Doomsday Warrior 07 - American Defiance (12 page)

Inside, the tent seemed as if it were about to explode from the pent-up panic of so many men and animals. The camels and ’brids each started their own howling choruses of fear as they heard the dying cries of their brethren outside. They drove each other to louder and louder heights, as if thriving on the noise, the madness. The men were sweating, covered with the foul stench of the place. Above them, all around them, the tent rippled as the tens of thousands of death drops bounced harmlessly off the protective material. To feel it—death—so close, actually repelled just inches from your nose, was quite an unnerving experience for the men inside. Only Rockson, Detroit, and Chen, who had been through a dozen such attacks, took it all in stride, keeping an eye on the dull greenish glow that filtered through the sides and on any ’brids or camels that might make a break for it. But even dumb creatures know when skeletal fingers are reaching for their throats. Soon they calmed down and lay atop one another, breathing heavily, occasionally letting out with a howling sneeze or cough.

“How bloody long do these to-do’s go on?” Boyd yelled from out of the semi-darkness.

“Anywhere from a minute to two or three hours,” Rockson shouted back over the driving roar of the Acid Rain pour.

“Ain’t this a pisser then, mates?” the Aussie lieutenant said with a laugh. “Say, did the bunger with the brew make it in all right?” Boyd suddenly asked with concern.

“Got ’em over ’ere, sir,” one of his men spoke up. “He’s keeping real nice and quiet. I’m ready to shoot ’im, sir, if he makes a break for it.” Even Rock’s men laughed at that one. The Aussies obviously regarded their precious tins of amber brew as a much higher priority than the life of one nervous camel.

“Throw me a tinny would you, then, mate?” Boyd pleaded through the darkness. “Don’t want to be entering the dark beyond without a few swigs of Queensland’s best in me guts now.” Cans of Foster’s went flying through the air, hitting men and beasts alike, setting up a whole new commotion.

“Are you all mad?” Rockson screamed out over the rising bray. “All we need is one of these damned animals standing up and—”

“Mister Rockson,” the Aussie commander yelled back, “you Yanks are just too bloody uptight. Down Under, we have the more mellow approach.” Rock could hear the pop tops snapping again in the green dimness. He gritted his teeth as the storm sent down its worst.

The Acid Rain slammed into the tent for nearly thirty minutes before finally slowing down and then dying out completely. A few parting bolts of searching lightning knifed the ground nearby. Then it was gone. The Aussies reached for the tent flap but Rockson yelled out, “No, don’t touch it. Even the drops sitting on top of the tent and on the ground will burn you—they go right through shoes or clothing. Let it evaporate. The stuffs so volatile it can only exist in liquid form for minutes. Besides, the sun’s coming out. It’ll clean things up.” They waited nearly fifteen minutes, and then Rock poked his head carefully through the straight shining flap.

It was a new world out there—a world of steaming death. A world of smoking bones lying in piles, the flesh that had once concealed them gone—gone completely. The cacti had all collapsed into a glowing putty on the ground, so that as far as the eye could see, the Acid Rain had cleared a path nearly three miles wide of every living, breathing thing it had caught in its acid grip. And behind, it had left only death.

They came out of the tent, slowly at first. Then, as the animals realized they were going to see daylight again, in a mad rush that turned into a stampede, tearing right through the side of the metallic tent and ripping one of the alloy sheets. It took nearly twenty minutes for the bedlam to at last get straightened out.

“Well, I guess we’ll be making our departure then, matey,” the Aussie leader said, offering his hand. “No hard feelings then. We can see we’ll just be in the way.”

“I can’t let you guys go off alone,” Rock said, mounting his ’brid. “You did after all come all the way over here to help us, and I’ll be damned if I could stand the thought of your bodies melted by acid rain somewhere, or digested in some saber-toothed wolf’s stretching belly. No, you ‘chaps’ will be riding with us—at least till I can drop you all off at some Free City that’s big enough to handle you all and your bloody camels.”

Rotund President Zhabnov was cutting a rose in the White House garden. He hummed a stupid ditty as he snipped the
Forens excelleza
—his own red hybrid with an orange-edged blossom. “Excellent, excellent,” he murmured. “I’ll send a bunch of these to the ailing Premier. The Grandfather will remember the kind gesture and repay me someday.”

A Russian Regular Army officer came running from the White House. “Your Excellency,” he gasped, handing a telegram to Zhabnov, “the Rebel President Langford and his daughter have been captured.”

Zhabnov opened the telegram. A gentle mind-scan had shown that the two prisoners at the remote Ft. Svetlanya in Montana were indeed they. What luck. What a beautiful day this had turned out to be. The
Forens excellenza
bloomed, and these two were captured. He felt so good he handed the startled officer a rose, albeit one of the slightly faded ones. “This is a gift. Now—be gone!” The officer thanked Zhabnov profusely and ran back toward the mansion, holding the rose carefully in one hand.

The Red President gathered a few more blossoms, enough for an air delivery bouquet for the Premier, and then waddled back toward the White House. When he reached his office, he picked up the phone and ordered the captives to be flown immediately to Washington for a Deep Mind Probe in the Octagon. The Octagon, his brainchild, was the newest and most modern of his Prison/Interrogation/Mindbreaking facilities. It was equipped to handle up to two thousand prisoners at a time in assembly-line fashion. Today it would have only two, Zhabnov thought to himself. But they would receive all the hospitality the establishment could provide. And when the Mindbreaker had finished with the so-called President of the Re-United States, Zhabnov would know the location of all the Free Cities in the country. Then the slaughter could begin.

Ah, what a lovely day, the Russian President of America thought as he walked to his bedroom. Perhaps he would have the Siamese twin virgins he had been saving until the banquet next week. No—tonight—he must have them tonight. He deserved a celebration. This life was too short to be putting off the sure pleasures of today for the unknowable sensations of tomorrow.

Ten

I
t was noon when the first tremors hit. For a moment, the ground felt strangely soft beneath their feet, almost like walking on a field of thick springy grass, to the combined Freefighter-Australian force of nearly forty men and God-knew-how-many beasts of burden who had been walking across the sunbaked prairieland for nearly two days. But it only felt pleasant for a second—then the harder quakes hit, knocking the mounts to the ground, sending their riders flying through the air, flapping like so many wingless birds. Once fully unleashed, the earth shook violently—cacti, ant hills, thorn trees, all vibrating and jumping back and forth as if having a fit. The ground cracked open in all directions, creating a spiderweb of chasms whose sides groaned and grated against one another. It was as if a madman lived just beneath the surface, and holding a God-like axe, was smashing away at the fragile earth intent upon completely obliterating it.

Rockson felt the ’brid stumble beneath him, losing its front footing. He kicked his feet from the open-sided stirrups and pushed up with his hands on the saddle to get momentum. For the other men flying around him, it was as if they were in the middle of a cyclone, unable to find their bearings or even which way the ground was. But Rockson—who had taken a thousand falls at the hands of Chen, and his enemies, that had sent him flying topsy-turvy through the air—knew exactly where he was and hit the spasming earth in a roll, spinning end over end nearly fifteen feet before he came to a stop. Rock knew there was no sense in even trying to get up as the ground increased its rate of thunderous turbulence every second. He spread himself out as far as he could, lying face down on the dirt, his arms and legs creating an X. He kept only his head up, trying to see what was happening to the others.

There isn’t a hell of a lot that a man can do in an earthquake. It reminds him very quickly that he’s just a piss-poor ant on the face of this earth. All any of them could do was pray and be buffeted about by the rolling waves of the planet’s surface. Pray that in five minutes they would be alive to feel like more than an ant, to feel important again. The animals had gone into their own brand of frenzy since they didn’t have the intelligence to just lie still, and as a result, they flailed furiously while trying to right themselves. Those few camels or hybrids who somehow managed to stumble to their feet were instantly knocked down again by the violent turmoil beneath them. Rock heard several screams above even the earth-cracking roar of the quake as a wide chasm opened beneath two of the camels. They fell in as if sucked down by a vacuum cleaner, disappearing instantly from view. Everywhere was dust, chaos, as the most solid thing that one can know in this life came apart beneath their feet.

The earthquake lasted for nearly a minute—a long time for such a high-intensity one. Rockson had been through quakes before, but this was perhaps the worst. His body was vibrating like a brass bell as he rose from the finally motionless ground. The dust clouds that had been raised slowly drifted down again, covering everything with a layer of fine sooty particles. The sound of the terrified animals was deafening as they jumped to their feet and ran wildly in circles and into each other, not realizing that the danger was past. Slowly, the rest of the men got up, brushing the dirt from their pants and shirts. For all the noise, there didn’t seem to have been too much damage beyond the loss of the two camels and some supplies that had toppled from the backs of the mounts.

Rock walked quickly around the white-faced fighters, first checking his own men. Ashton and Douglas, the MindBreaking experts, seemed to have gotten the worst of it since they weren’t used to such rough endeavors. They gave Rockson weak smiles and slowly stood up, bruised but not otherwise hurt. The rest of the Freefighters were already trying to calm their ’brids, patting the frisky creatures on the nose, slipping them some sugar cubes to take their minds off the quake. Chen stood next to his two martial arts students—Du Soo and Lenny Brown—with something resembling a proud smile on his oriental face. His two trainees had taken the falls perfectly. They were the first of a new breed of fighter in Century City, raised to fight from the time they were children. They had attended all the normal educational facilities of Century City, but on top of that had, since the age of five, had spent six to eight hours a day training in every aspect of warfare and fighting techniques. Chen’s heavy-duty classes, his constant pronouncements that “it is not fun and games but your lives and the life of your country that are at stake” were already paying off their dividends. Rock walked quickly by the rest of his team, barely glancing at them. Archer, McCaughlin, and Detroit had all been through hell and back countless times.

But the Aussies seemed somewhat shaken up by the encounter with but one more of America’s many ways of dying. Lieutenant Boyd hovered anxiously over three of his force who had suffered broken bones. They lay on the ground in obvious pain.

“Damage report?” Rockson asked in a concerned tone. There was no sense in trying to pretend any longer that they weren’t all in this together. They were—until death do us part.

“Lost four camels—two down one of your bloody splits in the ground and two from broken legs.” He pointed about thirty feet off where two of the Bitebacks were lying on their sides, unable to rise. “And I can’t find one of my men. I’m afraid—that he went down there.” Again the Aussie leader pointed a calloused finger toward one of the wider chasms some yards away, from which a cloud of red particles was rising straight up, borne aloft by the warm air flowing out of the crack.

“Sorry about all this,” Rockson said, by way of apology for his hostile homeland.

“Hey, matey, no need for that sort of brag. We knew, every bloody man who volunteered to come here, that it weren’t going to be no bloody Sunday picnic. Though I must say I would think your American God would be slightly more hospitable to such honored guests.” Rockson was growing to like the Aussies more and more. There was something courageous about them in a deep instinctive way. If their method of keeping cool in the face of danger was to pretend the whole damned shebang was little more than a big laugh, something to be amused by while they quaffed down another of their omnipresent Foster’s—who the hell was he to judge them. They were brave, good fighters.

At last they got the attack expedition moving again, the injured covered with splints and bandages, the wounded camels disposed of with pistol shots to the head. The Aussies, not ones for unneeded sentimentality, cut up the dead beasts in just minutes with razor-sharp knives and packed the filets of meat into a saltbox they carried. Their former profession as shepherds back in Down Under had also made them excellent butchers. And they clearly knew, as Rockson did, that survival meant doing many “unpleasant” things. The squeamish, the emotional, didn’t stand a chance in the new world.

The earthquake had changed the terrain ahead of them dramatically. Chasms had opened up as fast as desert plants blossom after a cloudburst. The entire prairie was cracked like a mud flat with everything from foot-wide gulleys to thirty-foot splits that whole trucks could drive down, and bottomless holes from which steam and acrid smells continued to rise as the earth burped and gurgled up her deeply buried gases. The combined American/Aussie force had to chart its way between the cracks carefully, making wide circles, slowing the actual travel speed to nearly half its previous rate. But by Rockson’s reckoning, they were within forty miles of the Red Fortress Svetlyana, and even with the obstacles he figured rendevous time by tomorrow night.