by Ryder Stacy
Rock motioned to Archer, who on his own had pretty much sized up the situation. “Ban-dats,” he said in that whiny guttural voice. Rock nodded.
“We’ve got to save them.” Archer looked back and reached up for an arrow. He loaded it into his crossbow and nodded yes at Rockson. The two men took off at a brisk pace.
The trail the bandits had left was easy to follow. Obviously, they hadn’t expected anyone else to be around to follow so they had made no effort to conceal their tracks. Bent branches and the hoofs of the hybrids spelled out the direction as plain as day. They had only gone about two miles when Rock smelled smoke from a nearby fire and heard voices, drunken and laughing.
Rock and Archer edged up to some bushes on a ridge just forty feet away from the bandits’ hideout. In front of a small run-down farmhouse, about twenty men, filthy, teeth missing, half without shoes, sat around screaming and drinking deep swigs from cider jugs filled with home-brew. Rock scanned the entire scene. There—to the right, his men, tied to stakes. All still alive. They looked a bit worked over but Rock didn’t see any deep wounds or blood flowing out of severed arteries. Several of the Freefighters were unconscious; the rest nervously eyed their captors. Chen stared impassively, waiting.
“Let’s shoot ’em now,” a drunken bandit suddenly yelled, jumping up from the porch and pulling out an old, rusted Western six-gun. He walked to the leader, Garvin, a huge man with a face full of scars and sores. “Now, kill ’em now,” he yelled again. “I’m hungry!” The other men yelled out their agreement. “Kill ’em, Garvin, kill ’em now. We ain’t et meat for days!”
The swine were cannibals. He suddenly noted the stack of bones behind the woodpile that fed their cooking fire. So they ate people and used the bones for weapons. Great, Rock thought. We’ve sunk this far. He looked at Archer who stared back. Unafraid. Rock knew he could trust this man implicitly. Whatever happened now, he had a good fighter by his side. Archer pointed at his arrows and then at Rock’s gun. Rock said “When I fire!” Archer nodded, he pulled out eight arrows and placed them in a little wire contraption beneath the stock so that each time he fired, an arrow would release into his firing hand so he could instantly reload. Rock pulled out his second pistol—a snub-nosed, nickel-plated .38. He had decided to carry an extra gun on the expedition just in case.
The leader of the bandits walked toward the prisoners with the second one, waving his pistol, screaming for blood. The rest of the motley crew rose to their feet and, licking their lips, started toward the imprisoned Freefighters. Rock gripped both pistols tightly in his hands. The scum would be upon his men in seconds. It was now or never.
He and Archer leaped over the crumbling edge of the rise, and rushed down a steep embankment about ten feet to the ground, firing as they moved. Rock got off two shots from each pistol before he reached the ground. Two of the killers fell, their chests ripped open, spurting blood. The bandits looked around in confusion. Then they saw the two men coming at them, a crazy-looking man with a white streak of hair across the middle of his head and a huge, hulking one firing some kind of wooden bow. They reached for their own archaic weapons as the two intruders came forward, still firing.
Surprise, Rock knew, was their only chance. They had to down as many of these slime in the next few seconds as they could—before they were armed and realized what was happening. Rock split to the left and Archer to the right, to avoid giving them too simple a target. Rock’s shotgun pistol spoke death again and again. At this range, he was taking out two, sometimes three with a shot. Bodies flew backward as the heavy shot entered their soft flesh from less than twenty feet. Hands and eyes, shattered bones, and spilled guts sprinkled the already-bloody ground.
To his right, Rock could see Archer shooting away with the crossbow. He took out three of them, firing, jumping to the side and then reloading. But they were upon him. The huge man disappeared beneath a pile of bodies, only to reemerge a moment later like a giant from the seas, literally heaving the bandits into the air. He reached for his huge knife and began slicing at anything that came near. Necks poured blood, chests were opened like sides of beef as the huge razor-sharp knife made target contact again and again.
Rock was in the midst of the screaming, confused bandits now. He fired at a mass of charging bodies. Fired at anything that moved. The shotgun pistol sent out hail after hail of death, finding faces and stomachs to bury itself in. Bodies fell around Rock like trees in a hurricane. He saw a knife coming at him and twisted around, smashing his gun butt down on the murderous hand—then he fired at the body attached to the hand and it flew backwards in a spray of red, knocking down two other bandits behind it. His shotgun pistol empty, Rock used it as a club, hitting at anything to his right while he began firing the .38 at the murderers who had tried to ply their trade on the wrong man.
The bandits, never used to a fair fight, their usual policy being twenty to one, were in a state of terror. They didn’t understand what was happening. They were the toughest. They were the ones to be feared. Everyone in these mountains had stayed away from these parts as if it were hell itself. And now . . . They reached for rusty pistols and broken knives and charged. But who was attacking? It seemed like an army! The white-haired mutant was unreachable. Whenever they charged him he spun out of their path and blasted out of the whirl, taking out two or three of them at a time. The huge one was felling their number with smashes of his wooden bow, knocking in heads and breaking necks with each thunderous smash of his weapon. Brown, cavity-ridden bandit teeth littered the dirt.
The leader of the cutthroats, Garvin, saw Rockson in the middle of the barrage of death and saw his own men flying out of it, blood spurting from their dying bodies. Already half his men were on the ground feeding their guts to the earth. His kingdom was crumbling. In a rage, Garvin pulled his own bone-handled knife and ran at the white-haired killer, pushing his way through his own stumbling men. He came from behind, saw the spinning back of the stranger and lunged forward.
Rock felt the wind of the attack, a thousandth of a second before it reached him. He spun his hips around as the knife entered his shoulder, instead of his back where it had been aimed. Rock held his .38 to the attacker’s face, the muzzle an inch from the man’s nose and pulled the trigger. The face dissolved into a flurry of red as blood poured out the greasy mouth. The bandit leader tried to scream but only gargled death coughs. He sank to his knees as his brains began running like undercooked pudding down the back of his head. Then he fell forward, flat on what had been his face and never moved again.
Rock turned quickly and fired again as two of the thugs came at him, one firing a luger of some sort, the other swiping down with a two-foot machete. Rock caught the gunman square in the groin with his last .38 slug. The bandit fell screaming, slamming his hands over his missing balls. The second one brought the machete down in a screaming arc toward Rock’s head. Rockson dropped both pistols on the ground and caught the machete handle as it reached him. He bent down and continued the motion of the attack, flipping the bandit over his shoulder. He ripped the machete free from the attacker’s hand as he flew over. As the man spun round and started to rise, reaching in his belt for a second knife, Rock came down on his head with the machete. The dark-haired skull split in two, like a coconut. The soft, gray brain matter splattered down onto the ground as the dead bandit hit the dirt like a stone.
Rock waded into the remaining group, only eight now, swinging the machete like a sword. Two more stomachs were sliced open, their contents spewing out onto the bloody, charnel ground: a mixture of yesterday’s food and quarts of precious blood from their dying bodies. A hand came out of nowhere, holding its own machete, lunging for Rock’s heart. Rock stepped instantly to the right and swung down with his weapon. The hand, still clutching its weapon, fell to the earth, veins and tendons hanging out from the parted flesh.
Rock glanced to Archer who seemed to be doing fine, as he slammed another would-be killer to the ground, his crossbow turned club now covere
d with a sheen of red. Rock let his vision dart over to the Freefighters who watched the struggle from fifty feet away, screaming encouragement to Rock and his unknown assistant. Suddenly Rock saw two of the bandits running toward the Freefighters, machetes in hand. So they wanted to take out the ones who couldn’t fight. Ducking from the pitchfork one of the remaining bandits lunged at him, Rock ignored his own little group of attackers and ran as fast as his strong legs could carry him toward the prisoners.
The bigger of the two bandits intent on finishing off their captives picked Chen for his first butchering job. He walked up to the diminutive Chinese and, with a twisted grin, raised the machete to deal the death blow. First mistake—never try to kill a martial arts expert. Chen’s untied foot came flying up in the air with the speed of a ground-to-air missile. It caught the pimple-faced murderer square under the jaw, lifting him a foot off the ground. The man came down in a crumpled heap, his windpipe crushed. He gasped desperately for air, his hands around his throat, but could find none. The second of the finisher-offers had walked to the other end of the row of tied-up prisoners. He looked at Lang, the kid, who stared back and spat in the bastard’s face. He raised his machete. “At least you will die,” he sneered, bringing the two-and-a-half-foot jungle trimmer down toward the center of Lang’s neck.
Suddenly, he was being twisted to the side. The machete buried itself in the ground. He spun around and saw the white-haired killing machine that had taken out half the clan. Rockson looked at the bandit with certain death in his eyes. Then he moved forward. The bandit kicked for Rock’s groin, but his feeble strike was slapped aside with a laugh. The bandit reached for his hook, his personal weapon—a curved loading hook, with a dagger point on the end. He waved it in little circles at Rockson. “Come on, come and get it, white hair,” the bandit chortled, his eyes wide and insane with blood lust.
Rock stepped forward suddenly and the bandit lunged, swinging the hook and ripping back. Rock swung his hips 180 degrees right around the killer, reaching over with his left hand and grabbing the grip of the hook. He jerked back, flipping the bandit through the air, and ripped the hook from the crazed killer as he flew past. The greasy faced, stinking cutthroat screamed and lunged at Rockson with his bare hands to strangle him. Rock moved like a flash, swinging his arm. The hook sank deep into the bandit’s throat, exiting the other side of the stubble-covered neck. The bandit’s eyes grew wide as if in surprise. Rock pulled his hand sharply back and the bandit’s throat ripped out, trailing on the tip of the hook: tendons, windpipe and larynx, followed by a flood of blood. Rock threw the hook from his hand as the bandit gurgled his way to a writhing death on the bloody dirt.
He swung his vision back over to Archer who still battled three of the remaining mountain savages. Rock started forward but Archer slammed another into his kingdom come and the last two fell to their knees, screaming and begging for mercy. Rock quickly untied the Freefighters. They rubbed their wrists and their bumps and bruises from the bandits’ brutal treatment, but they were OK.
“Thanks, Rock,” Detroit said. “What can I say?”
“Say thanks,” Rock said mockingly.
He got to Chen and cut through the leather thongs that bound the Chinese man’s arms behind the six-foot-high post. “What the hell happened?” Rock asked. “How were they able to take you?”
“Rock, they snuck up on the guards. Somehow got ’em. I started in on them, but they held guns to Slade’s and Perkins’s heads and I just couldn’t do my thing. Then they tied us up. Harris made a jump for his Liberator and—”
“Yeah, I saw Harris,” Rock said softly. One of his oldest friends in Century City. A man who had befriended Rock when still a teen, who had taught him much of his wood’s lore and shown him many of his survival techniques. He had seen Harris.
The Freefighters walked over to Archer who was holding the two remaining bandits on the ground as they pleaded for mercy. Everywhere were bodies and severed limbs. Blood covered the scene as if the banks of the River Hell had overflowed.
“Who’s that?” Detroit asked, pointing to the huge, bearded man Rock had rescued.
“Just call him Archer,” Rock said. “I found him stuck in a quicksand bog around the mountain. He’s a super fighter and a good man.”
“We saw that,” McCaughlin said. “Goddamn guy’s a whirlwind.” Archer smiled at the Freefighters and then looked sternly down at the whimpering savages.
“Look over here,” Chen said, his face growing a slightly pale shade of yellow. They walked around to a long metal trough. It was filled with bones and the still-rotting flesh of recent dinners of Homo sapiens.
“It’s incredible,” said Perkins, the archaeologist and anthropologist. “Here in America. I wish we could study this phenomenon more. It’s really quite unusual for an advanced Western society.”
“Yeah, right, Doc,” Rock said drily. They walked back to the two cowering cannibals.
“What the hell are we going to do with them?” Detroit asked. “Can’t take ’em with us. They’ll eat someone else if we leave them.”
“Only one thing to do, fellows,” Rock said, reloading his shotgun pistol. “By the authority vested in me as commander of official United States forces, I hereby sentence these men to death.” Rock motioned for Archer to step back. The big man did so, spitting in disgust on the two wailing and begging bandits.
“Please, mister,” one of them said, his nose twisted and broken, half his front teeth knocked out in some long-ago bandit brawl. “We wasn’t going to eat your friends—just play with ’em a little.”
“That’s right,” the other chimed in in a stuttering high-pitched voice. “We d-d-don’t eat Americans—just Russians.”
Rock walked over till he was about eight feet away. “Sorry about this,” he said. “I’d rather not have to do it. But—” He pulled the trigger and the two bandits, minus their faces, tumbled to the slaughterhouse ground with slopping thuds.
“Should we bury them?” Green asked, sweeping his hands around the blood-soaked yard.
“No, let the mountain have them,” Rock said, his eyes narrow and cold. “They’ll be better fertilizer than they were people.”
Thirty
Ullman sat in a stupor in the hard plastic chair he called home these days. He could barely move. The others were just as listless in their spots around the computer room. They slept and stared at each other. No one talked. There was nothing to say any longer.
Watching a species becoming extinct, Ullman thought bitterly, how exciting. Should be taping it all down for future scientists to study. Unfortunately for the leader of the Technicians, though his body was as weak as a dying blade of grass, his mind, the mind of the scientist, the analyst, was still crystal clear. The curse of consciousness, he thought to himself, to see everything. No possibility of self-deceit. It was so goddamn clear!
They were dying, were eating their own tissue away. Death wouldn’t even have to expend any energy when it came to take them, their stomachs would have predigested them. So? So what? He looked around at the zombielike faces of the thirty-one. Why should we survive? Only those fittest—and all that. We are not fit enough in this postwar America. An interesting experiment by Mother Nature, her claws glowing slightly, that went awry. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Countless races, species and branches in the Earth’s evolutionary history had gone down for the long count. The dinosaurs, the saber-toothed tigers, the Neanderthal man. Really, the Technicians should have gone down in some eternal record book as the shortest-lived creature since the dawn of time. One hundred years. Almost to the day. Surely the Technicians had only two, at the most three days left.
They had used the rest of the paste, a foul-tasting decomposition of flour that had been stored a century earlier. They had gone down in crews of four—and then the murderous struggle back, hoisting the huge barrel. Two of them had been killed in that endeavor. And now even that is gone, Ullman mused bitterly, biting his lips. He felt like he was going slowly
mad, witnessing the demise of his people. Death stalked the window of the room, glowing blue and wearing a long, black robe. He stared in at the failing Technicians. Ullman could feel him, could nearly see those hydrogen-bomb red and white eyes glowing in the darkness of the outer room. Mad, he was going mad listening to the sound of his own stomach growl.
Thirty-One
The Russian masons built the wall around Little U.S.A. higher and higher. Behind it they could hear the inhabitants gathered, singing:
O beautiful for spacious skies
and amber waves of grain
O purple mountains majesty
above the fruited plain
America, America God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea
The wall-builders paused in their work and listened to the cacophony of voices, the contrasting, rising choruses of the walled-in Americans who would soon starve to death inside those walls. The masons continued to work. This was a rush job, order of the KGB—and after they were done with the thirty-foot wall, they had to lay the barbed wire atop it.
None of the Americans some hundred feet away in the tire-rutted road tried to stop the masons. If anyone did, the KGB machine-gun squad that strode back and forth atop the slowly rising brick cage would turn them into flopping, bloody dead men. But the Americans were quiescent, not resisting. Just singing and singing. They shifted to another song.
