Doomsday Warrior 14 - American Death Orbit (12 page)

The doc was back in a flash with the bag. The pair of them rushed to the diner, and under Rockson’s squinting gaze, Michaels got out tools and cut into McCaughlin’s stomach.

It was horrible. There were a good two dozen of the red larvae. And even as he reached in and tried to take one small one out, razor-sharp teeth ripped into his thumb and latched onto it.

“Goddamn little monster,” Dr. Michaels shouted as he pulled his hand out and stabbed at the squirming thing with the scalpel. It came off and rolled along the table.

“Rajat, hand me that bucket,” he yelled out as the Indian youth grabbed it and held it out. Rockson thought the slender wide-eyed teen would be repulsed, but apparently there was something to scientific curiosity—for both of the whiz kids just stood there entranced by the operation, neither one turning or flinching.

The doctor had to retrieve each larva with long tweezers and they wriggled furiously as they were taken out. It was apparently instinctive for them to remain in the feast of flesh until they were ready to hatch out. These had only been laid within the last few hours and didn’t want to come into the outside world at all. And who could blame them. For the moment they emerged Dr. Michaels laid them into the bucket and Rajat stabbed at them with another scalpel until they were one hundred percent completely and absolutely certifiably dead.

No one wanted to see even one of these little bastards survive. After twenty minutes, the doctor was pleased to discover that none of them had penetrated any vital organs. All the while Rock had been reassured to feel a steady even pulse in McCaughlin’s wrist.

“The initial egg-laying is along the inside of the stomach’s muscle sheath, but not into the organs themselves,” Michaels said. “The mother wants to leave all the goodies for the little suckers to feast on fresh. So it’s unharmed. They haven’t been in there long enough to really move around and do worse damage,” he said, as he took out the last of the blood-red things and threw it with a shudder into the bucket.

“Will he live?” Rockson asked, as the doctor spread various salves down into the wound and then began sewing it all up again, using the coarse but effective methods of emergency trail doctoring, spraying antibiotic spray as he sewed.

“Rock, I couldn’t begin to answer that one,” Michaels said with a frown as he made the first of the stitches, pulling the wound closed. “I know I got all the eggs out—but we know they use poisons. His whole body may be flooded with junk now, plus the infection possibility . . . It’s all new to me. Really we should take him back to C.C. where he’d have more of a—”

“We can’t,” Rockson said almost inaudibly. “We must go forward. There’s just no time even—
God—
even for my friend! He knew he might be sacrificed for the greater good if it came down to it. Any of us might—even me. Do your best, doc. Sew him, get him as good as you can, and we’ll rig up something on one of the all-terrain vehicles.”

He headed outside as the doctor finished his sewing, and organized the burial of the dead Freefighters and the cremation of the Vampyres—fire to eliminate any possible egg inside the things.

Rock hesitated a long time before telling them to douse the diner as well. It was a sad thing to see such a noble and antique place destroyed. But the blood-drinking women had been able to lure men by the use of the place. And he had no illusions that the Freefighters had gotten all of them.

A number of his men had sighted some of the bat-women fleeing into the woods when they saw the battle was lost. He couldn’t allow the damned place to remain, to lure more unsuspecting victims in. As the military commander of Century City, and under the New Constitution of the Re-United States of America, he was authorized to liquidate cannibals—or anyone who preyed on human flesh—without trial or jury.

He figured blood drinkers fit in that category as well. If mutants wanted to coexist
alongside
man, that was okay. The New Americans weren’t out to get rid of them. But they sure as hell couldn’t live
on
human beings. There wasn’t room on the same planet for two predatory species like that.

Within an hour the survivors were all loaded up again, even McCaughlin, still out cold, bandaged and tied up like a suitcase on the back of an all-terrain bike they had fitted with a platform.

Rock raised his arm and they headed slowly out of the encampment as the cremation pyres burned and the U-ETE-HERE diner itself went up in sheets of reds and orange.

The past was gone. And it sure as hell wasn’t coming back again as a perverse trap for unwary travelers.

Sixteen

I
f someone upstairs had been messing with them for the last few days, he suddenly seemed to give the Strike Force a break. For once they were away from the wretched bloodsuckers’ village, and their hearts had settled down to at least a modicum of normality, they made good time.

The land grew quite flat as they got more northward and Rock thanked his lucky stars for that. They didn’t need any more problems before they reached the site of the Dynasoar spacecraft. His main concern—other that the mission itself—was McCaughlin. The man’s condition wasn’t changing one way or another. He rode along all strapped down to the back of the ATV pale like a corpse. But he was clearly alive, if breathing in shallow gasps.

Every six hours or so, when Rockson called a rest, the doc checked him out, gave him more intravenous antibiotics and glucose as there was no way to get him to eat anything.

The man was in a coma, total and complete. The wound seemed to stop oozing blood but it didn’t really look like it was healing either, remaining swollen and purple all over his whole side and stomach.

Dr. Michaels believed that the drugs the Vampyre queen had squirted into him in preparation for the egg-laying had actually put his body into a kind of suspended animation. Which was good in that at least his metabolism would have slowed down. But neither Rock nor the doc had any illusions about the long-term prognosis. The human body couldn’t take that much shock and abuse without a whole room of life support systems to help it along. Fat chance. But then again, Archer’s skull had been stove in with an ax once, and he still lived.

So Rock prayed every night when they stopped and made camp in a protected area. Prayed to the gods that be that they’d give the overfed bastard a chance. If cats had
nine
lives, Scotsmen should have at least
two.
Although, if he started to think about it for very long, which he didn’t, Rock knew that the guy had already used up quite a few of those “get out of death” cards in the past.

Within five more days of hard travel in driving rain and winds, they had made it into southern Montana and headed slightly east, as their maps showed a course deviation. Compasses were used on missions but because of the numerous bombs going off a century before had altered the true magnetic north, one had to keep making compensations for it, which Shecter’s math crew had fortunately figured out the proper equations for.

The only problem with the maps was that they referred to many landmarks and road systems over a hundred years old. Much had disappeared, changed, been covered with sand, or crumbled into dust. Still, there was enough left to carefully chart their course toward the alleged location of the spaceship.

As the skies cleared at last evening fell, the end of their second day into heavily forested Montana. Rock had the force stop and camp for the evening in a well-hidden, pine-treed valley set between a whole little cluster of low hills. He had them post a few guards up and around the plateau which surrounded the place, and taking Chen and Detroit, set out on ’brids to scout ahead. When he got this close to any military target Rockson always liked to go slow—and check things out himself.

They rode straight north for nearly an hour as darkness fell and only a crescent moon lit up the sky as the first stars trickled out. But as night came in earnest with stars like the god’s flaring cigars, they could see by the combined moon and star light.

They came to the end of a series of grassy fields when they saw lights below them. Rock had them tether the ’brids at some scraggly trees and went the final fifty yards on foot, the last few on hands and knees. You never,
never
knew what lay ahead.

And when he looked down over the edge, Rock’s breath quickened as did the other men’s. For they had obviously traveled farther than they had thought, and already reached their target.

And some fucking target it was! If they had been thinking this Warlord Garr was some two-bit operator—they were sadly mistaken. It was like a goddamned small city spread out below them. Oh a fucked-up, broken-down, ramshackle city—but a city nonetheless. There were countless shacks and mud huts, places made of salvaged metal all tied together with wire, everything was intertwined and built on top of one another, so it looked like an ant colony. And from where they lay looking down they could see the inhabitants spread out over acres.

“Jesus,” Detroit said, through tightly clenched lips. “Rath and his boys didn’t tell us any info like this. This place must have a few thousand inhabitants.”

“They couldn’t have known,” Rock answered as he took out his field glasses and lifted them to his eyes. He quickly scanned around the place searching for any indication of the spaceship bunker and its entrance.

It was clear that the area had been some kind of military base, for there were still pieces of the original machinery and equipment that had been above ground strewn around the place. Only now much of it had crumbled or rusted as well—and what was left of the old base was being used by the inhabitants to live in.

Rock saw three flat dishlike structures and focused in on them. Huge tracker radar dishes were aimed straight up at the sky where they had doubtless been getting some kind of information until the very last second—a century before. Now they were crumbling around the edges—and inside the dishes—what? It was hard to see, and when he did he blanched.

The dishes were filled with skulls and bones like great sacrificial alters that had seen their share of death. As he got a good look at one side of the huge radar dishes from the light of a fire that raged nearby, Rock saw that he was right, for streams of blood had clearly run over the sides of one and rusted a blackish color all the way to the ground down the support girders.

“Hey, this guy Garr must be some nice warlord to work for,” Chen mumbled in the darkness as he and Detroit also scanned the entire encampment. “I’m seeing some pretty nasty stuff down there.”

“This definitely the place, Rock?” the black Freefighter asked, as there was more than one warlord in these far north territories.

“Damn sure looks like it to me,” Rock answered. “It’s got all the old radar domes, and pieces of equipment.” He took the glasses down and consulted the map which had been compu-drawn for him in a small plastic jacket. “There’s a hell of a lot of stuff missing. But what’s here, as far as I can tell, corresponds completely to the map. You two tell me.” He tossed the map to them.

Detroit who was closer picked it up and started making his own comparisons, looking first through the glasses and then down at the map. Whole platoons of men down there, camped out.

“This is it, baby—at least we’ve come to the right place,” the black grenade-man agreed with Rock after a minute. “So far we’re batting a thousand.”

“Right,” Rock muttered cynically. “All we gotta do now is figure out a way to get in down there, not get killed by a fucking huge army, find the spaceship, pray that it works—and then be able to fly the damn thing out of there up a ramp I don’t see at all. Yeah, we’re batting a thousand all right.”

“Ease down, Rock,” Chen said softly without taking his eyes from his own binocs. He was making long slow sweeps of the place, trying to memorize every inch of it for combat.

“You’re right, pal,” Rock said, wiping his brow. He almost felt feverish. “It’s the pressure of this damn mission—it’s almost too much. In a way it makes all the other expeditions we’ve gone on seem pretty small potatoes.”

“Just think of it as another mission,” Chen said as he sat back and looked firmly at Rock. “You’re doing your best—somehow good things will come of it. That’s why we follow you through this hell.”

“Amen to that,” Detroit said as he tossed the map back to Rock. “You’ve led us through too much to start getting doubts.”

“It’s not doubts,” Rockson said irritably. “It’s—how the hell can we just charge down there into that mess? We don’t even know where the entrances to the bunker that still function—if any—are. I’m going down there—alone.”

Before the two could say a word he had stripped off his outer gear and equipment from around his shoulders and started toward the edge.

“Careful, Rock, careful,” Chen said into the darkness. “Do you want someone with you?”

“No, be better alone,” Rock whispered back over a sudden song of crickets on wind. Then he was gone, as Detroit took out some grenades and Chen some star-knives. And they sat silently watching him disappear down the slope and into the shadows, praying that he would make it back.

Seventeen

R
ockson could hear the grunts, the snores, the occasional scream here and there as he approached the outskirts of the ramshackle “city” with utmost caution. He stopped just a few hundred feet from the warlord’s outermost shack—made of car fenders and doors all set together with mud. Rock smeared some dirt over his face. Being too clean in a camp like this would be a beacon. Then he took out his knife and sliced his sweatshirt and pants so they were a little more tattered. He made sure his shotpistol was well hidden and rose to a lurching kind of walk. It wouldn’t be good to come in on all fours; that would attract attention. No, he had to fake it all the way from now on. He was one of them, one of the slave peons, one of the ragtag, filthy plunderer soldiers of Warlord Garr.

The first thing he noticed when actually entering the city was how it
smelled.
For once inside the shantytown border the smell of rotted meat, of death, of gangrened human flesh was almost overpowering. He took shallow breaths trying to keep the smell out as it made him gag. The second thing he noticed, as he passed a bunch of the inhabitants sleeping around a campfire huddled together by the dozens, was how repugnantly filthy and unkempt they actually were. He wasn’t nearly dirty enough he saw immediately.