Doomsday Warrior 16 - American Overthrow (11 page)

They closed their eyes and tried to
feel
the way out. The way through the earth to air and light above. Already, though they didn’t want to think about it too hard, they were getting claustrophobic. It was like a tomb down here. Everything closing in, pressing down on them. The earth continued to rumble once in a while and shake them so everything got a little dusty. Then subsided quickly.

“I say that greenish tunnel with rounded sides,” Chen spoke up first. “Somehow it feels
traveled
to me. Ergo something—a stream of water or lava maybe—has gone all the way up and out many times. I just hope we can get through before it gets flooded with more of the hot stuff. It looks to me like these tunnels flood periodically, The walls are too smooth.”

“I’m with that,” Detroit piped in next. “My mind said the green one—’cause, you know, green’s my last name. Plus—the color of money.”

They laughed. Rockson looked up at Archer who he was never quite sure understood what the hell he was saying. “How about you, Arch?”

“GREEEEN OONNNEE,” the near-mute croaked out, pointing firmly at the one the others had chosen, so there’d be no mistaking his vote.

“Then that’s the one,” Rockson said softly. “Salvage what supplies you can from the dead ’brid and let’s be out of here fast, I hear rumblings again.” They looked around as the walls shook and dust came down, coating everything with a nice thick layering of black ash, as if it needed any more. Already their silver white heat outfits were coated with soot.

Frosty the Snowmen in black face, in a multi-colored hell!

They headed down into the green-lit tunnel, stamping up clouds of the black stuff with every footstep. Thank the stars their boots were impregnated with alloy elements to make them virtually impenetrable, Rockson thought, because the sharp edges of dried lava which formed the ground beneath their feet sliced and ripped away at the soles, trying to gouge their way in.

The tunnel glowed greener as they walked deeper into it. It was as if the luminous dials of a watch were all around them. As a matter of fact he heard that watch.

Rock checked the rad meter on his field watch. It wasn’t all that accurate, he knew from past experience, but would give him an idea. The meter was ticking, but the radiation level read practically zero. Whatever was making the glow had nothing to do with radioactivity.

“It’s clean,” Rockson said, as he led the nervous ’brid on reins through the tunnel. “But this tunnel is not getting any
bigger.”

Suddenly that was the understatement of the day. The tunnel started getting much narrower, fast, like they were being funneled into a tighter and tighter opening. The sharp lava protuberances reached up and down from all sides, like black clawed hands with daggers for fingers. The remaining 3 ’brids had to move along with legs half crouched, as if trying to do the limbo.

Suddenly it seemed a lot brighter around the bend. And as he walked around pulling the recalcitrant steed, the tunnel opened up into a wide cavern that glowed twice as bright as where they were coming from.

“Holy mother—” Rockson muttered under his breath as he led Snorter into the football stadium sized cavern with glowing outcroppings of immense limestone hanging down from the four-hundred-foot-high lava ceiling. It was a stalactite
city
of impossible size and shape. The huge structures, with windows and doors hung down from the ceiling stretching in rough symmetry a good hundred feet down.

And Rockson’s eyes grew even wider in real puzzlement. For he saw figures moving, humanoid shapes in those windows. Just as the rest of the Freefighters came in behind him, Rockson saw movement behind some pillars of black lava about a hundred feet to the right of them.

“Company,”
he yelled out, reaching for his shotpistol and slightly amazed to find that it was still there. Now the figures were coming at them shrieking wild guttural cries like cavemen. They were men covered with the black lava rock, like scales all over them. And it was hard to tell, so tightly joined were the black scales, if it were a manmade armoring—or actual hard flesh that had grown up over them like scales of stone.

Across their lava-faces were shining triangular pieces of shimmering black stone that angled out to each side, covering all but their eyes and a slit for their mouths. They weren’t the prettiest of sights, especially holding long swords and spears made out of the shining black rock.

They were primitive weapons, but Rockson knew a lot of things will kill a man. And every second that Rockson backed up toward his men, he could see more of the lava-beings. They were coming out like ants now. They’d somehow stumbled onto a fucking colony of volcanic beings. And from the way they were closing in, stabbing their polished obsidian spears in the air and screaming incantations in an unknown language, Rockson wasn’t too optimistic about his life expectancy over the next few minutes.

Twelve

“M
ughh!”
one of the lava coated beings screamed as it came tearing up to Rockson. It suddenly stopped in its tracks and looked suspiciously at him, sniffing at him through the narrow slit in the lava mask. And it looked like it had a
snout,
not a nose inside there, which fact Rockson didn’t like at all.

Great numbers of the agitated beings surrounded the Freefighters and the ’brids which were rearing and making noises like they were in a punk rock band. The lava men waved their swords and spears as if they were thinking of deploying them at any second. Archer swung his crossbow around and slammed in an arrow, raising it to fire.

“NO!” Rockson shouted over the noise of a thousand screaming and grunting lava coated madmen, “don’t do a
thing.
We can’t even begin to take down these boys. Hold on!” He held up his hands to show he meant peace, letting the .12 gauge shotpistol slide into his holster, but ready to rip it up if that’s what was happening.

“Mugh,
Mugh,”
the seeming leader of the volcano people said, this time prodding with his three foot long glistening black tipped spear. It was like a dagger, thin and sharp as a razor on both sides. But strong! Rockson suspected it could slice right through him if the man pushed. These lava rocks were some of the hardest substances in the earth, right alongside diamonds. All their weapons were made with this glistening obsidian.

The Freefighters let their hands move away from their weapons realizing Rockson was right—they
were
vastly outnumbered. It was like stepping on an ant colony. Rockson saw that there were thousands more in the huge cavern, hanging from their giant stalactite buildings that dotted the ceiling, staring out round windows.

“Mugh,”
the leader shouted again and pointed with his spear to one side.

“I think we better do as he says,” Detroit spoke up. “These guys don’t look like they have the highest patience levels in the world.” But Rockson could see they were as scared of the Freefighters as the men were of them. Maybe they’d never even seen “normal” humans before. Or at least for a long time.

The ’brids seemed to fascinate them, as they gathered around the terrified animals and reached out, poking them lightly with the spears. A few daringly reached out with dried lava-coated hands, once they saw that the things weren’t about to eat their fellows.

The lava people formed a line of about twenty on each side of the four Freefighters, allowing them to bring their ’brids. The huge crowd that had gathered jumped and smacked their black stone weapons against their chests like gorillas beating themselves. The sound was almost deafening as the cavern filled with the sharp cracking sounds of rock weapons smashing on rock-chests.

Rockson tried to take it all in mentally as they were led along with the armed guards on each side. But it was hard. It was a bizarre and twisted world, unlike any that he’d ever encountered. Small craters, from a few feet across to twenty feet in diameter, were filled with steam rising out of them. Work crews of the lava-beings were filling rock gourds with something there. In other craters, the lava humanoids were sitting around floating in what looked like black mud. Like a jacuzzi for the yuppies of the green-cast underworld. They lay back soaking it all up, whether as a bath or to add more crust to their coverings; Rockson wasn’t sure. But as they did step from the steaming mud rock, their layerings seemed thicker. This was
definitely
the weirdest place Rockson had ever fallen into!

The buildings, or hanging structures, or whatever the hell they were that dropped down from the high glowing ceiling were miracles of construction. Somehow they must have tapped the natural forces of the lava and guided them, when hot, into various shapes. It was like a glassblower blowing huge hundred foot cones, all jagged and bulbous with windows and doors. The Doomsday Warrior could see more of the lava-beings moving in and around the structures, even though they were hundreds of feet above the ground.

He was wondering how the hell they got up and down from lava condos when he saw that there were some kind of thermal pits of air on the ground below each of the ceiling structures. The lava beings were standing up in a line and raising their arms out just over the pits. The sheer heat and currents lifted them straight up on an elevator of pure hot air! They rose high, seventy, a hundred, a hundred and fifty feet into the air, not wavering an inch. Reaching an inset platform at the bottom of the immense upsidedown cone-house-things, they stepped off as easily, as off an elevator stopping: “Ladies’ Lingerie, 6th floor?”

“Can you believe this place?” Detroit laughed, walking behind the Doomsday Warrior. “I mean, it’s like out of the Wizard of Oz mixed with Attack of the Mole People.”

“And we’re following the Black Brick Road: Right?” Rock couldn’t help but interject with a chuckle. For some reason he was feeling a certain amusement at the whole crazy scene and even the lava men that surrounded them. Maybe it was the sulphurous air, making him giddy.

“Yub,”
the one who was walking just ahead of Rockson said, as they came directly below one of the cone houses some two hundred feet up. It was the largest of the ceiling-crew, Rock could see right away. And it had what looked like huge precious stones inset all over the sides. Only these were stones the size of Cadillac snow tires.

“Yub, yub
top,”
the creature said, prodding at Rockson with the spear. They did speak English, crudely, Rock noted with a ripple of relief. Where there was communication there was always a chance.

“Horsie,” he said, looking around at Snorter who he was holding onto the reins of right behind him. “Me take horsie?”

“No horsie,” the lava soldier said, motioning for one of his own team to come up and take the reins. Rockson hesitated again. He sure as hell wasn’t going to allow the ’brid to be thrown into a stew pot or something. But the bastards hadn’t actually made any violent moves.

He sighed and handed the reins over and the lava man who took them seemed quite nervous, his lava coated hand trembling as he took them. He pulled the ’brid, which walked off and again the lead guard pointed toward the thermal draft.

Rockson looked over and down. It was glowing far below and he could feel, even see, the heat rising just ahead of him. He reached out gingerly with the heat shield covered arm and tested to see whether it would burn him to a crisp in a second. It was tolerable. Another lava-face prodded him and Rockson stepped forward, waving over his shoulder at his men who were behind him.

Instantly he was rising up on the hot air of the thermal updraft. It felt like a dream, like how a balloon must feel, if it could. With his arms out, his body caught enough of the super-heated air rising up at a good sixty miles an hour to carry him straight up. He was anxious for a moment when he felt his body start to shift to the right as he let an arm drift up. But the thermal updraft had a self-leveling quality to it, and it eased him back again, like he was going up through an invisible tube.

Suddenly he reached the bottom of the hanging cone structure and two guards held their hands out from a hatch and grabbed hold of him as he whooshed to a near-stop.

They pulled him over onto the platform made of the same shimmering black stone, this one a deep violet tinge. Rockson scanned the immense obsidian and lava city inside the door-hatch and whistled between his teeth. It was even more impressive from up high. He could see the whole group of structures more clearly, the patterns they formed up on the jagged ceiling.

The captors took him and the Freefighters—who floated up one after another—through a narrow carved walkway out of which dozens of other passages spread off. It really was more like a termite colony than something humans would inhabit. But then these things weren’t human. No potted plants, no fountains like Century City.
No ice cream.

They came to a large oval shaped room. It was shaped almost like a teardrop, rising up to a slender opening high above, widening to about thirty feet and then narrowing again below them in concentric circles of openings.

As they led Rockson in, he could see that below a hole in the room’s floor another crater, a wide one, a good thirty feet across. And this one was filled with the bubbling red hot lava. If you went down there—

But it was the sight of a strange chair that arrested Rockson’s eyes. There was a throne of some sort. It wasn’t the typical King Arthur-type throne, but it was definitely the seat of royalty. The handcarved stones it was composed of were polished and shimmering. The precious jewels, red and blue, green, and vibrant yellow were all over the thing in strange shapes and geometric patterns. Sitting on the “throne” was a man. The king, emperor, big cheese, whatever you want to call him, Rockson knew instantly. Power was unmistakable in any race, no matter how twisted and alien. The king was big. Must have stood above Archer at full height. But where he sat now, in the immense chair, with regal straight posture, he didn’t look large.

He too was covered with lava scales, but this king’s face mask was open. His “crown” was two black stones arching out like ears from both sides of his gray, impassive face.