Doomsday Warrior 07 - American Defiance (15 page)

As the blow came forward, Rockson merely turned his body ninety degrees, grabbed the outstretched fist underneath his right arm, and slammed his left palm into the extended elbow, cracking it in half with a loud snap like a chicken bone. There was an eerie silence for about one second as the Reds suddenly realized something was wrong. They reached for their pistols at the same instant that the sergeant, whose elbow was irreparably shattered, let out a scream to wake the dead.

There was no time for subtlety. Rock threw off the blanket and jumped forward, slamming both palms into the throats of the two closest Reds, driving the blows up with all his strength. Their larynxes smashed in, carotid arteries mashed into dog food, the two threw their hands around their throats unable even to scream as they began falling slowly to the ground, blood oozing from their grimacing mouths. Rock sensed the fourth remaining Russian just behind him, and threw himself down and backward just as a shot rang out, aimed for his head. The bullet slammed into the broken-armed sergeant who was still bellowing in pain several yards away, hitting him in the kneecap. He plummeted to the ground as if hit by lightning, his face driving into the cobblestone street with such force that his teeth were driven into the lower frontal portion of his brain, instantly slicing his cerebral cortex into pink quivering pieces.

Rock drove his fist up into the last Red’s groin just above him, and as the groaning soldier doubled over in pain, Rockson met the face with a fist as hard and immovable as the side of a mountain. The Red smashed into the calloused knuckles and bounced off like a ricocheting bullet. He dropped to the cool stone street somewhere between coma and death.

Rock glanced quickly around the street, but not a creature was stirring—at least none of these. But off in the distance growing closer by the second, was what sounded like a hundred pairs of feet. He couldn’t go on—it was too dangerous. He knew what he had come to know, and it was time to get out. Rock backtracked the way he had come, having memorized every turn, every landmark on the circuitous two-mile back-street route. The Reds in their typical unimaginative stupidity had decided he would come back to the front gates of the huge fortress to escape—which didn’t seem like a very good idea to Rock, since he knew they’d be waiting there. Instead, he went through the muddy alleys and side streets, the dwellings of the American slave workers—moans of pain, a thousand nightmares on each block of barracks. He wished he could help them—but not tonight. Soon, very soon.

He heard the sirens and saw lights in the distance behind him. The whole fort was coming to life. They apparently didn’t take kindly to the death of four of their murdering goons. Rock went on past the slave camp, past even the huge piles of Untouchables sleeping in little groups on the cold bare ground, huddled together for warmth. They stirred nervously as he passed by and held out hands, begging for rubles. At last he came to the wide strip of flat barren earth the Reds always cleared at the perimeters of their forts. Floodlights shone down with a brilliant glare from the towers that were spaced every two hundred feet apart. But other than a patrol that circled the entire fortress by jeep every twenty minutes, Rock new there was no one actually guarding the electrified sixteen-foot-high fence, topped with barbed wire, which marked the very edge of Ft. Svetlanya.

Rockson rushed from the protecting shadows out into the lit area, running as fast as his legs could carry him, right up to the chain link steel fence.
There
—he saw it—the edge of the pole he had put through one of the small openings at the bottom of the fence. He reached out carefully and pulled the long wooden pole through. Since it was non-conducting, it didn’t set off the electrical devices. Rock walked back until he was about fifty feet from the high fence and gripped the pole tightly in both hands. There would be only one chance, he thought to himself, focusing every bit of mental and physical energy on that one task of getting over the top. He suddenly heard the roar of a jeep’s engine. They were coming back ahead of schedule. There was no time.

The Doomsday Warrior exhaled, then took a deep breath and ran down the slight incline toward the fence. The jeep swung around a curve and a spotlight mounted on the front caught Rockson dead on. He continued without breaking stride, planting the other end of the two-inch-thick pole in the dirt. With every ounce of his mutant strength, Rock shifted his weight forward and up, kicking off his piston legs. A stream of Red slugs headed like a swarm of man-eating locusts toward him, but Rockson was already climbing up into the air in a perfect wide arc. He saw the fence coming, then the very top. The barbed wire came toward him, its spiked teeth searching for blood. With one final burst of power, Rock twisted his wrists up and flipped his hips in a somersault over the top. He made it—barely. The very upper strands of barbed wire ripped across his right calf as he flew over, slicing open a three-inch-long gash that oozed a stream of blood. But he was over. He soared on nearly ten feet and arced down toward the ground, timing it so he curled up the moment he made contact and rolled over and over. On the far side of the fence the jeep roared to a stop and the five patrol guards inside it opened up with small arms fire and a mounted .50mm machine gun on the back. Rockson came out of his roll, and in a low crouch ran deeper into the blackness that quickly began where the circles of the searchlights ended.

The guards in their haste had forgotten that they were firing through a highly charged metal fence. Some of their slugs made it through the openings—but many didn’t. They ripped through the steel mesh, setting off mini-explosions of electrical discharge. The sparks and the white-hot glowing metal of the fence flew right back toward the Russian jeep, searing the faces and uniforms of the troops inside. As the men screamed in pain, trying to stamp out the little flames all over their bodies, a large star-shaped piece of red-hot fence steel landed in the cartridge-belt feed of the .50mm. Within seconds, the whole crate went up like the Fourth of July—and then the gas tank from below, sending the jeep and its occupants on a quick fiery ride to hell.

Rockson turned back from the edge of some woods a quarter of a mile off and saw the immolated jeep. This particular batch of Reds wasn’t going to get him. Not tonight. He found his ’brid tied up another few hundred yards off and took off at full speed the moment he mounted it, not wanting to wait around while the Reds sent out a whole armada of searchlight-carrying choppers to find and destroy one man. But again, Rock circumnavigated the trouble spots, heading to the west, nearly five miles out of his way—but also completely out of the main search zones that the Russians would be concentrating on. He thanked God for their unchanging bureaucratic tactics. After one hundred years of occupying America, they still hadn’t figured out how to effectively fight a guerilla war—preferring the old methods of just sending out vast numbers of men and heavy artillery and laying waste to whole sections of the country. As long as they kept fighting like that, the Freefighters were safe.

It took the Doomsday Warrior nearly three hours of hard riding to get back to the hidden encampment inside a nearly inaccessible valley bordered by two steep mountains. The moment he dismounted he called for a meeting of the entire Aussie and American force. Within minutes they had formed a circle on the ground around him.

“Now, I know this is going to sound crazy,” Rockson began, each eye fixed on him, “but I had a plan sprout in my brain on the way back here.”

“And what might that bloody be?” Lieutenant Boyd piped up sitting among his men. Rockson gulped, knowing this might well be the hardest sell he would ever make.

“Well, let me ask
you
a question,” he said, turning toward the Aussie commander. “These boomerangs of yours . . . couldn’t they also—theoretically of course—couldn’t they guide, say, a creature like those overgrown octopi—make them do things?”

“If you’re talkin’ about making ’em carry your bedding and food—forget it, chum. If you’re talkin’ about just heading ’em a certain direction—that’s about the limit, at least at this point, of what we can do.”

“Exactly, exactly,” Rockson smiled, growing excited. “Guiding them—guiding them right into the walls of Fort Svetlanya.”

“The bloody what of what?” Boyd spoke up, not quite sure he was hearing the concept correctly.

“You say you can direct them like sheep, right? So these are sheep—and we’re guiding them into a corral—the fort. So they happen to be a thousand times bigger and meaner than sheep. But it all works just the same. We could send those monsters through the western wall, and in the chaos created pluck the President and Kim right out of Red hands.” Rock glanced around at them all with a slightly pleading look in his eyes. Now that the Reds had been attacked, they would be on full alert. The Freefighters would never be able to bluff their way in as the original plan had intended.

Boyd conferred privately with his men for a minute. Then he turned back to Rockson.

“We’ll give it a bloomin’ try,” the Aussie grinned. “But you realize we’re talking about trying to control these thingos for nearly twenty miles. If anything—and I mean anything—goes wrong, we’re all dead men. It would take only seconds for one of those tentacles to take us all out.”

“Pal, everything is trying to take us out all the time—the trick is to get it before it gets you.” The plan was carefully worked out with Rockson giving instructions from his reconnaissance of the fort of exactly where the octopi should be guided. Boyd and his men went over the crude maps Rock drew for them, making sure they understood every bit of it. There was no room for error—not when you’re controlling something bigger than a whale and with teeth like a dinosaur.

The Aussies sacrificed one of their boomerangs, turning on the screaming siren and dropping it straight down into the chasm from which the octopi had emerged. They mounted their camels, outfitting them with semi-blinders and ear pads so the creatures wouldn’t go berserk. Then they waited. It didn’t take long. One, another, then more tentacles than they could count came wriggling over the top. Within thirty seconds there were twelve of the gargantuan creatures, their three-story-high heads appearing out of the darkness like icebergs rising from an ocean. The twelve underground mutations pulled themselves out of the earthquake-created shaftway and ran in the direction opposite that in which the boomers were flying, shrieking bloody murder. Twelve mountains moved by nothing but sound waves.

The Aussies followed along, split up on each side of the line of fleeing octapoids, keeping pace atop their camels. In synchronized fashion, they each threw their boomers in a particular orbit so that they came to within just yards of the terrified mutations and kept them on track. Now that the creatures had hit their full stride, tentacles moving ceaselessly, they reached a speed of nearly twenty-five miles an hour. It was as if the very clouds had descended from the skies and were marching across the land, blotting out the daylight, crushing, toppling any and every thing in their path.

Rockson watched and whistled through his teeth. The damned thing was working. It was impossible, but . . . The Freefighters mounted and took off after the bizarre parade just disappearing over a sandy rise. By plan, they would stay a good quarter of a mile behind the proceedings so the Australians could keep total control over their flock—and have some room to maneuver in case one of them broke free from the pack. The Doomsday Warrior couldn’t help but think about man’s mastery over the beast. How human intelligence gave him dominance over even the largest of monstrosities. Never had mankind’s preeminence at the top of the evolutionary scale been so starkly outlined for the Doomsday Warrior. Perhaps in some fashion—using the Australian concepts of sound control—the beasts, the mutations of America, could become part of the fighting forces that would ultimately throw the Red bear back into his den across the sea. He made a mental note to talk to Dr. Shecter about it back at Century City—perhaps the Aussies could spare one of their boomers for study. Then he caught himself—planning for the future when the present hadn’t yet unraveled its unknowable outcome. There was a long way to go—and a million things that could go wrong.

But the Australians seemed in full control. They herded the pack of octopi like so many sheep, staying just out of the way of the thrashing tentacles, which aside from propelling the mutations across the hard-packed sand occasionally lashed out, trying to grab one of them. Fortunately, the dim-witted octopi, whose brains were hardly larger than those of cows, were unable to link up the fact that it was the small pink creatures riding just out of range who were the ones responsible, for the deafening sounds. Instead they fled in pain, trying to do nothing more than get away—which, try as the might, they were unable to accomplish.

The parade hurtled across the prairie as the sun slowly sank like a burning ship on the horizon and at last dropped from sight. The evening sky filled with the magnetic storms that sometimes raged high above the earth in kaleidoscopic patterns, filling the heavens with constantly shifting rainbows of luminescent color. And far beneath these waves of deadly beauty, the twelve largest creatures that had ever walked on the face of the earth moved through the darkness like apparitions from hell itself, here to deliver a message of doom.

The Captain of the Guard of Fort Svetlanya walked stiffly along the high walkways that ran along the top of the fortifications of the military sector. A fort within a fort, in case even their own slaves should ever revolt. The fifty-foot concrete walls were higher than the thirty-foot-high front and side walls that surrounded the southern, eastern, and western portions of the entire fortress, enabling him to see out over the plains. He strode as straight as a ruler, his shoulders held high, his chest bedecked with the many ribbons he had received during his ten years of duty here in the wastelands of America. He carried a checklist on a clipboard, and as he passed each machine-gun emplacement and artillery unit he checked off that all was as it should be. Although they hadn’t been attacked for nearly fifty years, out here in the wilds the fort was always on the highest security—every gun tower manned twenty-four hours a day. Still, it was hard not to fall asleep on post, as nothing ever stirred out there on the dark plains except the occasional horned owl flapping its thick wings in search of lizard meat or the flocks of bats that screeched out their sonic radar as they cruised by in the hundreds.