by Ryder Stacy
Rockson’s chest was heaving as he tried to catch his breath. The wound on his face was still bleeding, the warm blood trickling down his throat. He wiped at it with the back of his hand.
In a sudden lull in the noise around the Tower, Rockson heard voices from within the Chessman’s chamber. A woman’s voice—Kim’s! The guards must have taken her and the children inside through some other stairwell. A man’s voice—no doubt the Chessman’s—was speaking to her in an angry tone, but the words were indistinguishable. He had to get in!
There was only one way to get the knobless door open. Rockson raised his compound gun and fired.
The door was made out of a super-strong alloy that could deflect most machine-gun fire, but the compound gun was no ordinary weapon. The bullets tore into the door. Rockson concentrated his fire along the right side of the jamb where the locking mechanism should be mounted. He fired until the metal was blasted and smoking.
The gunfire broke the door’s seal. Rockson finished the job by kicking and shoving until he had an opening big enough for him to squeeze through.
He stepped inside, the hot, smoking machine gun in his hands.
“Teddy!” screamed Kim. She was backed against the right wall, cowering, clutching her two children to her. Her face was streaked with tears, her hair wild and disheveled.
But Rockson only took fleeting notice of her. Directly in front of him stood a tall, thin man in a blinding red outfit that flashed like a starfield. It hurt Rock’s eyes. His face was concealed in a white mask from forehead to chin. A shock of silver-gray hair flowed above the mask.
The Chessman.
Far below, on the grounds of Temple Square, Barrelman and his army of revolutionaries desperately battled the well-armed rookies and Tower guards. The area around the square was in chaos, filled with gunfire, smoke, artillery blasts, screams, and shouting. Barrelman hoped they could hold out long enough.
Their years of stealth and practiced “invisibility” had worked to the Runners’ advantage in the early stages of the assault. As Rockson had begun his ascent, they had slipped around the Tower and managed to take out nearly all of the laser searchbeams. Other floodlights still bathed the grounds, but they could not be used to zero in on a lone figure scaling the wall.
As Rockson had neared the top of the spire, the Runners had launched their attack, diverting the ground police.
For many of the Runners, it was a suicidal offensive. Barrelman and the rest had known it would be, and had accepted it. A few deaths would be a small price if Salt Lake City could be liberated from the Chessman. “Live free or die,” was the chant.
The Runners had quickly picked off the sentries around the perimeter of the square. Now guards had mobilized at parapets along the brick wall that enclosed the grounds, firing at the Runners with machine guns and hand-held rocket launchers.
The Runners dug in to their hiding places, firing back and hurling grenades. The grenades had to be used sparingly; they didn’t have many.
The man next to Barrelman was hit by machine-gun fire and slumped over his weapon. He was dead. His name was Fortier, and he was a young fellow, a recent recruit to the Runners. Barrelman felt a moment of sadness, then sighted his machine gun and fired up at the figures moving along the parapet. He heard a scream, and hoped it was because of one of his bullets.
He looked up at the Tower, white and cold in the light from the Temple grounds. “You’ve got to get him, Rock,” he said out loud, for only himself to hear. “You’ve got to!”
Rockson was fixated by the Chessman. He looked like a living skeleton—a skull with hair and a mask, gaunt limbs barely more than the bones themselves. He couldn’t be human! Rockson thought.
“Rockman . . .” the Chessman said, his voice sounding like it came from a tomb. “Rockman, you have sinned . . .”
“The only sin I’ve committed is the desire to be free!” Rockson shouted back. He tightened his grip on his gun.
The Chessman’s icy blue eyes, intense and full of hate pierced through him. The eyes radiated an incredible, powerful energy force, drawing him under a spell. The red of the Chessman’s garment was so bright it nearly blinded him. Rockson put up a hand as though he were shielding his eyes from brilliant sunlight.
The Chessman’s thin pale lips moved. “Lay down your weapon, Theodore Rockman, and come here.” He raised a bony arm and pointed a finger at Rockson. The nails on the bleached hands were dark blue.
The urge to obey the deep voice and the piercing eyes was overwhelming. With great effort, Rockson tore his eyes away. He glanced at Kim and the children, still whimpering and cowering in a corner. “Get back, Kim,” he said. “As far as possible.”
Kim responded by pulling the children closer to her and backing away. But in a round room, there were no corners to hide in.
The door . . . Rockson must bar the door before more thought police arrived.
Rockson took a step toward the door. His feet moved like blocks of lead. The Chessman was commanding him to come hither, and the resistance took every ounce of his will. His hands too were like lead; he couldn’t raise the submachine gun.
“Don’t disobey!” cried Kim. “Give yourself up, Teddy! The Chessman has promised mercy if you do!”
Rockson ignored her. Help me, brothers, he called out silently to the Glowers. Power . . . Focus . . .
Rockson summoned his inner power, calling on it to protect him from the magnetic, hypnotic influence of the Chessman. He seemed to be moving in slow motion. He reached the door . . . pushed it shut . . . then, clasping his gun to his chest with his left hand and shoving with his right, he barricaded the door with a heavy metal cabinet.
Rockson felt the Chessman’s eyes boring into the back of his head. He turned to face the skeletal being again. The Chessman had moved forward, almost gliding rather than walking. The dreadful aspect of a spectre, not a man.
Kim and the children shrank further back. “Teddy,” Kim pleaded. “Don’t! For the sake of our children, Teddy . . .”
“Be quiet!” Rockson shut out her words. He had to focus, concentrate on his own inner source of power.
He silently repeated the chants that would put him in an altered state of consciousness, all the while keeping his conscious mind alert. “Om ga-te, ga-te, para-san-ga-te . . .”
“Stop right there,” he commanded the Chessman, who was looming over him. God, the man was tall! The very air around him crackled with static electricity. The garment was dazzling, filling Rockson’s vision. If he came any closer, Rockson felt, he would smother in the all-encompassing redness. Rockson pointed the compound gun at the leering skull. “You’re finished, Chessman. No more king of the board! No more master of the game! No more slaves!” He pressed his finger against the trigger.
The gun spit air. The ammunition clip was empty. Rockson had emptied all his remaining bullets into the door.
The eyes behind the white mask bored harder into Rockson. The dry lips moved. “You’re the one who’s finished, Rockman. There will be no reprieve from this act of disobedience. I am greater than you!”
Rockson thrust the butt end at the Chessman’s face, but the holy man’s skeletal fingers closed around the barrel and ripped it from his grasp as easily as an adult would grab a baby’s toy. He hurled the submachine gun away with such force that the barrel bent as it smashed into the wall.
Rockson stared at his empty hands in astonishment. The Chessman closed in, his icy breath on Rockson’s face. The blue eyes were whirlpools growing larger and larger.
Rockson pushed against the gaunt form. It was hard, like steel. The Chessman’s psychic force was dissolving his ability to resist. He fought back with all his mental strength. But suddenly Rockson’s inner defense broke. He was swept away in a tidal wave of psychic energy and confusing visions. Physically, he felt the Chessman seize him in a painful, pincerlike grasp. But what he saw was not the Chessman, but a giant sea crustacean, twenty feet tall. Huge black globes of eyes waved at him on long
stalks, and antennae bounced up and down. The pincers threatened to cut him in half. The creature screeched in fury.
Rockson was nearly paralyzed with fear. The Chessman, Kim and the children had vanished, replaced by this writhing monster. It was real! He felt the shell, the sensor-hairs that covered the edges of the pincers. What had happened?
Barrelman’s words came back to him: “He has a face like a skull, and powers beyond belief. Powers of Illusion . . .”
The creature dragged him up through the air toward its mandible mouth, which was ringed with tiny, needle-sharp teeth. Rockson struggled but could not free himself of the pincer. The shell was impervious to his fists. He pulled a long-bladed knife from his pants waist and plunged it at the shell. The knifepoint bounced back, barely making a dent.
The mandible worked furiously in anticipation. The cavity was huge. The creature tilted Rockson, pointing him headfirst toward its mouth.
Rockson lashed out with his knife, severing one of the bobbing black eye-globes. It splatted on the floor. The crustacean shrieked and dropped Rockson.
He took the impact on his side, rolling to absorb the shock. The creature, consumed in pain, was thrashing about, waving its gigantic pincers.
Rockson got to his feet, dodging the multiple legs. He ran to the tail and climbed up on the slippery shell-back, clawing his way forward to the head.
The creature tried vainly to throw him off. Rockson held firm, and when he reached the crest of the head, just in back of the eye-stalks, he stabbed his knife deep between two sections of shell, destroying the creature’s nerve center. The monster died in a wild seizure of throes.
Suddenly it vanished. The creature hadn’t been real at all, but a hideous hallucination. The room returned to the way it had been, with Rockson facing the Chessman, and Kim and the children whimpering in the background.
The Chessman leered at him. Before the stunned Rockson could react, the bony form vanished again.
In the same instant, Rockson was no longer on his feet, but was being bounced on a solid, moving sheet of insect backs. The room was filled with giant cockroaches, some three to four feet long, teeming and crawling over each other. Their stench was unbearable. They were glittery and iridescent, like the radioactive, mutant cockroaches from Rockson’s world. And they were more than that—somehow he knew they were meat-eaters.
Rockson struggled to stay on top. If he went under those churning, hairy legs, they would have his bones stripped in seconds. He couldn’t believe it was another hallucination—it was too real. He could feel their greasy shells. They were just like the ones he had seen a few miles away from Century City once . . .
Century City! The thought went through Rockson like a bolt of lighting. The Chessman was pulling images from his own mind to create hallucinations! They seemed so real because, to Rockson, the memories were real. Rockson was being forced to meet his own enemies.
The Doomsday Warrior renewed his effort to focus his inner power. The KA force was still there, weakened, but pulsating. He concentrated, chanting the mantras the Glowers had taught him. The cockroaches were creations in his own mind; he could vanquish them. “All the Power that Is and Ever Was flows through me now,” he whispered to himself. “The Power is here for me to command. I command the Power to lock away past thoughts and memories.”
As abruptly as they had appeared, the cockroaches evaporated, and Rockson found himself lying on his back in the Chessman’s chamber, looking up at the thin red form standing over him. He sprang to his feet. “I’m on to your mind trick, Chessman,” he said. “It won’t work anymore.” He lunged up at the pale, gaunt throat.
The Chessman blocked him, the strength in his bony claws equal to Rockson’s battle-toughened muscles. The Chessman’s eyes still pierced him, like sunlight intensified by a magnifying glass that catches paper on fire. The Chessman could no longer make Rock hallucinate, but he still possessed awesome hypnotic powers.
They strained against each other, neither getting the advantage for more than a few seconds. Rockson put all his strength into pushing the Chessman back toward a window at the curved rear of the chamber.
To his right, Kim had sprung into action herself. Seeing that her “husband” was determined to destroy the Chessman—an evil act he could not possibly succeed in, and which mean certain torture and death for her and the children—she was trying her best to thwart him. If the Chessman realized she didn’t support her husband, perhaps he would grant her and the children clemency.
Kim fell on Rockson’s back, beating him with her tiny fists. He shrugged her off and she came at him again, pounding harder, yelling, her fragile voice lost in the sounds of the scuffle. She lost her grip as the two men crashed to the floor and rolled, bodies locked together.
She got unsteadily to her feet and looked frantically for a heavy object, intending to bash Rockson on the head. Then, over the racket, she heard pounding and shouts.
Someone was on the other side of the door! Guards!
Kim scrambled to the barricaded door. “Help!” she cried. “Help! He’s trying to kill the Chessman!”
In response came a furious pounding. “Open the door!” a gruff voice shouted.
Kim got as close to the door as she could. “I can’t—it’s blocked, and I can’t move it.” She pushed on the cabinet, but her little body was no match for its heft and bulk. The kids ran to help her move it.
The pounding continued, then sounds of several men trying to push the door open took its place. The barricade held.
Rockson had the Chessman nearly to the window. He pulled back his fist and delivered a rapid series of blows to the emaciated body. A lesser man would have been crippled, but the Chessman barely flinched. He grabbed Rockson by the throat, his sharp blue nails digging into the flesh.
Rockson gasped. To the window . . . to the window . . . If he could just get the Chessman to lose his balance and fall through the stained-glass window.
His windpipe was completely choked off. He clawed at the hands around his throat. He couldn’t get air. Seconds went by. The Chessman squeezed harder. Rockson’s chest ached, his heart hammered against his ribs. He had about a minute, at best, to live.
Seventeen
The Chessman’s hands felt like a vise around Rockson’s throat. Rockson gagged and choked. The edges of his vision started to go black, fuzzy. He felt dizzy, spinning off into space.
He had succeeded in pushing the Chessman back to the wall, near the window, but he didn’t have the strength to go on. His lungs were on the verge of bursting for lack of air.
There was a thunderous crash, and pieces of glass and debris imploded into the chamber. The Chessman howled and arched his back; Kim and the children screamed. Rockson summoned up his last reserve of strength and pulled free of the Chessman’s grasp, pushing the man away from him at the same time. The sharp blue nails raked across his throat as he spun away, gasping and wheezing for precious air.
Someone on the grounds below evidently had fired some sort of projectile into the window. The Chessman, closest to the window and with his back to it, had caught some of the shrapnel, and was groaning in pain. His garment was full of small holes.
The two were saved from more serious injury—and death—because they had been slightly to one side of the window. The Chessman’s hypnotic spell had been broken. For now.
An amplified voice came from the compound below. “This is Barrelman, Chessman. If you are still alive, know that it won’t be for long. Produce our leader at the window or die.”
So that’s what happened, Rock realized. They believe me captured or dead!
Despite his pain, the Chessman still possessed his hypnotic power. He grabbed Rockson and thrust him toward the window. “Tell them you are here—then we finish our contest!”
But the holy man’s spell on the Doomsday Warrior was permanently broken, and Rockson lunged at him.
A pair of RPGs came from the ground below, and missed the Tower window, expending themselves on
the impregnable stone walls. Barrelman’s army was sure he was dead, and were using rocket launchers—trying to avenge him. Soon they would hit both the Doomsday Warrior and his opponent. Not to mention Kim and the kids, who were flat-out on the floor, trying to avoid being hit.
Rockson saw the control panel now; it was marked Force field, City-encircling. There were a set of switches. The Veil projector. He tried to reach it, but Chessman’s clawing hands bent him slowly in the opposite direction. There would be another RPG soon, then another, until they were all killed. He had to end this!
With Chen’s “number-five twist,” Rockson slammed the Chessman backward into the window opening. The Chessman teetered and fell, but not far. He landed on the ledge that ringed the top of the Tower. Rockson scrambled out and threw himself on top of him. The Runners on the ground stopped firing, cheered.
Rockson had the upper hand now. The Chessman was wounded, and his hypnotism no longer worked on the Doomsday Warrior. But the man had an amazing reservoir of physical strength, and it was all Rockson could do to keep from being hurled over the side of the parapet to his death.
He stabbed his fingers in the Chessman’s throat. The Chessman gagged and jabbed at Rockson’s eyes, missing them by millimeters. The Chessman’s breaths were coming hard; he was tiring!
The Chessman bit and clawed his way out of Rockson’s grasp, then dove for the window opening. Rockson tackled him as he was halfway in, dragging him back to the parapet. The Chessman twisted and fought like a rabid beast.
Rockson struggled to his feet, shoved the Chessman against the ledge. He ripped off the white mask—and gasped. It was Streltsy, his gold tooth gleaming with his words. “You shouldn’t be surprised. You are not the only one with a counterpart in this world! We find ourselves matched again. Only I am much more powerful in this place than I was in the desert. I, fittingly, replaced a giant—the Chessman. You are a mere mortal. Aren’t you afraid? I beat you before, after all. And future-history repeats itself. Now.”
