Doomsday Warrior 06 - American Rebellion (21 page)

Rock saw a sudden glint of something nearly 200 feet across the cave floor and fired with his shotpistol set on tight pattern. But the hot lead just slammed into the wall sending out a veil of dust. The guy was good—real good.

The Doomsday Warrior quickly stripped off the white-thermal protection suit. It was both a blinding bullseye for anyone after him and cumbersome as hell. In his loose civvies his arms and legs were completely free. Now he was ready. Rock chose to stay right where he was—let
him
come after me, that’s what he’s getting paid for. But even with his super normal powers of perception he just didn’t pick up anything. Not a sound, not a blur of movement. Rock searched his mind, trying to remember everything he could about the secret society of killers that had existed for centuries—perhaps the greatest assassins the earth had ever known.

“They thrive on drama,” Chen had told him. “Each one trying to create a new, more incredible method of attack, each trying to outdo the other. They kill with a flourish, Rock, getting their pleasure from completely breaching their opponent’s defense as if they were paper, humiliating them, before the death blow.”

The Doomsday Warrior looked everywhere, tried to use his mutant ESP to feel the man. He sensed his presence but it almost seemed diffuse, the assassin might himself have extra-sensory perceptions and be sending out a psychic smoke screen. Where the hell was he? Tunneling underneath? Impossible! Nothing could go through granite. Not even a laser digger. Above?

He looked up and saw hurtling down dark lightning bolts—two spears, their steel shafts heading straight for his skull. Rockson dove forward in a flash, landing hard on the uneven sharp-edged floor of the cavern as the two shafts ripped into the stone where he had been standing, sending out a shower of yellow sparks. Then they fell harmlessly over on their sides, unbloodied. Rock lifted his shotpistol straight up and fired into the darkness. Again and again, he pumped away six shots, spaced a foot apart, directly from where the spears had descended. On the fourth shot he heard a groan and then a body appeared out of the darkness, plummeting down just yards from him, where it splattered into a bloody puddle on the cave floor. The ninja—dead as a proverbial doornail, huge rubber suction cups attached to his elbows and knees. He had traversed the very upper regions of the cavern. Rock looked back up for a second. There . . . he must have gone just where the wall meets the ceiling. That narrow corridor of utter blackness where the light of the bulbs didn’t penetrate. All for naught, Rockson thought as he stood up. The ninja’s stark black uniform was now drenched with blood, turning it a sticky scarlet. There were no magic tricks that were going to pull him out of this one.

“Rockson!” A voice called from out of the narrow tunnels that led out from the cavern into different sections of the subterranean labyrinth that ran beneath Carson and Ice Mountain. The voice yelled out again, this time angrily. “Rockson! Turn and look at your destroyer.”

“Oh no, not again,” the Doomsday Warrior said with a weary look in his eye. He saw the approaching assassin, moving quickly toward him across the cavern floor.

“You guys don’t give up, do you? They must pay you a fortune in overtime.”

“Your attempts at humor, Mr. Ted Rockson, are as feeble as your attempts at fighting me will be. I am Tamatsu the Swordsman. I am the best.”

The assassin was not a large man, slim with long arms. He wore a dark blue hakama, Japanese-style skirt that flowed around his waist, covering his legs. At his side, its scabbard resting in the red sash that criss-crossed his chest and waist, was a samurai sword.

He pulled it out with a lightning draw and continued quickly forward. The tempered steel blade, hand pounded into shape by master craftsmen in the hills of Japan, glistened with slivers of light from the bulbs. Rock could see that it was as sharp as a razor blade as it turned sideways for a second and almost disappeared from view. And by the way the assassin was swinging the thing around, Rock knew he was good.

There must be a whole goddamned squad of them after me, the Doomsday Warrior thought as he slammed a new clip of shells into his pistol. In the past he had accepted his designation as “Most Wanted Man in America” with humor and pride. But now, as he stepped forward to face as formidable an opponent as he had ever seen, the responsibilities of the office seemed a little tiresome.

Tamatsu suddenly rushed forward screaming
“Kaiii!”
as he whipped the blurring blade at Rockson’s skull. Rock fired the twelve-gauge shotpistol, which sent out its spray of hot death. But somehow the swordsman evaded it, stepping just to the side as he came in swinging, and attacked Rock from a slight angle. The sword flashed down like a bolt of white lightning toward Rockson’s chest. The Doomsday Warrior spun on a dime, using a quick jerk of his hips to pull him around in less than a hundredth of a second. The sword flew past him, but caught the very tip of the pistol, sending it flying from his hands.

But the Doomsday Warrior was an expert swordsman himself and had studied not just attack but defensive responses to the sword, in a system called Aikido, in which Chen was a master. Aikido was a soft system, which enabled the user of it to blend in with his opponent’s motions, in a perfect harmony of movement. Against the slashing sword of Tamatsu, Rock had no other option open to him. To go face to face against the perfect curved blade of that lethal weapon was to invite annihilation. He would have to go
with
the attack.

Tamatsu grinned darkly as Rockson jumped back several yards and stood facing him, his hands held straight up in front of him, firm yet relaxed.

“Others have tried, but I, Tamatsu, will succeed,” the cocky Japanese said as he slowly placed one foot forward at a time, the ankle always turned to the outside for instant footing and lightning strikes. Rockson duplicated his advance, moving the corresponding foot back as Tamatsu advanced, keeping exactly the same space between them. He would make the swordsman attack off balance, draw him forward, and then make his move. He had to cut through the training of the man, force him to make the slightest error.

“Yes Tamatsu, I have heard of you.” Rockson said as he kept his body just out of reach of the poised sword held above Tamatsu’s face, the point aiming down at the cavern floor at a 45-degree angle. With a twist of his hip, Rockson knew, Tamatsu could whip that sword around and down at hundreds of miles an hour.

The assassin’s face brightened. “Ah, so my reputation is worldwide. I am known even in the U.S.S.A.”

“Yeah,” Rock answered, readying himself for what he hoped would be the response to his next words, “known for having killed your mother and father, raping female goats and urinating on the graves of Tarihawa and Ukidai—your sword style’s founders.”

The assassin’s face grew hard as stone as his entire body seemed to freeze in a state of apoplexy. Then he let out a roar that shook Rockson’s eardrums and leaped forward swinging the sword around in a steel wind of death. No man on earth could have avoided that speeding blade, but Rockson had gambled on its coming exactly at that angle and spun around, body pulled low to the ground, and to the side of Tamatsu. The sword flew past Rock’s head about a quarter inch above, the breeze from the barely missing blow ruffling his dirty black hair, the white streak in the middle starting to fully grow out once again.

There couldn’t be a second chance. Rockson, still crouched down, facing Tamatsu’s back, pulled at the man’s right ankle and slammed the blade of his hand into the nerve behind the knee. Tamatsu crumbled to the cave floor as if an electric jolt had gone through his leg. He slammed down hard, the sword hand cracking against the floor, sending the sword flying off along the pointed rocks in a hail of spitting sparks. The swordsman pulled his leg with a snap, freeing himself from Rockson’s grasp and he jumped to his feet, pulling a second, smaller blade, about a foot long, from inside his blue top. They circled each other, the swordsman’s face suddenly less confident, staring at Rockson in disbelief.

“You de-sworded me,” he said with both fear and respect. “No man has done that before.”

“No man will again,” Rockson said dryly as he waited for the attack. Tamatsu rushed in, ripping the knife around in a figure eight pattern, slicing at every part of Rockson’s body. The Doomsday Warrior feinted to the right and as Tamatsu followed, he jumped back to the left, throwing a handful of rock and dust he had gathered in his palm seconds before when lying on the cave floor. The cloud of particles flew into the ninja’s eyes, instantly blinding him. Rockson shot in for the kill, slamming his knee up into the man’s groin and lifting him off the ground. The assassin screamed out as his testicles burst apart into a bloody sticky soup and dribbled down his legs. But the screaming didn’t last for long. As the assassin came down, Rockson ripped his elbow into the man’s throat, smashing the larynx, the windpipe and arteries into a fused mass of blood and twisted bone. Tamatsu threw his hand around his throat and then sank slowly to the ground, jerking and twisting wildly, spitting up fountains of bright red blood through his pale lips. Then he was still.

Rock stared down at the motionless form, the hands still clasped around the ripped throat as if he had strangled himself. The eyes were wide open, staring up at the ceiling, and through it into realms only the dead can enter—beyond, beyond, beyond. He had the warrior’s face and had been a brave fighter. But why did all these goddamned fighters have to test themselves on him?

The idea depressed Rock immensely as he suddenly visualized endless bouts against those would-be glory boys. But it didn’t depress him nearly as much as when he turned to start back to the caved-in tunnel and saw another nine of the assassin warriors—each one decked out in a menacing outfit representing one of the martial arts, each one clutching some death device—and all of them staring at the Doomsday Warrior with eyes of purest malevolence.

Twenty-One

“A
re you guys cheaper to hire by the dozen or what?” Rock asked, letting the shotpistol hang loosely by his side. Not a man answered him as they slowly spread out in a half-circle, and came toward him, bent on nothing less than his obliteration. They wore blacks and reds and blues, silks and khakis. They carried knives and staffs, laser wands, star-knives, each holding the weapon of his specialty in front of him, all aimed at the heart of Ted Rockson. He could see with a quick sweeping glance that they were all as well-trained as those he had already faced, or better. They moved with the flowing motionless ease of only those who have spent decades in the pursuit of complete mastery of one of the martial arts.

And he could see something else. That he was a dead man. There was no way in hell he could face up to
all
of them at once. Death, ever at his shoulder, seemed to claw at his flesh, whisper in his ear—that it was time to go. But Rock wasn’t quite ready, not without the fiercest fight he had ever put up in his life. He moved very slowly to the side, away from the rock wall behind him, not wanting to get cornered, lose his maneuverability. The semi-circle closed in, raising their blades, their staffs, and cleavers. Rock waited until they were about 20 feet away and then whipped his pistol up in a blurring arc, firing the thing on full-auto, ripping his arm in a streaking circle across the advancing line. Each of the assassins jumped, in a fraction of a second, to the side, moving with the lightning quick reflexes they had mastered. But Rockson, knowing they could beat the shot, had fired
between
them, not
at
them, so as they jumped, several of them leaped into his line of fire, catching the cross-pattern of shot. One of the killers, holding an immense battle axe, collapsed in spasms on the cave floor, the axe dropping down on its wielder, slamming into the huge neck. It buried itself in to the hilt, sending out a geyser of blood from the pulsing artery.

The one in a white silk flowered gown, holding a narrow stick which Rockson recognized as a Tai-Chi wand, and the one carrying a handful of circular saw-blade sized star-knives, slapped their hands over small circles of blood that appeared on their uniforms. Hit, but not dead.

But they kept coming. One down, plenty more to go, the Doomsday Warrior thought to himself as he slammed another magazine into the top of the foot-long pistol. It didn’t look good, to say the least. But he didn’t have much choice. One at a time, one at a time. Even if they all charged, he remembered from his Aikido and Tai Chi training, only one or two could actually reach him at any one moment. He would spin and weave and strike out at whoever was closest. The rest was in God’s hands—if He was still around. The Doomsday Warrior pulled out the glistening double-sided bayonet he had taken in Goerringrad and held it in his left hand. He raised both hands and waited for the first man to come. He would be the first one to die.

There was a sudden crashing sound just behind the entire group as if the wall was coming down. They disappeared from Rockson’s eyes in a sudden swirling cloud of dust accompanied by the sounds of yelling and firing. Within seconds the dust disappeared again, sucked in by the now functioning ventilation systems of the cave complex. Rock could scarcely believe his eyes. Pouring forth from the caved-in tunnel, which was now cleared of its rocks and boulders, was the rest of the team, their Liberators and pistols at the ready.

“What the hell is going on here?” Detroit yelled out, a huge chromium .45 in his hand.

Chen, Archer and the other six men of the repair team stared wide-eyed at the apparitions of the assassin squad as they slowly reappeared out of the dust cloud.

“I was beginning to feel a little bit like Custer at Little Big Horn,” Rock yelled over to his men, now 15 yards away.

“Yeah, we knew you’d be in some sort of trouble, like you always are,” Detroit yelled back. “So we blasted the whole damned cave-in apart with some explosives one of the techs remembered were stored nearby.”

The assassins looked on in confusion. The cave-in had been created to stop the others from helping. So that there could be no doubt of the outcome. But it didn’t matter to them. They were the toughest, the baddest hombres on the face of this earth. A few more split skulls and dismembered bodies would add spice to the historic event—the death of Ted Rockson.