Doomsday Warrior 11 - American Eden (7 page)

Rockson needed every bit of his famed “mutant’s luck” if they were to reach the obscure site. The bearing was vague, as Dutil had measured direction with a sextant that was little more than a toy.

They came upon an area 235 miles south of Colorado Springs Plain that Rockson himself had crossed years earlier. It was the area around a small hunter-trapper community called Moosehead. Moosehead Township was a set of ten or twelve wooden shacks and a tanning shed for hides. The Soviets usually ignored these primitive American communities, which served their purposes because their commanding officers did a brisk trade with the mountainmen who did fur trapping. Hides and furs were exchanged for rubles. The rubles bought the trapper families some precious supplies like salt in the small free markets in the shadows of the great Soviet forts further east.

But someone hadn’t left Moosehead alone. When the Freefighters and their Edenite friend came within sight of the town, they started to see signs of destruction. Scattered along the red-stained snows were the bones of several animals—horse bones, dog bones, and what looked like a picked-clean small human arm bone.

“Wolves?” Rockson asked Detroit, pointing to the paw tracks all around the bones.

“The wolves
ate
the meat,” said Detroit, “but see the bullet hole in this human femur?”

“Reds,” Rona said, and drew her shotpistol.

Detroit nodded. “Probably. The animals came later—drawn by the blood.”

“Let’s get up on that hill and scan the area,” Rock ordered. “Keep your weapons at the ready.”

From the rise Rock could see that the shack-town beyond was a charred ruin. There were many bodies, some reduced to skeletons, wearing pieces of cloth the wolves didn’t like the taste of. There were crates also, some six or seven feet wide. Putting down his binocs, Rock said. “The town was probably hit with artillery, and then mopped up by a squad of commandos.” He swept the area again with his electron binoculars. “The fires are out, whatever happened occurred at least a day ago. Let’s go down and see if we can find out why they hit it, and look for survivors.”

Scheransky volunteered, “Maybe I should keep the sleds here, in case there’s land mines, they’re a bit hard to steer in exact situations. I can cover for you here, with my Dragunov sniper rifle, pick off anyone that comes near the town.”

“Okay,” Rock said. “You stay with the dog sleds. The rest of us go down and look around.”

Scheransky slid the sniper rifle out of his sled’s blankets and covered them, peering around the countryside far and wide through the telescopic sight. Then he left the rifle sitting on top of the blankets of his sled. He unzipped his parka. Crouching behind the sled he took out a small black box. It had lots of buttons on it. He pressed one. The box sprung to life with a dozen blinking lights. He seated it in the snow, and then pulled a whip antenna up to a height of three feet.

He left the device to do its secret work, then peered over the sled to make sure no one had turned back for some reason. The others must not know.

This was only the third time he’d had the opportunity to set up the device. If only they would leave him alone more, he could accomplish his job.

Rockson and his group skiied sullenly into the pathetic settlement’s ruins. There were not only the bodies of adults, but children’s half-eaten corpses too. And one little girl’s frozen nude body had deep gashes in her pelvic area. She was hanging by the neck from a pole, swaying in the cold wind. Her anguished blank blue eyes stared at him as if pleading for—

“McCaughlin, cut her down and bury her under some rocks,” he ordered.

“Bastards,” McCaughlin muttered as he worked. “Murdering bastards.”

There were more bodies—ravaged women, men with missing testes, atrocities of all descriptions throughout the town. And lots of tracks of wolves.

But what attracted the Doomsday Warrior’s attention most was the booted footprints of men. Soviet murderers’ bootprints.

“What could they have done this for?” Danik asked softly of Detroit, who walked alongside, surveying the disaster site. “What did they want of these poor people?”

Rock had no reply.

The tanning shack was partly standing. The team headed that way. Rock told Danik to stand guard outside the shack. He put a shotpistol into his thin long hand. “Better get used to holding this baby.”

Entering the shack with Liberator rifles set on full auto, just in case, the search team found a man. He was trussed up by a rope on the one unfallen central wood beam. He was still alive, and he moaned when he saw them.

The survivor was not a pretty sight. Rock instinctively shielded Rona’s eyes, then withdrew his hand. Who was he kidding? The woman had been in the middle of the worst action a dozen times. She had seen as bad, and worse.

The man had one eye half pulled from its bloody socket, his lips were cracked and blue from the cold. He wore a torn fur parka lanced with a hundred bloody holes—perhaps the short jabs of a Soviet cavalry bayonet, sunk deep enough to make the man talk and talk. Torture. His one good eye tracked Rock as he approached.

“I don’t know,” the agonized man pleaded. “Please, kill me, don’t hurt me anymore.”

“No one’s gonna hurt you,” the Doomsday Warrior said softly. He gave the man a drink from his canteen. He was about to cut him down, when he saw that the man was just a torn mass inside his clothing. The guts of the man had been pulled out of a hole in his stomach. Slippery coils of intestines pulsed with pain. To move him . . .

“The Reds did this?”

The man nodded slightly. “They—they wanted information on—on—some modern-dressed stranger they picked up on their instruments. They said they knew he was near here. One of their automatic overflight drones—Midnight Marauders—detected him. That was about—few days ago . . . Thought he might be a Free—Freefighter, ’cause he was dressed—different then us simple folk. I—we—told them we didn’t see—didn’t know . . . they shot our children one by one, trying to find out—but God, we didn’t—”

Rockson knew injuries—when they were hopeless, when they weren’t. This was hopeless. The man had minutes. His trussed hands were blue swollen dead things, the circulation out of them for hours. The man’s lips trembled, spoke these words: “Please, please . . . kill me. Kill me—”

Rockson lifted his shotpistol and dispatched the man from his agony. “Well bury him too—alongside the little girl,” Rockson said. “We can’t stop to collect all the bones in this town, but we will bury the two of them as a token of respect for all the people martyred here.”

On the way to the pile of rocks at the edge of town that would serve as the burial site, the Freefighters came upon two dead Russians. Their faces were eaten away by the wolves, but their uniforms of cheap brown synthetic material hadn’t proved as tasty. “A lieutenant and a sergeant,” Rock noted, pointing to the stripes on their sleeves. “There’s a bullet hole in each of their heads—big caliber.”

The Sov’s guns were out. Tokarev ten-shot pistols. Fired.

Behind the rocks the Freefighters found the American shooters body. A mountain man with a blunder-buss single-shot moose gun. He was intact, the wolves had been busy on the Sovs.

“We’ll bury this brave and good man too. He deserves it.”

As they returned to Scheransky, who had been watching them with the binoculars as they made their grim rounds, Danik asked about the shot in the shed. Rockson told him they had found a man in pain, but alive. Beyond help.

“Did you find out why the Reds did this?” Danik asked. “I know from the tapes I studied in Century City that a community like this is usually left alone . . .”

Rockson saw no point in telling Danik that
he
was the unwitting cause of this atrocity. “No, we don’t know why the Reds did this,” Rock said flatly. “We have to move on.”

It was always their intention to save the precious food supply the carried for themselves and hunt food for the wolf-dog teams. But they’d seen no game, not even any tracks, since setting out. Now, when they did see tracks, it was that of a small rabbit.

The tracks were hours old, Rock saw when he stopped to examine them. “No sense in going after the little thing, it would hardly sate the teams anyway. Let’s push on,” Rock said. “I don’t like the looks of those clouds.” He pointed up to the south.

“More acid snow?” Rona asked.

“No, but nevertheless it’s sure to be a bad storm.”

Indeed in a matter of minutes a wind started rising and soon became a howling enemy. The wind-driven snow, though of the ordinary variety, took their breaths away. It was coming directly from the south, so the choice was either to take a different tack or fight it. Rockson compromised, ordering the team to turn southwest and keep moving.

The temperature dropped rapidly. Rock glanced at the thermometer reading on his watch—seventy below. He saw Danik falter and let go of his rope and fall. Rock stopped the sleds. McCaughlin raced over and helped Rock put the man on his sled, covering him with everything available.

“What’s wrong with him?” McCaughlin asked, shouting into the wind.

“I think he’s still a bit weak from his ordeal getting to Century City. All the vitamin shots in the world can’t make up for a frozen trek like that. The Edenites never had to endure much in the way of low temperatures. We’ve got to find shelter.” Rock replied.

To make things worse, in another ten minutes of slow travel, the dogs abandoned their fanned-out position at the end of the nylon rope traces and tangled themselves into immobility. They began howling and biting at the strong rope. “We’ve got to untangle them, find shelter.” Rock implored.

It took twenty minutes of bone-chilling work for all of them to untangle the dogs—and they had to take off their mittens to straighten out the traces. They were well on their way to having frostbitten fingers by the time they got moving again. Danik was barely conscious, bundled down under ten layers of blankets and furs in Rockson’s sled.

They were on a high plateau, totally exposed to the elements. Rock had to find them cover
now
, or Danik would die. And the mission with him.

Rockson took up the infrared binoculars and scanned ahead. The binocs cut through some of the obscuring effects of the storm. Dimly Rockson made out a line of boulders ten or twelve miles ahead, down from their exposed position on the hill, in a little valley. Maybe there would be shelter somewhere in that jumble of rocks. He certainly hoped so.

The Doomsday Warrior, lifting the many fur coverings, took a glance at Danik’s face. It was ashen, his breathing was shallow. He hoped he would last till they got there.

It took another twenty minutes to get into the sheltered valley and find a group of three huge rocks. There was a space between the them big enough for the humans to scramble through with their tent and some supplies—including the Primus stove.

Danik had to be passed from arms to arms wrapped in his blankets, for he was completely unconscious. There was just enough room to set up the survival tent there among the boulders out of the wind. With frozen determination, they accomplished that task, and pulled the stove inside and lit it up. They placed Danik closest to the stove’s heat. The dogs would manage in the lee of the wind, sleeping in a huge tumble with one another. They had the stamina to do so.

There in the rapidly erected silver tent the cold and hungry Freefighters huddled. As the tent slowly grew warmer, they began to unpack the bundle of food-stuffs Rock had dragged along. Danik came around as the temperature rose. They fed him some hot broth McCaughlin brewed up out of chunks of preserved venison, some melted snow, and vitamin capsules.

They were safe from Mother Nature’s winter wrath. For now.

The alarm woke him up at six o’clock; McCaughlin eased out among them. It was totally dark. It shouldn’t be. No—there was a bit of light at the very peak of the tent. He realized they were nearly buried in snow. The Scots-American rose up to full height, the air was very stale. He snapped open the chimney slit in the tent top. It instantly got colder, but the air was okay. He peered through the hole. It had stopped snowing—they could dig out later. The others began to stir.

McCaughlin knew what was needed besides his jokes to restore morale. He started up breakfast: venison strips as bacon substitute and hot coffee and biscuits—the kind you just put in a pan and swell up once you cover them and they steam. His own famous trail biscuits.

Sniffing the food odors did more to awaken his companions than did the alarm. “Rise and shine, mateys, breakfast is all ready.”

“Never heard a more pleasant sentence,” Rockson said. He turned up the Coleman lamp and looked around at the bundled-up Freefighters now coming to life. “Why is it so dark in here?”

McCaughlin explained. Rock frowned. “Of course—how could I be so stupid—we could have suffocated.”

“Not with you along we couldn’t,” McCaughlin said. “You have mutant’s luck, remember?”

Danik lay half asleep still on Rockson’s sled when they set off on their way again. He was still the worse for wear, but improving rapidly after the warmth and sleep and good food. The warming sunbeams seemed to bring the man around further.

Rockson took sun readings every three hours, when they paused for hot green tea—an Eskimo custom Rock had picked up.

Scheransky asked Rockson to come to look at some odd ice formations a bit away from the others. He had something, he said, on his mind. Rockson asked him what it was.

Scheransky’s dark eyes were intense. “I want to know what really happened to you out in the desert, after our Alaska mission last year. After you left us in Alaska to chase down that missile, what happened to you? What’s the big secret about the missing five days of your trek to Century City? I heard that the only one you told is Dr. Schecter.”

Rockson decided to tell Scheransky. He was a technician, a scientist. Perhaps someone other than Schecter
should
know. Maybe Scheransky could help Schecter in his project, a project based upon what had happened in Rockson’s missing five days. “I went backward in time, that’s what happened.”