by Ryder Stacy
“I got you, Rock,” Lang said, letting his body untense slightly. The pain was unbearable, yet he was bearing it. He let his mind go down to his stomach and breathed deeply. He would live. His leg would heal. The pain was just a meditation.
Slade quickly opened the medikit and cleaned the edges of the burn. He rubbed the plastisalve mixed with the antibio cream over the upper leg. Lang gritted his teeth from time to time, but seemed to be dealing with it much better after Rock’s words. Slade sprayed the sealant over the burn then pulled out a disposable hypo with twenty grains of morphine. He injected the painkiller into the artery on the back of the leg and stood up.
“Should be good as new in a few days. Infection is the main problem now. But if anything can keep it away it’s these.” He held up the medicines that had been created by Dr. Shecter’s staff, and packed them carefully away.
Lang rose to his feet, the ripped pants leg whipping slightly in the night wind. “Feels about a million times better,” he said, his eyes a little blurred from the morphine.
“I can give you another shot or two of this stuff,” Slade said. “But after that you’re on your own. The stuff’s incredibly addicting.”
“Can he ride?” Rockson asked.
“He should be able to. He’ll just have to keep the wound from rubbing against anything. Should be raised up. If you could rig up some sort of contraption,” Slade suggested. Rock quickly gave commands for a rigging to be built using tent poles and rope and they hooked up a kind of raised sling device which kept Lang’s right leg in the air. He was twisted around in his saddle backwards, but using a frame from a backpack they managed to rig up a metal and canvas backrest. The entire structure looked somewhat odd, but it functioned. The Freefighters headed out slowly, single file, Green holding tightly onto the reins of Lang’s new ’brid, which plodded along lazily behind him. Lang was looking backwards. Through his pain and drug-hazed eyes he saw the charred remains of what had been his hybrid. Shackles! He had had the ’brid nearly three years. It would be missed. The flames of the burning fuel still sprouted orange and blue fingers but had burned down to a much lower intensity. The heat and the smell of charred horseflesh headed up, up to the stars twinkling madly in the clear black night, a million billion crystal clear eyes, looking down on the desert, on the planet, on the death that was occurring everywhere.
In Denver, the console monitor went dead. The soldier manning the twenty drone transmissions of the Far West Flight Group smashed his hand down on the video monitor. The damn thing was always blinking out. The drone had seen something—what, he couldn’t be sure. He replayed the video transmission from the master recording tape. There—it was at normal altitude. He spotted a thin line of—were they animals? The sun was going down so the video image was very dark, and marred by the high-rad soil. The drone circled closer. There! He saw them suddenly. Men, firing from atop the wild hybrids that roamed the American countryside. Yes, at least three or four. The image suddenly went haywire, spinning around. He saw the sky, then the ground twist by and then . . . it went dead. So it wasn’t the screen. Rebels. And somehow they had shot down the “impenetrable” Heavy Drone Soyuz II. He picked up the phone, keeping an eye on the huge display of screens relaying images from all over the ruined lands of America—deserts, dried-out lake beds, volcanos, cratered regions—the video recording of the destruction the Reds had caused across the American landscape. The recording was transmitted to central records for future viewing.
“Comrade, comrade,” the second lieutenant, video corps, said into the cigarette-burned mouthpiece of the telephone. “I think you’d better notify the commandant. There’s definite rebel activity far deeper than anything we’ve picked up before. The coordinates? Let’s see.” He went through the digital readout that accompanied the video imagery. “Make that Sector K, fifty-five degrees, twelve minutes west, north thirty-six degrees, forty-two minutes. They were moving in a northwesterly direction.”
Thirty-Four
The Freefighters moved ahead through the night. Rock had to assume that the images had been transmitted before the drone had been blasted to whatever technological hell machines are sent when they die. Lang, looking bleary-eyed but out of the numbing pain of the first few hours, seemed to be handling his burns well. His strong, young body should be able to fight off infection with the help of Shecter’s potions. The land remained flat—with occasional volcanos popping up like tumors from the ground every thirty or forty miles. The area had been saturated with Red missiles to take out the huge U.S. MX system—a network of highways through three western states, with trucks carrying the missiles, patrolling at least twenty miles apart. The Reds had seen those MX bombs as their biggest threat and had targeted nearly one thousand of their own five megatonners into the five hundred mile square system. Much of the land looked like the dark side of the moon. Nothing grew or lived. Bones sticking up from the now-dried ground were testament to the fate of creatures that wandered into this Godforsaken land.
The sun dragged itself out of the coffin of night with orange hands. The landscape once again lit up, showing its ugliness in full panorama—shades of gray and black. It looked as if someone had held a barbecue using a thousand miles of American soil as the charcoal. Rockson kept them going, twenty degrees further west than before, in case the computers of the Red control center tried to establish a bearing for them. He rode back to see how Lang was doing and the kid was sitting up, eyes bright, talking with Detroit who held onto the kid’s hybrid, the reins wrapped around his saddle horn. He was telling Lang war stories about other battles he and Rockson had fought together.
“Hey, Rock,” Detroit said with a huge smile as the commander of the Expeditionary Force rode up. “Remember that time when we were both taken prisoner and they had us in that basement prison waiting for transportation and—”
“Yeah, Detroit, I remember,” Rock said, raising his eyes skyward. “How could I forget it after hearing you remind me twelve thousand times.” He looked over at Lang. “How you doing?”
“Just bring ’em on, Rock,” Lang said, raising his Liberator from across his stomach. He lay back on the rest they had built, looking quite happy about the whole turn of events. “Like riding in bed,” he continued with a grin. “Used to have dreams about this kind of thing. Just get me a better pillow and a good-looking woman and I’ll live up here.”
Rock grinned back. “Since you’re feeling so good, we’ll keep on going. I want to get as much space between us and that damn drone as possible.”
“Hey, don’t stop on account of me,” Lang said. “Unless you see a diner. I could use a hamburger and a Coke.” Detroit and Lang laughed.
“What the hell you been teaching this boy?” Rock asked Detroit as he turned his hybrid around to head back to the front of the line.
“Just the truth, Rock. Just the truth,” Detroit yelled after him.
Rockson took the lead and fell into pace. But he couldn’t get rid of the feeling that something was wrong. The sky was a sick indigo. Precognition they might call it. Something about the sky. He searched the indigo, laced with small, green strontium clouds that floated overhead like dead lillies in a swamp. He wanted this mission to succeed. Other missions had been important, but now they were tantalizingly close to the greatest success America had ever had in its postwar fight against the Reds. To fail to bring the knowledge of the Technicians back would be too much.
His senses went on full alert as his heartbeat quickened, preparing for danger. They had gone about a mile further on the never-changing flat terrain when Rock heard it: the dim whine of a jet. From the grinding sound of the whine, it was a big one. Within a minute they could see the big Soyuz II transport craft. The huge loading doors of the plane opened up from the front and figures leaped out. As they hit the air, parakites popped open above them and they streamed down, dozens of Blackshirts from one of the elite special forces team. Figure after figure jumped from the slowly moving jet until the sky seemed to be filled with
the quickly falling parakites.
“Let’s move it,” Rock yelled, raising his arm and quickly bringing it down. Lang would have to hang on. They tore across the plain, the hybrids quickly picking up to a good speed as there were virtually no obstacles to watch for. They gave it all they had as the Freefighters kept hitting them on the sides with the ends of the reins and whispering in their ears to move it.
But the parakite force easily kept up; their curving orbits brought them ahead of the Americans. They were going to be cut off, Rock could see that. It would be better to be in a good position defensively than to be picked off the hybrids’ backs. Rockson held up his hand—the stop signal—and the troop came to a whinnying, hoof-stomping, dusty stop. “Let’s fight it out, men. We’re not going to be able to outrun them so let’s get our defenses as strong as possible.” They quickly dismounted and broke down into their defense squads. Four men got out two machine guns and quickly set them up, using the pack ’brids, lying flat around the Freefighters, as shields. Berger and Perkins worked the small mortar and quickly set up range of 150 feet. Rock and the others set up their Liberators on the fold-out bipods that were built-in underneath the barrel. Detroit took out ten grenades and laid them carefully down in front of him. Five concussion and five fraggers. Each man did his job calmly and swiftly as the parakites came zigzagging down at steep angles. The Reds didn’t want to waste time either. They circled ever lower, nearly forty of them in black leather gear, oxygen masks and goggles to keep out the dreaded radioactive air and soil. Some of them began firing their .9mm submachine guns from the armrests of their nylon paragliders. Slugs bit into the parched earth just twenty feet from the Americans’ defensive circle.
“Let’s get them, men,” Rock yelled. He began firing his Liberator on full auto at the descending flying force. “And watch your backs—they’re swinging around.” He had hardly gotten the words out when a Red paraglider came swooping in from the back, barely ten feet off the ground and moving a good 150 mph. Rockson could see the leering face of the Blackshirt as he let loose with a burst of fire that cut right through the center of the defensive circle. One of the ’brids in the middle let loose with an ear-splitting bay of pain and began flopping around out of control. Rock opened up with his Liberator before the parakite had reached the other side of the circle. The bullets arced up, making target just as the skyrider zipped by. Rock’s hail of death pounded through the nylon of the kite and into the Red’s stomach and chest, slicing the man in half. His body, spitting blood like a fountain statue, fell from the parakite and into a lifeless lump about thirty yards past the Freefighters.
“That’s one down,” Rock yelled out to the Freefighters who were cutting loose with their own weapons. But the zigzagging patterns of the highly skilled Blackshirt parakite squad made them extremely difficult targets. Archer aimed carefully, shooting four arrows in ten seconds. Two found their marks, a hundred yards up and two hundred yards away, piercing the bodies of two of the elite squad troops. Their parakites wavered out of control and then plunged to the earth. The Freefighters cheered every time a Red went down.
But the first Blackshirt had landed. They quickly set up their assault-team equipment: light machine guns, a bazooka-type rocket launcher and other sundry Soviet field weaponry. Not waiting for the rest of their comrades to land, they opened up with the machine guns, hitting two of the pack ’brids in the side of the circle facing the Red gunners. They were ripped apart, dead before they had time to scream. It was a shame that the ’brids had to be sacrificed like this, Erickson thought. Lang, his foot resting up on a pack, handled the belt to the .9mm machine gun, guiding it up to Erickson. But their deaths meant our lives, Erickson rationalized. ’Brids had often saved the lives of their parties by affording protection where there otherwise was none.
With the machine gun resting securely on one of the dead ’brid’s haunches, Erickson opened fire, cutting a trail through the rippled dry earth straight toward the Red gunners. If the Americans had hardly any cover, the Reds had none. The seam of death swept through the machine-gun nest, tearing it apart with the force of a whirlwind. The big slugs tore through two of the Red gunners, chewing up their faces and necks into pulpy hamburger. The two flew backwards and lay motionless on the shell-cluttered ground. The machine gun, smacked by two slugs, exploded in the chamber, blowing apart and into a third Blackshirt, the barrel of the long machine gun ripping into the belt-handler’s skull, piercing him like a lance. Dead eyes rolled up, staring up at a godless sky.
Two more of the KGB Death Squad, still gliding down, came in for another try on the Americans. They soared in from two sides, firing their subs from atop their hang bars. Rock saw the stream of lead coming a second before it slammed into the ground where he had been standing, making little clouds of dust spurt into the air. He dove to the side in the nick of time then, lying on his back, fired at the two crisscrossing Blackshirts. His shots hit one of them in the neck, severing his spinal cord. He fell face-forward onto the glide stick as the parakite glided slowly down. The second Red pulled a grenade and droped it as he flew overhead. He soared past and headed for his comrades several hundred yards away who were setting up a steady stream of fire on the trapped Americans. An arrow shot from forward side of the defensive circle and, spinning ever so slightly, slammed into the fleeing Red’s buttocks at three hundred miles an hour, piercing the KGB elite’s intestines and then lungs. He let out a bloodcurdling scream and fell thirty feet, landing directly in front of his own men. They turned their heads in disgust at the still-lanced, bloody corpse and set up their lines of fire. Within five minutes all thirty-six survivors of the drop were organized into strike teams. One advanced slowly, crawling on their bellies, sending out a blizzard of fire from three machine guns, while the other two worked their way around to either flank. They would soon have the Americans cut off on three sides. Then they’d close in.
Rockson surveyed the scene. It was apparent what their plan was. He glanced around at his own men inside the defensive circle of hybrids. Three of the ’brids were already dead, on the edge of the circle facing the guns, their bodies riddled with bullets. But the thick hides and four foot width of the creatures made them good cover. He hoped no more would have to die.
“Anyone hurt?” Rock yelled out.
“I’m winged, Rock,” a voice yelled out. It was Slade, with his hand over his shoulder. “I guess it’s only appropriate that the doctor on this expedition get a dose of the real thing,” he said, wincing slightly as he shifted his body. “But my instant diagnosis, additional fee, of course, for visiting the patient, is that I’ll live. Could you hand me the medipack, Perkins?” Slade asked, sitting himself straight up against the back of the ’brid behind him. With Slade’s direction, Perkins cleaned and sealed the wound with the instant plastic sealant that even held the edges of the wound together, stopping the bleeding almost instantly.
The Russian firing continued, coming in from three sides as the Reds slowly moved their flanking forces forward. “This is the story men,” Rock said decisively. “They’ve got our asses cooked in about five minutes. There’s no way to outfight them from this position. So we’ll have to outflank them. Detroit! Chen! I want you both to go straight back, away from the Reds, and then circle around them, coming in from behind. You’re both exceptional runners so I know you can cover the ground in good time. You’ll have to be at least three or four hundred yards away from them or you’ll be spotted. Then come in on them while their attention’s on us. Detroit, you’ve got your grenades. Chen, do you want to carry grenades?”
“I’ve got something new I’ve been working on for the last few months with Dr. Shecter’s help. Here, Rock, I haven’t shown you these as I wanted to wait for the right moment to use them.” The Chinese martial arts master pulled out two five-pointed star-knives. The blades were round in the center with five razor-sharp points coming out like a starfish. “Made them myself—well, with Shecter’s help. They’re lined with explosives, Rock. H
igh explosives. Go off on contact, with the explosive force of about half of one of our standard grenades. I’ve been working with them—they’re quite efficient. I’ve got ten of them in the back of my belt,” Chen said, lifting the back edge of his long, black jacket to reveal a row of knives, each in its own small, leather pocket.
Rock looked at the master of death, then said, “I’m glad I’m not a Russian today. Good luck to both of you.” The two headed out from the back of the defensive circle of ’brids, jumping quickly over the backs of the neighing animals and running as fast as their pumping legs could carry them in a line straight away from the advancing Red forces. They went about two hundred yards and stopped.
“Take it slow,” Detroit said, glancing over at Chen, who took two of the lethal star-knives from his hidden belt pouch.
“I’ll take it fast, if you don’t mind,” Chen retorted. They headed off in opposite directions, moving like blurs, bent over as far forward as they could without falling over. They circled far around the action, watching the Reds send out curtains of flesh-seeking slugs. Then they heard the sound of rockets. Good God, they were shooting goddamn rockets at the trapped men. The sounds of battle pushed the two Americans on, faster and faster, as they raced against time to save their fellow warriors.
Inside the circle of hybrids, Rockson directed the return fire. He had wanted to go out against the Reds but felt that he should stay with his men, just in case.
“Try to cut that right flank off with a steady line of fire right along that slight rise there,” Rock directed Erickson who shifted the machine gun over several feet.
“Will do, Rock,” he said, sending out a line of screaming slugs that tore up the dirt just ahead of the Red Blackshirts. They returned the fire and Erickson ducked as the Red bullets dug deep into the hide of the dead hybrid in front of the machine gun. The corpse of the animal shuddered violently and then was still. Erickson returned the fire, with Lang, now sitting wide-eyed, handing him the heavy belt of ammo.
