Doomsday Warrior 09 - America’s Zero Hour (5 page)

Rockson rode Snorter, a hybrid he had used as a mount for many years now. The creature was immensely strong and heavily pelted—the result of generations of breeding of wild mustangs affected by radiation exposure. Like Rockson, the horse was a mutation,
Mutaneous equinus,
better equipped for the Post-Nuke world than any horse that had ever lived.

The ’brids like Snorter and the other mounts that Rockson’s men rode truly lived only when they ran. Their massive sinewy legs churned away like steam engines, as their mouths, gaping wide, sucked in oxygen to fuel their bodies. The attack team rode along in perfect unison at full gallop, each man leaning far ahead around the neck of his ’brid to cut down the wind. Even the Doomsday Warrior had a smile on his face as they raced across the purplish-lit land.

The winter had been slow in starting, fall drifting along apparently endlessly, the gift of warm desert winds coming up from Arizona. The aspens were masses of yellow that fell like confetti in the sudden gusts of wind, the fresh air so warm that you had to leave your flak jacket across the back of your saddle and you were never sweaty in your tee shirt. But then the wind shifted. The temperature dropped fifty degrees in fifteen minutes. Rock’s ’brid whinnied in displeasure as the warm breezes became sprinkles of snow thrown by the wind as if some huge fist had pitched the flakes directly into the ’brid’s face. The young birch trees bent over, their leaves falling in storms of color—red, orange, yellow. Men that just moments before had been in their tee shirts now had their winter parkas zipped up tight and their heads down. The snow didn’t last, mostly it was wind and a few flurries, but a light frost fell on the dark green grass, a silent blanket of white, quickly covering it. They rode on, thinking private thoughts . . .

“Moose! Moose!” a voice suddenly bellowed out, shattering the momentary serenity. Rock turned in his saddle to see Archer, high on his steed. His face was flushed with excitement as he gestured wildly with his mitt-sized hands.

Rock directed his ’brid over to the hyperactive mountainman. Snorter stopped in his tracks when he saw the mounds of moose droppings steaming on the cold snow, and started sniffing at the big holes the moose had kicked out of the moss.

“Moose season, huh?” Rock said.

Archer merely grunted, flashing a broken-toothed smile. “Me hunt?” He pointed off at the trail of hoofprints that headed toward a hillock of pine trees.

“Easy there, pal, no,” Rockson said. “If we see one on the way, okay, we’ll take a shot at it and you’ll have your mooseburgers—but we’re not on a hunting trip. Not today. Sorry.”

Archer’s face—what you could see of it beyond the black, overgrown, tangled beard—was crestfallen. But he nodded assent. Rockson was the one man he obeyed.

Rockson got the party moving again, taking the lead. Moose. The species had been almost wiped out by the war. But in the past decade the Freefighters had run across the majestic horned beasts numerous times. Once he had seen a herd of nearly a hundred grazing out in the grassy plains. Like most twenty-first-century animals, they had mutated from the radiation. Superficially they looked pretty much like the moose of old—but of course they weren’t. He knew the moose were now largely nocturnal. Their big yellow eyes were slit like a cat’s, enabling them to gallop at top speed through the darkest forest and never bang into a tree. The slit-eyed moose were a hell of a lot meaner and harder to kill than those of old—but they tasted wonderful.

Five

T
hey had proceeded another ten miles when Archer shouted again. They turned and saw a magnificent moose on a hillock. Archer’s face broke into a wide, idiotic grin as he reached for his crossbow. The creature, with horns big enough for a man to sit in, was approaching them with a quizzical expression on its face. Suddenly there was a
whooosh
of a rocket as a white-and-red trail of fire shot from a copse of trees. The moose barely had time to look up, startled, when the missile hit it, blowing it into a million stew-size pieces.

“Russians,” Rock yelled, knowing that no American would do such a thing—waste an animal like that for fun.

They shot for cover as several Reds came driving out of the woods, singing and drinking, unaware of the Freefighters’ presence. They had hit a moose with one of a rack of rockets on the back of a flat-top truck. There were five more men on cycles and about twenty troopers in armored half-tracks—KGB Blackshirts. But these were sloppier than he had ever seen. A few had vodka bottles in their hands or in their mouths. Usually KGB were rigid as steel—like their master of murder, Killov. They would pay for their carelessness.

“When I give the signal, waste them. Grenades ready—frags and phosphorus, okay, Detroit?”

“Star-knives?” asked Chen.

“For the wheels,” Rock said. “That ought to at least cripple a bunch of them, then use full auto fire, deployment method B.” The Reds were making such noise partying that they neither heard nor saw Freefighters as they fanned out on the ridge overlooking the grisly scene of casual slaughter below. The KGBers were too busy laughing and grabbing pieces of moose—paws, parts of horn—for souvenirs to take back to mother Russia.

“Look, Nivski,” the leader smiled, a major by his insignia, “I will mount this eight-prong horn over my fireplace in Murmansk.”

The lieutenant, a tall scraggly blond man with a half-empty bottle glued to his lips was evidently on unusually comradely terms with the major, for he said, “They will never let you come back to Murmansk. You have grown too used to lax discipline now that Killov is gone. None of us will ever go back. Let us drink and hunt and rape. Use this land for some fun before the rads or the Red Army get us.”

“You are right, comrade,” said the major, poking the lieutenant in a drunken manner on his chest. “And just for being right, you can have the other horn.”

“The damaged one? Thanks, thief. You keep the good one and give me the damaged one!”

The KGB ranks gathered around the drunken officers and sent out gales of raucous laughter as they weaved alcoholic dances around the fragmented creature. They were at the peak of humor when the Freefighters shot forward from their hiding places among the boulders firing their Liberator rifles on full automatic. Many of the Reds choked on their own blood before they even stopped laughing. The others dove for cover amongst the rocks and bushes around them. Their well-oiled Kalashnikovs began to speak their own brutal tongue, flames leaping barrels, searching for flesh. Rock, as he rolled for cover, was grazed by a lucky shot. He winced in pain as the slug tore through his arm. Chen saw Rock get pinned down, and since he was on the opposite flank of the shooter saw a chance to catch the man by surprise. He ran forward with a star-knife in each hand until he was within twenty feet of the KGB’er. Just as the Red turned with his rifle, Chen unleashed his weapons. They spun through the air one after the other like homing pigeons of death. The first hit the man square in the throat, slicing in through the Adam’s apple and jugular, spraying out blood. The second hit his chest and slid in between the ribs, slicing into the right lung which oozed air like a popped balloon.

Gagging on his own blood, the Blackshirt spun on his heels and pitched forward into the grass. His eyes rolled up like dull marbles.

Digging two more of the six-pointed star-knives out of his belt, the martial arts master rolled under some Communist fire and managed to scramble to the cover of a fallen log. Bullets chipped away at the rotted wood, threatening to bury themselves in his flesh, but he lay flat as a pancake.

It’s my turn now,
thought Rock. He rushed out from his cover and blasted away with his shotpistol, at the group of Reds who were pouring fire down on the Chinese Freefighter. One KGBer got it in the head and leapt to his feet in a half-mad jerk, blood spitting from his mouth. He seemed to be staring at the hole between his eyebrows as he collapsed in a heap, half over his nearest comrade. This knocked the rifle from his friend’s shoulder, and before he could regain it Rock was on him. His hunting knife flashed and dug deep in the man’s throat.

The rest of the Reds—two huddled groups of five men each—lay behind rocks halfway up the opposite hill. They fired wildly at everything they saw or heard. And they heard a lot of rocks and pebbles that Chen and Rockson began throwing about the killing field. Dead stumps and small boulders were chipped by frenzied fire from the Kalashnikovs as they spent a lot of ammo on nothing. Rock smiled. Uncontrolled, hysterical fire. He chucked a softball-size stone about thirty feet to his left. It rustled the leaves of some cottonwoods. Instantly both groups of Reds poured immense firepower onto the offending sapling grove. Little remained of the small stand of foliage when the wall of bullets stopped.

“Fools,” screamed the major, who had good cover now behind a dead tree. “Save your ammunition. Fire only when you’re fired on.” Though the shout was a quick colloquial Russian with a Ukranian inflection, Rockson caught the gist of the order. He had thought this would be easy. Now, with a Red officer in charge, it might be a little harder. The major would have to go.

The Doomsday Warrior took it upon himself to begin crawling down the decline toward the major. With him out of the way there would be no contest. The wet-behind-the-ear soldiers and the drunken insubordinate lieutenant, who had miraculously managed to stay alive behind a solid oak tree’s cover, would be easy pickings once the major was taken out.

Rock crawled through the tall grass for a good fifty feet without being detected. Chen had shown him just how to move to appear like the wave of the grain of the fields. When the wind moved the grass, he moved. A wave, undetectable.

He was about to chance attack when he heard the loud concussion of grenades in the approximate position of the Red major. Detroit yelled, “Go for it, man,” and jumped up from behind a boulder, throwing another grenade. It sailed over Rockson and impacted just to the left of the major’s cover. The Doomsday Warrior ran the fifty feet across the open area and rolled behind a fallen tree. Now he was higher and behind the KGBer. The man knew it and made a run for it. Evidently he was abandoning his half-assed command, heading for the hills. Rock got to his feet and took off after the major. Shots rang out, whizzing by his shoulder, but return fire from his men pinned down the Reds trying to get him. Rock tackled the Blackshirt football style and they fell together in the dust at the top of the hillock.

It was a brief struggle. The man was powerful but untrained in the martial sciences. Hand-to-hand was not his forte! With a knife to the major’s jugular, and the man’s arms pinned by Rockson’s weight sprawled over him, the major cried, “Surrender! I surrender! Mir!”

Rock knew the Red word for peace. “So it’s peace you want.
Mir,
hey?” Rock said, twisting the blade so it made a little red pinprick just to the south of the man’s pounding blood vessel. “Well, we’ll both get up, then; you tell your men to drop their arms. Okay?”

The major said
"da,”
and they got slowly up. The major was looking for a false move, a way for the tables to be turned, but Rock didn’t give him any leeway. With the knife to his throat he walked with Rock back down the hill, shouting, “Surrender. I
order
you to throw down your weapons.”

The first group, three men, immediately stood and tossed their rifles and raised their hands. The second group, of three, behind the tree stump, jumped up too, but with their Kalashnikovs blazing as they backed toward the woods. Farrell cut one down with a burst of .9mm slugs.

Archer popped up out of nowhere, his bearlike body moving with grizzly speed. He had threaded a harpoon-size arrow into his steel bow and now let it fly directly at the offending pair of Reds. The arrow, a good four feet of steel with a serrated tip, sliced through the belly of one, and, since his comrade was right behind him, it entered him too—skewering the two of them as they fell face forward, together.

The four surviving Reds—the lieutenant, the major, and two privates—were made to sit with their hands on their heads on the ground. The Freefighters, who had frisked them quickly for hidden weapons, stood over them.

“How about disposing of this pack of vermin so we can get on with our expedition,” said McCaughlin, fingering his Liberator.

“No,” Rock replied. “I think we’ll let them go on, without weapons or food. These parts are crawling with mountainmen, trappers, all sorts of interesting animals. It’s time the KGB learned how to forage, how to hunt, and maybe how to beg the people they come across—people they’ve been oppressing—for some food, some water.”

The major wet his lips with his tongue, and said in broken English, “No! Please. With no weapon, no food, we die.”

McCaughlin nudged him with his rifle barrel. “Take your choice, partner. Die now or take your chances. As a matter of fact, Rock, what do you say we take their boots too?”

They all began begging now, and Rock, after a while, said they could keep their boots. They were told to run over the hill, and they did so with just their clothes on their backs.

Farrell put a plastisynth bandage on Rock’s nick to prevent infection. In addition to his other skills, the lanky blond man was a pretty fair medic. Somehow that fact hadn’t gotten on the file.

As they rode, McCaughlin brought his steed alongside Rockson’s and said, “Won’t they come back after the little meat we left on the moose? Isn’t that giving them too much?”

Rock smiled. “Before we left, I sprinkled it with a bit of juice from that arovalis plant over at the edge of the field.”

McCaughlin laughed. “That will give them a few nightmares.” The arovalis, he knew, was a senior cousin of the weed, the stuff that made plains animals as violently mad as rabid dogs if they happened to lunch on it.

Miles beyond the encounter, Rockson called a halt, and they camped, setting up the four survival tents—two men in each. They slept for six hours, except for Archer, who sat watch. The mountainman seemed inexhaustible. But he made up for the sleep he skipped by the huge portions of food he consumed.