Doomsday Warrior 17 - America’s Sword (12 page)

The rafts pulled up to the island where Rockson was overjoyed to see that his men were unharmed. They were pretty happy to see him too. The idea of losing their commander was, to say the least, not their favorite daydream. Aside from liking Rock, they all knew that they didn’t have a snowball in hell’s chance of getting out of this place alive without his ability and judgments all the way. McCaughlin would
try
hard, but this was a job for the Doomsday Warrior!

“Load up,” Rock shouted out, as the rafts pulled up onto the shoreline. Instantly the men rushed and got the hybrids which were tethered to some ropes about two hundred feet off. They carefully led the mutant horses up onto the rafts and then got their equipment packed onto their mounts. One of the ’brids slipped as it was getting aboard and floundered around in the black surface waters as some snakes came streaming through the current. But one of the gourd men let out a sharp sound and the snakes veered off at the last second. The ’brid was dragged back up to shore and then led, whinnying and dripping, onto the raft. The other mounts grew nervous but at least they were more careful, staying as much as they could toward the center of the rafts.

“Everyone and everything aboard?” the Doomsday Warrior shouted out as he surveyed the chaos of men and animals.

“You got it, Rock,” McCaughlin yelled back, as they made a quick head count.

“Move them doggies out,” Detroit laughed, glad to be getting out of the dank hellhole.

“Okay, Chiefie,” Rockson said, walking over to Bailey. “Let’s get this real straight. I don’t want problems, any accidents, any
anything.
Take us north until we reach solid land. I’ve got a compass, so don’t try any tricks either. Otherwise you ain’t going to have a neck!” Archer tightened up a little, just to remind the man of his present situation.

“Absolutely—no problems,” the Snakeman King gulped hard. “I’m no fool.” He addressed his polers, and the gourd man on each raft blew his signals to keep their snake-army off. The rafts began poling past the village, slowly at first, but as they built up some momentum, the craft hit a half-decent “cruising” speed. Snakes slithered near them in the swamp but didn’t approach, as the gourd men let out little toots on their instruments. The Freefighters began relaxing more and more as they drew away from the village and the snakes.

Alongside them in high trees they could hear and see monkeys dancing around, making a noisy spectacle of themselves. Huge python-like serpents hung down from wide branches, but didn’t come any closer.

Here and there, the men could see shapes splashing from the shorelines of the hundreds of little islands that they passed. At first Rockson thought they were snakes as well, but on closer inspection he could see they were alligators. The gourd sounds didn’t seem to affect them one way or another. But being poked by the long pole prongs kept them at bay. Though they shadowed the rafts, hoping something or someone would fall off, the alligators didn’t make any aggressive moves. A monkey, one that had gotten too near the end of its branch, lost its balance and tumbled down into the swamp water. In a flash two of the ’gators ripped the hapless mammal into two bleeding pieces. They swallowed hard and the animal was gone, as if it had never existed.

They poled on for almost an hour as the swamp widened more and the water grew a little clearer. At last Rock could see the low mountains that surrounded the valley swamp just ahead, looming out of the mists.

“This is it,” King Bailey groaned again as Archer let his arms relax slightly so the prisoner could talk. “That bank there.”

“Have your men pole us over to that shore,” Rock said as he scanned the solid ground just ahead of them. King Bailey shouted out commands to his crew and the rafts were quickly poled up onto the bank of black mud which grew solid after a few feet. Rock had his whole team drag their ’brids from the rafts onto shore. He had the polers throw their equipment into the swamp, so they couldn’t suddenly try to attack them, and then had his men all mount up. “But,” complained the king, “you can’t leave us without our pole-weapons!”

“Sure I can,” Rockson said, with a cynical expression as he looked at Bailey. “I can see the valley wall right ahead. Your men can dive for the damned poles. But you look sweaty from this little trip in the country. Archer, maybe our friend here needs a little bath to get the grime off?” He nodded his head twice, as all the blood drained from the king’s face.

“No, no! Please! Not the swamp! Not the—” But Archer was already lifting the man high over his head, and with a slight bend in his massive legs the Freefighter threw him as far as he could into the swamp.

Bailey splashed around in the water feet first, but before his guards could swim out and extricate him, several immense heads rose from the water. And even as the snakemen looked on in horror, the alligators charged at their king. Several of them snapped their massive jaws around the snakeman’s extremities. And with hundreds of red bubbles foaming and a final scream, Bailey was pulled down into the swamp.

And didn’t surface again.

Fourteen

T
hey rode for ten hours, and camped in a nice, dry spot. The first thing Ted Rockson saw when he awoke the next morning was a large, black, ugly bird, with wings that must have been at least eight feet across and a strange hooked beak. It was flying in circles perhaps ninety feet above him, its red eyes looking down with great curiosity.

Suddenly it swooped lower, the table-sized wings flapping out sharp snapping noises in the air. Rock’s heart sped to double time as he reached for his shotpistol. But the moment he had the gun in hand and his arm thrust out, the great bird saw the motion and was already swooping away, the huge black wings releasing a few feathers here and there as they stroked hard. The bird gave him a quick little turn of the head as it tore across the prairie, and then was just a dot in the sky.

Rock had almost fired before he realized what it was—a vulture. A big one, but vultures are only interested in the dead. These huge birds were carrion eaters. He had never seen one go after something living, not even a rabbit or small mammal. It was just one of nature’s scavengers, a living vacuum cleaner without which the environment would be filled with the rotting flesh of tens of thousands of animals.

He looked around with a sheepish expression on his face, but no one had seen the action. Next he’d be firing at chameleons and ants, at the rate he was going.

The rest of the men were just starting to rise up themselves, yawning and stretching out their arms. Rockson sat up and slipped the big .12-gauge shotpistol back into its home and jumped to his feet.

“Rise and shine,” an annoying voice shouted out as he banged a coffeepot against some other loud cooking utensil. The Scotsman walked around the encampment, slamming two music makers together as if he were trying to wake the dead. “Up, up, before you miss one of my amazingly tasty wasteland breakfasts,” McCaughlin bellowed. “With real eggs. You hear me—real eggs.” Men groaned and a number of not very savory phrases came hurtling back at him.

“Come on now, men,” the Scotsman said with mock hurt. “I’ve been up since dawn—found some eggs. Cooked up a whole shitload of snake-sausage too. You’ll all be happy if you come get some chow. Before it runs out.” He banged the pots a final brain-jarring time and headed back to his fire.

None of them was particularly enthusiastic about either getting up or eating snakes. But since the only culinary alternative was the energy packets in the ’brid bags, they made themselves move over to the fire. Even Rockson stumbled over, feeling unusually sleepy this morning. The food he forced down without much enthusiasm, even though he knew it was pleasing his stomach a lot better than Shecter’s synth-chow. It was the coffee, even if it was hydroponically grown, that got his juices going.

While the others finished up, Rock took out field binocs and surveyed the land ahead from Snorter’s back, jumping up onto the animal’s broad shoulders and grabbing hold of the hanging mane. He could see herds of bison, other smaller creatures that looked like a cross between a mountain goat and large deer. Rock had never seen a hybrid mix quite like that before. On the other hand, everywhere he went, every terrain seemed to bring new creatures. The old days, the old pre-war animals—were gone forever. God knew what the bison ate out here. It didn’t seem as if there was nearly enough to sustain such large herds of big animals. But there must have been something just at the ground’s surface, or even hidden below it, to sustain them.

The autocompass on the side of binocs showed him north. He didn’t always trust the direction finders, especially since the magnetic pole seemed to keep shifting over the years, sometimes slowly, sometimes changing a number of degrees within hours. Old Shecter explained it with all kinds of complex facts, including axial shift, gravitaton readjustments between the sun and the earth, and so on. Rock never quite understood it all; he wondered if even Schecter did, as the man didn’t like to admit he didn’t know what was going on in any subject. But between the high-tech binocs, the direction of the sun, and his own mutant sixth sense, Rockson figured it was as good a guess as anything.

“All right, let’s load up,” the Doomsday Warrior said, turning and shouting from atop Snorter’s back. “You bastards have had your chance to be lazy enough this fine morning.”

As the men gathered their gear together, McCaughlin quickly broke down the mini-kitchen. He seemed able to put up or break down, in just minutes, a full “Cookie” setup!

Just when Rockson was wishing for another cup of the black brew, they were ready to move on. The prairieland was actually fairly hard-packed once they got farther out on it. The sandy ground compressed instantly and the hybrids’ hooves hardly sank in at all. Yet, they moved fairly slowly at first as Rockson never trusted anything he didn’t know, be it human, animal, or terrain. But it was clear after about five minutes that this stuff was solid enough, and he had them all moved to medium cruising speed. He kept lifting up his binocs every five minutes or so to scan all around them.

The bison herds were right ahead of them. Vast blankets of brown and black. And for a while, as they trotted through the wastelands, Rock wondered whether they should go through the tens of thousands of the slowly moving, grazing creatures or search out some circuitous route. But they had already lost about thirty-six hours; he just couldn’t afford to lose any more. The citizenry of Century City were surely going through their own hell. The Freefighters couldn’t do any less.

“We’re going right through the center of that herd,” Rockson addressed the men, turning in his saddle but not slowing perceptibly. “I don’t think we should have any problems with them. They’re vegetable eaters and slow. They don’t even have the right teeth to chew on flesh. But keep your firepower handy. If something charges—take it out.”

“You got it, boss,” Chen responded as he held up a few star-knives, that suddenly just appeared from beneath his sleeve. The man was a proverbial magician when it came to fighting. For the thousandth time Rockson was grateful that the Chinese martial arts master was on their side and not the enemies’.

They rode on for another twenty minutes or so and the vast numbers of bisonlike creatures grew overwhelming. They just spread out across the plains like an army, each one standing nearly as tall as a full-grown hybrid. And yet Rockson knew that even this army was nothing. In the old days, before the Europeans had come into America, there had been herds a million strong that had spread over whole states. Early settlers had described the vast migrations as totally unimaginable unless seen with one’s own eyes. This bunch wasn’t doing too shabbily now, Rockson noted with a certain satisfaction. The bison had, after all, been left basically alone for over a hundred years.

As he reached the outer edge of the nearest band of bison, Rockson saw what they were eating: a hardly visible coating of a whitish brown weed that virtually covered the prairie, but only for an inch’s depth or two. You could hardly see the foodstuff, unless you were just a few feet from it. The grain, or whatever the hell it was, must have been highly nutritious as all these animals were surviving, even growing fat off it.

A few of the great horned mammals looked dully up as Rock had his team slow down. They blinked a few times with their mug-sized eyes and then dropped their immense heads back down to important things like chewing. But as Rock slowed his team down and led them right through the herd, the buffalo hardly even deigned to look up. In the animal world, only quick motions caused reactions. Predatory movements, things coming in fast. That would sure as hell set this bunch going.

“No fast movements,” Rock shouted out to the team behind him. “These animals aren’t going to bother us unless we startle them in some way.”

Most of the bison didn’t lift their huge heads, being too busy pursuing the next little pieces of grain and the stalks beneath them. And as they moved slowly along, the bison let out big loads of steaming fecal waste.

“Rock, do you notice something funny about the sky ahead?” Chen asked as he rode up alongside the Doomsday Warrior. “Almost straight north,” the Chinese-American Freefighter pointed, holding his combat binoculars in his hand as they moved at slow gait through the blanket of bison.

“Yeah, I see what you mean,” Rock said as he stared through his own binocs. He got a worried look on his face. The northern horizon was getting dark, very dark. Even as he watched, it was as if someone were pulling a set of curtains as thick as iron over the whole stretch of sky. “It looks like a cloudburst—only it’s too dark,” the Doomsday Warrior added nervously. “And it’s coming fast.”

“I hate to say what I think it is,” Chen said as he scanned the area again with his glasses. “A dust storm—and it’s coming like a freight train.” He looked around him and saw that the buffalo were starting to look up at the sky themselves, getting their own anxious reactions. There were bleating sounds everywhere, as the herd began picking up speed, heading due east. Animals didn’t need mechanical devices to know what the hell was going on around them. And this bunch knew they were about to be blasted with gritty sand, coming in hard and fast.