Doomsday Warrior 07 - American Defiance (13 page)

The camels seemed more cooperative as the force made its way through the ravaged prairieland of Southern Montana. Perhaps the black openings in the ground all around them put a damper on their usual orneriness, for they barely bellowed their indignation at being ridden, and took careful, almost delicate steps, keeping a nervous eye on the ground. Sharing danger seems to bring men together, and the Freefighters, at first distrustful of the Aussies’ constant joking and beer-swigging, now rode side by side with them, talking and exchanging war stories. With a common language and heritage, the two fighting forces soon found they were much more like one another than they were different, and quick friendships formed amid boisterous laughter as they rode on in the blazing floodlight of the sun.

They had gone perhaps twenty miles, just reaching the end of the earthquake zone, when Rockson, in the lead with Lieutenant Boyd and Detroit riding by his side, heard a shrill whistling scream like that of water boiling rapidly in a steam kettle. He had never heard the sound before—and didn’t like it. Anything unknown put the Doomsday Warrior on full alert—for the unknown meant death ninety-nine times out of a hundred. He raised his right hand, waving it back and forth several times, the signal to slow down, and pulled his Liberator rifle from beneath his saddle. Detroit extracted a grenade from his crisscrossed chest webbing and took the pin out, holding the lever tightly against the steel ball.

“What the bloody hell is that?” Lieutenant Boyd asked a little nervously, not quite ready for the next wave of attack that the American continent seemed to enjoy throwing at him and his men in ceaseless barrages.

“I haven’t got the faintest fucking—” Rock began, but his words sputtered to a stop as he saw something rising out of the final large chasm they had to circumvent. Something horrible, slimy, and hungry. A hundred yards off, a tentacle edged up out of a wide hole, waving, flopping around as if it were searching for something to grab.

“Jesus Christ,” Rockson muttered under his breath as the Attack Force came to an abrupt halt. The blackish-gray appendage was nearly ten feet thick and covered with slime-dripping suckers, round and wide as a man. At first it appeared to be some sort of snake, but as more and more of the thick tentacle emerged, they could see that there was something attached to it, coming up from below. Another of the ghastly whipping appendages suddenly appeared about twenty feet to the right of the first—and then another. Whatever it was was climbing right up out of the battered earth.

With a shriek that nearly sent their mounts into a stampede of fear, the creature that was attached to the tentacles emerged from the chasm. The Freefighters and their Aussie compatriots stared at the thing in frozen shock. They had all seen monstrosities in their time—the world was a zoo of mutations nowadays—but none, even Rockson himself, had seen anything to quite match the hideous earth-dweller that pulled itself up from the darkness. It looked like some sort of octopus—at least its ancestors had once been such. But the octopi of the Pre-War days had been fish-eating creatures, ten feet long at most. This thing looked to be a good hundred feet in length and it dragged itself out of its subterranean world on eight flopping tentacles.

The head emerged at last—a bulbous one-eyed nightmare as big as a truck. And even from their vantage point over a hundred yards away, the Freedom Fighters could see the black crushing jaws, the hundreds of curved teeth that gnashed spasmodically as if chewing something. The thing heaved its bulk completely out of the abyss and seemed to look around as it got its bearings. It had lived its entire life in an underground sea, a world of darkness broken only by the phosphorescent walls of the caverns that contained it. The huge white eye with its red pupil the size of a table, set in the center of the monster, blinked as if the brightness of the sun were bothering it. An oozing liquid poured out from the crevices around the eye, lubricating it. But within seconds the thing’s vision had adjusted enough for it to notice the group of creatures that stood looking at it. The Freefighters could see the thought go through the thing’s head as the eye clearly focused on them—
food.
More food than it had ever seen at one time. The nightmare pit of a mouth opened wide and released another high-pitched scream of hunger and, slowly at first as the legs were not used to the shifting sands, it started towards them. As it came, more of the suckered tentacles poked out from the crevice, feeling for a grip.

“A friend of yours?” Lieutenant Boyd asked Rockson, who was sighting down the scope of his Liberator, unsure of quite what to aim for.

“No, I thought perhaps you had invited him,” Rockson said without taking his eyes from the rifle. He got the thing’s immense eye lined up so that it filled his telescopic sight, and pulled the trigger. The bullet ripped across the few hundred yards in a tenth of a second, and as Rockson watched, tore right into the land octopus’s eye. But nothing happened. No wound, no blood, nothing.

“Jesus Fucking Christ,” Rock said with disgust. “Every goddamned mutation and its cousin seem to be interested in having us for lunch these days. It must have some sort of porous cellular structure, able to absorb bullets, god-knows-what-all without damage.” Detroit pulled his recently reattached arm back and let go with the grenade like an outfielder trying to make the play at the plate. The steel ball flew with pinpoint accuracy, landing just feet from the huge head which rose thirty feet in the air, held up by the undulating tentacles. It went off with a loud concussion, sending up a cloud of smoke. But when the mist of sand and shrapnel cleared, the immense predator was still coming straight for them, gaining speed as it quickly adapted to its new surroundings. Behind it a second, then a third head appeared as its siblings popped out to see what all the commotion was about.

Rockson looked desperately around him. There wasn’t time to make an escape—and with the chasms from the quake dissecting the prairie all around them, they couldn’t even beat a retreat.

“We’ll have to form a defensive perimeter,” the Doomsday Warrior screamed out to the rest of the force, who were barely able to stay atop their steeds—every one of which was trying to bolt as they saw the hungry octopus approaching. “McCaughlin—get the mortar out—we’ll shoot straight on. Chen, get—”

“Begging your pardon, chum,” Lieutenant Boyd said with amazing calmness. “But perhaps you’d let me and me mates take a crack of the whip at these over-legged thingos.”

“No disrespect intended,” Rockson said, “but with your .45’s and a few camels, I don’t see how you could—”

“Ah, matey—we ain’t got no blooming octopussies to play footsie with Down Under but we do got our own bunyip’s as we call ’em—monsters to you Yanks. And over the years—we’ve learned a few tricks of our own.”

“Hey, fella,” Rock said as he dismounted and joined his men, who were frantically preparing a defense to the advancing mutations, “this here is a free country—do any goddamned thing you want.” He paused a moment, suddenly realizing that he had already grown to care about the blasted Aussies, and didn’t want to see them gobbled up as if they had never existed. “But be—bloody careful.”

“It’s the name of the game back in Queensland—being careful, that is,” Boyd replied. He turned to his own men who had already dismounted their camels and thrown blinders over the beasts’ heads, knowing from past experience that when the Bitebacks went totally berserk, there wasn’t much one could do calm them. They didn’t like not being able to see—but had they been able, they wouldn’t have liked what they saw a hell of a lot more.

“Aussies—to the front,” Boyd bellowed out in a voice that competed with the octopus’s own squealing thunder. The Australian force fell to attention in two straight lines in front of the commander. “Boomers out,” Boyd ordered, quickly pulling out his computerized boomerang. Within seconds the entire Australian expedition was holding the strange weapons in their hands.

Rockson groaned, looking at the well-meaning but heading-for-death fighters from the other side of the globe. There was no way in hell those little gadgets were going to even be noticed by the hundred-ton-plus monstrosities heading rapidly toward them.

“Listen up, you bloody ’ockers—we got ourselves a little problem, then, ain’t we. Now, we done this Down Under tons a times. So just be thinking that it’s a bloody load of walking wool—not this too-many-armed dinger, and before you know it, we’ll be biting on some Foster’s again. All right, then?” he asked, saluting them stiffly.

“All right, sir,” the entire platoon yelled back. They turned and then ran off suddenly as if the whole thing had been rehearsed a thousand times—the forward line heading to the right flank of the advancing octopi—the back line to the left. They gave a wide berth to the immense dripping tentacles, which snapped back and forth trying to snag them with their suckers. Rock and his men got down on the ground behind the ’brids, who were trained to lie still so they could be used as firing stands, and opened up with a hail of slugs from their Liberator rifles. The slugs hit the first of the advancing creatures, its tentacles almost within reach of them, slicing a line right across its immense one-eyed bulb of a head. But it was as if the thing’s flesh was able to heal itself instantaneously or was created of such gelatinous matter that it was like Jello. Whatever the scientific explanation, the thing just kept coming like some runaway nightmare hacked out of a madman’s skull. It seemed impossible that something so big, with such huge arms and head, could even move along on the land—but their underground existence had somehow given them the ability to haul themselves forward, throwing the tentacles ahead on each side of themselves and dragging themselves back in, pulling the central mass of their bodies forward. Detroit flung two grenades and then another two in just seconds. All four exploded dead on target, two alongside the eye and two near the grinding spider-like jaws that dripped a rust-brown saliva.

“Jesus, Rock,” Detroit said, turning to his longtime friend, “I think we may have actually bought it this time.” He grabbed another set of grenades and prepared to heave them at the python-like tentacle that was just feet away, deciding then and there that he’d rather take his own life fighting it than be swallowed by those gnashing black teeth, rows and rows of which disappeared inside the belly of the beast. Rockson held his shotpistol in one hand, his Liberator cradled under his other arm. And he prepared to die.

Suddenly there was an almost deafening chorus of what sounded like sirens, something that might have ridden on a police car or a fire engine a century earlier, a wavering high-pitched scream that made the Freefighters throw their hands over their ears. But it was affecting the giant land-roving octopi as well, as their tentacles pulled suddenly back in, forming a protective canopy of legs around them. Just the huge windshield-sized eye, bright red in the center of a sea of white, stared back at them, blinking madly like shutters snapping open and closed.

Rock, with his hands still protecting his ears, looked up at what seemed to be the source of the sound. Something flying in circles around the octopi—boomerangs.

The Australians were throwing their boomers in orbits around the beasts, sending out the brain-splitting siren sounds. All four of the eight-legged monstrosities that had emerged from the wide chasm went into a complete defensive formation with their arms knotted into an impenetrable shield of ten-foot-thick octopus flesh around them.

The Australians let the boomerangs fly circles around the now-motionless predators for about thirty seconds and then started throwing their V-shaped weapons on only the left flank, also raising the intensity of the twenty-five whistling boomers even higher. The sound seemed to make the outer flesh of the octopi begin trembling as if in parallel vibration to the sirens.

The pain was obviously too much for the subterranean mutations. They had never experienced the sensation before, as there had been nothing big enough, tough enough, or daring enough to try to hurt them. But this hurt. The super-high and low-register notes were being fed out through small computerized speakers on the sides of the boomerangs at over 1,000 decibels—the noise level of an atomic bomb detonating from a quarter of a mile off. Shrieking in agony, the pack of octopi headed back toward the hole from which they had come, ripping themselves forward on their block-long legs as if they were running in the mutation Olympics. They reached the edge and literally dove right over, not even caring what they slammed into. Their membranous flesh could take the damage of cave walls much more easily than the sound waves of the twirling boomerangs.

Within a minute it was all over. The giant predators had decided cowardice was the better part of hunger and had returned to the unimaginable darkness below, where they were king.

The Australians walked slowly back to Rock and his men, slapping each other on the back and raising their hands in victory.

“You promised us the Foster’s now, matey,” the Aussie fighters demanded in unison.

“That I did and you bloody blokes deserve it,” Lieutenant Boyd laughed. “You done your dinkum and turned that bonzer into bull dust. But from now on,” he added with an ominous tone, “there’ll be no amber unless we’ve performed exceptional heroics. Like today—we’ve got to kill ourselves some monsters or wipe out a whole Russkie platoon—or something. But there just ain’t enough of the lolly left to be sucking it all down right away.” His men complained—but they were getting rewarded now, and that’s what always matters. They sat down sweating from the exertion of throwing the boomers and put the cool cans of Foster’s—kept that way in a small sun-shielded refrigerator atop one of the camels—against their foreheads and then took deep satisfied slugs.

“I’ve never seen anything like that,” Rockson said as the Australian commander walked over to him with a big smile.

“And ’ope you never do again, Mr. Rockson. I thought we had some strange thingos Down Under—but really, you Yanks always got the biggest, the most horrible, the ugliest—ain’t you now?”