by Ryder Stacy
“Cute,” she said. “Is it true that they surround you, and hunt in a group when they get wind of you? Are they that smart?”
“Look for a tall tree,” Rock said with mock grimness, “or it’s people meat for them this evening. Would you please put an apple in your mouth and lie on a platter?”
“Very funny. Very funny,” Rona said, snapping the safety off on her Liberator. “I suppose Mr. Ultimate American will let me be eaten?” He gave her a knowing look, said nothing, but intimated by a look to her thighs what he was thinking.
They moved across the rise into the next valley and their rendezvous with enough bear meat to last weeks. Down the narrow footing the hybrids stumbled. Actually extremely sure-footed creatures, they always gave the impression of being clumsy by all their clomping and shifting of legs. In fact, they were careful because they instinctively understood the subtle movements essential for survival on these steep mountain cliffs. And in fact, they rarely fell. The wind was still with them as they headed down the tree-lined slope into the thickly wooded valley. Bear valley. He’d have to remember the place for future hunts. He knew he would remember the peak towering behind them with its sharp, twin boulders capping the very top.
Rock put up his hand. Silently they tied the horses to some trees, slid their scoped rifles from their mounts and, moccasin clad, moved silently onward to their prey. If the hunt was successful they would bring up the mounts and load the bear meat. If not, the horses would tear loose eventually and roam free. A few might even find their way back to Century City, grim testimony to the death of Rock and Rona at the tearing paws of the giant black grizzlies. Rockson was confident that they would be successful. He had hunted with Rona before, though there had only been two bears to contend with. Now there was a whole slew of them. Well, the wind was holding up, their friend today unlike the last time.
Rockson motioned for Rona to wait on the bank as he waded across a bubbling stream, cold as mountain ice. Safely on the other side, he motioned for her to cross too. It was damned quiet—the birds didn’t seem to like this valley much. Rockson wondered if the rads had only died down here recently as much of the vegetation was lush but strange; there were many leaves and flowers with the sharp spikes that characterized mutated plant life in the central portion of the United States. And the bears did seem unusually tall. Two or three of them had looked over twelve feet. Mutants? He checked his mini-counter. It was quiescent. Good. No need absorbing more rads than one had to although Rockson knew that in his thirty-three years of life he had already absorbed enough radiation to kill a hundred men. He knew he had a far higher tolerance for the deadly rays that shot out invisibly from the decaying, hot materials than most men.
Rona walked alongside him silently, about three feet to his left. They moved as quietly as a slow breeze, their safeties off, fingers on the trigger guard. They were careful where they pointed the Liberators for the rifles had hair triggers. They entered the deep, dark forest ahead, a forest fairly easy to walk through, the trees being only lightly vegetated until about ten feet up, where they became a wild tangle of vine branches. Vines like Rockson had never seen before. Vines that grew out of the tall pine trees, vines with needles. Unusual. It was so dark underneath that they didn’t see the lumbering black shadows closing in from the maze like thickets of trees.
Suddenly the huge grizzlies were upon them. Towering, furry bodies, standing upright, claws slashing, jaws snarling and coming right for their throats. Rockson swung his Liberator with lightning speed, but the closest monstrous creature whipped its clawed paw across it, slamming the rifle against a tree with such force that the barrel bent in half and the oak stock smashed into little chunks of useless wood.
There were three of them, and their red eyes seemed to glow in the semi-darkness. They roared in anger and hunger. The second grizzly whipped its five-foot-long arm at Rona who ducked barely in time. The clawed hand, as big as a baseball mitt, tore into the tree just above her head, ripping a chunk of thick bark into the air. She rolled to the side and came up firing her Liberator, getting off three shots into the black-furred grizzly. At the same time, Rock jumped backwards giving himself a ten-foot separation between him and the bear and whipped out his shotgun pistol. He fired point-blank into the advancing monster’s chest. Rona’s and Rock’s shots all made target, blowing bloody holes into the thick, black hair. But the targets didn’t seem to know—or care. Both bears, and the third, moving from behind an uprooted tree, kept advancing.
Rock saw Rona sprint for cover just as the bear closest to her made a jumping dive—onto thin air. She ran about twenty feet to two large boulders side by side, with an opening at the base just big enough to hide a body. She dove into the opening, pulling her legs quickly in behind her as the bear ran toward the rock, covering the distance in seconds. Rock slammed the rapid-fire shotgun pistol onto auto and cut loose with three quick shots that smashed his hand back like the whiplash of a bucking bronco. Three loads of .12-gauge lead shot smashed into the grizzly’s neck and side. Blood poured out as if several of the bear’s arteries had been severed. But it didn’t stop him. The grizzly slashed at the boulders, reaching frantically under to get to Rona. Its six-inch-long, curved claws dug out trails of stone, sending rock dust flying, leaving a ridge of half-inch cuts that would last ten thousand years embedded in the rock, a fossil of violence. Rona crawled deeper into the eight-foot-deep wedge-shaped opening, looking back with horror at the grizzly’s jaws pushing in at the entrance, foaming, snarling, dripping the blood of its own internal injuries.
From forty feet away, Rock watched. Rona was safe, but he had company. The two other grizzlies, one an almost foxlike red with dark black lines and dots, the other as black as the blackest night, closed in on their human prey. They tried to surround him as they broke apart and came up from each side. Slow, deliberate. Not wanting to let him hide as the other one had. He had two shots left in the pistol. No time to reload. Damn! He wished he had a grenade. But he did have a phosphorous bomb. He reached in his utility belt, slung low around his waist, and opened one of the dark-green pockets. He continued to walk slowly backwards, one hand gripping the .12-gauge pistol, the other lifting out the apple-sized grenade.
He flicked the trigger with his thumb and released the safety pin, waited four seconds and threw it at them. At the same instant he turned and ran straight to the left. The two grizzlies dropped to all fours and rushed forward at Rock’s sudden motion. They got about three feet before the device went off only inches from their red eyes. They let out screams of pain and fear as they continued to lumber forward, moving from the momentum of their two thousand-pound bodies like engines without a driver. The bomb showered them with burning phosphorous, burning into their thick hides. Their eyes were blinded from the light, brilliant as a sun, the retinas blasted into orbit.
Rock rushed forward as the grizzlies slashed wildly away at the air searching for the thing that had hurt them. He held the pistol two feet from the black-furred one and pulled the trigger. The brains of the grizzly blew out the other side in a spray of blood and bone. This time there would be no more hunts. Blood spurting like a fountain from its torn-open head, the bear fell, shaking, to the ground.
Rock spun instantly around, one shot left. The phosphorous bomb had done its job. The other bear was burning, its thick red-and-black-spotted pelt flaring with blue flames. It howled in anger and agony. No longer interested in the fight, it tore off into the woods, an action that only fanned the flames hotter. Soon Rock could hear in the distance the mournful cries of its death throes.
Rock turned and ran over to the boulder Rona had hidden beneath. A car-sized mass of fur and blood lay on the red ground nearly blocking the narrow rock entrance. Rona had filled her unwanted guest with lead from inside her protective crevasse. He saw a hand coming out from under the huge rocks, trying to push at the bear’s wide-open, motionless snout.
“Come on, Rock, for God’s sake, help me.” Rock walked up to the huge black griz
zly and grabbed hold of two thick handfuls of hide on the creature’s neck. He pulled with all his strength, moving the giant inch by agonizing inch. As strong as Rock was it was like moving a piece of solid rock. Finally, after a minute of pulling at the creature again and again in red-faced bursts of strength, Rock at least cleared the opening enough for Rona to emerge. She dusted herself off and looked up at Rock who couldn’t help but smile slightly at her emergence from literally out of the bear’s jaws.
She returned the smile. “Do I get to mount him as a trophy?” she asked, bending over and looking at the monster’s teeth. She whistled. “Jesus, Rock, look at these.” In the front of the grizzly’s arm-sized jaw were two curved fangs, a good twelve inches long, with rows of white pointed teeth disappearing in trails down the creature’s throat.
“Mutant,” Rock said. “These fangs could be a de-evolution taking place.” Rock remembered what Dr. Shecter had said to him recently about a theory he was developing that many species were actually going backwards in the evolutionary progression. “A kind of protective adaptation as far as I can see, Rock. When species are threatened they go to a simple state so as to be more adaptable. I wouldn’t be surprised to see mastodons, and saber-toothed tigers returning.” And now, here before Rockson was just that, a grizzly with fangs. Shecter would go mad with joy when he had this monster’s head down on a lab table.
Rock’s keen senses scanned the suddenly silent woods. All he could hear was Rona’s breathing, and yet—
“Rona, stay here,” Rockson said, hitching himself up the branches of a tall pine. He could barely make them out at first through the veils of leaves and branches ahead, but about a hundred yards away was another group of grizzlies. Normally such a set of explosions would have driven the bears away but these black grizzlies seemed to have the opposite instinct. They were mutants and hunters of human flesh. No wonder no one had ever told him about this lush valley—no one had ever returned alive from it.
The bears were almost running now toward the clearing where the three grizzly corpses lay. Rockson reloaded his shotgun pistol with eight shots and told Rona to hand him the 30-08 rifle with exploding shells. “Get back into the crevasse,” Rock yelled down to her. “I’ll pick them off from here.”
“The hell I will,” she replied sharply. “You go!” She grabbed her fallen Liberator and climbed up the tree, quickly joining Rock about fifteen feet off the ground in the thick lower branches of the towering pine.
“Make every shot count,” Rock said, wrapping his thighs around the two-foot-wide branch. “And go for the head only. The eyes, the brain. That’s the only thing that will stop them. I got our furry friend over there—” Rock pointed down to the larger of the two grizzlies he had taken out—“with three hits to the side and it didn’t even faze him. These things are as tough as they come.”
Rona balanced herself on a long, sap-oozing branch, wrapping her legs and arms around it like a blanket. She took her Liberator, set it on single-shot and aimed at the brush about thirty feet away from which a snapping, growling sound was rapidly approaching.
Four grizzlies, each as wide in girth as the trees Rock and Rona hid in, each snarling and running forward, now on their hind legs, claws flailing. Damned fast and smart. But not enough. The two Freefighters opened up from above, one shot after another, every one finding its deadly mark. The skulls of two of the giants shattered in pieces as Rock’s explosive cartridges found a home in bear brain. Rona fired methodically away at a third which stretched up to its full height as if daring death to touch it. Her third shot caught it full in the right eye, blasting the right side of its head away. Her fourth caught it just above the ear but it was already falling by then. The last remaining grizzly stopped momentarily as if to take in the carnage around it. It stared up into the tree and, with a roar that shook the forest, ran forward on two legs right for them. It swung a mighty paw up into the air like a sword. The claws, reaching five feet beyond its eleven-foot shoulders, caught the branch on which Rona was hanging, about four feet away. The wood snapped with a crack and slowly began tilting groundward.
“Rock, Rock,” Rona screamed, losing her balance and beginning to tumble forwards. The bear turned toward the human that flew down to it, its jaws opening wide for the kill. Rockson had no choice. Throwing the hunting rifle away, he reached for his .12-gauge pistol, grabbed it in his right hand and jumped. He landed full on the immense grizzly’s back. He gripped a handful of thick-matted fur and held the muzzle of the pistol at the creature’s cranium. He pulled the trigger once, twice, three times, turning his head as the two-inch-thick skull shattered into a storm of razor-sharp bone shrapnel. Yet, somehow, something lived within the grizzly monster. It reached up with its left claw and slashed at Rockson, swiping down his leg, which opened in rivulets of red. The force of the blow pulled Rock forward, and he found himself falling through the air. He twisted over in midflight so as to land on all fours, and let his body collapse with the hit, rolling over several times. He came to a stop and without a moment’s hesitation reached down for the bowie knife strapped to his leg. The grizzly took two steps forward, seemed to waver for a moment, took another step and then fell, only half its huge head still remaining.
Rock stood up, putting a hand to his torn leg. It was deep—about an inch and a half, but from the movement he still had it didn’t appear that he had severed any vital muscles or tendons. He would survive and heal. He had been hurt before—many times, and much worse than this.
He walked quickly over to Rona who was sitting up, rubbing her shoulder. Her silky red hair fell down over her face and neck almost covering her. She tossed the camouflaging strands aside and looked up at Rockson.
“I landed all right, but then the damn branch came down on my back,” she said defensively, as if ashamed she had been hurt.
“Well, we both got our wounds from this one. Our last little teddy bear hugged me a real sweet goodnight before the lights went out on him.” He lifted his hand from his thigh, which was now bright red with blood, the khaki field pants torn into five separate pieces where the claws had cut them like tailor’s scissors.
“Oh, Rock,” Rona said, jumping to her feet. “You’re really hurt.” She made him sit down and cut away at the top of the pants leg with her knife, revealing the full extent of the wound. The bear’s claws had entered at midthigh, on the very outside of the leg and pulled down a good eight inches of flesh before losing contact. Rock pulled out a leather thong from a back pocket of the utility belt and tied a tourniquet at the very top of his leg.
“That’ll hold for twenty minutes or so until we get back to the hybrids where I can patch it up.” They stood next to each other and looked around at the scene of carnage. All around the clearing were pools of blood and furry flesh. The huge carcasses still twitched in death spasms. Rock walked around and pumped a few more rounds into the still-breathing ones. Grizzlies had been known to play dead for hours, then come suddenly to life as strong as ever and take their revenge. He heard thrashing coming from the woods, but it quickly grew more distant. They had had enough of man for the moment.
That night they lay together in their joined sleeping bags. Overhead, the aurora borealis rippled and crackled with writhing currents of rainbow electricity. Rona held him close to her, covering his body with hers, draping her arms and legs over his hard flesh. She nuzzled in his neck as he slowly stroked her waist-long, soft, red hair.
“The old America, Rock. What was it really like? I know you study the old history tapes. Tell me, was it really great? Really beautiful?” Rockson had a faraway look in his eyes. He didn’t answer for a moment but seemed to draw energy from the pulsating magnetic patterns in the sky. It was as if he were communing with the earth, with the forces of nature. Finally he spoke.
“Yes, it was great, Rona. Great and powerful . . . and polluted and corrupt. The pursuit of money took precedence over the founding fathers’ idea of freedom. The pursuit of the ‘buck’ they called it. You should view
the tapes some day, Rona. See what they were willing to do to get money. Freedom came to mean license to do as you wished—if it meant money. The citizens of America were mired in the same materialist obsession that the Russians are in now. And like they fell, the Russians will someday fall. The old America died because it became too soft and fat and lost its will to live. Now it is the Russians who live off the land, the slave labor of others and become soft while the Freefighters become tougher and leaner every day.”
Rona looked upset. “Rock, isn’t that heresy? What you say about the old America?”
“The truth is never heresy,” Rock said, his eyes still focused on the magnetic storm that raged above. “America was great for two hundred years. Then it abandoned its ideals and it pursued goals that weren’t brave, weren’t concerned with peace for the world. It didn’t keep the torch of freedom burning. And that torch went out with a bang.”
“So we’re trying to rebuild something that’s not worth—”
“No, Rona. We’re trying to restore the dream the way the people back there failed to do. The original dream. Someday we’ll fight the Russians off our backs, out of our land and then we’ll spread freedom to them. We won’t occupy Russia permanently like they’ve done to us. America spreads liberty—it doesn’t take prisoners.”
