Doomsday Warrior 17 - America’s Sword (2 page)

Without the stimulation of the world, it was as if he hardly existed. An embryo of fear, trapped in a womb of destruction and paralysis. He tried to breathe as slowly as he could, since when he took large breaths, he would also draw in large amounts of the dust, clogging his mouth, throat, and lungs, making him feel like he was suffocating. But when he could cool himself out even a little, and take very slow, even breaths, it seemed as if he could actually get some of the precious oxygen into his tangs. It helped a little, just that feeling that he had the slightest amount of control over his environment, even if it was at the bottom of a collapsed mountain.

Rockson had no way of knowing if the whole damn mountain had given way and Century City was now crushed beneath it all. Or if the whole world—everything—was gone. He knew it wasn’t a nuke sent by the Reds, or there would have been a lot more heat generated. No, it had to be an earthquake or some fault in the geological structure beneath the mountain—a fault which moved a little too abruptly. Though it wasn’t technically
that
earthquake zone there in the middle of the Rocky Mountains, at least he had always thought so. But a thousand, ten thousand years between quakes meant nothing to the Grim Reaper. He did what the hell he wanted.

Rock tried to keep his mind occupied, thinking about the different parts of the city, trying to visualize just what was out there now. Sometimes his telepathic abilities actually enabled him to see beyond his immediate surroundings. But not now. He had to be in a super-relaxed meditative state and that just wasn’t happening at the moment. He’d be rescued. He had to believe that. There were work crews out there right now, no doubt digging their way down to him and the others trapped. Yes, for sure. He tried to hear, slowing his breath as much as possible, listening for any sound of help, of emergency crews slamming their tools through the concrete maelstrom. But there was nothing coming, nothing that sounded human anyway. Just the beating of his heart, and the occasional shifting of large slabs which made a grinding, terrible sound like a giant’s fingernails on a chalk board.

There was another sudden shifting of the debris above him and Rockson felt the steel frame of the bed make all kinds of threatening noises like it was thinking of snapping in half. He knew if that happened, his days were over. Crushed into pâté that only the ants would enjoy. But though the frame gave some and he could feel a little more pressure on his lower left leg and foot, it held. Thank God, Dr. Shecter’s manufacturing design people had made the things in Century City strong, to last for decades. If he ever got out of this dusty mess, he’d sure as hell thank the science chief of the city and his tech boys. If there was a city any more.

He had to stop thinking about them all, as their faces flashed before his dust-coated eyes. It was too much. He could deal with his own demise. It was hard, but God gave and took back again like a nervous shopper in a K-Mart universe. There wasn’t a hell of a lot he could do about that, other than send up a few prayers. But the others, the city itself, ending! It was too much to allow himself to think about. President Langford, Kim—they were both here too, since they’d been rescued from Pattonville a month before. They were here all right, but he had no idea what state they were in. Against his will, Kim’s delicate face flashed over and over in his mind like a neon sign gone mad. Only her face was crushed in, with bones poking out and blood all over the damn place.

Rockson gritted his teeth and with sheer force of will made himself think of other things. For some reason his mind drifted back, back through the years which flipped and spun through his mind like leaves on the wind. Back to memories that were easier to deal with, memories filled with beauty, light, and no dust.

He was a child, back in the valley where he had spent his childhood, it was a harsh but stunningly beautiful world, with slopes filled with wildflowers, running brooks and wildlife abundant, and fresh air. For a landscape a hundred years after nuke war, one would never have known that such terror had occurred, that just a hundred miles in any direction there were craters and vast, scarred areas of land. Places where hardly a thing grew but for stunted and thorned trees with bark as thick and hard as steel.

He had been a wild child. Almost more of an animal than a human child. But his father had known that the mutant boy, with his white streak of hair running down the center of his jet-black name of hair and his mismatched aqua and violet eyes, was not like other children. He was tougher, stronger, faster. He needed the wildness of the surrounding hills and woods. And so he had let the boy Ted Rockson run free almost from the moment he could walk.

Rockson drifted back, ever deeper into the past, the past which was so much more preferable than the hell state he was in now. He was six, and was climbing Telegraph Peak, about eight miles from his valley home. Why they called it that, he didn’t know, as there were no telegraphs or even the poles that had once carried such information. He climbed a rough-barked fir, the tallest of the tall trees that blanketed the slope, and at the very top he could see his house, the thin trickle of smoke rising easily into the tawny sky. Above, an eagle flew serenely on the wind, about five hundred feet up, searching with its crystal eyes for prey. It caught his eye and for a flash the boy felt something like a charge between them, a current of life, of understanding of what the other was. An understanding that they were of the same wave, the same life-electricity that fueled all things.

Then the great golden-winged bird was off on an updraft, sensing the movement of something a mile or two off. And for a flash Rockson could see through the great bird of prey’s eyes. He was up there too, looking down. And for a moment, he felt dizzy, almost overwhelmed by the new perceptions. He would fall, he would crash down onto the trees. Then the cross-species perception was gone, and he let his pounding heart slow down again. If this was part of the legacy of being a mutant child, then so be it. He felt suddenly blessed and understood with a kind of childlike wisdom that he had to learn to allow such perceptions, such out-of-body experiences, to grow. That he was not like the other boys. For better or worse, he was different.

The scene in his mind suddenly changed. He was with his father, down by one of the nearby streams. Marston’s Creek it was called, though no one could recall just who Marston was. They were fishing, and it was a perfect day with chandelier-crystal blue sky, not a cloud up there. A slow breeze wafted through the trees that grew on each bank of the easy-flowing water, and father and son were lying back lazily on their elbows as they waited for something to bite. His father was telling him about this and that, about how to find the best spot where the fish congregated, about dealing with women. About every kind of thing that a father passes onto his son. And Rock felt lucky, incredibly lucky. He knew that this was a special, special moment. And he let it all in, soaked it up inside, his soul smiling.

Suddenly, against his will, the scene shifted again. He was ten years old, and was back in the small but comfortable cabin that he shared with his father, mother, and sisters. They were all cutting string beans, a red species that seemed to thrive since the nuke war, as the other green species had virtually all died out. Moose and bean stew was on the agenda for dinner; young Rockson’s mouth was already watering as the triple-horned moose meat was being fried up slowly to get the juices out before being thrown into the huge stew pot nearly big enough for a young lad to bathe in—a fact which Rock’s mother sometimes threatened him with when he got in trouble.

Suddenly everything had changed in just seconds. There were sounds outside the cabin, and as his father rushed to the window, he yelled to the family to hide.

“Reds,” his father had yelled out. Just that word, a single sound, but it still reverberated through all the years. There weren’t a hell of a lot of places to hide, but they all tried to find someplace, under a bed, inside a chest, as his father grabbed the family pump shotgun and stood inside the door, waiting. And they hadn’t had to wait long. A squad of Death Shirts, the dreaded KGB murderers who roamed the countryside, killing and mutilating survivors, came smashing in. His father fired and took out two of them. Then he was sliced to bits. From beneath the floorboards, the young Rockson watched, tears streaming down his face, knowing he couldn’t make a sound. Watched as his mother and sisters were raped, and then cut up like creatures for the slaughterhouse.

The image burned itself into his heart and mind as the tears coated his mouth and neck. His human heart wanted to leap up and attack them; he knew there was nothing he could do. He didn’t have a chance against the seven murderers who carried out their bloody crimes. So he watched and memorized their faces, his eyes peering up from the darkness, unseen by the invaders. When they were done, there was nothing left of what had been his family. All the dreams and idyllic talks with his father, the scents of stew, wiped out in a matter of minutes. And Rockson as well was changed in those dreadful bloody moments. He became harder inside. Something inside of him died, and something else, an iron determination to live, and to fight the oppressor, was born.

When the scum finally left, Rock waited several minutes and then crawled out of his hiding place. He couldn’t bear to look at what had happened to those he loved. But somehow, using the analytical side of his mutant nature, he overcame his fear. He wrapped each of his family up in sheets and buried them. It took almost a full day to do. Then he equipped himself with a few meager supplies, and a large hunting knife that had belonged to his father, and set the cabin on fire. He walked off without looking back.

Rockson’s eyes suddenly flew open. He was back in the dust and debris of Century City, and tears were welling up in his eyes, just as they had decades ago. Memories lived so long, it was as if it had all just happened the day before. If he lived to be a hundred he would remember it, a nightmare in bloody technicolor. It took seconds to readjust to the here and now, so intense had the past been. He listened and looked to see if help was on the way. But it was all the same, just dust floating everywhere.

Suddenly, he heard a sound, as if something was moving near him. For a moment his heart speeded up with hope, his eyes opened a little wider as they searched through the dimness. But he saw instead something that made his gut turn over. A rat. No, a whole stream of them. His mutant eyes, able to collect ten times as much light as the eyes of “normals,” were able to see the furry black shapes in the semidarkness as they scuttled around in the jagged debris of what had been his room. Rockson knew there had always been rats in Century City, but they had remained hidden away behind walls, down in their own secret labyrinths and tunnels. The city had always been kept clean with traps and cats. Until the walls came tumbling down.

“Shit,” the Doomsday Warrior muttered through clenched teeth, not able to stand the vision of the bastards eating away at him, while he couldn’t do a thing to stop them. He tried to pull back deeper under the bed as if that would hide him, which he knew even as he did so was a ridiculous gesture, as the rats could see better than he could in this light. There were hissing sounds as several of the vermin about three yards off sensed his motion and they stopped, staring hard. Their reddish eyes glowed like embers in the dust-fog, and Rockson gulped hard. How long would it take them to realize that he was unable to fight back?

Near panic, he felt something beneath his hip. Something hard, pushing against the bone. For a second he thought it was a piece of shattered concrete, but then realized as he brought his mind down to the spot, that the cold metal was his shotpistol. Somehow it had tumbled from the table beside his bed down with him when the whole world went crashing. Using every bit of strength and will he had, Rockson somehow managed to move his hand and shift his hip just a few inches. It took almost a minute to get it out. and gripped in his hands. He watched the rats slowly edge in closer, looking at his face like it was going to be the first thing on the plate of delicacies. Many yards off, he heard a scream and prayed that the huge tunnel rats hadn’t just taken a bite out of one of C.C.’s other citizens.

“Fucking back off, you slime-buckets,” Rock yelled as one suddenly came charging in. The scream startled it, and it stopped and hissed, its fur rising up. Rock gripped the shotpistol and pulled it out from beneath him, causing excruciating pain to ripple down his body as he had to press against jagged pieces of cement everywhere. He got the thing firmly in grasp and aimed it in front of him. His scream had startled them, but now that they saw there was nothing to back it up, a whole horde of the toothy creatures came down the slabs of shattered ceiling while lay everywhere.

Rock pointed the pistol straight ahead, not even caring whether the shot ricocheted back onto him. If he was going to go, let it be from his own pistol, rather than from a thousand gnawing teeth. He pulled the trigger and there was a roaring boom that deafened him. By the light of the blast he could see there were hundreds of the wretched creatures spread out all around the debris. And they went flying as the shot poured into them. Furry bodies flew every which way like bloody ragdolls, heading into orbits, splattering on the collapsed walls, ramming into each other. Their squeals were deafening, then all was silent but for a few muted squeaks of pain.

Rock felt with his fingers around the side of the pistol. Two more shots left. Damn, why hadn’t he reloaded the fucking thing last night, when he could have? He knew there were shells in the room. A lot of good that would do him now. They could have been inches away, but it was like a million miles. He was lucky to have even gotten the pistol. Already the unharmed rats were closing in again, gnawing on the butchered bodies of their compatriots. But there were too many of them; they would want more to eat. They seemed to pour out of every crevice in the grayness. A bunch came toward him again.

He held the pistol hard in his hands, wondering whether he should use it on himself, rather than on them. Seeing them ripping at the dead didn’t exactly make him want to wait around to share the experience himself. And as they came in closer for the huge meal that awaited, Rockson’s mind reeled back and forth as his finger tightened on the trigger.