Doomsday Warrior 11 - American Eden (24 page)

Once on the limestone floor below, Rockson considered waiting for his companions who were following, then changed his mind, plunging ahead at breakneck speed.

He ran for what seemed an hour but might have been just a few minutes, then, exhausted, he fell heavily against a jutting rock formation. He was breathing heavily. It was silly, this running after a flying thing. A thing more powerful than a hundred men. A thing by now lost in the bowels of the Earth.

He let out a cry of utter hopelesssness.

Rockson’s heart sank to its lowest level ever. All of his struggle, the immense trek, the terrible passage through the caverns of Eden, the death of Chief Smokestone—all for naught.

Surely the canister of death was shattered someplace in the cavern now, and slowly, inexorably, over the next few days the strange and deadly germ would permeate everywhere.

The glow of his flashlight annoyed him now, for he wanted the darkness to hide his tears. Rockson’s flicked it off and wept alone in the darkness.

Giggles
. The touch of icy thought fingers to his forehead. The damned Whisperers again. Rock thought, with anger.
“Go away,”
Rockson shouted.

“Aren’t you afraid of us?” the soft whisper said.

“What’s to be afraid of?—The whole Earth is doomed.”

“How so?” asked the gentle voice.

Rockson said, “Look. Whoever or whatever you are—you might as well know. I’m doomed, all is doomed. So leave me alone.”

“I read into your thoughts. What you think is happening is horrible. It
must not be
. I must help you.” There was a swishing sound, like the rippling of silk in the wind. A breeze caressed Rockson face.

And the voice was closer. “My name is Starlight. Turn on your light and see me.”

Curious and thinking to himself, Oh, why not, seeing this creature will fill in the last few hours of my life, Rockson turned on the light, and beheld a delightful girl child of about ten years of age—a girl dressed in a sparkling gossamer outfit, like a fairy. She had the softest blond hair and a cherubic face. She also had two green tendrils that looked like combed-back antennae on either side of her forehead. Telepathy apparatus.

Twenty-Nine

“S
tarlight, can you really help?”

“I have powers, and friends. It is possible. I will call my great red friend.” The child whistled long and slow. “There, that is done. Now while we wait—it will just be a moment—let me tell you about us Whisperers.

“We are the missing children of Eden. Our parents left us
hideous
children—we mutants look all scrunched up at birth—to die at the Sacrifice pool. They believed the cavern beings would take us and eat us. Many of the first to be abandoned died. Some among us crawled away and lived off the mushrooms—and survived. We took care of the others who were left at the waters after that. We are not as young as we look—we age very slowly. I am psychic, you are correct there—that is why I could immediately understand the peril. I know something good. The canister is yet intact.”

There was the noise of a great flying thing swooping down from the cavern roof high above. Rock yelled,
“Down,”
and went to draw his pistol.

“No,”
said the child. “It is only Ra-we-nak. The red bat. He is the friend I whistled for. He will help us find Stafford and retrieve the vial.”

Rock flashed up his beam at the monstrous thing of leather wings that now swooped down and folded its wings. It waddled over to Starlight and nudged the girl child with its big single-horned head.

“Nice Ra-we-nak,” Starlight said. “You must let us ride you; you must follow the vampire bat that has taken the man.”

If a bat could look startled and uneasy, this one did. It shied away, trembled.

“Do not worry, Ra-we-nak,” said Starlight. “We have a weapon, a heat pistol. And you must do this, so that we can all remain alive. Please. If you like me, and want me to be your friend anymore, please do this.

The creature’s eyes became watery and it seemed to nod.

Rockson was prompted by Starlight to mount the giant flying steed. He shrugged, and holding the horn of the dark red saddle, he pulled himself up on the thing’s back. This was all a hallucination anyway, he thought. One of the Whisperers’ crazy mind-jokes. He’d go along for the ride.

Starlight climbed aboard, squeezing her cherubic little body in front of his. Then they took off at lightning speed, the giant red bat snapping its wings mightily to gain altitude.

It sure seemed real enough, Rockson thought, hanging on for dear life as the floor of the cavern disappeared in the darkness.

Soon they were in a dull fiery red light. They were apparently going about a hundred miles an hour. Rock figured that from the flashing-past of a multitude of stalactites on either side of their flight path. They flew at the red glow in the distance. He felt like he was inside an intestine. And laughed. Perhaps this twisting huge tunnel was one of the bowels of the Earth. Ha ha, what an illusion.

And then he saw it—the huge black bat, floating along in front of them, holding Stafford’s limp body in its claws. And Stafford’s hand held a long slender cylinder. Factor Q.

Thirty

S
tarlight exclaimed, “Yes, I see it too.” The black bat didn’t turn its prehistoric toothy head, but it must have sensed their approach, for it squawked and veered off, making a sound like a diving B-98 bomber. It dove down a corkscrewing fifty-meter-wide side tunnel.

“Hold on tight.” Starlight said. Rockson dug his heels as hard as he could into the side of the giant red bat as it swung to the left and dropped like a meteor. Its wings had snapped shut, hurtling them down the precipitous side tunnel in pursuit of the black bat and its human prey. His stomach felt like it did in the high-speed elevator at Century City—queasy.

Ra-we-nak, their steedbat, snapped open its wings from time to time to change direction or make a sudden spin, following the spiraling near-vertical descent of the tunnel. It was gaining on the black bat, which took another wild turn down an even steeper pathway in the faintly luminous underground world.

As they continued plummeting downward, the walls of the tunnel drew in tighter and tighter. Rockson could see it slipping by like the corrugated lining of some giant dark intestine at a mile a second. The red bat started screaming out a high-pitched sound, possibly to steer itself, listening to the echoes of its own shrill voice as a form of sonar. The Doomsday Warrior’s ears hurt; he wished he could let go of Starlight and cover them, but it was too chancy.

They wove and spun, sometimes coming perilously close to a rocky wall of the corkscrewing tunnel. The air grew fetid and hot; the sulfurous smell increased. The Doomsday Warrior’s ears popped again and again as the pressure increased.

God, if this kept up, he thought, they would soon reach the flaming hot magma lying miles under the Earth’s crust.

“Starlight,” Rock shouted, “where are we going?”

“To hell itself—where the dark creature, the ruler of all the vampire bats, nests.”

The bomber-sized black bat disappeared from view momentarily around a sharp corner, then reappeared. They were gaining on it. Rockson’s wind-teared eyes squinted over the red bat’s head to see that Stafford was still held in the grip of the thing—and the canister was still in his death grip.

As the suffocating, sulfurous-smelling high-pressure winds whipped by, the noise his steed’s leathery wings made mimicked a Stuka dive bomber. The yawing and rolling of their impossible flight path through volcanic tunnels deep under the Earth continued until Rock felt his ears would burst. He was near to blacking out.

Gravity ceased to have any meaning. They were upside down, then upright, then upside down again. The Doomsday Warrior jammed his heels in against the stiff body of his unearthly mount, wishing he had stirrups, holding on for dear life, his arms locked around the small soft body of Starlight.

How far had they come in the five minutes of flight in the glowing red dimness? It seemed like a thousand miles. They were somewhere deep into the Earth’s bowels. It was growing very hot—perhaps they neared the source of the volcanic light.

Now they came out in a large cavern lit by the orange glow of a flowing river of red hot lava. They leveled off, rode through thunder and lightning, swirling clouds of blue and gray smoke. The killer bat was less than a hundred meters ahead. Ninety, eighty . . . and slowing.

And then they lost it. Their red bat screeched and screeched, trying to get an echo from the big killer, but to no avail. There was too much thunderous electrical display all around.

Rockson asked that they fly in a search pattern, over the fiery stream of lava, where the clouds were less thick.

Rock scanned the cavern as they traveled, soaring in large arcs, as he had indicated to Starlight.

Starlight shouted, “There it is,” pointing over to the right. At the far end of the chamber, high on a ledge, was a nest—but not a bird’s nest of straw. This nest was of metal—pipes and gears and other man-made things plucked from the area near Eden and flown here, then woven and bent into the giant vampire bat’s nest.

And perched in that nest of twisted metal pipes on the far ledge above the red flowing river of lava was the vampire bat—and Stafford.

Stafford was torn open. Obviously dead. The canister containing Factor Q was nowhere to be seen.

The giant black bat was preoccupied, too preoccupied to notice the approaching red bat and its human cargo. The vampire bat had the man’s carcass in its beak and was shaking it, dribbling its blood into the jaws of its three hellish bat-chicks.

Rockson had his shotpistol up; they approached at enormous speed. “I have to see if the canister is in the nest—attract its attention with a near pass. Get it to follow us.”

Starlight whispered something into their mount’s ear and the red bat began screeching an angry attack litany. Now the creature of darkness shifted and dropped the human body alongside the bat-chicks. Rockson could hear the three smaller black bats screech for their supper, angry that they had been cut off from the warm blood feast. The mother bat shifted and took to the air.

Rockson saw the canister teeter-tottering on the edge of the nest where it had lodged. If it fell from its current position, it would drop a few hundred feet and hit sharp rocks. And probably crack open, releasing its death to the world.

But if the canister could be dropped in the fiery lava river it would be instantly vaporized. Cleansed. Destroyed.

The red bat swung into a long arc of escape as the black mother bat followed, shrieking. It wanted to drive them from the area of its offspring. Motherly instinct—even in hell itself.

Rockson shouted, “Lose it in the smoke clouds, then get back to the nest and get that canister. Drop it in the lake of fire.”

Easier said than done. The black bat was as tenacious as a fighter pilot following a target drone. Finally they lost it, and doubled back to the nest. Rockson could hardly bear to look as they came out of the clouds of steam and sulfur. But to his relief, the canister was still on the edge of the nest, jammed between two pipes—for now.

“Dive in, get the canister, drop it in the lava,” Rock screamed.

The red bat dove, and at that moment the black bat swooped out of the clouds and screeched a horrible challenge. It probably meant something like “Don’t get near my kids,” and Rockson knew it meant it.

“Get the canister,” he shouted.

He started firing his weapon over his shoulder, aiming for the fierce orange-glowing eyes of the nest defender. He really didn’t expect to kill the thing— God knew how many shots that would take, even point-blank—or if it were possible at all. But he hoped to slow the attack enough for their own bat to snatch the canister up.

The vampire bat was hit, the X-pattern shots from his pistol smashing fist-sized holes into the thick skin of the flying creature. It veered off, screaming a different tune, its mouth dripping blood.

Ra-we-nak’s claws scratched the canister as it flashed by the nest, but only succeeded in dislodging it. The canister careened down toward the jagged rocks far below.

“Catch it, catch it,” Rock yelled, and the bat dove with all the power at its disposal.

It would be close. And no second tries this time.

“Please God, please,” Rock begged the Almighty. “Please let it be caught.”

Willy Mays couldn’t have made a better save-the-game catch. Ra-we-nak’s left claw closed around the canister just a foot from the jagged rocks, and majestically pulled out of the power dive, narrowly missing dousing itself—and its riders—in the smoldering lake of fire.

“Drop it in the fire,” Rock yelled triumphantly.

This the red bat did with a flair, screeching what must have been a victory song. Rock saw the canister of Factor Q hit the lava, spark briefly, and then sink. A few seconds later there was a bubbling at the surface. Then nothing.

“Let’s head home,” Rockson said, heaving a sigh of relief. Now all Rockson had to do was get his people back to the surface, and trek a thousand frozen miles back to Century City.

He’d find a way. After all, he was the Doomsday Warrior.

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