Doomsday Warrior 10 - American Nightmare (26 page)

In just a moment it happened. He, and it, and everything,
was one.
He was all-conscious, all-being,
all-everything.

Then, with a sickening wrench,
it
exploded outward,
it
became separate things—quasars, galaxies, stars, and, finally, worlds.

And Rockson saw the earth ahead; a blue-and-white globe, hurtling at him like a cannonball.

He entered the atmosphere, expecting to burn up from the speed, and yet he didn’t. Rockson seemed to drift, like a leaf, over fields of tall fern trees. He now saw dinosaurs grazing down there. Then he was lower, and suddenly he was not Rockson, but a little shrewlike creature, running around under the feet of the dinosaurs. He was the first mammalian ancestor of man. And then he went through a hundred, a thousand, a million lives, all in the flickering of an eye. He graduated through the classes of larger mammals: a tree-climbing monkey; an apelike creature with a club; a stooped-over, hairy man. And then—he was a human.

After fifteen million lives, he was a human, a struggling nomadic hunter, living with a band of other similar human creatures. And he was frightened, hungry, cold. Finding a caribou, he smashed its brains out, eating the raw meat. He did that for a hundred, a thousand lifetimes. Hunted.

Then there was fire, sacred fire, started by lightning and kept alive by a member of the tribe, who watched over it while the others hunted. And when they returned to their cave, their ate not raw, but cooked meat. And it was good.

Then Rockson was a man stooping over primitive corn plants, tending them, watering them, back-breaking day after back-breaking day.

There were great floods, and earthquakes. He was a priest, a priest of the Pharaoh of ancient Egypt, predicting the time of reincarnation of the Pharaoh, who had just died. The Pharaoh was embalmed. And all the priests, including Rockson—his name was Ta-Ah-Nek at the time—were forced to commit suicide and be buried with the Pharaoh, so that in the time to come the Pharaoh would have company. And the great, absurd vanity that Rockson had possessed in his life as the Pharaoh’s priest led to a hundred future lives of humbleness for him, to atone.

Then a hundred more incarnations—lives of desperation in north India, wealth in China, in the Pacific Islands. Lives in times when humans no longer understood their place in the universe, times when they no longer were aware of the fact that a lifetime is an instant, just a building block to another, then another, life.

And mankind became—evil. Murder, war, delusion after delusion came. And the few souls that transcended it all, and out of their compassion
tried
to tell the others
the truth,
were martyred. Crucified. Stoned. Burned at the stake. And man knew not what he was . . .

And slowly, slowly, the karmic progress of his soul occurred. He would not kill, he would not eat human flesh. Then Rockson was a textile worker in early industrial England—toiling twelve hours a day for subsistence wages. Yet he did not hate, he did not lash out in his anger. More karmic progress occurred. His soul rose higher in the chain of evolution. Others fell and rose on the karmic chain, some devolving to animals again because of their lack of compassion. But slowly, slowly, despite pitfalls, the Rockson moved ahead, evolving until . . .

There was a
scream.
And it was Rockson’s scream. He had landed on a desert.

He was Ted Rockson, the Doomsday Warrior. A twenty-first-century human being. And after seeing it all, the beginning of everything, after being the Oneness, the evolution of the stars, of the galaxies, of life on earth, after seeing the millions of lifetimes of birth and painful death and rebirth, Rock fell to his knees and wept. He wept for himself, and for all life. He wept for all the ignorant, striving souls lost on the endless wheel of time.

And his fists closed on the sand. The sand grains slipped through his hands, fell to the ground.

He looked around. A deep-blue sky above; the air cold and thin in his lungs; flickering green strontium clouds high in the western sky.

He was back.
Back in 2092
A.D.

Back where he belonged. He looked around him, stood up. Yes! There was Kim, and the kids, and Barrelman, standing there, looking like they were frozen in shock.

“Did you see—did you experience all of
that?”
Rock asked Kim, coming up to her and taking her cold left hand. She looked pale, so pale.

“Experience what? The last thing—thing—I—remember is you pulling me into the Portal.”

“You didn’t see it, see everything?” Rock asked. He gave up trying to explain.

“No. Did something happen? Did we make it?”

Rock sighed. “We made it, Kim. We made it.”

There were practical matters to attend to—like getting the group together again before they wandered away in the desert—and keeping an eye out for the Soviets.

It seemed that only Barrelman, of all the Runners who had approached the Portal, had crossed over. That saddened Rock, but there was nothing to be done about it. He hoped the others might have “fallen” someplace or some
time
else safely. He gathered his wife, kids, and friend and started . . .

Soon, Rockson found scattered debris—bits of Soviet clothing, a pistol which he picked up and slipped into his belt. He wished it were the compound gun. A pistol wouldn’t do in this age. He headed toward an area filled with debris. It contained the empty missile silo Streltsy had taken him to. Rock found its roof blown off. The time-tornado had done its handiwork here. Dead Russians lay scattered everywhere, some beginning to rot. They were being picked upon by birds.

Days must have passed since he’d left! Startled by his presence, the cloud of buzzards swooped up from the charnel pit that had once been a silo-home for the perverted Soviet officers. He told Kim and the others to wait, then climbed down and took a submachine gun and some clips. How was it that none of these Reds had come into the past with him? Possibly it was because they had no counterpart back in Salt Lake City 1989. That must be it. They had stayed here and gotten smashed to pieces by the tornado. All except Streltsy, of course. He had a counterpart back in 1989
—Chessman!

Rockson took the supplies he needed—canteens of water, some Soviet rations in canisters, ammo, and headed southeast, walking in the harsh light of the setting orange sun, with his strangely silent entourage. He could see the snow-capped Rockies in the distance.

They walked onward for about an hour, saw the first stars come out in the flickering green clouds of strontium high above.

Soon, Rock thought, the sky would be a dark place filled with the guiding lights that would direct them home. They stopped to rest. Kim, particularly, was feeling the strain. She didn’t look right at all. Neither did the kids, nor Barrelman. Rockson wondered what would happen when he reached Century City with them. After all, Kim had a counterpart in this time-space. The kids didn’t—and neither did Barrelman. The situation was, to say the least, odd.

He passed around the Soviet canteen’s water and then Kim stood bolt upright. “Rock, oh, Rock,” she wailed, frightened.

“What is it?” He stood too. Were his eyes deceiving him in the dim light of dusk? Kim seemed to be semi-transparent.

“Rock. I’m fading away,” she shouted. But Kim’s shout was just a faint echo. Hollow, fading. Rockson could look through her body. She was becoming like a mist. The kids too, and Barrelman, were fading. They started screaming the same hollow scream. Rockson rushed for Kim, tried to grab her. But his hands went through her body.

“Good-bye . . . Rock . . . good-bye . . .” she said. And then she faded away. She was gone. They were all gone.

Rockson stood there alone. He stood there a long, long time, until the night air was so cold that he had to move or freeze to death. He tried to understand. Could it be that they didn’t exist? Was it all a dream? Some hallucination brought on by eating the bloodfruit, plus the delirium caused by the torture, by being dragged behind the Soviet jeep?

There was not a
scrap
of evidence to lead him to believe the whole thing—Salt Lake City, the Chessman, the Runners—had ever been real.

But what about his white suit? That was real. He looked down at his body. He was naked. That was why he felt so cold.

If it had
never
happened, if it all had been a dream, the sealskin garment could have been torn from his body by the force of the storm winds. He might never know if Salt Lake City had been a dream—or if
this
was the dream.

Dream or not, it
felt
real enough. He was cold, and he was alone, and he was miles from home. He looked around, found some Soviet garments, in a pile of wind-strewn debris. He put on the best of the lot—a torn field jacket and pair of khakis.

Then he started walking—walking toward home.

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