Doomsday Warrior 01 (37 page)

“Floorwalker?” Rock asked.

“Yes, that be my name. Son of great-great-grandfather named Floorwalker Macy. That be my name. That be all our name. We Floorwalker.” Again, he raised his head high, obviously proud of the family title.

“Can you make sense out of that, Perkins?” Rock asked.

“Archaic expression. I think it’s a title of a store employee in ancient times. Probably someone who literally walked the floor. Some sort of security perhaps. And Macy’s, if I’m not mistaken, was a chain of large stores that sold general merchandise.”

One of the savages in the crowd suddenly fell forward, hitting the floor with a thud. The others pulled away, leaving their fallen comrade in the aisle.

“Him hurt,” Floorwalker Macy said. “Rip flesh and now red and blood.” Slade walked over to the fallen primitive and looked at the young man’s leg which was swollen purple from a nasty slash the week before.

“Grab me my medikit would you, Detroit?” Slade yelled over to the Freefighter. Detroit high-tailed several hundred yards over to the hybrids and came back with the kit. Slade quickly stuck a painkilling hypo in three spots around the infected spot, as the savage grimaced on the floor.

“Him hurt! Him hurt!” the leader of the primitives started up again.

“Calm down,” Rock said softly. “He’s helping. He’s fixing the hurt.” The leader looked suspicious, but folded his arms across his hairy chest and looked on curiously. Slade waited a minute or two until the local anesthetic had a chance to work and then sliced the wound open. Green and white pus oozed out of the infected area and dripped onto the ground. Slade wiped the inside of the wound down with alcohol and then rubbed in antibiotic cream. He sealed the wound with plastisalve and stood up.

“Good as new, Chief,” the young doctor said. “Just keep him off his feet for two days and he’ll be throwing spears like the rest of them.”

“Good. That be good,” the chief said eloquently. “We be friends now.” He walked over to Slade and grabbed him in a bear hug. “Friend!” Slade’s face turned red as the bear hug squeezed half the wind out of him. The other Floorwalkers ran over to their new hero and, one by one, grabbed Slade around the shoulders and pulled him close to their hearts.

“I think that’s their form of payment,” Chen said, watching with amusement. After all the profuse thanks were given, Perkins questioned the store creatures who sat on the floor grouped around the Freefighters.

“Are there any firesticks here or food?” Perkins asked, notebook in hand, as he took notes on the fascinating offshoot of the human race. The war had led to the evolution of man in thousands of isolated little communities. Adapting to their special needs and situations and helped along by the genetic engineering rearrangements of atomic radiation, countless new forms of Homo sapiens had sprung up throughout the world.

“Food all gone in store here, but there be more cans in Price Chopper Store.”

“Price Chopper?” asked Rockson.

“Probably another food chain store. Don’t forget, Rockson, America was a huge, vast society with chain stores that sold every kind of goods throughout America. There was A&P, Associated, Grand Union—”

“My God, do you know everything about Americana?” Rock asked, smiling. “When do you get the time to learn all this stuff?”

“I’m fascinated by history. Someday there’ll be a unified America again and we’ll need to know her history. A country without a history is like a man without a heart, no soul, no spirit. We need every precise bit of our history that we can find and reassemble. Someday, Rock, this mall should be a museum that our children and their children’s children can come to and learn of their nation’s past.”

“And those spears,” Perkins continued, questioning the Macy’s creatures. “You made these?”

“Yes, from pots and pans in Kitchenwares, sharpened over fire, beaten into points. Use kitchen knives too—tie to mop handles. We kill. Kill death dogs and cat beasts out in fog. Sharp!” he said, holding one up, handing it over to Rockson. Rock hefted the homemade weapon. It was actually very well balanced. He pulled it back and swung his arm forward, flinging the four-foot spear through the air. It flew a good eighty feet and twanged to a stop in the center of a pillar, still adorned with ribbons and paper garnishes of a century before, now yellowed and turned to dust from the relentless grinding down of time.

“We live here,” the chief said, sweeping his hands across the vast, shadowed expanses of the mall. “I am Chief Floorwalker. It be that way since our fathers’ fathers’ fathers’ fathers’ time. We stay here, hunt and trap creatures that come near. We eat food from Food and Delicacies on second floor. We wear clothes from racks—” He pointed down at his new blue boxer shorts. “You like? There be more—” the creature said benignly to Slade. The Freefighters all laughed.

“Go ahead, Slade,” McCaughlin said through guffaws, “take a dozen. You could sell them back in C.C. Underwear like that is hard to find.” The Freefighters, even Rock, cracked up. The Macy’s creatures looked on, confused at first, and then joined in. Laughter filled the darkened aisles, echoed up the rusting escalators.

“Any Russians nearby?” Rock asked.

“Last time come—two, three years ago. We killed with spears. Many. We kill all. We have. Want to see?”

“What the hell is he talking about?” Rock asked Perkins.

“I think I have an idea,” the archaeologist said nervously.

“Come! You come with us!” the leader of the Macy’s people said, pulling Rock and Slade with his two huge, hairy hands. They went through a long aisle of gloves, mufflers and ear warmers and then through two swinging doors to a back room. Here, hundreds of mannequins, naked, waiting eternally to be clothed and displayed, stood silently. Floorwalker led them to the center and, pointing proudly, said, “Russians.”

Rock and Slade and the other Freefighters gathered tightly behind, looked up and gasped. There, in full uniform, were thirty Russian troops. They had been partially preserved but had still decomposed over the years. Their faces were dripping, rotting monstrosities, held together with glue; their bony hands, flesh curdled down to a thin leather, clutched the pistols or weapons they had been holding when the end came. They were posed in positions of action—one Red with his leg lifted as if running, another holding up a Kalashnikov to take aim.

“Good? Yes?” Floorwalker said, looking at Rockson. The other creatures looked on anxiously, listening to his response.

“Careful, Rock,” Perkins said. “I think this corpse museum has some sort of religious significance to them. Be complimentary.”

“It’s beautiful. Truly beautiful.” Rock walked over and hugged the beaming savage, who grabbed him back. The people all cheered. Rock stepped back and surveyed the sculpture of dead flesh more closely.

“I think you’ve got a friend for life, Rock,” Perkins said, examining the creation.

“I like their rifles,” McCaughlin said. “Looks like they’re still serviceable. Freshly oiled. These Macy’s folk must take good care of their merchandise.”

The Floorwalker clan seemed overjoyed by the enthusiastic reaction to their display of Russians. They exited the main lobby and walked out into the fog bank and then quickly back into another building some hundred feet away. The Price Chopper. They walked through the ruins of the supermarket. Cans, cans everywhere—mostly rusted to bits, some opened and eaten long ago. But not the prize that Erickson went looking for and found.

“Look men, Maxwell House coffee—two containers of it. We can have old-fashioned American coffee.” They wasted no time, this being a treat of extraordinary dimension, and made a fire on the floor, brewing the coffee in a big pot that one of the primitives ran and got from Kitchenwares. They poured the bubbling, gritty brew through a strainer and into orange-and-blue designer cups.

“Goddamn delicious!” Berger said, starting a second cup. The men all savored the brew. The coffee beans that were grown in hydroponics back in C.C. somehow didn’t have enough richness. These, on the other hand. Rock offered a cup to Archer and then to the Macy’s creatures, who hesitantly took the steaming coffee and, after burning their lips several times, got big smiles on their hairy faces.

“This good,” the leader said. “All this time we no know.”

“Tell me,” Perkins continued with his questions, trying to gather as much data about the Macy’s people as possible. “Where are the women? Children?”

“We keep in other building, way in back. Pet Supplies—big building. Thick walls. Safe there. No come out. Many dangers here.” He swept his hand across the outside window. What strange creatures were breeding out in that fog bank, Rock wondered, that put such fear into these people.

“Tell me,” Perkins asked, leaning closer, “what do you all believe in? I mean, why are you here, what is your god?”

The Macy’s man looked at him incredulously. “What our god? Macy’s is God. We here to serve Macy’s and Mr. Macy. This his temple on Earth. That why we keep displays neat. Take what we need but everything ready for business.” The Freefighters listened in fascination.

“We keep store clean for when Mr. Macy come down from the fog and open store. Then he take us in giant Buicks and Toyotas down the highway to the home of the gods—New York Macy’s. There we live happy, no danger.” He smiled as all around him, the Macy’s creatures, sighed in appreciation of their myth they lived for and would die to protect.

“Mr. Macy be very proud when he come here and see store so neat. That why we kill Russians. They mess up place. No one can mess up store.” He looked fiercely at Rock and Slade.

“It is very well kept,” Perkins said dubiously, looking down at the leader who sat, his long, hairy arms hanging to the floor, in front of his people.

“We decorate store every Christmas—have plastic tree with stars we put up. Hold special sale on all goods. But no one comes. Never. You want buy anything?” he suddenly asked, looking hopefully at the Freefighters. “On sale, everything, plus ten percent discount for Americans.”

“I think you might have a few sales,” Rock said, looking around at the amused Freefighters. “But God knows what we’ll pay you with.”

Thirty-Three

T
he Expeditionary Force headed out the next morning after stocking up on several hard or even impossible things to obtain in 2089
A.D.
, courtesy of the Floorwalkers. Perkins had stayed up nearly half the night questioning them about their society. He had taken pages of notes and begged Rock to let them stay another day.

“Sorry, pal,” Rockson said as they loaded up their ’brids. “We’re already behind schedule and off course and I’m sure there are loads more surprises ahead, so—”

“But, Rock, it’s so . . . so fascinating. These people have evolved a unique society in a hundred years, using just the materials at hand. It demonstrates the infinite adaptability of the human species. The isolated tribes that have sprung up around the country must be studied. As scientists it’s our obligation to—”

“I agree, Perkins. But we also have a mission to obtain weapons that will help return America to us. That will have to have priority over all other scientific experiments for the moment. Sorry. Anyway, you can come back. They ain’t going nowhere.”

The mist seemed slightly thinner as they rode northwest from the mall. After several hours it began to dissipate altogether and they found themselves back on one of the many almost-dead plains that seemed to fill the midsection of the country. The sun was strong once they came fully out of the mist, but a constant wind blew across the flatlands keeping the men and the ’brids relatively cool.

They began passing ruins of towerlike structures. Spires forty feet tall, twisted red metal, arches in doorways, entrances twice the height of any human.

“Ever see anything like ’em, Rock?” Perkins asked, taking pictures with his 35mm camera.

“Not me,” the man who had crossed nearly half the country in his days of trekking, replied. “They look functional somehow. Perhaps astronomical tools, or timekeepers, using the sun.” Rock had seen pictures of the ancient Druid Stonehenge and the sundials of the pre-technological world. Perhaps these were part of America’s distant past as well, though he couldn’t remember reading about them.

“I’ve never heard of anything like this, Rock,” Perkins continued. “There’s something strange about them, though I can’t quite put my finger on it.”

They passed more of the slightly tilted metal towers, every nine-and-a-half miles, all pointing directly northwest, the tops of the towers just visible to one another. Perkins got Rockson to agree to a rest stop next to one of the structures and quickly shot up the ladder, snapping shots of everything. He reached the top, a kind of oval room, and yelled down from one of the ten large windows evenly spaced around the egg-shaped chamber, “Nothing in here. Just metal, but I can see back and forwards, just the tops of the towers. With mirrors you could easily signal messages.” He poked around some more, trying to figure out how the structure had been built, finding no seams, rivets or screws. It was as if the entire tower was one piece. Impossible.

They headed slowly forward, keeping a steady pace that the ’brids could keep up indefinitely, provided they had their daily water and grass or wheat or whatever. Hybrids were extremely versatile—one of their major strong points being the ability to eat almost everything and anything, which they continually tried to do.

The sun crept like a wounded creature searching for safety beneath the horizon, as the sky turned green then ocher. As the beet-red orb fell lower and lower to the cracked, parched surface of the endless flatlands ahead, the stars grew brighter. The northern lights came on like a kaleidoscopic light show of the skies, flashing, splashing, dancing across the purple-tinged sky. Curtains of super-accelerated electrons, caught in the magnetic intensity of the Van Allen Belt high above the Earth, poured explosions of rainbow shrapnel across the northern sky.

The edge of the sun touched the desert floor, then something happened. A noise—coming at them. High overhead but dropping. Something they had missed entirely thus far on their expedition—a Red drone flying reconnaissance. The drone, its sensors picking up movement below, zeroed in on them. There was nowhere to hide, nowhere to run. The ground was flat for miles with scarcely more than a few dwarf cactuses to hide behind.