Doomsday Warrior 07 - American Defiance (6 page)

Kim’s thoughts were not of her country, but of the man she loved—Ted Rockson. It had been months since she had seen him. And as time went on, the days became harder and harder. It was sometimes difficult to hold his face in her mind. Yet her love, the desire to be with him, to hold him, love him as a woman should was overwhelming, like a flood of desire threatening to explode at any moment. She knew he was alive. She could dimly sense his presence with her barely developed telepathic powers, brought to life by the Glowers after she and her father had been saved from the very jaws of death by the hideous but compassionate race. If he had been killed, she would know it—would feel the sudden void. And yet he seemed to live so heedless of death, giving everything he had for his country, his Century City, and his fellow Freefighters. He was just like her father—devoted, obsessed with the fight to free America. And so was she, of course. Yet some days, days like today with the sun like a bonfire in the sky, burning down on the low grasslands of the endless plains, jack rabbits darting from bush to bush . . . some days she wished she and Rockson could have just been man and wife, could have lived as they did in the old days—with babies and a house, a two-car garage, and PTA meetings. They were all the things she had read about in the old America—the pre-Nuke America—a place she would never know. She felt an aching in her breasts and in her loins—an aching to feel his hands, his lips upon her. “Oh, Rockson—come to me,” she telepathed through the shimmering heat waves that rose from the flatlands around them. “Come to me, I miss you,” she communicated with all her might, not even knowing if she was sending her thoughts any distance at all. Her eyes filled with tears, which she quickly fought back, as her father slowed his ’brid some ten yards ahead.

They came suddenly to the top of a ridge and looked down over a deep valley strewn with pink and white flowers. Kim sighed. She wished she could make a wreath for Rock’s head and put it on his white streaked hair, gaze into her lover’s mismatched mutant aquamarine and violet eyes once more. Perhaps soon—when her travels with her father took her farther south—perhaps in the snows of winter, she and Rockson would meet and keep each other warm . . .

Her father peered through a pair of plastic electronic binoculars, scanning the valley from his position on the auburn ’brid. He focused on a thin wisp of smoke nearly a thousand feet off. Only the Sovs had mechanical means of transport in these parts. She watched as her father attached the sound detector module to the binoculars and continued to scan. Suddenly he put the binocs down, turned to her in his saddle, and said, “We’d better get out of—”

He never got to finish the sentence. Out of the nearby cluster of trees came a group of Red troops, armed with Kalashnikovs they trained on the President and his daughter. The two didn’t even have a chance to reach for their weapons. They were dragged off their mounts and rushed back to an armored personnel carrier parked behind some trees. A well-sprung trap, President Langford thought bitterly. No place in America was safe from the Red death grip.

Kim and her father were tied up tightly with nylon rope, elbows bound together behind their backs. She prayed that the officer in charge wouldn’t realize who they were. If he did, they would be sent to a Mindbreaking center. Their precious secrets, the locations of the American free cities, would be worked loose from their dissolving minds.

Lieutenant Primorski, who had stalked the two for miles, walked over to Langford, took his chin in his hands and yelled, spitting right into the President’s face, “I know who you are—who could mistake that Mount Rushmore jaw, those piercing blue eyes? It seems I have hooked myself a really big fish indeed. Yes,” the officer said, the veins in his nose ruptured, his cheeks bloated and discolored from too many vodka-soaked nights, “this could be very good for me, very good indeed.” He walked slowly around the two prisoners, a broad smile crossing his face. He knew there was an astronomically large reward for the capture of either Rockson or the so-called “President” of the country. Hundreds of thousands of rubles. Lenin, what a big mansion that would buy back in the Motherland! He would be promoted, become a wealthy, powerful man. He slapped the President on the back suddenly, feeling great warmth for the unfortunate fellow—after all, Langford was about to make him a very rich man.

“Here, Mr. President, have a drop of vodka with me. It will be your last, I can assure you. And as for what lies ahead—well, I’m sure you can imagine. Please have some.”

Langford laughed. “Me? President Langford? You have delusions of grandeur. The President travels with a whole convoy, not just one woman. We’re just simple mountain people.”

Primorski’s beefy face suddenly darkened with fear, the way a bright day is darkened when a thick cloud passes over the sun. His wealth, his women, all his visions of excess threatened to vanish as quickly as they had formed. He slammed the cap back on his silver and turquoise flask and said angrily to the prisoners, “Well, we shall soon find out. No one has ever withstood the laser probes of the Mindbreaker. I’m sure you’ve both heard of
that
little device, even out here in the wastelands.” He snarled sarcastically, “I’ve heard some of you simple mountain people aren’t so simple at all. That you hide weapons, explosives, even artillery in your filthy animal lairs.” He looked toward their motionless ’brids, reins held by a Red trooper, and scanned them quickly with his bloodshot eyes. No, it couldn’t be, he decided instantly. There was no way these two could be transporting anything bigger than a few pistols on the ribsticking mules.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” he yelled out to his subordinates, who pushed Langford and Kim toward a waiting transport truck. “I hate this desolate radioactive world out here. Let’s get back to Fort Svetlanya, where we can warm our goddamned flesh with fire and our blood with vodka.”

Five

“I
seen it with my own two eyes,” Mountainman Farley said, “I swear it. I was jes coming over Chisholm pass when I sees Langford and his daughter—and I wuz jes about to go greet them, when
wham,
this Red Army squad swoops down on ’em and they get themselves tied up and hustled off. I seen it myself.”

“Are you sure it was them—the Langfords?” asked Magrundy, a buckskin-and-fur clad rugged-looking fellow whose bearded face was covered with scars.

“Positive. We bin expecting them for days now in Wallingstown. I was sent out to scout ’em and lead them in to town. I found them all right—but too late. So, I figured, how the hell we gonna get them two out of Fort Svetlanya? I mean, that’s one of the biggest Red military posts in these parts. Now, I reckon the people of Wallingstown are as brave as any Freefighters in this country, but they got thirty, forty, maybe fifty thousand Red soldiers over there. So I ask myself how in blazes we gonna get them out?” The nearly toothless mountainman smiled broadly. “Then it come to me—like in a flash—only one Freefighting city could free ’em—Century City and Ted Rockson. I knows they’d come. So I come to you, Magrundy—to take the message down there.”

“You did good,” Magrundy said, throwing a saddle over his hybrid palomino. “Me and the Pony Express can get the message there within thirty-six hours, I’d reckon.” The Pony Express was the Freefighters’ most valuable means of communication between their Hidden Cities. They were unable to use radio or any other electromagnetic form of communication, since the Reds could pick up their messages from monitoring satellites. So a network of hybrid-riding message carriers—Post Atomic Pony Express—was set up, extending like a spider web across large parts of the country.

Jeb Magrundy loaded the frisky hybrid with water and rifles, waved good-bye to Farley, and rode like the wind across the shattered terrain of South Montana—past the setting sun, which fell like a blazing blood-red pumpkin from the purple sky. It was dangerous to ride at night. The sturdy palomino was a Nocturnal, one of those mutant mountain horses that could see well in darkness. But it didn’t matter what you saw if it was hungry. And Magrundy knew there were plenty of things out there that could eat him and his ’brid in one bloody bite. But it was the President. The goddamned President of the Yewnited States. He gritted his teeth and checked the .12-gauge pump shotgun in the saddle beneath his right leg. He was glad he’d oiled the trigger that morning.

He watched the moon rise—bluish in the mist over the mountains to the east—as his ’brid’s clattering hooves beat a tune of speed and recklessness heading south. He heard the wolves howling at the moon, the growls of tree bears, and the whine of the distant Larkloons. And the snar-lizards. If
they
were out tonight . . . he shuddered at the thought.

Southward, ever southward he rode, hanging on in the nearly impenetrable darkness. Suddenly the ground gave way under him, and the palomino pitched forward into the blackness of night. Magrundy woke up minutes later, his face a mass of blood. The ’brid—its two front legs broken—struggled and whined in pain behind him. He crawled over to the horse and took his pistol from its holster. “Sorry, fella,” he said. He pointed the shotpistol at the horse’s temple and pulled the trigger.

He managed to get up and walk, though with a bit of a limp. He had sprained his left ankle—otherwise, just cuts and bruises. How far did he have to go to the next post? Twenty miles, he figured. Twenty miles of desert, and it was near dawn. What had tripped up the surefooted horse? Magrundy walked behind the dead hybrid—and in the dim light of the half moon he found the holes of Curudiggers! Christ, he thought, Curudiggers only came out of the ground every thirteen years. They had once been cicadas, but the great nuking had changed them. They had become a hundred times larger than before . . . ground-living insects that tunneled like gophers. They stung, too, and their sting was deadly. He saw one, a whining, red-eyed thing—and then another. He backed off. They were repairing the damage the horse had done to their burrows, though, and didn’t have time for
him.
They worked fast, like scarab beetles, but on an enormous scale—wetting the sand in their mandibles, rolling it into balls, and packing it over the exposed burrows. Others came out now and tentatively touched the hybrid’s dead body, stroking it with their long razor-edged jaws. Then they dug in, ripping the dead beast of burden apart within minutes. There were nearly a hundred of them at the feast. Magrundy couldn’t watch. He gathered what he could of his supplies—canteen the most precious—and started hobbling toward the next Pony Express stop.

The sun rose, beginning what promised to be a hellishly hot day. Twenty miles had to be covered. Twenty miles before he fell for the last time. But there was more than his own life at stake—he had the future of America in his hands.

By three o’clock that afternoon, Magrundy was crawling. Exhausted, out of water, the sun beating down like a hot poker on his torn shirt and the exposed skin of his back, at times fusing fabric and flesh together. Since the nuke war, the radiation shield of the ozone layer had weakened, and to non-mutants like Magrundy the sun could be as deadly as venom.

He was on a slowly rising slope of sand. This was the fiftieth or sixtieth dune he had crossed—what did the numbers matter? If he remembered correctly, there was a mile or two of dunes before the steep drop into Brooke Valley—and then water and the shade of the trees at the Pony Express stop. But his lips were so dry, his flesh like a sun-cooked chicken. He could barely move his legs. He wanted to give up, wanted to lie down and die. Maybe if he were going on for just his own sake, he would have given up. But for the President, the goddamned fucking President! As long as there was some life in him, he wouldn’t allow the Red butchers to do their grisly work.

He put his swelling leg forward again, then the other, his hands grasping at the hot air. In half an hour he reached the top of the dune—this was it. This was the end. He was nearly blind. He crawled up, rolled sideways over the crest, and looked down through parched eyes. “Oh, my god,” he cried. A narrow valley, an oasis lay before him. The rippling water of a pool a hundred yards down the slope—could it be a mirage? How could he even get there?

Suddenly, he realized—roll. He turned over, the twisting motion wrenching him forward. Faster and faster he went, ignoring the stabs of the sharp rocks beneath him. “Roll, you bastard, roll!” he screamed out loud. At last his descent slowed, and, spitting up dry dust, his tumbling body came to a stop. His left hand had landed in something cool, unbelievably soothing, a dream. It was water. He cupped it, struggling to bring a handful to his mouth. It was real—cold, clear water. He grabbed another and licked his palm. Then another. There was shade a few feet away, and he crawled toward it. There he fell into unconsciousness.

Magrundy awoke at sunset. He knew where he was—Brooke Valley. The shack was just beyond the hill. With supreme effort, he pulled himself up. One more mile to the Pony Express stop.

“Is there somethin’ out there, fella?” asked Billy “The Kid,” scratching the back of his Ridgerunner, Greg—one of the mutated species that selective breeding had managed to reintegrate as domestic dogs—servants of man rather than his deadly enemy.

The dog looked up anxiously. It saw something, and the boy saw it too. A dust cloud. Then a lone walker. Coming from out of the desert. Billy got out his old .22 rifle, a squirrel gun with a difference—it was loaded with explosive, armor-piercing bullets. The kid took up his old binoculars and peered through them. A limping man, in buckskin. It looked like . . . “Magrundy!” he yelled. Greg ran forward to greet the old friend. From even fifteen yards away the shack was invisible in the deep copse of trees surrounding it. Magrundy hadn’t seen it, and he hadn’t seen the kid until this instant.

Greg ran right up before him, followed by Billy. “No time to talk, son—where’s your dad?” Magrundy asked. “He’s got to ride with an urgent message—he’s got to get to Century City!”

“But—but he’s away,” the boy replied.

“Well, Billy, then it’s you has to ride. I can’t go another ten feet.” Magrundy recited the message as they walked to the house. “You know the way,” he concluded, “and tell Rockson or one of his men what I told you. Now repeat it for me.” The boy recited the message, and saddled up. Then he was off—a twelve-year-old boy on a man’s errand.