Doomsday Warrior 15 - American Ultimatum (6 page)

“Sorry, baby,” Rockson said gently, leaning over as he approached her and kissing her soft and lightly perfumed cheek. “Ah, you smell mahv—ee—lous.” He grinned his most charming grin as he plopped down in the seat next to her and looked down at his plate. His smile dropped, for the entire meal was already sitting there, and it looked quite cold and dead, and not very appetizing. Three-eared rabbit is tasty when hot and covered in a steaming cheese sauce, but this one—cold and coated with something orange and hard, with a few loudly buzzing flies already circling around its crevices—made him gulp hard. He pushed the plate away a few inches, not being able to quite look directly at it.

“Well, that’s what you get for being late,” she said. “I couldn’t wait, see?” She pointed down to her plate, which was completely empty but for a single synthobean which dangled precariously at the end of the slightly chipped chinawear. “And it was delicious.”

“I guess I screwed up, didn’t I?” Rock said, raising his eyeballs as he confessed his guilt. Suddenly his stomach, which had finally gotten the message from his eyes that there was food sitting somewhere out there, began growling and telling him that it didn’t care if the meal was living or dead, hot or cold—just that he’d better start eating right away or he was in trouble. It growled a few more times, and then gnawed at him with a horrible empty feeling as digestive acids already began dripping deep inside. Rockson reached slowly out with knife and fork and cut a piece of the gamey rabbit. The first bite was hard to swallow. But by the third forkful he was actually enjoying it. “Better than trail food!”

She frowned.

After dinner, and a decent dessert of soycurd blueapple pie and then a drink or two, both he and Rona were felling pretty good, his lateness and cold rabbit long forgotten. In fact, with hardly anyone else there that night (too lazy or tired to make the long climb), it was quite romantic. The stars filled the wide curved, domed ceiling above as violinists played soft lilting music from a grotto off to the side. Rockson bowed to her and took her out on the dance floor, and they moved gracefully around, dancing in ever wider circles as they began moving faster. The few, mostly elderly, couples who were dining in the restaurant stopped their alimentary processes and watched the beautiful couple. They were a perfect match in a way, Rockson with his body chiseled down to stone and steel, and Rona, a dancer, gymnast, and seductress, with her flame-red hair swirling around her. It made even the oldest ones in the sparse audience sigh, and remember with bittersweet recollection their younger days.

Later, back in her bedroom—for his was far too small and cluttered—they made passionate love through the night, as she clung to him like a python around a tree, never wanting to let go.

Six

L
eaving her was the hard part. It always was. Rona’s warm body clung to him in the darkness of the room as the wall clock whirred away with green hands inexorably turning. She felt and smelled like paradise itself, with her hot woman’s perfumes and soft mouth constantly pecking at his neck and shoulders. He had to be a madman to give up this dream of sensuality and go into the murderous wastelands. But he lived for more than his own life. He lived to free his people, his country. He was a Freefighter.

So Rockson rose, made himself rise. And dressed, even as he heard her sobbing softly, not wanting to show him her tears. He leaned over when he was fully clothed and kissed her hard, and then turned and walked out of the room. He didn’t hear the sobs turn to bawls the moment the steel door slid closed behind him.

The others were already there, standing alongside their fully packed ’brids, talking about the upcoming mission. That is, Chen and Sheransky were talking. Archer just grunted unintelligible noises from time to time, but seemed to be enjoying the conversation as much as the others. Rock was pleased to note they were fifteen minutes ahead of time. He didn’t know they’d in fact all been there for an hour, each wanting to be the first.

“We’re all battle-geared,” Chen said as he stood next to his chestnut ’brid. “This fellow McKinley here is something else. We all went over our stuff on checklist, not missing a thing.” The horse man, who stood off to the side making sure there were no last-minute problems, grinned with pride and looked down at the sawdust-covered stone floor of the outer cavern.

Rockson walked over to the ’brid that was his and came up to it slowly from the front so it could see him clearly.

“Name’s Secretariat,” the horse-handier shouted over from a loading platform where he stood leaning against a steel pole. “Named after one of the greatest twentieth-century racing horses. And I’ll tell you what—this boy here could give ’em all a run for their money. He’s just about the fastest ’brid we’ve got here. Probably ain’t even been clocked at his best speed.”

“Good boy, Secretariat,” Rockson said as he reached out and patted its nose. He held out a handful of syntho M&M’s, and the horse lapped them up like vitamins. Then it whinnied and raised its head, and Rockson saw that it was a strong, proud animal, high at the shoulders and with still-wild eyes. Eyes that told him it could run when it had to, and wouldn’t bolt if it spotted a snar-wolf or something worse.

“You’ve got a friend for life,” Sheransky said, laughing. “Should have thought of it myself. This one keeps snapping at me.” As if hearing his complaint, the ’brid kicked out a back foot that missed the Russian Freefighter by an inch.

“I want to get out there, hit some of the woods before the sun gets up high,” Rock said as he walked to the side of his mount and leaped up onto the plastisynth saddle. “So take your final trip to the bathroom—and Archer, that means you—cause I don’t want to stop until sundown.”

Usually Freefighters out in the wastelands did just the opposite, moved at night when the Red drones couldn’t see them as clearly, and rested in the day. But the direction they were heading in to “liberate” a Russian jet was hazardous, Rockson knew. The way was filled with earthquake chasms and steep and gravelly slopes. Traveling at night would be impossible. They wouldn’t get a hundred yards in the night without someone getting hurt. They’d have to take their chances in the light.

“Open them up,” Rock shouted across to the two guards with submachine guns around their shoulders who stood on each side of the wide steel doors built into the side of the mountain. This was just one of a dozen such exits hidden around the base of the mountain, though this one was the largest as it was the main hybrid egress. The guards pulled at a large lever and the thing began chugging away, pulling the doors to each side. The dawn light filled a tunnel ahead that ran for about fifty feet. It was camouflaged, made to look like a bat-and-slime-encrusted cave. He soon reached the weed-and-leaf-woven camouflage netting. Rock slowed his ’brid and swept the netting aside in the middle with his arm so the creature could get his head through. It was all pretty crude, but from even a few yards away it looked pretty good.

They rode into the dawn, as the radioactive skies brightened by the minute. Far above, the undulating magnetic lines of purple and green ringed the earth, filled with high radiation death, fallout from the twentieth century still releasing its poisons in flakes, rays, and God knew what all. The Northern Lights atomic-style. And yet it was beautiful as well. A radioactive rainbow in the dawn. Beauty was in the eye of the beholder, that was for damned sure. And if this was his world, then Rockson was sure as hell going to have to take beauty where he found it. Whether it be in the pearl-lustered shell of a snapping roach, or the oddly twisted black horns of the unicorn rams that were replacing normal mountain rams in the Rockies as the years went on. Rock was a mutant human himself. Who was he to judge the worth of other creatures? Whatever God gave them—that was their existence. For better, for worse, in ugliness, and in grandeur.

But such aesthetic thoughts passed quickly as the dawn sun rose higher, pulling its red face up into the sky like some bloated drunk who had slept one off in the gutter.

It was going to be a scorcher, Rock could see that after just an hour of riding. The sky, which was generally filled with odd-colored clouds or rings of one thing or another high above, things which often blocked out many of the direct rays of old Sol, had today decided to be perfectly clear. As the sun rose higher over the fir trees that surrounded them on the Rocky Mountains slopes, the sky above turned a crystal blue, the blue of expensive chandeliers in Soviet palaces.

The sun beat down on them like a searchlight searing at them with its gamma and ultraviolet and X-rays. Rock had them stop when he started feeling funny himself. No man, not even a mutant, could take the full, unfiltered rays of a twenty-first century crystal-sun. But Dr. Shecter had provided for this several years before, with one of his devices that really did work.

“Take out the reflector blankets,” Rock said, reaching around his back. The packs that were tied around the rear of the saddles and over the broad back of the ’brids had been worked out years before with Rock’s assistance. He and the other men knew just where to reach for their gear. Within seconds they held what looked basically like thick pieces of aluminum foil, and were unfolding them. Based on the “Space Blankets” of the twentieth century, these were the advanced models, virtually unrippable and capable of reflecting back nearly ninety percent of the sun’s rays and heat. Within a minute they were all draped with the things, looking like foil-wrapped potatoes ready to pop into the oven. Chen’s, Rock’s, and Sheransky’s fit fine. Archer had a special reflector—two of them glued together. And even then he was barely able to get it around himself, and to snap the velcro seals closed. It would have to do.

It was always somewhat slow going the first few hours out on any mission. It didn’t make sense to push it. The men’s bodies, the ’brids, everything had to fall into the right rhythm. Rock knew it would happen, and he let the animals get used to being out, let them find their own natural gait. The first few hours were hard anyway because of the steep slopes of the age-old Rocky Mountains. They rode up and down through forests of firs, across hillsides of wild purple and orange and blue mountain flowers bursting with fragrance so that they were almost covered with hordes of bees searching for early morning nectar. It was, in spite of the searing sun, an awesomely beautiful day. The men could see for miles when they reached the summit of each high hill, the Rockies stretching off in every direction as if they covered the entire earth.

They traveled half the day, not even stopping to eat. Rock’s men knew he wasn’t one to stop for a pleasant little picnic. They ate on the move, throwing feedbags down over the ’brid’s faces as the animals were capable of eating and moving at the same time. High in the saddle, the Freefighters took out their own concentrated energy packets and chugged from water jugs.

Still and all, they made fairly good time over the course of the day. By the time the sun was starting its slow descent to the west, like a kite that had run out of wind, they were already into some of the lower foothills. The southeast route they were taking was one Rock hadn’t been on for years. It was a route that headed straight for the nearest Russian airport, some hundred and fifty miles away. Compasses were virtually worthless in this neck of the woods because of strong rad-deflected magnetic fields. But the mapping teams of Century City were always out and bringing back updated information. Every hour or so Rock took out the plastipaper map that showed the five hundred miles east and south of C.C., checking on a particular mountain or some granite outcropping.

So far they were dead on target. He wanted to get up to a certain mountain pass before the sun completely dropped from sight, because it would mean easier travel the next day. According to the maps it was much smoother going on the far side. None of the men complained, though their butts felt like they were being ground down into what could have been sold for leather pocketbooks, if there had been such things anymore. Getting into the saddle always took a certain amount of readjustment, even for those who had been out numerous times before—like Chen and Archer. Sheransky had only had a few missions thus far, and he groaned and spat out soft little curses in Russian as the ’brid bounced up and down beneath him. But he didn’t say a word to the others.

They reached the mountain pass just as purple-pated Sol disappeared behind a far glacial mountain. Rock hesitated as they reached the start of a valley about a mile long. It looked a little treacherous because of the gravelly ground, but the ’brids’ hooves were as hard as steel. He made a decision and headed in. He was just starting to relax a little, after they’d gotten about halfway through the pass, when the shit hit the fan.

Actually it was bats that hit the fan of the rapidly darkening night air. It was as if they came out on cue the moment the sun fell completely behind the mountain, brought out by the darkness or the sudden cooling that hit once the warming sun had vanished. Whatever their reasons, the bats came out of small caves on each side of the mountain pass, by the thousands, by the tens of thousands. The flapping creatures flew out of their caverns like an army of leathery birds, and soared out with high-pitched squeals. The wrong kind of squeals for happy bats. These were blood-bats!

“Shit,” Rockson barely had time to mutter as he saw the hordes come shooting out. As a bunch of the ugly little faces came barreling straight at him, he saw as well that they weren’t the insect-eating variety. They were after something far meatier—men and hybrids. They weren’t large, that was one thing anyway. So even as the first few scouts snapped down at him, Rock was able to brush them off, waving his hands wildly in front of him. The Freefighters all still had on the Shecter blankets, which gave them a certain amount of protection and seemed to confuse the bats. But the teeth of the blood-drinkers snapped closed over the outerwear over and over, trying to break through trying to get to the good stuff inside.

They were ugly, hideously ugly, Rock saw as he caught one in his hand, squeezed hard, and threw it off dead to the ground. They were more like flying teeth than the insect-eating bats he had seen in the past. Definite mutations, with fangs a good two inches long and slime-coated black bodies with spiderwebs of red veins throbbing all over their surface.