Doomsday Warrior 18 - American Dream Machine (20 page)

A familiar huge, hairy shape loomed over him in the blinding light of a flashbeam. “Rockson! He’s hurt! Call surgeon!”

Archer! It was Archer!

Rock tried to smile, to focus his eyes. He could recognize the voice, smell the man looking at him with such pity. Archer had made it back!

Other hands, small, cold hands, touched and probed him. More pain. A small, faint voice, not meant for him to hear, whispered, “He’s in bad shape. We have to perform surgery immediately. Get him lots of whole blood. There’s surgical equipment in the back of the cave. Get the gas! I’ll perform the operation myself! Here, Archer. While I get the stuff, shoot this into his arm.”

And with those words he felt the prick in his arm. The pain eased. Rockson felt only a dark, pleasant oblivion.

Hours later, after stripping off the surgical mask, the Techno-survivor surgeon said to Archer, “I’ve done all I can. He’s still breathing, but I’m not sure I took care of all the internal damage. These mutant-types heal well. Any normal man would have died from those wounds. So I think he’ll live. But I’m worried about his brain—all that oxygen deprivation. I don’t know if he’ll ever come out of his coma.”

“He’s alive!” Archer insisted.

“We could bring him to Century City. But,”—Zydeco looked down at the floor—“brain damage is—irreversible . . .”

“No! I no believe that!” Archer cried, clutching the man’s lapels and lifting the frightened Zydeco off the floor.

And then Archer gasped and let go. Archer’s hat flew off and, as the Techno-survivor backed away, Archer started to scream and roar like a bear. There was a blue light shining from out of his head! As they all watched in awe, Archer’s crystal-implanted skull glowed. Each of the multifaceted crystals imbedded in his head started glowing.

“What the hell?” Zydeco said. “Archer, are you all right?”

“Shhh,” Archer said. “I’m getting a message through my crystals! The implanted crystals in my head have been quiet for years!”

“Message?” Zydeco was too amazed to comment on Archer’s sudden eloquence.

“From—the Glowers. Now, please, keep quiet!” Archer’s veins pulsed, and he moaned and nodded once in a while. Finally the light in the crystals in his head died out.

“What happened?”

“The Glowers gave me instructions to take Rockson someplace much closer than Century City. They say they will try to revive him. Three hundred thirty-one miles. Get me a map, before I forget. My brain hurts,” Archer said. “I don’t like talking so fast!”

Once he plotted out the way on the map, Archer became his old staring, inarticulate self again.

Quickly Zydeco and Archer arranged a stretcher to carry Rockson out. They placed him in the armored personnel carrier that they had stolen to break out of Zhabnovtown—and, wheels spinning, headed off toward the Glower encampment.

Twenty-Seven

T
he journey was swift and Archer’s directions kept them on course. But when the APC and the other commandeered Sov vehicles arrived at the spot where they expected to find the Glowers, there was no settlement there. “Could we have gotten the directions wrong?” Zydeco worried aloud.

“No!” Archer said, “I tell it right!”

Suddenly there was a humming. No, it was more like the wash sound of electrical currents in the air. Heads swiveled. Binocs were raised, scanning the rocky horizon. Zydeco saw it first: “THERE!” he gasped. “THREE of them.”

“Of what?” scientist Myra Flourite asked, focusing in on the same direction.

“I don’t know, honestly!” Zydeco gasped. “Three ships. God, they look like old pirate galleons; masts and sails and . . .”

“But there’s no
water,”
the white-smocked little surgeon exclaimed. “God, I see them, too. They’re coming fast! Must be sixty miles an hour. God, they’re not on wheels, the three galleons are floating over the surface of the sands!”

The strange ships weren’t the half of it. Huge, blue, glowing creatures manned the great sails’ ropes, steering the crafts with giant ships’ wheels, too. “Monsters!” Zydeco gasped. “Assume defensive positions!” Zydeco called out. The hot-ray men flattened out behind several boulders. Archer hit his forehead with a meaty left palm. “NO SHOOT! Yes, I remember,” he said, scratching his flickering, crystal-laden head. “I was on such ship many years ago. No, don’t shoot! They are friend!” shouted the not-so-gentle giant. “THEY’RE GLOWERS!”

The ships slid alongside them as they stood in a line of greeting. The mental words came out of a creature of glowing blue brilliance who leaned over. “ARCHER AND THE EIGHT CLOSEST TO HIM, CLIMB UP THE NETS WE THROW DOWN; GET ON BOARD. WE’LL SEND A SLING DOWN FOR THE STRETCHER. DO NOT TOUCH US OR YOU WILL SURELY DIE. THE REST OF YOU WILL RETURN TO REPAIR YOUR HOME.”

The big mountain man carried the stretcher containing Rockson over and put it in the lift. Once it was moving up, they all clambered up the soft, warm, plasticlike nets. The deck was awash with flickering blue energy. Everyone’s hair stood on end.

Up close now, the Techno-survivors were terrified. The things that had invited them on board stood in a phalanx, staring at them with saucer-shaped, green-yellow eyes. Zydeco and the other Techno-men huddled behind the massive frame of Archer. “You didn’t say the Glowers
looked like this!”
Zydeco exclaimed. “Are they human?”

And before Archer could answer, the lead Glower’s mind came into all of their minds at the same time. “WE LOOK SO STRANGE BECAUSE OUR ORGANS ARE OUTSIDE OUR SKINS, HELD BY CARTILAGE. WE ARE HELD TOGETHER BY ENERGIES OF THE MIND. THINK OF YOUR OWN BODIES TURNED INSIDE OUT. YOU WOULD LOOK MUCH LIKE WE DO. EXCEPT, OF COURSE, YOU WOULD DIE THAT WAY. BUT YES, WE ARE . . . OF HUMAN ORIGIN.”

That answer just seemed to make the Techno-survivors more frightened. So the leader of this band of Glowers sent a burst of mathematical models into the Techno-survivors’ minds, so that they might understand the nature of being a Glower more quickly in their own parlance. To Archer, of course, the model the Glower leader sent was much simpler, reminding Archer that the Glowers were the next step in evolution of mankind beyond the Rockson stage; that their evolution had been pushed forward—perhaps on another track entirely—by radiation; that they were the immortal children of the astronauts whose space station had been bathed in the rays of the nuclear war below them a hundred years earlier; that they were
brothers,
and
Americans.

That eased minds only
somewhat.
Archer and Zydeco, with the rest of their party huddling behind them, faced the apparent leader, who communicated: “INTRODUCING YOUR MEMBERS IS NOT NECESSARY, WE SCAN YOUR MINDS. I AM THE TURQUOISE SPECTRUM. WE HAVE MET BEFORE, ARCHER, DO YOU REMEMBER?”

Archer nodded. He couldn’t tell this “man” from the others physically, but his radiant power was familiar. Answering an unvoiced question from one of the Techno-survivors, the Glower leader spoke in all their minds:

“WE CALLED YOU TO THE NEAREST PLACE OUR SHIPS WOULD BE ABLE TO SAIL. OUR VILLAGE IS MANY MILES DISTANT, FAR OUT IN THE DESERT. WE WILL REACH IT IN A MATTER OF THREE AND A HALF OF YOUR HOURS. ROCKSON WILL NOT DIE IF WE REACH THE MEDICINE IN TIME.”

“Why didn’t you bring it?” Zydeco asked in a shaky voice.

“THE MEDICINE IS THE
PLACE
, NOT SOME
DRINK
,” Turquoise Spectrum responded immediately to the thought. “ONLY THE GREAT ENERGY OF THE AREA WE LIVE IN, AND ITS ANCIENT MEDICINE WHEEL, CAN EFFECT A CURE.”

Even as he spoke in their minds the great ships turned into the wind. Their sails shifted position under the guidance of the strange, inside-out beings that handled the guide ropes. The sails caught the wind (or the sunlight), and the ship slowly started to move in the direction from which it had come.

The other two ships followed. Zydeco’s thought: “Why
three
ships?” He was immediately responded to. “THOSE ARE GUNSHIPS. THEY CARRY . . .” There was a pause, as if there were no equivalent words. Finally the Glower leader’s thought continued. “THEY CARRY WEAPONS UNDREAMT OF EVEN IN YOUR WILDEST IMAGININGS. THERE ARE THINGS IN THE DESERT BETWEEN HERE AND WHERE WE INHABIT. THE ESCORT SHIPS KEEP US SAFE FROM INTRUDERS—INTERDIMENSIONAL BEINGS LET INTO THIS WORLD’S TIME-SPACE BY THE POWER OF THE NUCLEAR BLASTS LONG AGO. THESE THINGS DO NOT RESPOND TO REGULAR DEFENSES. YOU WILL SEE.”

About an hour into the trip, something like an alarm went off. As Zydeco, Archer, and the others watched in awe, the two gunships moved ahead of their “hospital” ship, where Rockson still floated over the deck in “medical stasis.”

“THEY ARE COMING,” the thought came.

“What?” Archer said aloud.

“SHHHH,” Turquoise Spectrum said in his mind. “WATCH.”

The desert wavered and flickered, as if it were bending, as if reality itself were bending. Then a thing—glowing like the glowers, only a sickly green—jutted out of the sand and tried to take a bite of the prow of the first gunship! The thing had three rows of teeth and must have been fifty feet wide. Only God knew how long. The thing was sort of like a
worm,
but with huge furled wings, with talons set all along their leading edges. Part seagull, part alligator, part earthworm!

As they all shrank back in horror, expecting the gunship to be devoured, the ship and its partner fired strange, rippling red rays at the thing’s many-eyed head. The thing’s teeth locked onto the hull, bending some of the forward plates of the ship’s prow. And then the thing screamed as the red rays hit an eye. It was a weird, other-dimensional scream that shuddered through the spine of each and every human who was watching. It chilled to the bone and deeper. It must have been a square hit, because the thing rose up out of the desert sea and sank beneath the sandy waves.

Zydeco and the others had scarcely caught their breaths when a sight met their eyes that made what they had just witnessed seem a kiddie’s tale told in the nursery. The three ships shuddered with the force of some terrible disturbances beneath the dunes. Then the things came bursting out of the sands—a veritable armada of horrid, glowing worm-bird-reptile creatures, with jaws the size of tanks. There must have been twenty or more of the neon nightmares leaping in and out of the dunes like flying fish. When they screamed, the green-gray platelets—scales around their worm necks—ruffled. Red flesh rattles slid out between their scales, making a horrible din. Strangest of all, the worm things seemed to
pulse
in and out of existence, as if a strobe light played on them.

They moved fast. One would be in one place and wink out. The next sighting, it would have moved to a completely different area. The two gunships flanked the hospital ship, sending out their own kind of wobbly, red death rays from very odd weapons. Zydeco, Archer, and the other humans could see devices resembling TV “rabbit ear” antennas rising from the decks of the gunships.
Nyerp
ing arcs of red and blue light were discharged into the air. The Glower leader, Turquoise Spectrum, tried to explain telepathically that the weapons were somehow linked into the creatures’ strobe-rhythms, the kill rays winking in and out of existence
with
the monsters. Or, to be more technical,
following
them into whatever dimension they tried to escape to. They were called strobe-pulsers. And they had better work!

The gun crews had all they could do to direct the weapons at the creatures and time them to the exact pulse of the creature’s dimension-jumping pulse, before they devoured the ships and their crews. If the shots were mistimed, the weapon and the creature would be out of sync. They weren’t mistimed!

The worm screams and thunderous worm rattles were deafening. That and the constant barrage of the weapons made the humans hold their ears.

The hospital ship was tossed from side to side by the writhing bodies of the dying thunder-worms. The gunships at all times sailed to protect the hospital ship. Rockson’s body, floating in its energy cocoon, swayed back and forth with the ship. He was totally unconcerned about the danger, about his earthly existence. Archer stayed right with him. The worst part about watching was the utter helplessness of Archer, Zydeco, and the Techno-survivors. No weapon they had could possibly touch these monsters from a sandy hell!

Each gunship was kept busy battling with these winking, blinking monsters, when suddenly a huge flying worm broke through the defenses and leaped over the deck of the hospital ship, just missing Rockson’s stasis cocoon. Random Vector, one of the bravest of the Techno-survivors, saw his chance for action. He ran straight to the end of the deck and jumped into the sandy sea. The worm’s jaws poised over Rockson, but that immense, horrible monster was diverted by the jumper. It chased after him,
dove
after him. Random Vector’s diversionary action not only saved Rockson, but the entire hospital ship, from certain destruction. As the worm thing
ate
the heroic man, they heard Random Vector’s mind waves: “I, RANDOM VECTOR, AM NO MORE. GOOD-BYE FRIENDS. MY BODY IS NO LONGER, BUT THE PART OF ME THAT IS THE WHOLE STAYS WITH YOU.”

The gunships continued the battle against the worms. Archer, Zydeco, and the other Techno-survivors watched in horror, their hair standing on end, this jagged nightmare of constant weapons’ sounds, pulsing screams, and rattles. The hospital ship tossed so much from side to side that they had all they could do to hold on. Archer could feel his stomach beginning to heave—seasickness on the desert!

Then, suddenly, it was over. The last of the attacking worms had been hit, and was screaming the awful scream of defeat. Then it winked out of existence. There were no other Glower or human casualties. All that was left was total silence and the distinct smell of ozone burning their nostrils, and the memory of Random Vector’s ultimate sacrifice for his fellow men.

“THE DANGER IS OVER,” said Turquoise, “FOR NOW.” They sailed on.

When they reached the area between the dozen geodesic domes, blue lit from inside, the sand ships slowed and many Glowers came running out with huge poles. The poles, Archer knew, would steady the ships, so they would not lean over on their sides, for once the sails went down, the ships were no longer capable of floating.