Doomsday Warrior 08 - American Glory (11 page)

“Oh, haven’t I shown you my arsenal?” Kim laughed. “I’m loaded for bear, darling.” She flung open her velcron-layered field jacket to reveal two pearl-handled .45’s strapped to her waist, a set of throwing knives ready for quick draw, and a snub-nosed magna/aluminum Ingram with a 30-slug clip. “When there’s trouble—it’s usually the men who come to me,” the petite blonde said coolly. And so it went, the rest of the team silent, as they all rode along in single file. Only the barbs of the young women passed back and forth like little platters of poison punctuated the air. Each thought: When we bed down,
I
will be with
him.

They rode for hours into the evening and then the night, which grew dark as heavy storm clouds migrated by above heading east to deposit their straining loads. Rock decided to camp about midnight, sensing that Snorter, his ’brid, was beginning to falter. And if that giant among mutant horses was feeling tired, the others were surely ready to drop.

He held his right hand straight up and cried out, “Rest stop—six hours!” The 15 man, 2 woman team headed the ’brids about fifty yards over to a grove of jungle-leaved willow trees, their nuke-mutated hanging branches forming a protective canopy from the elements and from prying Red spy drones in the morning sky—although since the KGB had attempted its coup, Rockson realized that he had seen not one of the cigar-shaped unmanned camera-rockets flying by. Out of the worst of occurrences came useful results.

The ’brids were given their nylon bags filled with high-protein oats and then allowed to graze on tender morsels nearby while the men set up their sleeping bags and undid their tents, just in case the pack of thunderheads riding miles above their heads should decide to spill out their guts of rain water. McCaughlin quickly set up his mini-kitchen, pulling supplies, pots, and pans down from his two pack ’brids. Using smokeless, low-light flame pellets, he cooked up a meal of rabbit and carrot stew, whose odors had every Freefighter in camp lined up with plate in hand before the tough meat had had time to soften.

“Just wait, pull your belts tighter around your stomachs,” the big-bellied Scottish fighter/chef said, waving a long stainless-steel ladle at them. “You eat rabbit before it’s tender as a chicken and you won’t be getting much sleep tonight. Not with said rabbit trying to jump through your intestinal tract and back up to its burrow.”

At last the food was ready and the Freefighters sat around in a circle eating, swapping crude insults, although the level of the joking didn’t slip quite to the usual depths since there were “ladies” present. Thankfully, Kim and Rona kept quiet as they ate, realizing that everyone had probably had about enough for the day. But as Rockson finished and went to turn in after posting guards, both women followed him, setting up their own sleeping sacks on each side of him just yards away. All three of them lay there unable to really fall asleep as they felt the emotions run between them like electric current through a wire. They lay on their backs, eyes open, looking straight up at the sky, each with his or her own seething thoughts and desires. Suddenly the night lit up above as several meteors flew down into the lower atmosphere, burning up in gigantic bonfires in the sky. Since the war, the lower levels of atmosphere in the biospheres around the earth had allowed debris from space to burn more slowly, sometimes hitting the ground in somewhat larger chunks than it had in the past. And the larger masses burned spectacularly at lower altitudes as they speeded up, pulled down by the clutching arms of gravity. The sky was suddenly filled with balls of fire, screaming down from their trillion-mile journeys through space. The meteorites were so large that the Freefighters could see the shapes of them as they came burning down like hawks with their wings on fire, swooping in at stark angles. A globe of white seemed to drop right down on them, filling the night sky with near-daylight for a second. Then it whooshed past, crashing several miles off. They could see the explosion, the white glow filling the horizon for a moment. Rona’s and Kim’s hearts were beating like pistons, but neither made a sound or reached out to be held by the man they loved. They were like two wolves circling prey, each waiting for the other to make a move. Rockson, seeing no alternative, glumly slept alone.

The next day, Rockson woke them all early and after freeing the ’brids from their daily collection of burrs, brambles, and twigs, the force loaded up and was off again. Kim and Rona got on the case again within minutes of striking the trail.

“You look like you could have used a few more hours of beauty sleep,” Kim said, looking over at Rona, whose eyes were often puffy when she first woke up.

“At least I have something to beautify, dear one,” Rona replied, sitting high in the saddle, her khaki field jacket wide open in the morning heat, revealing her large melon breasts pushing against her gray sweat shirt.

“Something’s not the word, darling,” Kim went on without missing a beat. “I would say stockpile is more accurate.”

“If a man came to you looking for supplies,” Rona spat out, “I daresay he’d find only empty shelves.” And so it went.

The attack force rode for hours, the clouds dissipating as the sun rose higher, cutting them apart with its golden machine-gun rays. They came to a rise in the increasingly sparsely vegetated terrain and Rockson took his field glasses to scan ahead. A motion on the ground several hundred yards forward caught his eyes. A long undulating shape, thick as a branch. A snake—a big one. As he moved the glasses to the right he saw another, then another.

“Judas Priest,” the Doomsday Warrior cried out, causing Rona and Kim, sitting atop their ’brids on either side of him, to take out their own binocs and look.

“Yech,” Kim said, making a disgusted expression. “They’re everywhere, Rock—it looks like hundreds of them spread out all across the near part of the plain.”

“Scared of a few snakes, dear?” Rona shot out, seeing her chance.

“It
is
silly, isn’t it?” Kim answered instantly. “With such a large target as you—why would they ever go after me?”

Rockson looked left and right as far as he could see and then turned to the rest of the men who had come to a stop behind him.

“I’m afraid we’re going to have to go through them. Must be some sort of breeding grounds—extends for miles. We can’t play around trying to detour.”

“But Rock,” Rona said, suddenly feeling not a little squeamish herself. “Surely some of them are poisonous—how—how will we get through? I mean, the ’brids—” She stuttered on, nearly incomprehensible, as she slowly realized that he really meant it.

“We can use the new aluma-tarps that Dr. Shecter developed. His tech boys reformulated them so they can be split into strips and used for other purposes. They’re as strong as steel, flexible—just perfect for hybrid armor.”

It took them almost half an hour to get the wide protective tarpaulins—based on the space blanket of the 20th century—wrapped around the legs of their ’brids from the hoof to top of the thigh and secured with tape. The animals didn’t seem to like the idea too much, making noises to that effect—but they had been well trained back in Century City and allowed themselves to be girded. When the Freefighters finished and stood back to see what they had wrought, they had to squelch the laughs. For the creatures looked like overstuffed, badly made carousel horses, walking around stiffly from the somewhat confining pieces of aluma-tarp. But beauty was not the name of the game out in the wastelands of post-nuke America. Only their hoofs and eyes were uncovered.

Rockson ordered the team to mount up—and pull their legs up onto their ’brids’ shoulders out of reach of the acres of snakes. Slowly, every man in the unit, even Rockson himself, feeling the deep unconscious fear of the man’s most ancient enemy—the serpent—deep in his guts, started down the pebble-strewn slope toward the plain below. The ’brids grew increasingly nervous as they approached the gauntlet of living venom-tubes, raising their heads high and looking down out of the wide fear-opened eyes. Rock hoped that the snakes would just let them pass, not wanting to get trampled by the large ’brids. But such was not to be.

The moment Rock’s hybrid reached the start of the obstacle course, the snakes went wild. It was as if they had been waiting just for this moment to arrive. As if with one mind, one living body with a hundred thousand tentacles, the plains all around them came to life in a slithering of slimy bodies. There were snakes of every size and color, thick black ones like eels with their dark mouths open and hissing, green and red ones, moving like slashes of electric color across the light brown dirt. From little worms the size of pencils with fangs nearly as large as their bodies to pythons twenty feet long with jaws opening like a shark’s ready to swallow a man whole—and maybe try a second course of hybrid horse. And they were all coming in one direction. If there is a universal human phobia, it is that of snakes. What man can look upon the face of a viper, stare into those diamond eyes as orange as the back side of the sun, and not fear that forked tongue flicking in and out, endlessly tasting the scent of evil in the air? Who can look and not know that that face is descended from Eden’s demon?

“Rock, Rock!” Kim screamed just behind the Doomsday Warrior as her ’brid reared up, nearly toppling her from the saddle. Her boots had come out of the stirrups.

“Hold on, Kim. Wrap your legs around its neck, grip the saddle horn with both arms.” There was no stopping, no time for mistakes. The snakes closed in from all sides like the twin walls of the Red Sea crashing together against the terrified riders and their mounts. They leapt and struck out with jaws agape as if they were ready to swallow the world. Thousands of pairs of fangs closed on the aluma-tarps around the hybrids’ legs, searching for flesh in which to inject their venoms—poisons which could take out even a ’brid in a matter of seconds. But the death-dripping hypodermics couldn’t penetrate the material. An ooze of venom began running down the sides of the ’brids’ legs. The ’brids stepped high—and fast, scrunching many.

Rockson knew it couldn’t go on like this for long—one of them would get up high enough to reach paydirt, and . . . He leaned around in his saddle and screamed out over the disquieting sound of ten thousand snapping rubbery jaws, “Hit the ’brids! Scream at ’em—shoot your pistols off next to their heads—make ’em more scared of you than the snakes!” The men did as Rockson ordered, kicking, yelling in the ears of the animals. Guns went off, firing in the air as the snakes continued their ceaseless barrage against the foil-covered legs of the panic-stricken steeds. When an animal is frightened, the only way to regain control of it is to take back control of its mind—be a more powerful fear-force than the one confronting it. Or so the theory goes. And in this case it worked. The pistol shots terrified the ’brids, who had been running in circles into one another, stepping high, afraid to venture further out into the sea of living serpents. The barks of the guns, the men screaming as if kingdom come had come, panicked them into a dead-ahead galloping stampede. Rockson took the lead with Snorter and shot across the moving ground as the other ’brids closed rank behind, all of them running as fast as their steel girded legs could carry them.

Thousands of the snakes were trampled, ground into bloody mud beneath the ’brids’ pulverizing hooves. Yet still the serpents on every side flew into the air as the ’brids approached, trying to judge their airborne trajectory so as to reach the faces of the tearing animals or the things that rode atop them. The Freefighters kept shooting on every side of them, firing first one way then the other and reloading with snap-in clips in seconds. The streaks of black and gray erupted in explosive blasts of snakeskin and innards as the .45 cal., .7mm and .9mm, along with Rock’s own .12 gauge death-presents all turned the air around them into putrid mists of red.

God only knew how many vipers they sent back to hell, but the Freefighters weren’t counting—just killing. The stampede went on with no intention of stopping—only the sheer speed and power of the large mammals and the leg armoring allowed them to slam their way through what, for any other creature on earth—even a three-horn grizzly—meant certain paralyzing death. Rock heard a piercing scream behind him even above the constant gunfire and turned around to see one of the new men picked for the mission, sandy haired Matheson, wrestling with a four-foot-long piece of writhing death. The black snake with four yellow and red stripes running parallel down the sides of its body had its fangs sunk full-length into the man’s neck and was pumping out grams of nerve poison. Matheson managed to rip the thing out and heave it away and back down to the writhing army below. He threw his hands around his throat and his whole head seemed to lift up, his neck stretching impossibly long. Then his entire body began spasming, the arms and legs jerking out of control. The body tumbled from the saddle and down to the sea of death. In a second it was covered with a blanket of the things. The others had to go on. They rode for minutes that seemed like days, but at last the snakes seemed to grow less dense and then they were gone completely. Rockson made them ride on for another thirty seconds to make sure the wretched creatures wouldn’t come after them, and then pulled Snorter to a stop. The other ’brids, their energy gone in the mad burst and seeing no more of the squirming things crawling around their ankles, also slowed and halted, their foam-flecked jaws hanging open from the exertion, their tongues hanging out panting like dogs.

“Everyone still here?” Rock asked, making a quick head count.

“Everyone except Matheson, poor bastard,” said McCaughlin, who had been taking the rear, spitting out a disgusted wad onto the dirt below.

“At least he didn’t suffer,” added Chen, who had been riding just behind the unfortunate man. “I saw him go down—he was dead before he hit the ground. That poison was like a cyanide injection to the brain.”

“Anyone else? Any ’brids acting funny?” Rock asked. They all looked around at themselves and each other—and somehow nothing was the worse for wear. Matheson’s hybrid, who had followed the orders, stood looking up at Rockson nervously as if it had done something wrong.