Doomsday Warrior 11 - American Eden (15 page)

They removed her coverings, so that she stood shivering in her gossamer and scant bikini and bra, to the right side of the stone snake. Manion went over and bowed before the immense Renquist statue, and took up a book—a Bible—and headed back solemnly to stand before Rona, who was drawn by the monks to stand beside the stone snake. Manion opened the Bible and lifted his hands in a genuflecting gesture that made the sign of the star. He intoned, “Who gives the bride?”

And he answered himself, “I do.”

“Do you, Sandra the Renquist, again take as your lord and master and husband this God, the sacred Edward Renquist, as your lawful and divine husband, till the end of time?”

Rona said, “What?”

“Say yes,” Manion whispered in exasperation.

Rona was woozy; she thought she was in Century City’s chapel with Rockson, all six foot two of his manly presence, standing next to her. She was getting married. Good. It was about time.

“Yes, I do,” She said firmly.

Manion smiled, “Then by the power invested in me as chief priest of the Sacred Holiest of Holies, I pronounce you God and Goddess—proceed with the chastisement and impregnation.” He slammed shut the Bible and tossed it to one of the monks, who caught it and placed it back near the statue.

They led her away, through the near darkness, with strains of organ music played on the stalactites echoing eerily around her. “Hey, doesn’t Rock get to walk with me? Where the rice?”

She was coming out of it. Why were her hands tied behind her back? “Say, what kind of a wedding is this, anyway—who—”

She started struggling, wriggling. She was held firmly by her elbows. This time by powerful soldier-monk’s hands.

They took her to the mound. The mound was about six feet in diameter and curved up to a maximum of three feet off the floor in the center. It was made of semiprecious stones—agates, turquoise, coral—all cut into one-inch-square mosaic tiles. Rona could see the depiction of a coiled cobra snake on it. It took six of them to bend her over, stomach down, on the mound. They untied her wrists, only to retie them to some rings set at the edge of the mound. They likewise, spreading her powerful legs wide, affixed her ankles to some golden rings set in the floor. She found herself spread-eagled, firmly tied—struggle was useless.

Manion came over and put his ugly fat face down close to her and whispered, “You, Sandra, are so beautiful. Even in those awful khaki combat clothes I could tell your beauty. If it were not sacrilege, I would have this honor, but alas you are the Goddess, and must be mated with the Renquist.”

He stood up, and in a strong voice said, “You, Sandra, goddess-consort of the Renquist, must now be strapped—with the sacred whip.”

“No, wait—why?”

“Do you not know why? A cloud of forgetfulness must have passed over you on the surface, oh Goddess. You must be strapped, and severely. The chances of bearing a male child will be increased by the pain—that is why. It is the way . . .”

A gong was sounded by Manion.

Thus was the Amazon-like Freefighter prepared for what was to come. Her winsome body firmly secured, exposed to whatever whim the priest and his cohorts had in mind.

“Let the ceremony of the Blessed Honeymoon night begin,” the high priest intoned. “Cut her clothing from her.”

“No.”

The two handmaidens took small knives and quickly snipped off the flimsy bra and bikini bottom from the struggling bound redhead.

Thus stripped of the last shred of protection, Rona’s upthrust backside, spread wide by her ankle bindings, revealed the deep crease between her firm tan thighs. Every detail of her female anatomy was exposed in the most lascivious way. Many a male would have yielded to the temptation of plunging his manhood between her startlingly full and jutting posterior globes. But the high priest and the soldier-monks—aside from their viewing it as sacrilege to take from Renquist what was his—were likewise sexually incapable. Only the ritual concerned them. All the nuptial rules must be observed; their God, Renquist, must have his honeymoon privilege. Through the sacrament of the insertion of the snake-rod.

“Let it commence.” Manion solemnly intoned. “Now, before the sacred impregnation, the chastisement must be rendered.”

She shouted, “You can’t do this.”

Manion went to a dark recess of the room and returned holding a long slender whip, the kind formerly used to hasten reluctant carriage horses. He tested the long cord in the air. It snapped viciously in the darkness near her body.

“Oh no, please, don’t.”

The second blow was for her. Heeding not her entreaties, Manion moved into action. The long birch rod swished viciously down across Rona’s pinioned posterior. She let out a cry as the sudden blow stung across her bottom, sideways.

“Stop. No. Oh God, it
hurts,”
Rona shouted. Before she could say another thing, the leather cord swished down again, and then a third time. She screamed out as much in anger and frustration as in pain, and she frantically wiggled her backside in a vain attempt to avoid the blows.

A dozen telling strokes placed expertly from her lower back to the tensed thighs followed, and then Manion started the whip blows back up towards her back once more. Rona cursed and strained at her bindings, twisting in a frenzy every time a blow was launched, but to no avail. Why were they doing this to her? Why? She screamed as loud as she could, which was plenty loud, every time a telling blow of the rod was delivered. Maybe somebody would hear, maybe Rockson was looking for her. He would, he would come—somebody
had to come
.

Manion paused to inspect his handiwork. And was pleased. Sandra’s tightly stretched nether-globes were crisscrossed with red weal marks. Hardly an inch of her firm flesh had escaped the horizontal scourges he’d delivered.

Now it was time to change position and deliver the vertical blows. The job would not be over, and the Goddess not properly prepared for her sacred trust, until there was a red crosshatch pattern on her lovely posterior.

The blows began anew, this time up and down. They fell so many times in the next few minutes that Rona thought she was going to be beaten to death.

On the hundreth blow, a dizzy, half-conscious Rona heard Manion say, “The scourging is over.” Manion turned to the statue and bowed. “Oh, Renquist, your bride is properly chastised. As it was written, pain and the anger aroused in a chastised bride will increase the chance that a male child will be born of this sacred union. So be it. Now let the insemination proceed.”

Rona twisted her head, shook the blurriness from her eyes. What were they doing over there? They were chanting and moving about the statue of the snake. Oh God, they don’t mean to—

“Praise be to Renquist,” the acolytes, the handmaidens, and the soldiers shouted. The two maroon-robed acolytes went forward from the group of chanters, over to the ice-covered votary that was the carved cobra snake. They took up flickering torches and played the flames under the snake statue’s head to gradually melt the ice seal around the long, slender cylindrical object that was hidden in the snake’s stone mouth. Slowly, once the long cylinder was freed of its ice, the torches were played along its bottom, until the frost was burned away. The sixteen-inch-long green glass tube was a straight glass snake, a sealed catheter with a milky fluid in its narrow interior.

“The honeymoon vessel has been prepared,” Manion intoned, ringing the gong again. “Let the insemination of the honeymoon begin.”

Insemination?
“No,” Rona gasped, twisting her tear-stained yet defiant countenance around to see the green glass vial as it was passed to Manion’s meaty hands.

No
.

Rockson had heard the frantic screams for several minutes, and had run at all the speed he could muster, setting himself far ahead of his companions. Rona was being tortured—somewhere in this maze of tunnels. He went up two dead ends, and then retracing his steps, tried a third tunnel. And found the snake temple. He blasted the door open with a burst of fire—explosive .9mm bullets from his Liberator auto-fire rifle tearing the huge brass doors off their hinges.

Rockson burst into the Temple of the Snake, and immediately took in the situation.

The priests. Rona—bound and naked, the long green-glass cylinder poised between her spread legs. The awful streaks of red across her backside.

He leveled his weapon on the man with the vial, the one closest to Rona.

“Drop whatever the hell you’re holding, mister, or die.”

McCaughlin and Chen flew into the doorway behind him, to back up his words. The soldier-monks around the temple who had started to lift their weapons were cut down by a sweep of hot lead from three Liberator rifles; their bodies jerked back and slammed against the altar of their false god, spurting hot streams of blood.

The blue-robed man at Rona’s side dropped the glass vial and it shattered at his feet.

Detroit came in next, shotpistol up. Ready. Danik, panting from the run, came in behind him. It was a tense moment. They were in time to hear Rockson yell, “Away from her, priest.”

Manion made to reach the trank-stick on his belt—and never made it. Rockson fired on full automatic. The priest’s head, severed by a sweep of hot lead, spun across the darkness. The body that had belonged to Manion’s head sank to the floor like a sack of potatoes, the neck-opening pumping out a fountain of blood.

Through the cordite smoke of the weapons, the Doomsday Warrior stepped over to his beloved. Rockson approached the beaten nude figure stretched out on the mound with trepidation. Was she alive? Yes. But her eyes were bleary.

“Rona, are you—”

“Untie me. Rock,” she groaned in a soft voice.

Rockson used his balisong knife to cut the bindings off. He threw his coat over her, she zipped it up. It was large and went down halfway to her knees. It would do. Detroit was stripping the headless corpse of its shoes—they were about right for Rona’s feet. Rockson slipped them on her and lifted her to him and hugged her. “Rona, are you—”

“I’m basically all right, though I don’t want to spend any time sitting real soon.”

She had spunk. That was for sure.

“Can you walk?”

“Walk? Hell, I can run. Let’s get out of here.”

There wasn’t much left of the enemy down the long ice corridor, Rona quickly saw that. Slumped bodies were everywhere. The Freefighters had gotten only so far in their Cultist disguises, and had finished off a good number of their enemy on the way to rescue Rona.

Rockson had grabbed one of the surviving soldier-monks from the temple and was pushing him along the corridor, a gun in his back. “You find us the passageway to Eden—the old construction tunnel—or else.”

“The construction tunnel? Why, that was blown up, sealed off last week. There is no way to Eden anymore.”

Rockson spun the cowed man around on his heels, and cocked the shotpistol and placed its cold barrel against the captive’s forehead. “Then, you find us another passageway to Eden.”

Eighteen

T
he captive, the pupils of his colorless eyes pinned in fright, stuttered out, “There—there is a passage—to the Caverns of H-Hell. They say th-that those caverns come out in—in Eden. But—”

Rockson said, “You take us to this passage—
now.”

The captive complied, leading them down a series of corridors, then down some steps with an inch of dust on them. “God, Rock,” said Detroit, “no one must have been down here for a long, long time.”

“That’s because,” Danik gasped, keeping up the pace down the curving wide stairs with great effort, “because the Caverns of Hell have legends of horror.”

They reached the bottom of the stairs; their flashlights played along a wide crack in a stone wall. There was darkness beyond, and a cool wind coming from the hole. “This is it,” said the captive. Now let me go—you said . . .”

Rockson let go of the man’s arm. “Get the hell out of here, jerk, and don’t tell anyone—”

“I won’t,” the man yelled, taking off back up the stairs two steps at a time.

“Now, what’s the story on these caverns, Danik?”

“In Eden we know them as the place of horrors. A natural series of caves with strange voices in them—and death. The man that led us here was correct, though. They do come out in Eden. Through a fissure. It isn’t sealed because a fresh wind comes from it. The whole ecosystem of Eden would overload if they closed the fissure. The Caverns of Hell—sometimes called the air caves—were briefly explored by early Edenites. Most never returned. The few that did told of horror beyond the imagination.”

“What sorts of horrors? You mentioned voices—could just be echoes, coming back long after someone spoke. What else?”

“I read that there were animals—of some sort—they had big teeth. Adults in Eden never read of such oddities, it was just nursery-school stuff. I don’t really know.”

“Maybe,” ventured McCaughlin, “they just made up the tales. The leaders of Eden weren’t too keen about having people go out of the city. Could be all hogwash.”

“Hogwash or not,” Rockson said, “I hear some thundering feet up the stairwell. I think the reinforcements are coming. Shall we make the plunge?”

Rockson was sure the Death City folks wouldn’t follow. He was right. They were unmolested in their quick march through the cavern. Danik told him that if they just kept going south, they would descend steeply, and then go up after seven miles and come out at Eden. A piece of cake. Of course he was going by dim recollections of a map he’d seen in a book in Eden—when he was a child. They found direction with one of Schecter’s pocket compasses; unaffected by local sources of magnetism, the nifty little luminous dial-thing unerringly pointed magnetic north.

When they had gotten about a quarter mile into their remarkable passage, there was a tremendous rumble, and rocks and soot sifted down from the trembling mountain above them.

“Quick, against the wall of stalagmites over there,” Rock ordered.

Because they obeyed their leader, they avoided anything more than a few shoulder scrapes from falling chunks of rock. The rumble died down. Then its echo also. All was silent.