Doomsday Warrior 12 - Death American Style (3 page)

“Oh, shit,” Rock muttered under his breath as he raised the tranq-rifle and prayed to the gods-that-be that the damned thing worked.

“Get that blunderbuss ready,” Rock yelled to Rona, glancing around at her for a second. She seemed half paralyzed, terrified of the charging meateater—already halfway toward them and accelerating by the second. “Snap to it, lady!” Rock screamed out. Her eyes opened and she seemed to come out of a trance.

“All right, Rockson, you bastard—you don’t have to yell,” Rona screamed back, her green Irish eyes sparkling like glowing emeralds. But she raised the .50 caliber autofire and waited—in case. “In case” looked like it was about to happen pretty damned soon. Rock fired—the bear roared like a lion as a huge hypodermic bolt ripped from the wide muzzle. The prong found the mutant grizzly dead center in the chest and the hypo shot its 1000-mil load right into the predator’s nervous system. But if it felt
anything,
it sure as hell wasn’t letting on. For the animal only seemed to come faster at them, as if angered by the sting of the needle.

“Let him have it,” Rock snapped angrily at Rona. Angry at himself that the mission was going to be a failure. That they hadn’t been able to get the monster alive.

Rona fired but the slugs dug a trench along one side of the charging carnivore, missing it as the creature jumped two yards to the side without breaking stride. The thing was incredibly fast and, apparently, smart. Rock could sense a consciousness in those raging red eyes that were almost upon them.

“Back, back!” he screamed out, firing another load of the tranquilizer that had autopopped into firing position, carrying a total of four loads. He fired yet again, this shot catching the grizzly square in the nose at a distance of about twenty yards. That at least stopped it. Even a N’hokari has a tender spot, and its bowl-sized black nose—with the needle imbedded squarely in it—was just the thing to give it pause. The grizzly came to a screeching stop, half rolling over in the dirt. It reached up to pull the offending protruberances from its flesh, moaning groggily like a drunk.

“Run!” Rock yelled, pulling Rona as he rushed away from the struggling predator. They ran back along the slope, half stumbling down the sides but somehow holding each other up, and headed back toward the ’brids that were standing around, tethered to a tree, acting very nervous and skittish as they sensed what was happening.

Then the great bear pulled the needle from its snout and let out a deafening roar of pain and anger. It started toward them. The ’brids grew more anxious, rearing and letting out whinnies of sheer animal terror as the grizzly closed in.

“Jesus Christ,” Rock spat out, “I don’t know if we
can
stop the bastard.” He grabbed for his shotgun-pistol, setting it on autofire so it could release all seven loads of super .12 gauge in an instant. He’d at least take away some of its good looks before it had human dinner. Shecter’s little party was turning into a deathtrap of the first order. Rock glanced over to Rona, who seemed petrified by the rapidly advancing creature. But she slammed another banana clip into the bottom of the sleek .50 caliber and raised it up, ready to fire to the last. And suddenly Rockson felt love for her. For in the midst of it all, in spite of all the stark fear, she was tough—and would go out fighting to the very end. Like him. She fired point blank. The bullets
bounced off.

“Bye, baby,” Rock whispered, hardly a word audible above the howling scream of the charging maneater.

A flicker of a smile twisted across her face. And in a strange way she relaxed. It was not so bad after all, something inside of her suddenly decided. To go out with the man you love. Together, eternity together. And she breathed a metaphysical sigh of relief inside of her at her impending death. Rockson too emptied his weapon, to no effect.

Suddenly there was a terrible ripping sound, as if the very earth were being rent asunder. All three players in the little drama of life and death stopped and listened. For the sound was too powerful, too near, not to listen. And as they watched, the towering fir that the grizzly had gnawed halfway through suddenly began to topple. It was as if it were seeking out the bear, reaching out for revenge. For the tree came unerringly through the branch-filled sky, cutting and slamming its way through the outstretched arms of its brothers all around. Its roots tore up with a grinding, crunching sound, and then, as if its countless cone-tipped arms were reaching out to hug it, the tree came down on top of the grizzly.

Rockson and Rona covered their heads as the giant fir came toward them. There was a loud cracking sound like a drawn-out peal of thunder, and bark and pine needles seemed to cover their bodies and fill their mouths as they breathed in the debris of the falling fir. After about ten seconds they realized they were both still alive and slowly rose up to see just what the hell had happened.

The tree had succeeded in its anointed task. The grizzly was dead, crushed beneath the fir’s harsh branches. The broken carnivore lay twitching, stopped in its tracks only ten feet from the two humans it had been about to turn into a pleasant snack. The very tips of the top branches just reached them—stopping perhaps a foot away. But the bear hadn’t made it. It’s powerful head was pulled back, broken, so that it lay at a near right angle to the rest of the body. And through its chest the end of a thick branch had gone like a spear, crucifying the carnivore to the bloody grass covered ground.

“Well, I’ll be,” Rockson said, holding Rona to him. “Impervious to bullets, but a spear of wood—kills it. Who can figure it?”

“It’s
dead.
That’s all that matters.”

Three

“C
hrist, this thing is heavy,” Rona grunted as she helped Rockson hoist the huge carnivore up onto an odd sort of carrying structure they had rigged atop four of the pack ’brids roped side by side. Even so, it was rough going. The damned thing must have weighed upwards of 1800 pounds—and loading it up involved hours of makeshift pulleys, baying hybrids that didn’t at all like the idea of carrying said cargo, and about a million bees that gathered in the air as the sun went down, their funereal buzz incessant as they hovered over the great corpse, licking at the blood-soaked spots here and there on the hide that marred the pure red-orange pelt’s perfection.

Rock and Rona kept slapping at their faces as the damned black bees seemed to be trying to fly right into their noses, eyes, and ears—and every other sticky place they could find to smash their annoying, droning bodies. But at last the huge carnivore was loaded up atop four unsteady mutant horses and the “expedition” started back the fifty or so miles to Century City—while the going was good. Rock had planned to do some additional hunting. But that would have to wait. This thing would draw wolves and all sorts of smaller meateaters eager for some of the leftovers. They had to move—and fast. He hoped they could make it back before nightfall, but that was wishful thinking, as it was already heading on past two.

The going, thank God, was almost entirely in a downward direction, at least for the first 20 miles or so as they moved into the lower mountains. The ’brids, once they saw that they weren’t all dying or croaking from heart attacks from the heavy load, got up some good speed going down mountain trails carved out by nothing more than goats’ feet and elk hooves. Rona was only too glad to get out of the woods. She was afraid she’d never quite have the same cheerful feeling about this part of the territory again—after their run-in with “Clyde.” She watched his bleeding snout whipping back and forth at the side of one of the hybrids, coating its dark-furred hide with streaks of red as they rode.

They had just about reached the halfway point to home base when Rock first heard it—a distinct droning sound coming from the cloud-shrouded horizon.

“Hide—fast!” he yelled, motioning for her to grab the reins of the second bunch of pack ’brids following behind his group, which he led with tight reins. Rock scouted around quickly and saw a rock shelter created by a long overhang, some hundred yards to the left of them. He headed for it, making the ’brids do double-time, so that the huge bear bounced up and down on their backs. They let out wheezing grunts of air each time, their flared nostrils snorting hot steam. Rockson reached the overhang and got them into the semi-darkness. Rona followed fast with her six-head pack, just as the pilotless Soviet drone emerged from some scattered clouds and flew overhead, a thousand feet up. Rock hoped it hadn’t gotten a pic of them.

Rock hadn’t seen any of the spy planes in this area for a while. He had thought—or hoped—that the Red Army’s technical equipment and support was starting to fall apart. But this one buzzed along in fine fashion, its spy camera, he knew, transmitting images of the mountainous terrain back to a central video headquarters. There the data was sent on to a Central Western Territory Information Center, where computers matched and compared random drone sightings from ten states. It was actually a crude arrangement. But it had helped the Reds track down many a careless Freefighting band.

This one passed overhead without slowing or zeroing in on them for a closer look. But past experience told him to wait a minute or two before heading out. And as usual, his intuition was 100 percent. For hardly had the buzz of the pilotless drone vanished than a second sound quickly filled the afternoon sky. A gargantuan bomber, ancient from the looks of it, with long, hanging wings instead of the swept-back configuration of the supersonic Van Allen Belt dartjets that the Reds used now. Apparently this one was on a sort of hunting mission itself: As Rock and Rona peered out from the darkness of the granite overhang they saw leaflets begin falling from the jet’s bomb-bay doors, which had suddenly flown open. Just a few at first, then a hurricane, then a blizzard of whirling and spinning pieces of paper about a foot square came sailing down, filling the entire sky above them as if with snowflakes.

The plane deposited its load over the entire mountainside—and then flew past as Russian troops inside the metal bird continued to shovel out the leaflets by the thousands. Litterbugs on a grand scale.

“Bastards,” Rock muttered as the plane disappeared over a far ridge still shitting out its load of propaganda. He walked out figuring there were no more aircraft, and caught one of the falling announcements in his outstretched hand. He read,

AMERICAN FREEFIGHTERS:

IT IS TIME FOR PEACE. WE HAVE ALL HAD ENOUGH OF THIS FIGHTING, THIS WAR. PRESIDENT ZHABNOV AND PREMIER VASSILY HIMSELF, WHO IS FLYING OVER FROM RUSSIA, WANT TO MEET WITH THE LEADERS OF THE FREEFIGHTING FORCES, PARTICULARLY TED ROCKSON, WHO WE KNOW IS AUTHORIZED TO NEGOTIATE TERMS FOR ALL REBEL FORCES.

THIS IS NOT A TRICK, BUT A REAL OFFER. A NEW CHANCE FOR WORLD PEACE. AS OFFICERS AND GENTLEMEN WE IMPLORE YOU TO MEET US AT WASHINGTON, D.C. ON JULY 28, 2095 A.D. THERE YOU WILL BE FETED AS BEFITS YOUR STATION. AND A NEW DAY MAY BEGIN. A DAY WHEN RUSSIAN AND AMERICAN WILL WORK HAND-IN-HAND AND TURN THE AMERICAN-SOVIET SOCIALIST STATES INTO A PARADISE ON EARTH.”

It was signed PRESIDENT ZHABNOV, LEADER OF THE UNITED SOCIALIST STATES OF AMERICA, and PREMIER VASSILY, PREMIER OF ALL THE RUSSIAS.

“What kind of manure are they shoveling this time?” Rona asked, stepping up alongside him as she caught one of the paper snowflakes herself.

“The usual,” Rock said with disgust, squeezing the paper into a ball in his clenched fist. He started to throw it angrily to the ground and then saw all the others lying there, ten thousand pieces of garbage. So he held it—and put it in his pocket for later disposal. As if the land needed any more debris.
Assholes.
When—not if—but
when
the Freefighters at last took back control of America, he would personally march every son of a bitch who had littered something under these spacious skies and make him pick it up with his hands and take it back to the Motherland, throw it in the Volga, the Tolga or the Holga—but not in the goddamned Rocky Mountains! There wasn’t a hell of a lot that Rockson was attached to—but these mountains, these granite peaks reaching impossibly high into the sky, daring the very clouds to stop them, these ridges with eagles soaring around their breadths, slopes covered with a green-firred flesh that almost blinded the eye with its beauty when the rays of the noonday sun or the midnight moon swept down over it all . . . These lands he would fight to protect to the last cell of his body.

“Come on, let’s get the hell out of here,” Rock said, feeling for a mad moment like stopping and picking up all the waste that now blanketed the area as if a blizzard had passed overhead. But it was impossible, ridiculous. The paper would rot, would melt in the purifying rains and snows. Nature would take care of Man’s folly.

By keeping the pace up they made good time through the falling light of the late afternoon. He pushed the ’brids hard. They complained and tried to bite him whenever he got too close. ’Brids just happened to be, aside from being just about the mangiest creatures on God’s earth—the laziest as well. You just had to know how to relate to them. Which Rockson did. “You’re almost home boys. Soon, the feed bag.”

The bloated orange sun slid behind jagged cliffs, casting up magnificent pink streamers. Rock saw the first of the C.C. forward-observation posts. To an innocent passerby, or a Red search-and-destroy operation, nothing would have seemed amiss in the woods and boulders around them. But Rock knew guns were trained on him from every direction, faces hidden among the twisting shadows of the branches silhouetted in the pinkish rays of the sunset. Rockson knew this particular clump of conifers.

“Relax boys,” Rock yelled up toward one particular grove of pines where he saw the edge of a gun muzzle dimly reflecting back. “It’s just me—I—”

“I know who it is,” a voice yelled back. “I kin see, I ain’t blind. But still you gots to give the
password.
Come on now—or hold in your tracks. Could be an imposter.” A hammer clicked ominously in the growing darkness. Rock slowed the ’brids behind him, who were only too happy for a moment of rest. The redhide grizzly atop them seemed to have doubled in weight over the last few hours. Rockson smiled as he squinted into the branches. He knew the voice. Old Crayson. The man was heading on ninety—but still volunteered for guard duty. Damned guy had been one of the first generation that had been born in Century City after it was founded from out of the rubble, out of the ruins, back in 1989.