on the wind that, thank God, brought its smell to them—and not theirs to it.

It was Shecter’s Field Operations Staff’s idea that they needed a freshly stunned, undamaged body of one of the huge bears to test out a theory of Shecter’s—the theory of retro-evolution. It proposed the radioactivity, the radical reordering of genetics after the nuke war, were all Nature’s way of returning to the past, of simplifying things, making a world where animals might be once again balanced among themselves. Only, many of these “new” animals were nightmares. Most of the old creatures were dying out. The “normal” ones. Only “normal” had no meaning anymore. Not in a gamma-rayed, beta-rayed, every-goddamned-rayed-and-waved world—where not a living thing could find a place to hide from the radiation.

No, it was the mutants that would survive. The mutants like Rock—with his mismatched aqua and violet eyes, the stark streak of white down the middle of his jet black hair. Rockson was a Star-Patterned mutant, as they were called because of the star shape that appeared on some part of the body. Rona, too, was mutant, but Shecter and many of the others in homebase—Century City—mostly the older ones, were normals, Homo sapiens. Homo sapiens vs. Homo mutatiens. Which one would win—which would die out, as extinct as any dinosaur that had once shaken the earth?

“The mission would be a combination vacation/specimen hunting expedition—” Dr. Hart, chief of Shecter’s Biological Labs had naively suggested. And Rock had agreed, had set off into the wilds with Rona. They had set out with a team of six hybrid horses, sturdy ones, to find the N’hokari, as the Indians called the redhide bear. Plus bring back some meat for Century City’s larders!

“Rock, maybe we should skip this one,” Rona said softly, slipping the glasses back to him in a somewhat subdued fashion. Men—Russians, cannibals, mountain bandits, these she could handle. But huge mountain monsters with jaws that looked like they could slaver down a Volksvagen without burping were not her idea of a nice summer vacation in the Rockies.

“Forget it, sugar,” the Doomsday Warrior replied with a little I-told-you-so grin. For he
had
told her so. That hunting N’hokari was not a stag shoot, or a rabbit hunt. And now she was starting to see what he meant. “You’re along for the ride,” Rock said in a whisper, not wanting to take the slightest chance that the carnivore might hear them. He knew the creatures had uncannily good senses. “And that’s the one we’re going after. And fast—while we’re downwind. Once that son of a bitch catches our scent—forget it. It’ll come charging in like a goddamned bull.” He grabbed the tranq-rifle that the C.C. tech’s had given him—had said a single dose of the stuff could take out dinosaurs. Only it wasn’t a dinosaur Rockson was after. Something meaner.

“Come on,” Rock said, leaping up when he saw that it was rising on its hind legs, looking away from them as it clawed and ripped at some branches of a tree, tearing at the thing as if it hated it. Rona looked up, reluctant to rise from the ground as Rock rushed forward across the steeply angled slope of the 8,000-foot mountain they were on, and toward the grizzly some two hundred yards off atop a little plateau of trees and bushes. She was more afraid of staying alone, Rona suddenly decided as she heard a noise from behind her in the woods. She jumped up, unslinging the Liberator automatic rifle from her shoulder, this one a new variation on an old theme—super-short barrel and stock, so that it handled more like a snub-nosed submachine gun than a combat rifle. It fired .50-caliber slugs, super-grooved and silicon-coated so they could go through quarter-inch steel. Holding the weapon firmly in her sweating palms, she rushed after the rapidly departing Rockson.

Somehow, as they drew closer, even with her finger on the trigger of the banana-clip death machine, Rona didn’t feel too secure. For as they got nearer,
it
got bigger and bigger. Even Rockson was a little taken aback as he got to within about twenty-five yards of the beast, crouching down low behind a boulder so the thing couldn’t see him. The bears had notoriously bad eyesight—almost like a rhino’s. But their sense of smell, and hearing, were acute. It was tremendous—stretched up on its back legs, growling and slamming away at the fir tree with both claws, it must have stood twelve feet high. It’s immense red and maroon striped head was as big as a tire, while its red and orange spotted body was stark and almost mesmerizing with its dayglo coloration. The long arms of the carnivore must have stretched out six feet on a side—as tall as Rock.

Its claws were meat hooks, steel-like daggers that tore into the bark in the middle of the tree, ripping it open like a hyena tearing at the flesh of the newly dead.

The tree it was attacking was a good two feet thick, and seemed impossible to fell without a chainsaw. It stood a good 75 feet high, stretching out with high, thick branches. But the bear didn’t seem to know that it shouldn’t have been able to knock down whole trees—for it had already slammed through half the thickness, sending splinters and bark flying off in every direction. It was working its way down to the center of the conifer, to its core, biting away at the innards with its immense salivating jaws like some sort of beaver gone mad. And from the wasteland of tumbled smaller trees behind it every twenty feet or so, it appeared that the thing could well finish what it had set out to do. What was it after? Bees flew everywhere.
Honey.

Suddenly there was a
snap.
Rockson didn’t know if it was he who made it as he shifted his leg, or Rona breaking a twig as she slid down behind the boulder alongside of him. But whoever made the noise—the redhide grizzly heard it. That was for sure. The thing’s ears instantly perked up like little radar scopes as it stood stock-still, not making a sound. It froze like a statue for a second, its eyes turned clearly toward them so they could see its terrifying majesty in full face. And what a face. Its saucer-sized eyes tried to focus, and then it seemed to come to rest on the two of them, and a low growl hissed from between its hardly opened jaws. It swung its head far back and let out an unearthly howl, more like a timber wolf than a damned bear. The thing didn’t seem to know what the hell it was.
That’s the trouble with these damned mutations,
Rockson thought darkly to himself, They were all mixed up—and took it out on the world. The grizzly let the immense striped head drop down again, like the blade of a guillotine falling into place. Then it slammed down on all fours and came straight toward them.