Doomsday Warrior 14 - American Death Orbit (8 page)

Chen and Rock looked at one another and both had to laugh.

“So you got all this stuff on the menu,” Chen asked, looking up at the board that sat midway above the counter. “Buffalo burger, home fries, pancakes? You really got these things?”

“Better believe it sugarcakes,” the over-rouged night manager laughed. “That’s why we’re the most famous restaurant for five hundred miles. Of course, the fact that we’re the
only
restaurant don’t hurt matters none either.” She laughed, and her eyes hooked onto Rockson’s in a subtle but clearly sensual way.

This place was
all right,
he decided as he breathed out hard. He was just too fucking suspicious by nature.

Chen was already sitting at the counter eagerly eyeing the menu. Rock made his decision to let everyone come on down and share the bounty. So he went to the window and signalled with a small high-intensity, pencil flashlight. A light flashed down from the mountain peak where the rest of the team waited.

“You got more coming in?” the woman asked as she put her hands on her hips with an even broader smile pasted to her red lips, no doubt anticipating extra revenues tonight.

“Yeah, just wanted to check the place out first,” Rock said sheepishly. “You know how it is.”

“Oh, of course, you can’t be too careful,” she grinned back. She turned and yelled into the kitchen for the girls to turn on a few extra burners as there was a whole load of hungry mouths coming in.

“How the hell do you power this place?” Rock asked, as power sources of any kind in this day and age outside of mule power were rare and far between—unless controlled by the Reds.

“Well, see, this was a real diner,” the blond waitress said, putting her hands on both Rock’s and Chen’s shoulder and leading them over to one of the formica tables that sat along the wall, just below the bank of windows. “When the bombs came they—they didn’t get us. The way those hills are shaped kinda led the poison away. Our ancestors stayed on, what the hell. Had a huge supply of propane tanks, as they’d gotten their own equipment years before and stocked up huge amounts of stuff in shacks all around the area. Over one hundred tanks of the stuff. Anyway, us valley girls have been keeping this place running for the last century,” she said proudly. “Cooking eggs, turning pancakes. I tell you, the people that come in here with scowls—they leaves with smiles on their faces.”

“A primitive paradise,” Chen said, eyeing the Boston cream pie.

“This is about as close as it’s going to get to paradise this side of the pearly gates!” She smiled. “Now, what would you boys like? We got a full menu tonight. Just bagged us some fresh mountain goat; Got bison—the non-mutant kind. So just let me know. And remember we cook to suit your taste—spicey, mild, or no taste at all.” She laughed again and Rock decided he liked her. With her huge breasts pushing out tightly against her waitress outfit, he liked her quite a bit in fact. And Rona was far away . . .

Rock and Chen studied the menu carefully then placed their orders. “A sirloin and garnishes for me,” Rock asked.

“Two hornburgers with slugs,” she screamed out in time-honored diner slang of all the hash joints throughout history. “Double Q-B’s triple Frenchie smasher . . .”

It sounded horrible, but it sure as hell tasted good when it began arriving at their table, carried by two smiling waitresses, each one more curvy and uniform-busting than the next.

By the time the rest of the team got their ’brids and all-terrain bikes parked out front and marched noisily in, Rock and Chen were already deep into the main course of their respective meals—Buffalo burger rare, with onions on the side, home fries—real potatoes, not dried spuds or hydroponically grown like C.C.’s, which always left a certain chemical residue in the mouth, no matter how much the eater pretended they were the real thing.

The food was excellent and within minutes the whole place was nothing but chewing and slurping sounds, forks and knives clattering against bowls and plates as the whole crew ate and talked loudly. It was a dream. A taste of mom’s home cooking from the days when there had been thousands of such railroad-car-shaped diners that filled the land. It almost brought tears to some of their eyes, even as it brought orgasms of taste to their tongues.

It was Bernstein who felt a little funny first. Just a queasy feeling in his stomach. But then he had always had a bad stomach, an ornery digestive system going back to his teens. And working with explosives for the last twenty years hadn’t helped to cool a nascent ulcer down any. He excused himself and asked one of the waitresses where the men’s room was. She pointed down to the right side of the diner, where he saw a set of wooden doors. He pushed through, found the men’s room and walked in. He had seen pictures of such in the Century City library, where they had preserved everything they could about the past, every picture, every scrap of writing found in the ruins of old America. For whatever they gathered on their search missions could well be all that would be preserved of Twentieth Century America.

The men’s room, with its porcelain urinal and sink and tile floor sure as hell would have made the archeology boys back in C.C. happy, Bernstein thought with a grin as he did his business into the old ceramic urinal. The place was a time capsule.

He headed back outside, and noticed a piece of plywood nailed up on the windows that faced the back of the diner. Unable to contain his curiosity he walked over to it, still feeling strange in his stomach, and looked through a small crack along one side. It was hard to see at first, like squinting through a hairline crack. But then his eyes adjusted and he gasped. Naked corpses—five of them, lying side by side on wooden slabs. They were horrible looking, all collapsed in, as if their insides had been vacuumed out, their flesh as white and pasty as month-old dough. Whatever had been done to them was something he didn’t want to know about.

Whether it was the shock of the sight, or his stomach really going through a number, Bernstein didn’t know. He stumbled backwards away from the plywood and bounced off the walls like a billiard ball as he lurched back toward the well-lit diner. The rest of the men’s eyes suddenly caught him and all eating stopped as he walked trembling into the room.

“Poisoned, we’ve all been poisoned,” he screamed out, hardly able to make his lips move. And even as Rockson reached for his shotpistol he was suddenly feeling the same deep cramps that Bernstein was already in the later stages of. The cushion-tile ceiling above them opened up, and strange glistening nets dropped down on each and every one of the strike force. And even as they struggled, falling to the floor amidst the food and the broken plates, they saw the waitresses gather around.

And now they were laughing, laughing out loud, as they pointed at the struggling men to one another like it was all of vast amusement to them. But then the drug that they had put in the Freefighters’ food set in in earnest, and amidst the convulsions that shook their bodies before they fell into unconsciousness they couldn’t even see the waitresses’ laughing faces, but only feel their own spasming pain.

Eleven

W
hen Rock started slowly coming to, he felt like slipping right back into unconsciousness again. His head pounded like it was beneath a jackhammer as his eyes opened just a crack. The dim light was so painful to his drugged brain that he slammed the lids shut again as fast as he could. He could feel his heart race in his chest a mile a minute.

Where was he? What the hell was happening? He turned through the melting pages of his mind, searching for answers. And then remembered. The diner—the women. They had—

This time he forced the eyes open whether they wanted to be or not. His brain burst into rockets of pain but he made them stay open even as his heart pounded hard. It took a few seconds for him to adjust to the gray light of the room, then they opened in horror. For the other men were hanging in stand-up position, tangled in the nets that had fallen on them in the diner. They all looked unconscious. Maybe dead. But the two across from him, Rock couldn’t quite make them both out, had red smeared all over their necks.

Blood.

He tried to move his arms and couldn’t—and looking down for the first time discovered that he, too, was wrapped up tight as a bug in a rug in one of their sticky nets. The smell from the thing was awful, now that his nostrils were working again enough to take in scents. It smelled like glue and horse dung and kerosene all mixed together. But whatever the net-ropes were made of, they sure as hell worked. He couldn’t budge an inch, the whole thing stuck right around his body like the web of a spider who has wrapped up his food for later digestion.

As his mind as well came more into focus and function, Rock’s heart started beating fast again, apparently the drug exaggerated his emotions, sending adrenaline into his system. The whiz kids—his own Rock team. Where the hell were they? He strained his head with all his might, a difficult effort, both because the drug had made him feel weak as a baby and because the netting had wrapped around the back of his head and throat making it hard to move. A few of the men were moaning and stirring slightly.

He stared as hard as he could into the dimness. The only light was coming through some windows covered over with opaque plastic material that allowed only a fraction of illumination to come in from the outside.
There—
he saw them—the two kids far down at the end of the room, the last two in the row on his side. They were clearly out like lights, both of their heads tilted all the way over to one side. He prayed they were still alive.

Even as he searched around for Detroit, Chen, the others, the door across from him opened up and the room flooded with light from some outside hall.

Three of the women came walking in, only this time they weren’t wearing the cute sexy waitress outfits and—they weren’t smiling either. At least not the friendly dumb waitress expressions that they had all mastered so well the night before. These were, rather, sneers of disdain. And as they walked in, high heels clicking on the wood, and switched on a light on one wall, they seemed to exude evil. When the room sprang into brightness Rock saw with horror that they were wearing—human skin.

It was clearly skin, and male, too, as he could still see the hair all over the skin which had been stretched out. The waitresses had cut it into what almost looked like deerskin pants and jackets, half-open, so their breasts poked through like melons being swung on a pendulum.

“Ah, the males awaken,” one of them, the blonde, said with scorn as she walked up and down the two rows facing each other on opposite walls, poking at them, examining their faces, their necks. “A good batch,” she said to the other two who followed along behind her with little tubes of what looked like blood in their hands, and a set of collars which they secured on each man as they went down the rows, putting them around the men’s necks. They were almost like dog collars, perhaps were, and had numbers written on each one.

“This one’s an O-positive,” the leader of the three women said as she pointed to one of the men just to the left of Rock. “We’ll put him on the A-list.”

“Right, Zeran,” one of the subordinates said as she marked it all down in a notebook. Rock noticed that the women were pale now, like death itself, having washed off the make-up and rouge.

“Well look here—we got us a live one,” the head woman Zeran said, stopping in her tracks as she came right in front of Rockson. He looked her squarely in the eyes without flinching, even though his brain felt like silly putty which had been filtered through a spaghetti colander. He could feel the pure strength of her will as she gazed at him with burning yellow eyes.

Rockson suddenly realized these were mutants. However, they had hidden it all with contact lenses and other accoutrements that the spider uses to trap the fly—they were clearly mutants. And not of his particular variety of Sapiens new evolution. They didn’t have the star-shaped birthmarks on their breasts, nor the streak of white hair that ran down the center of the true mutants’ scalps like Rock’s. These were of a different ilk entirely. And from the look of them not a very positive branch of evolution at all.

“What are you looking at so strongly, mister?” Zeran asked, as she kept her cat-slit yellow eyes focused right on his, wanting to make him look away, wanting to subordinate his human male will to her female mutant will. But Rockson of all people, who had stared down snar-lions out in the wastelands, wasn’t exactly the one to test wills with.

“I don’t know,” Rock replied softly, discovering that he could hardly speak, that his lips felt like they were made of desert sand with a pinch of salt thrown in. “What
are
you?”

The yellow eyes burned wildly as he could see fury rise in them. The lips curled back from the mouth revealing two sharp fangs set on each side just beyond the front teeth. She seemed to lose control for a second and then Zeran let out with a catlike hiss that sent shivers up Rock’s back. Then suddenly, fast as a striking rattler, her hands shot out and clawed across his face. Rock felt a stabbing of pain and then warm blood tickle down his cheek and chin. She pulled back and held her hand up, clawed as if ready to strike again, and Rock saw the long nails on each of her fingers, inches long and curved back on themselves like a tiger’s claws.

The hiss died out in her throat and her lips settled back down as she realized she had lost her cool.

“I am not used to people talking back to me,” she sneered at him. “Especially not men.”

“Why have you taken us prisoner?” Rock demanded, feeling around with his hands which were wedged alongside of him, to see if there was any way out. There wasn’t. “Why have you drugged us? What the hell is going on here?”

“Strong words,” she laughed as the other two seemed amused by Rockson’s assertiveness. “Considering the fact that we’ve got you tied up as tight as a wasp in a spider’s food sack. In fact, that’s just what you’re in here for—for your information.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Rockson snarled, getting a sudden queasy feeling in his stomach, and that was on top of the already sickening whirlpool that was spinning around inside his intestines.