Doomsday Warrior 01 (31 page)

They headed off across the absolutely flat, parched earth as hard as clay. The hybrid’s prints hardly dented the surface. They had been going about four hours when Rock’s senses suddenly went on full alert. He checked around him but there was nothing. No possibility of an attack when there wasn’t a cactus, even a rock as far as the eye could see. He looked up. The air felt suddenly damper. There—storm clouds to the southwest. Far off, but dark black and purple, falling lower and lower to the earth. Lightning speared the sky again and again, breaking into streaks of slivered electricity, arcing across the entire horizon.

Rock hoped the storm didn’t get too close. With that kind of electricity they would be sitting ducks for those lethal bolts out here on the flat plain. The rain traveled alongside them but far away for hours, dumping torrents of dark rain on the drought-striken region. It was the sound of the hybrid’s hoofs slapping instead of cracking on the ground that made Rock look down. The cracked earth was seeping with running water. Within minutes the trickle became a stream of quick-running rain water shooting across the dry plains. They kept going. There was no turning back. Rock raised his right arm and swung it down quickly twice. “Let’s move it, men,” he yelled. The men slapped their hybrids wickedly on the sides and tore ass across the flatlands. They rode for nearly an hour as the slowly rising water grew to two, then three inches. The hybrids couldn’t move at full gallop but with their powerful limbs were able to keep up a brisk run. Even they sensed the need for quick action.

Rockson’s sixth sense picked it up first. Far away, a roaring sound like an approaching wall of—

“Men,” he yelled, stopping them all suddenly in the midst of the wastelands. “We have to seek the highest ground we can find in, at most, three or four miles. There’s a mudslide, a flood of wreckage and debris and mud coming at us. I’ve seen these before. They’re—”

“Look, Rock, there!” Detroit yelled, standing high in the stirrups of his hybrid, scanning the plains ahead. “About thirty-five degrees to the right of our course—some kind of boulder-strewn rise.” Rock whipped out his field glasses and found the protrusion, breaking the horizon like a nipple.

They tore off toward the rise, watching back over their shoulders with dread at the thought of seeing the tidal wave of mud approach. They grew closer although the damned hill of whatever it was hardly seemed to grow. The water beneath the hybrids’ hoofs grew dark brown, then black. Branches and several small drowned creatures floated by.

“It’s coming,” Rock yelled. “Keep it up, men. Keep it up.” He stopped for a second and let them all ride by. McCaughlin seemed to be having trouble with the ’brids. He yelled at them over his shoulder as he tugged on the tether line that linked the four pack brids together. “Get on up, you dang mules.”

“What the hell’s wrong?” Rock screamed above the increasing din of the rushing water beneath them and the approaching storm above. He pulled alongside the rotund McCaughlin who looked exasperated, his face red and puffing.

“These fucking creatures don’t know what the hell’s wrong. They’re just as stubborn as—well, as mules, which is to insult the mule. If Shecter can give us all these marvelous techno-wonders why can’t he breed us a pack ’brid who works right?”

“We ain’t got time to play,” Rock said, pointing behind McCaughlin’s head. The big man turned and looked out over the flood-swollen plain. He gulped, then gulped again. A wall of mud some sixty feet high took up the entire horizon. It came at them at twenty-five mph—and already looked a foot high. Rock pulled out his shotgun pistol. “Just keep a tight rein on ’em,” he said and pulled the trigger about five feet from the lead ’brid’s head. The thing took off like a bat out of hell, pulling its mates along with it. Instantly they combined in a stampede of fear. Holding on for dear life, wrapping the rope around the saddle horn, McCaughlin took off like a shot toward the other men ahead. Rock looked at the wall of blackness for a moment. They had maybe five more minutes. He turned the palomino around and urged it into a gallop through the slush, quickly catching up with the fleeing Freefighters.

They reached the base of the small mountain out in the middle of nowhere. It was about 300 feet wide and nearly 125 high. Hardened coral-like stone. The mud tidal wave was now only a mile away and coming at them like an advancing army. It roared with a deafening sound, the kinetic energy of ten atomic bombs contained within the rushing onslaught of debris. Pushing the hybrids ahead of them, the men quickly scampered up the side of the structure which was eaten away with countless little holes.

“I think this damn thing is an anthill of some kind,” Rock yelled out to Harris, who knew almost as much about the wilderness as Rock, having been raised by mountain men before joining the city.

“Was, Rock,
was
. Definitely dead now. You’d see fresh dirt around the edges of the bigger entry holes, guards. No, this is dried out, old.” They reached the top with no time to spare. The wall of thick, foul-smelling mud hit the dead ant hill with a smashing roar, rushing up the front of it. McCaughlin was still only two-thirds up—the damn mud was rising.

“Move,” Rock yelled down. McCaughlin’s rear ’brid was sliding in the mud. It slipped and fell in, instantly pulled to the side as the tidal wave of brown death flowed unceasingly forward past the structure and on, sweeping down everything in its path, enveloping the earth in thick, wet darkness. “Cut him loose,” Rock yelled at McCaughlin as the other three ’brids were yanked backward, still tied to the flailing ’brid now totally submerged in mud. McCaughlin rushed forward and ripped out his Carver Woodsman. He slashed at the rope twice and it parted. The back ’brid, still struggling wildly for air and trying to right itself, was instantly sucked around the hill and off into the twisting lake of mud.

They watched from the flat rise of the hard structure as the mud crept higher and higher. They could see trees, animals, bushes and wreckage of every kind floating by, most of the once-living things now bloated corpses. An occasional monkey or field rat clung desperately to a piece of log or a floating square of peat.

Still the mud rose, threatening to engulf the entire hard dirt hill. “Turn the ’brids with their backs to the mud; sit them down in a circle,” Rock commanded. They did as he ordered and got into the center. “Now fill the spaces between them with clothes filled with sand, pants, anything. It may not help much but it will give us another four or five feet which could mean the difference between life and death.” The men complied, stuffing the space between the restless but lying hybrids with anything they could lay their hands on.

The mud slowed but still continued to ascend the hill. It touched the backs of the ’brids, who didn’t like the idea at all but kept down at the repeated commands of their masters. Another minute would tell the truth. Some of the men prayed silently—surrounded by an ocean of blackness, of nothingness. Rock just looked out at the dark sea without expression. He watched it rise, acknowledged that it might take his life momentarily. He would rather have died fighting the Reds—but this would be good. The earth of the United States. Topsoil, rich material for growth in this dead part of the land. And he would join it. Part of his country forever.

As the dawn broke, shooting down streaks of purple and red rays onto the darkness, the mud began to subside. Slowly at first, as if reluctant to give up its recently held position of power, then quickly, the mud, stretched out to its limits, began crushing down on itself with its own weight. The sun came out brilliantly and baked the wet surface of the plain, now a good twenty feet higher than it had been the day before.

They waited two days on the peak before the mud had dried enough to walk across. The hybrids slipped and slid but managed to make their way across the rapidly hardening surface. Occasionally one would sink deep into the still-wet surface and would have to be dragged out by tying ropes to several of the other ’brids and pulling. They moved all day and into the night—a cold, clear night without a moon. At dawn they reached a plateau of shining mica, a good thousand feet above the plain. The Glowers’ plateau, according to one legend.

Here, the sun again beat down on them like a furnace, the mica of the ground reflecting the sun’s blistering rays back on them. They moved on slowly under the glare, for though the ’brids were tough, they too were susceptible to the temperature which hovered between 110 and 120 degrees. They saw dust devils spinning far ahead as the rock-surfaced land slowly changed back to a flat, lightly vegetated terrain. The rising heat off the ground created waves of rippling air and produced strange effects. Mirages would occasionally appear on the superheated horizon ahead of them. Trees, mountains, the far-off refractions of a herd of buffalo near a waterhole. Was it totally an illusion—or were these images somehow being transported wide distances through the reflecting light?

But the mirage that was most incredible was the one that occurred late in the day, after the intense heat faltered slightly and the men were happily able to take off their heat-radiation shields. The mirage danced enigmatically in front of them for over an hour as they plodded steadily on. They strained their eyes to make out the details in growing amazement. It was the mirage of a city—a city like none they had ever seen in their own lifetimes. There were buildings everywhere, tall spires with lights blinking on top—skyscrapers. There were hundreds of glass and steel structures reaching toward the sky. It seemed to be Salt Lake City if they remembered the pictures from their history books correctly. But they knew that all the population centers west of the Rockies were no more. How could something from the distant past be a mirage in 2089
A.D.
? As the Freefighters watched in awe, they saw planes and helicopters circling the metropolis, the brilliant golden reflections of thousands of car windows and chromed bodies sending out dazzling sparks of light like a million fireflies in the gathering darkness.

The phantasmagoric image shimmered, sometimes faded and then came back as strong as ever. The Freefighters discussed what it could be, each offering his own interpretation of the unique phenomenon. Rockson remembered some of the basic physics courses he had taken as a teenager in Century City. He remembered reference to such an occurrence—only theoretical of course. As far as he could remember there had never been an actual witness of such an event. A time warp! An image from over a hundred years ago, trapped by the spatial interference created in the center of one of the hydrogen bombs that had demolished this region of the country. In another dimension, these people were driving home from work, typing in their offices, eating the evening meal, watching television, perhaps talking about the peace conferences that were taking place and how World War III would, thank God, never occur now, because both sides were negotiating so earnestly. They were locked forever in that day, the people of Salt Lake City, cast out of normal space, placed in the fourth dimension, forever. They relived one day in their peaceful existence, eating the same breakfast cereal, watching the same rerun on TV, laughing, loving, dreaming, in the fourth dimension. Forever.

Finally, as Rock’s team plodded on, the image winked out. The men, who had sat transfixed on their rocking mounts, looked at each other, eyes wide, somehow wanting to share the moment. They felt sorry that they could see it no more. And each wondered in his inner heart would it not be better to be in that city in the old world, be in that forever-the-same-day land, forever, forever, forever.

Twenty-Seven

P
remier Vassily turned the last page of the old book and put it down.
Notes from Underground
—a most profound and odd book. Dostoyevsky—in Vassily’s opinion, Russia’s most gifted writer of all time. But no one out there in Red Square could carry this book, no one could possess it. Such speculations on esoteric non-materialist subjects were forbidden. The state atheism would not allow itself to be challenged by such radical religious doctrines.

After the Great War, the peoples of the world, reeling under the blow of atomic destruction, turned to religion. In Russia, the survivors clung fiercely to the old Russian Orthodox Church. They disobeyed orders to work on Sunday and prayed in secret masses together, spreading not only God but underground propaganda. The KGB—at that time merely the security arm of the Kremlin, a spy network no longer needed after the war—went ruthlessly after all dissenters and religions, purging all views that the war was a failure. There were mass executions in the Politburo as well. The ruthless KGB Blackshirts kept the empire together through the reorganization period. They maintained the premier as a mere figurehead while they swept through the Soviet Socialist Republics killing all who doubted the party line. The KGB virtually ran the Soviet Empire for thirty-five years after the war, but when the great famines hit in the Thirties and Forties the rioting masses brought a revival of the traditional Russian leadership—the premiership—which again became the most powerful position of authority. With his new powers and the army firmly behind him, the then-premier, Aleandri Druznhy, was able to push the KGB down into relative obedience, their powers greatly stripped.

And so it had been until now, Vassily mused. Now Killov, the cleverest and most ambitious KGB leader for over half a century wanted the premiership. Already, rumors were spreading, with Killov as the source, that Vassily was a failure, was losing his grip of control. There were intrigues, spies—how many of his closest “friends” were Killov’s men? Vassily rose on shaky legs and walked to the window. It was dusk—the changing of the guards was taking place, far below the Kremlin walls in front of the Lenin-Drabkin Tomb. What had been a foot of snow the week before was now, in August, a wet, muddy mess outside the Kremlin. The goose-stepping guards splashed but somehow didn’t slip as they changed posts. The ever-present lines of heavily clad women, peasants and stooped laborers waited patiently in endless lines to see the only icons left in Mother Russia.