by Ryder Stacy
The Doomsday Warrior wished he had his Liberator automatic rifle, but it was strapped to his hybrid horse nearly an hour away, tethered at the mouth of the deep cavern. His shotgun pistol and mutant reflexes would have to do. Several of the scientific party were already dead. Blood Spiders stood contentedly slurping down the bloody pieces of what had been men—a head in one’s mouth, a head and shoulder in another’s. Rockson let loose a blast directly into the jaws of each of the sucking creatures. They jerked violently away from their meals and went into a frenzied dance of death. Across the nearly hundred-yard-wide cavern, lit only with the barest of an amber glow emanating from the rock itself that surrounded them, Detroit Green was giving some Blood Spiders a run for their money. Detroit was always armed with twin bandoliers of hand grenades wrapped around his broad chest, and now he was pulling off two at a time, holding them and heaving them at his attackers at the last possible second. Again and again he blasted the spiders back to the nightmarish hell that had created them in the first place. At least Rock didn’t have to worry about one man. More shots!
He turned to the right as he heard a heart-stopping scream. Pierce, the archeologist, was nearly covered by one of the flesh-eating monstrosities, his arm disappearing inside the meat-grinding jaws. A foul-smelling brown saliva mix true of the guts and blood of the already dead men and spiders created a vomitous odor. Rock ran over to the man, unnoticed by the spider, which was chewing the meat off the bone of Pierce’s arm. The Doomsday Warrior pushed the muzzle of the shotgun pistol right up into the thing’s jaw and pulled the trigger. The creature lifted nearly a foot in the air, like a marionette yanked suddenly by its operator, and released the half-chewed arm of the scientist. Rock pulled the man away and leaned him up against an outcropping of stone. The poor bastard was already going into shock. Rock knew the symptoms well—white face, trembling lips, eyes staring off into infinity as if preparing to meet their maker. The arm was badly mangled, bits of white bone and tendon hanging out like a rag doll chewed up by the family dog. But there was nothing he could do right now. There wasn’t time to tend to the wounded, he didn’t know, if they were going to get out at all. He reloaded the seven-shot pistol in seconds, slamming shells from the ammo belt into place. Then he dove back into the thick of it.
The Blood Spiders were still descending from above. How many of the goddamned things could there be? They were so large, Rockson thought, it didn’t seem possible that that many could live up on the roof of the foul cave. He quickly scanned the hanging threads that dangled and shook as the spiders slid down them like commandos at a training camp. For such big and apparently ungainly creatures they were weirdly graceful, their twelve legs gripping the silk webbing and shooting down nearly three hundred feet from the top. Rock set the pistol on close-pattern shot and began firing straight up in the air, trying to blast the carnivores before they could reach the ground. Each shot knocked one of the squirming hairy red mutations from its strand, and the air was filled with high-pitched squeals of pain as they dropped. Rockson had eliminated six more of the things when his sixth sense told him to spin to the right. He moved without knowing why and felt himself suddenly caught by the fabric of his shirt by the mandibles of one of the Blood Spiders sneaking up from behind. The damn thing had him! For all the strength of his six-foot-three two-hundred-fourty pound frame of purest chiseled iron, the Doomsday Warrior couldn’t break free. The Spider reached forward with two hairy legs and wrapped them around Rockson’s calf, pulling him to the ground. His arm had become jammed under him, the shotgun pistol wedged between his chest and the dank cave floor. The Blood Spider lowered itself down on top of him, and the Doomsday Warrior could see dark, dripping jaws filled with what looked like a thousand fingernail-sized teeth, a threshing machine for flesh coming down at him. A long, needlelike protruberance came out of the ugly mouth and pierced Rock at the shoulder. He felt the instantaneous stinging acidity of the poison. Great! The thing didn’t want just to eat him, it had to poison him first. He could feel his shoulder burn as if branded with a white-hot iron. Then his upper arm began growing numb as the poison spread.
The Blood Spider shifted its weight for a second to get a better balance to eat. That was all Rock needed. With the weight of the creature off him even for a millisecond he was able to swing the hand with the .12 gauge pistol up and into the guts of the horror now only inches from his chest where it was preparing to rip out his heart. He pulled the trigger and felt the satisfying jerk in his hand as the metal death tool spat out a storm of shot into the face and mouth of his would-be eater. The spider stopped in its tracks, blinked its eyes a few times as if puzzled, and then fell in a bloody heap on top of Rock.
The squishy weight of the dead monstrosity nearly suffocated him, its foul smelling innards oozing, dripping down onto his face. With an incredible effort of will and strength, Rock was able to squeeze his way out from under the dead carnivore. Everywhere around him Rockson could hear screams and blasts from Detroit’s grenades—a full-scale battle was going on between humans and spiders, with the homo sapiens definitely on the losing side. Rock scanned the wide cavern and could see only three of the crew left—plus Detroit, who was peeling off grenade after grenade from his bandolier and tossing them at the army of hairy killers. The Doomsday Warrior ran across the blood-soaked silt of the cave, searching frantically for any surviving members who might be still alive, trapped beneath one of the things.
A Blood Spider had one of the geologist’s, Avner’s, legs halfway up its mouth, like the thigh of a crisply fried chicken. Rock ran alongside and pushed the shotgun pistol against one of the large, unblinking green eyes and pulled the trigger. The eye disappeared into a splatter of egglike slop and the spider, although assuredly not dead, pulled back and let out a thunderous gurgle of pain. Shrill as a piece of glass grating on rock, the sound startled the other spiders as well. They took stock suddenly of themselves like an army that has been battling for hours and hears the trumpet call to retreat. Even spiders, with brains surely not larger than grapes, had to realize that their kind lay dead and splattered everywhere. Detroit let off with two more grenades at a group of three of the spiders by the far wall. They erupted into a burning wall of red fur spewing dark blood.
These pink things were not like their usual prey. These killed and killed again. From far above, the men heard a strange echoing clicking. Rockson raised his pistol at the threatening sound. Nearly three hundred feet above them, almost invisible in the dim blueness of the glowing walls, was a slug-thing a good twenty times larger than the cuties down below. It was their leader or queen, or some damn thing.
It seemed to be giving orders to the ones below with a series of clicks—FIGHT ON! With renewed vigor, the creeping walls of hundreds of pairs of legs began churning their way toward the remaining freefighters now banded together in the center of the seared-meat-and-cordite-smelling cavern. There was only one chance.
“Detroit!” Rock screamed out above the bellowing and piercing war cries of the charging spiders. “Up there!” He pointed to the nearly thirty-foot-long reddish sluglike thing high above them, which pulsed with blood, like some immense larva, as it swung slowly in the webbing of hundreds of strands of the thick, sticky webbing.
“Can you reach it? It’s our only chance.” Detroit Green had the best throwing arm in Century City. Descended from one of the great pitchers in baseball of the late 1980s, Lenny Green, Detroit, with the physique of a cannonball of living black flesh, with arms as wide as the legs of most men, could hit a bird at a hundred yards with a stone.
“I’ll be damned if I can’t hit that barn door of a thing, Rock,” Detroit said, with a self-mocking grin. “Anyway, if I miss I don’t have to worry about your telling anyone, do I?” He peeled off two of his phosphorous grenades and pulled the pins. Rock warned the other men to get back against the rock wall beneath an overhang of mica-specked black magnetite. The spiders grouping together for an attack from across the hundred-foot space separating them from
their dangerous prey shrieked in unison, apparently in an effort to get their courage up. Even Blood Spiders can sense the dead of their own species lying around them. As they came suddenly forward, their flotilla of hairy red legs pumping madly, Detroit pulled his right arm far down and back behind him, like the discus throwers of old, and then swung his entire body back around, whipping the grenade from his hand with the force of a catapult. He instantly followed up with the other arm, which shot the second ball of steel death in just as straight and swift a high trajectory.
The two phosphorous grenades, fashioned in the weapons shops of Century City, seemed to fly faster as they rose, as if responding to some powerful mental urging from the freefighters below. The slug thing, the leader of the Blood Spiders, all eighteen feet of its jellylike throbbing body coursing with veins of the reddest blood, seemed to sense the twin balls of death as they approached its nest. A row of narrow pink eyes turned slowly toward each intruder. But it didn’t have time to study them too closely. The first of the soaring phosphorous grenades went off with a blast of fiery jell, spreading through the moist air and instantly engulfing the blood slug in an ocean of flame. It raised its multibrained head with two long curving black horns on the top and let out its own brand of pain. A scream that rocked the very walls of the seemingly endless cavern. A second later the second of Detroit’s perfectly thrown grenades went off just feet above the frantically wriggling creature.
It had never felt pain before. It had ruled, always ruled. Always had the smaller hairy things brought food and obeyed its every command. For years, countless years, it had lived this way—queen of this subterranean world, of this dank hell. And now—SENSATION! Unbearable feeling of pain. Its entire body was throbbing with a terrible aching, ripping apart. Its very flesh, its pumping veins filled with ten thousand gallons of blood, blood sucked from other creatures, animals that wandered unwittingly into the cave, creatures that the Blood Spiders went out and hunted at night, grabbing them from the surrounding forests and plains and dragged back for their queen. Now that blood was aflame. Blood and thick, flabby flesh without bone or muscle burned in an oily smoke, hundreds of feet up in the elaborate network of thick webbing. The slug rolled and wriggled in pain. Within seconds the webs themselves had caught fire, and they burned with an almost sizzling delight, ripping off into flame in every direction, like the fuse to dynamite. Spiders throughout the cavern, who had been hanging to the webbing, plummeted to the earth below, smashing open their demon heads, breaking their hairy legs like snapped twigs. Streaks of screaming flame shot down like meteors.
Far above, a deafening ripping sound as if the very cavern ceiling were collapsing. The blood slug was falling, toppling, as its comfortable web nest burned down to blackened useless shreds. Like some kind of cloud of fire, the screaming, flopping thing fell, spewing red blood that burned like the rivers of hell itself. It dropped, continuing to scream its ear-wrenching cry—the sound of a million birds’ throats being slit, the slithering hiss of all the snakes in the world about to strike, the shriek of rats, of centipedes and megapedes and scorpions—of everything foul—of every dank and rotten thing that crawled from beneath rocks and stank in muddy pools beneath rotted logs. The blood queen shrieked with the sounds of infinite foulness and fell on top of its army of fighters below. The Blood Spiders were smashed into pulp. The slug queen splattered over them, every inch of its rolls of bloody fat aflame, washing across its slaves in a tidal wave of blazing red putresence. In seconds they too were burning, their hairy flesh crackling with blue flames, sending out acrid, oily smoke. They writhed and fell over one another, trying to escape. But there was no escape. Not this time. The blood slug covered them in a final ghastly embrace of death, like a blanket of molten lava, their own queen taking them along on its quick descent into hell.
“Run!” Rockson screamed, grabbing the three remaining trembling scientists who seemed to be nearly paralyzed in shock and fear. Rock could feel his shoulder where the Blood Spider had bitten him minutes before, now swelling and becoming totally numb. With Detroit taking up the rear, tossing an occasional pineapple behind them in case anyone was tagging along, Rock led them down the smoky cave tunnel back to their hybrid horses, waiting nervously at the mouth of the deathtrap. They had just reached daylight when Rockson felt the poison hit his heart and brain with a fistlike punch.
“Detroit,” he managed to sputter out. “I think I’m going to go, man.” He had barely gotten the last word out when the poison overpowered his nervous system, and the Doomsday Warrior pitched face forward onto the hard stone ground.
Two
A grizzled old mountain man—Charlie Whiskers—came over Oak Pass with two other scruffy-looking woodsmen. They all chewed tobacco, spitting out huge gobs of the muddy stuff every minute or two as they shifted around uneasily on their mounts—old, scraggy half-mutant pintos, covered with red burns and cancers, that stumbled along the mountain trail, their eyes dull, their hooves plodding and listless. On the backs of their mounts, tied behind the saddle, were piles of ratty-looking furs. The men were trappers, who made a living out of whatever pelts they could gather, trading them at small country stores for their basic needs. Beaver, fox, raccoon, an occasional bear—they pretty much bagged whatever fell onto their laps. Being lazy and drunken louts, they didn’t put much energy into their livelihood, preferring to sit around a fire, gurgling down their cheap country brew, talking about liquor, women, or how many Reds they’d killed, all of it lies. Thus the animals they actually were able to catch were always the weakest, sickest, ugliest of the lot, with hides that looked motheaten before they were even skinned from their owners.
They acted like old pals, cursing at one another, mock-insulting each other, questioning the state of mind, parentage, sexual persuasion and everything else they could think of about one another, seeing who could be the meanest, the most foul-mouthed of the three.
“Your mother sucks donkey slime—through a straw,” O’Grady, the fattest of the three, said as he bounced around on his oversized black saddle.
“Your mama wishes she could find some donkey slime to suck,” Pete, a smaller man with a face filled with pockmarks, snapped back. “Instead she fries up beetle balls and has skunk piss soup.” He leaned around in his saddle and smirked at O’Grady.
“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” Charlie Whiskers said, riding third in the line of bedraggled hunters, “if either of you had mothers I would be glad to insult them—but since everyone in these parts knows that you both sprang full-grown from rattlesnake turds, I can only compliment you on how well you’ve done, considering your excremental heritage and how well you’ve disguised the smell of your shit-oozing bodies.” The two men ahead of Whiskers both let out a howl of derision.
“Damn, you always get the better of us,” Pete said, with a twisted grin. “And half the time I don’t even know what you all is talking about. “What’s this ex—ex—whatever the hell you said?”
“You don’t want to know, my fecal friend,” Whiskers said. “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”
“Sounds worse when you don’t know what it means,” O’Grady said with a laugh. “But fact is,” he continued with a snort, “I done heard some Indians talking the other day, Whiskers. They was talking about the size of your manthing. You was bangin’ away on some squaw, thinking you was givin’ her the time of her life, when she looks up and asks ‘Is it in?’ ” O’Grady and Peter cracked up. At last they’d gotten at least a mildly good one in on Whiskers. The three continued to ride slowly across the wooded terrain, insulting each other at the top of their lungs, sending woods animals scurrying off in all directions as they heard the bellowing humans.
O’Grady and Pete had grown to like Whiskers. He was one of the boys—a good curser, drinker, and hunter. He had shown up three months earlier, stumbled into their camp and introduced himself. Since then they’d somehow all traveled together. O’Grady and Pete, who had been raised in the local mountains, introduced him to all the
shopkeeps and local farmers and hunters as they made their way around the area. What they didn’t know was that “Charlie Whiskers” was in fact Colonel Andreyov Kozlovsky, a Red agent trained in Moscow for five years for this mission—deep penetration of the American freefighting forces. He had to move slow, as the rebels were notoriously suspicious of outsiders. But they weren’t used to men as well-trained as Colonel Kozlovsky.
He was one of a new breed of Red spies, trained for years not just in English and American history—but in cultivating a precise accent, a way of acting, looking . . . the colonel had attended the Elite KGB Special Operations Center run by the KGB just outside of Moscow, along with several hundred other “Deep Agents,” as they were called. Each was to be sent to a different region of the country to infiltrate the freefighters’ ranks—and hopefully destroy the rebels once and for all. It was a suicide mission for every man who went—slow suicide at that. For the Russians’ genes had not evolved as the Americans’ had, and their tolerance to radioactivity was far lower. The KGB brass lied and told them that there were new treatment facilities for detoxifying the body of radiation. Some believed it—some didn’t. But the rewards involved were so high that they took the chance anyway. They were treated like royalty during their five-year training in Russia, given large apartments, cars, money to burn, mistresses . . . they were in the top one percent of Russian society. If they succeeded in their infiltration missions and survived, they were assured of a high rank in the KGB and rewards and riches far above the lot of the average citizens of the Great Soviet Empire. They joined the elite. There were few ways to carve out a niche for oneself in this new world, to become special, to rise to the top. This was one—and for those who chose it, for all its dangers—it was worth it.
