Doomsday Warrior 18 - American Dream Machine (3 page)

Might as well start walking—which way? Northeast. Climb up that granite face before dark, get his bearings with the stars. Sky is clear, Rockson reassured himself, the stars should be bright tonight. He could find the way.

Inventory of supplies: Matches for a fire, a map. Brains and brawn. Things could be worse. How about weapons?
Oh God!

Rock ran back to the fragmented smoking wreckage and dug around through the scorched debris. He was relieved when finally his hands uncovered his shotpistol. It was looking bad, but it was still functional. He found some ammo in a steel case. Not much—100 rounds. The Liberator rifle was a fused mess. He lifted its melted mass, then threw it down in disgust.

He looked up at the sky above him. The stars were already coming out, along with flickers of blue-green aurora. A cold wind arose. With the shotpistol recovered, things weren’t really so bad. Should he really climb
now?
As cold as it was here in the canyon, it would be much colder up on the plateau. There would be driftwood to make a fire, near the river. And water—maybe a fish dinner.

Rock quickly decided to stay the night in the canyon. He’d stay warm with a cozy fire, sheltered from the winds by the canyon walls. He’d get going bright and early in the morning. Archer needed him alive, after all.

He headed down toward the river, back along the skid marks and gouges from the crash landing. It was not long before Rockson saw the ripped white lines on the dirt—the mysterious ropes that had saved his life by slowing the plane. Funny, he had almost forgotten about them. He went over to the first rope, lying torn and twisted. He bent down and found that it was warm and sticky to the touch. Maybe it was some sort of creep-vine. He pulled his hand away with some difficulty. Shit, if it was a creeper, it could be dangerous. Creepers can tangle you in two seconds. He shouldn’t be touching one.

He noticed other broken “ropes” scattered about. They didn’t move, yet he kept his fingers on the butt of the shotpistol he had jammed into his waistband. He’d tangled with all sorts of crawl-vines before. The mutant arms of such plants could wind about your ankles and drag you into the throat of a carnivorous plant in a flash! One of the nifty threats created in the hundred years of radiation since the war.

Rockson edged away from the “ropes,” though they continued to remain inert. He took a more circuitous path toward the raging rapids. He could hear the turgid water’s song of violence. He spotted some driftwood on the shore. When Rockson went toward the twisted branches, he came across animal tracks. Not those of hooves, like a deer’s. The prints were made by three-toed paws.

Very
peculiar tracks. He bent down and studied them carefully. A strange, pungent odor came into his nostrils, of something like musk. The tracks were too numerous, too closely packed, for one thing. Maybe the animals that had made them were in a tightly packed bunch.

Rockson followed them along. The tracks were fresher and fresher as he walked toward the river. Mountain lions? By the shallowness depth of the prints, the creatures weren’t very big, he decided. Maybe three feet high. Well, he could handle
that
kind of cat. Rockson was powerfully thirsty now, and the water ahead was greatly inviting. Rockson walked on in a hurry—and then paused in mid-stride. What if the creatures that had made the tracks
weren’t
animals? What if they were insects? Many-legged insects could have made those tracks. His heart froze as if an icicle had struck it. If the creatures were insects they were pretty large.

Spider
Canyon. Shit. This place was
called
Spider Canyon. Now the mysterious ropes that had slowed his crash landing made sense. They weren’t ropes! They weren’t creeper vines! They were spider webs!

Just then he heard scuttling noises and dropped quickly to the ground. The noises ceased. After a long while of utter silence Rockson crawled stealthily up to the top of a low knoll and peered toward the river. There, in the dim twilight, he saw a dozen three-foot-wide, furry white spiders! The monster arachnids were devouring the carcass of an antelope-type creature. The carcass was caught up in some of those very same white “ropes” that had saved his life. More spiders came and went.

The hairy white spiders evidently hung around the water line, inside those piles of driftwood. Dens for spiders! They waited for thirsty animals or for humans such as Rockson. The poor animal they had in their clutches now had probably been seeking a little drink. Now it was being torn apart and devoured. The spiders’ rip-jaws made unpleasant slurping sounds.

Rock had seen and heard enough. He’d stay thirsty tonight! He probably could devastate that pack of spiders with the shotpistol, but there were other packs of the bastards around. His ass was grass if he stayed around here!

He crawled slowly, silently, back down the way he’d come, and scanned the canyon walls: vertical, with few handholds, if any. And it was getting dark. But those feeding sounds made him decide. Handholds or no handholds, he’d try a climb. That was better than becoming a meal for the chittering arachnid gourmets behind him. He assumed they were the kind of heavy, land-roving spiders that
didn’t
climb walls. A shaky assumption, but one that gave him
some
comfort! He crouch-ran toward the rock escarpment, holding his shotpistol in his right hand. The flickering aurora above seemed shaped like a skeletal hand. In the near darkness, Rockson almost ran into another set of the sticky horizontal spider-ropes. These were fresher than the ones that had snagged his airplane. If Rockson had fallen onto them . . . well, he would have been stuck there until visitors came—white furry visitors.

He slowly circled the web-rope network, not seeing any net manager around. He again ran. This time he ran flat out. The roar of the water should cover his footfalls—he hoped. Jesse Owens would have been left in his dust!

Rockson’s night vision was excellent, and as he raced along, he studied the sheer rock face dead ahead for danger. There were no web-ropes that he could
see
on the cliff, and no place for the spider-things to hide.

One hundred more yards! He’d better get there while that pack of carnivorous spiders was still busy. He almost lost traction, slipping on a patch of strewn gravel. That made noise, and soon he heard scampering sounds behind him, and the sounds of slavering jaws. It quickly sounded like a horde of little schnauzer dogs were right on his heels.

The spiders started screeching for blood—his blood.

One quick look back. They were gaining!

They were going to get to him at the same time he got to the cliff! Pulling his weapon from his belt, Rockson spun once on his heels and fired his shotpistol on full automatic. The X-patterns of deadly explosive pellets spread out and demolished the foremost ranks of the red-eyed bastards. In a second he’d used up a whole clip.

More of the things just came rushing over the torn and bloody bodies.

This wasn’t going to work!

Three

T
he furry white eight-legged creatures snapped their sharp, drippy mandibles right at Rockson’s boots, but by then he was up on the cliff, his fingers and feet searching out and finding the tiny indentations in the rock, just in time. In a second, as the spiders, snarling in rage, tried to jump up on his back, Rockson was already twenty feet up the wall, climbing with all his mutant survival-instincts on full go. Imperceptible hand-and-boot holds, tiny irregularities that no normal human climber could have managed to secure himself on, were as good as a staircase to the desperate Doomsday Warrior. Nothing seemed less desirable at the moment to Rockson than falling, winding up as the evening meal of the drooling bunch of eight-legged bastards screeching and yapping below him.

For a second Rock worried that they might be able to climb walls, but as he got further and further up, the carnivore-spiders continued merely to jump up and fall back. The cliff surface became more irregular after a time, with lots of easy grips. This cliff, Rockson realized, was ready made for climbing. Still, it was pretty dark now, and he told himself not to grow too confident. There were a good 2,000 feet left to climb.

Rockson, the immediate danger behind him, began pacing his climb, taking it easy, despite the disgusting slavering of the spiders. When he looked back down to see how far he’d come in twenty minutes, he was disgusted and repelled to see the whole canyon below covered with spiders,
millions
of them. They seemed to reflect the faint starlight, almost to glow. “Must be a shortage of meat in the area! Or maybe they particularly like two-legged suppers! Is it my Desperado cologne?”

Worst of all, the spiders were climbing over one another. It was like rush hour in Manhattan down there. They just kept coming. God, if he only had a grenade! The damned things were piling up ten, twenty, thirty deep, crushing one another to get to Rockson!
No more taking it easy!

Rockson climbed as fast as he could now, and that was plenty fast! After about another thousand feet of breathtaking ascent he chanced again looking back down. And with relief he noted that the piles of spiders hadn’t increased much in height. Rockson listened, but didn’t hear anything except the raging river. It looked eerily alive from up this far. The foaming, turgid waters were luminescent in the light of the rising moon.

Rockson, though evidently out of range of the creatures, didn’t slacken his pace. His fingertips were raw and strained, his toes felt like raw tortured meat inside his supple leather boots. There were just another hundred feet or so to reach the top. He did the distance in about twenty seconds.

When his fingers crawled over the edge, they touched sand. He got one elbow, then the next up over the edge and crawled onto the gritty surface. He lay flat on his aching back, utterly exhausted. Rockson stared up at the brilliant crescent moon and the fields of crystal stars. The red star Regulus was high up in the west, which, at this time of year, made it about midnight. A glance at the Big Dipper, which cruised upside down in the north, confirmed the time-guess.

Within minutes Rockson’s remarkable mutant ability to recover from exertion worked its wonders. His breaths came in more regular and less sharp intakes, and he began to feel the bitter cold. Though he wanted to stand up and get moving, to try to get warm, he did not move. He just listened. For there could be spiders or—other things—up here, too. He watched random meteors from time to time flit cross the strewn-diamond starfields. Now and then a pulse of deadly radioactive energy—the leftovers of a war that had happened over a hundred years ago—briefly created a smoky, twisting, purple curtain in the ionosphere. When he was quite sure nothing lurked nearby, Rock decided he HAD TO move. He was freezing.

The minute he tried to get up, he started to hurt. Every muscle in his body had, evidently, been strained to the utmost by his mad climb to safety. Rockson took a deep breath and stood up anyway, countering the pain with his willpower, which was immense. His ankles throbbed, his leg tendons felt like rusted bridge cables. But he could walk, that was the important thing. As for the pain . . . maybe something could be done about it.

He searched in his beltpack for the antiswelling pills and found the little blue tablets. He palmed two of them, brought them up to his mouth, and swallowed them with a gulp. He barely got them down. After all, he was bone dry.

“Have to get water.” His voice sounded cracked and parched. He jumped up and down, trying to keep numbness away. As the pains in his limbs eased, Rockson, sighting up the stars, turned and headed northeast.

After an hour of steady plodding on flat surface, he came upon a spectacular rock formation. Glowing in the low moon’s yellow light was a sand- and wind-carved arch of stone. It was about a hundred feet high and twice as wide. This, he thought, had to be the so-called Utah Rainbow, clearly delineated upon his map. The moon was bright enough for his mismatched blue mutant-eyes to verify that fact.

Rockson smiled wryly. He was only twenty-three miles from his intended destination. Better than he had hoped when he crash-landed. But even twenty-three miles could be a deadly distance if he didn’t get some water soon; it might as well be a hundred. And the cold was worse than he’d expected. Must be minus fifty already. And the night was young! If he was numb with the cold now, what about in an hour? He surveyed the moonlit irregular rocks near the arch and considered crawling into a crevasse in the sandstone formations, to try to rest and keep warm till dawn.

No,
he’d die here for sure if he did that! “Keep walking,” he mumbled to himself. “Walk until you find something to set fire to with the matches.” He had to look for some dry grass to gather, or twigs. He had to use his eyes, look for live vegetation—for live vegetation might mean water.

He was staggering after just an hour. But Rock kept his head high, trying to tough it out, ignore the cold. He kept telling himself that he could walk till dawn if necessary. Yeah, believe it!

As the first rosy fingers of dawn wriggled out of the grave of a bitter cold corpse of earth, Rockson’s numb and frozen eyes beheld a clump of twisted, dried-out pine trees dead ahead. He rushed over to them, half stumbling over his own numbed feet, and fell upon the scattered brown needles. Madly he gathered together a pile of the dry stuff, and with shaking bluish hands added a few twigs to the pile. Then Rockson took out his matches and struck one. It lit cheerily. He ignited the kindling to start a campfire. He kneeled by it, keeping it from the constant west wind, and absorbed its growing warmth until he almost burned his pants off. He found some larger branches and added them to the flames.

By the time the sun peeked red over the horizon, Rockson was on his way to getting warm. And that meant he had another thing in mind now: water! “Got to have water!” His wild eyes searched around like radar beacons, and soon alighted on some squat, round cacti, a whole mess of them, each about a foot wide. Cacti! Most postnuke cacti were poisonous. And yet . . . these looked very green and fresh, beckoning in the sunlight.