Doomsday Warrior 03 - The Last American (15 page)

But that had been years before. The Reds had quickly learned that the Glowers meant death to all who came near. Bullets couldn’t harm them, nor flame, nor gas, nor any of the vast weaponry that the Russians had heaped upon them in the middle of the postwar century. The blue energy circling their bodies stopped anything from coming in from the outside world. Any weapon or nay flesh. They couldn’t even touch one another. Physically, at least. Thus their psychic communication had developed to an intense degree. Nor could they eat. Food would vaporize at their touch. But somehow their evolution into such a high-energy state had also altered their energy-absorption system, so that they took in all their sustenance from the rays of the highly radioactive soil all around them—for their home was in the most devastated part of the country, possibly the “hottest” land on earth.

The Glowers, of all creatures on the planet, thrived on that which killed life. Just walking across the megarad ground on which they lived gave them their food, their energy supply. None of them ate. They neither procreated nor died. They existed, pure beings, in the here and now.

They had felt the Evil growing, in the large circles when all the People joined and they merged into the Perfect One. They had begun feeling the Evil a year before. Had sensed it, and then followed it with their hearts. The freefighters, they knew, were about to hold perhaps their most important meeting ever. The Glowers knew the outer world, knew of the battles between the Free Cities and the Russians. They had never interfered. Theirs was not the way of death. They were the new evolution into a more perfect state of harmony with all things.

Yet . . . even those who had evolved with the very concept of noninterference with humans as the tenet of their spiritual philosophy could stand by no longer. Times were changing. That was part of the Evil. But the Evil could be stopped and the Good could be released. That was the Way. The freefighters were trying to recreate the spirit of America at a convention they were holding in the north lands. The Glowers knew where it was, they knew all who were coming—even the Rockson. And they knew that the Russians had planted a spy in the very midst of the convention. A man who right now was transmitting coded messages back to his KGB bosses in Denver. To Colonel Killov, the man who was so despised that they could feel the very fear of him emanate from the seventy-five million slave workers in the Red fortress factories. The Glowers knew that the chance for America to reclaim itself, to be restored to a more perfect harmony, was doomed—unless . . .

The People ripped through the night on their shadowy craft, skimming across the glowing wastelands that no human being had ever seen. Land where the earth actually moved and writhed like a snake in pain, so wounded had it been by the bombs. The Glowers lived in this worst of deathlands, in the hottest of the killing radiations. When the Reds had sent over their flaming spears of death, raining down by the thousands, turning green to black, and red to black and blue to black, they had unwittingly set in motion forces that would now come back to fight them, to challenge them, to help destroy them. The Glowers.

Evolution never forgets, and time brings . . . revenge.

Eleven

T
he first few days out were very hard on Dean Keppel. He tried to act as if everything was fine, but Rock could see that the man was suffering severely from the constant riding, the thin, harsh air, and the sun—always the sun beating down on them like a sledgehammer. Ms. Shriver also was in obvious discomfort. She rode high in the air on her ’brid, her gluteus maximus muscles apparently not reacting well to the endless bumping and shifting of the saddle. But to her credit she didn’t complain—not a word. Rock had to give her that. His respect for her grew just a notch. They’d toughen up. They’d have to. There could be no stopping out here, no resting for more than a few minutes at a time. Every drop of water was precious, every shadow could mean death.

There were a thousand rules to staying alive out here. Rockson knew them all. Somehow he’d have to keep his charges alive. He mentioned to Chen that they were hitting some rough territory ahead and to keep a very close eye on the pair.

“I think between the two of us we should be able to make a safe delivery,” the Chinese freefighter laughed. “I’ll keep my lasso ready in case one of them heads off a cliff.” He patted the coiled rope on the side of the saddle. Among his numerous weapons, Chen was also quite adept at roping—having watched films of old rodeos they had dug up, plus some instruction from one ol’ timer who had actually been in a rodeo when he was very young.

Rockson kept the lead, not traveling at quite the pace he would have if it had just been himself and Chen, but still moving along at a good pace. There were many of the electric storm clouds that seemed to coalesce over wide open spaces—churning, immense black and brown thunderheads that were filled constantly with hundreds of lightning bolts. Rock had seen this type of clouds suddenly descend and shoot out their lethal bolts at everything around them—trees, animals, people. But these seemed quite high up and the electric aura created by the phenomenon prohibited the use of spydrones, enabling the party to travel across the open spaces throughout the day. The four of them would be a real catch. And Rockson didn’t want to think about what they’d do to Keppel and Shriver, who hadn’t received any painblock training at all.

They rode for hours at a time, stopping for fifteen minutes and then moving on, in cycles that seemed to stretch on endlessly. On the fourth day out they began entering a strange new terrain—the ground became nearly orange in color, the hue of a bright pumpkin. Rock took out his radmeter, but it didn’t register very high. They moved onto the soft, porous dirt, the ’brids whinnying and skittish as they found it hard to get a good foothold. Nearly everything in this zone of land was the same color—bushes, trees, even several small squirrellike creatures they got a glimpse of, flying from tree to tree, using two tails to steer them. The orange zone lasted for about twenty miles and then they hit more low, jagged hills—these obviously created by the debris thrown up from a nearby nuke blast. Thousands, millions of small rocks had almost melted into one another, forming a surface that was sharp on the top and fused together into a solid mass just an inch deep. The hybrids had more hard going as the sharp stones cut into their hooves, themselves virtually steel hard. They pranced and tried to find smooth surfaces to come down on, without much luck.

Here nothing seemed to live. They were in a wasteland of black and gray fist-sized stones. It was as if the entire planet were made of this razor-sharp rock, as it stretched on in every direction. The rads were quite a bit higher here, going into the twenties on the meter, which was calibrated to go up to a hundred. Most of the freefighters had taken over the top dose numerous times and seemed none the worse for wear. Rock himself had been exposed to such high doses that he should surely be dead—but he wasn’t. Part of the genetic structure of the evolving Homo Mutatiens species was very high resistance to radiation. Even Dean Keppel and Ms. Shriver, though not able to take the doses the freefighters could, had radiation-shielding cells in their flesh. Otherwise such a journey would have been unthinkable.

The Reds had never evolved such radiation resistance. Since their invasion of the United States, they had stayed as much as possible inside their Fortress Cities, with Slave Labor Sectors, factories, and military defenses built within one immense walled structure, capable in some cases of holding as many as half a million people. Within their own quarters they had movies, special kitchens, and whorehouses staffed with the prettiest of the young slave girls, so the army had no particular reason or inclination to settle the “wilds,” as they referred to them. When they went out, it was in convoys, wearing full-body radiation suits and breathing through oxygen masks. Thus, paradoxically, though the Reds had taken over America, the army that came to conquer her had itself grown soft, lazy, while the freefighters had been bred stronger and tougher than any human who had ever existed. America—a virtual laboratory of super speeded-up evolution. Rockson was at the vanguard of that new evolution, and his powers and abilities had only begun to be known—even to himself.

On the fifth day out they saw what appeared to be an immense bomb crater’s rim-wall, which stood as tall and fierce as the day it was created. They could see it from miles away like some sort of totem to the God of Death, taking up more and more of the horizon as they drew close.

“Must be one of the Super Bombs the Reds sent over,” Rock said over his shoulder to the others behind him.

“Super Bomb?” Ms. Shriver asked curiously.

“Yeah, supposedly they had secretly stockpiled twenty Super Bombs—in the hundred-megaton class. Most destructive weapon ever seen on the face of this earth. The idea—at least what I can gather from my readings in the history section of the Century City library—was that the Reds figured if there was ever an entire army they had to take out somewhere they could just drop one of these babies. A conventional nuke, even one of your big boys, like, say, a ten meg, will only kill for a range of about eight to ten miles, but an advancing army is more likely to take up to fifty, spread out, with flanking actions and all. So the hundred meg was designed to actually destroy an entire nation’s army—maybe five hundred thousand to one million men.”

“That’s horrifying, Mr. Rockson,” Ms. Shriver said, putting her hand over her thin red mouth.

“But, apparently, when they had the First Strike they decided to throw in the kitchen sink, too, so they sent these babies over. God knows where the others landed, but this looks like it did major rearranging.” They moved at a medium pace forward until they came right up to the high sloped wall of the blast crater.

Dean Keppel looked straight up in the air at the structure. “I swear it goes up into the darn clouds,” he said, with a whistle.

“We must climb that?” Ms. Shriver asked, looking incredulously at Rockson. Her costume was already disintegrating in the dust and the rain of the journey. Her pith helmet had vanished two days before into the waiting and gurgling sands of a quicksand bog. Her right shoe—a sort of mix of desert boot and high heel—had become hopelessly lodged between two rocks when she went climbing to fetch some flowers. Rock had fashioned her a new pair of foot coverings from some thick hide. When he had first been thrust out into the wilderness in midwinter, still a child, he had done the same thing—only that time he had killed the deer with just a knife. It had gored him with its single horn coming out from the center of its head, but he had won. He had cut out the innards, eaten them, and then slept inside the body to keep warm that night, a small fire in front of the blood-smelling corpse.

With her new foot gear and her saddle soreness gone, Ms. Shriver had become a little more relaxed. Dean Keppel’s chest had been giving him problems, and Rockson was getting a little concerned. The last time Rock had seen Keppel cough, the handkerchief he held to his lips came off red.

The four delegates from Century City looked up at the ominous crater wall for a long time before Rockson finally said, “Okay, let’s climb it. We can reach the summit before nightfall and camp there.” They headed up, the hybrids slowly and surefootedly making their way up the sharply slanted wall. It took them a good three hours to get to the summit, the ’brids very carefully picking out a route up the bomb crater. Their riders swayed back and forth and held on tight, grasping their arms around the creatures’ wide necks. Somehow they made it, though Dean Keppel and Ms. Shriver looked a shade of swamp-green after a while.

Rockson got to the top first, and the palomino ambled out onto a wide plateau, several hundred feet across. Rock first looked back to see how the others were doing. Ms. Shriver was still a good quarter-mile below with Dean Keppel, and Chen was keeping watch on any falling delegates. Rock took a quick scan of the land behind them—small hills of the bomb-melted rocks. Then the orange zone, then hills and more hills. From up top the ravaged terrain took on an eerie beauty, creating a mosaic of shapes and color like some huge abstract painting. The known was behind, the unknown lay ahead. Rock made a clicking sound with his lips and the ’brid spun around and headed to the other side of the crater lip. Not a thing grew on the charcoallike dirt, not the tiniest weed, not the smallest insect. The crater was cursed, Rock could feel the negative energy of the place—probably composed of atomized flesh and vaporized homes and trees and . . . he felt the anguish and evil that lay beneath the sky-high crater. His mind and body were totally attuned to the environment and what was in it. Sometimes he saw too much.

The Doomsay Warrior stopped the palomino at the very edge of the inside crater wall. “Whooa, Snorter,” he commanded as the ’brid seemed momentarily confused by the deep drop ahead. He pulled the reins back sharply and tightened his legs around the hybrid’s wide midsection. The great mount responded instantly to Rock’s commands and stopped dead in its tracks, looking out over the great shining plain below.

Rock whistled and took out his field glasses to view the endless alabaster white desert ahead. It took up the whole horizon, every direction as far as his binoculars could see. White—a brilliant, blinding, saturating white. Rock had never seen anything that looked so smooth, so perfect, without a dot of color to mar the whiteness, without a rise to break the absolute flatness. There was an almost hypnotic pulsation to the entire terrain, as if it was throbbing, beating deep inside, though Rockson was sure it was some sort of optical illusion created by the sun’s bouncing off the whiteness like a mirror. It was hard to believe the vast stretch of land was natural, it had such a precision, an evenness to it, flatness calibrated to the millimeter. He aimed the radmeter down the long, curving slope of the inside wall, this side not nearly as steep as the outside wall—medium count, up to the forties already, and he knew when they got to the bottom it would go a lot higher. But there was no turning back, they had only one way to go—straight north.