by Ryder Stacy
The animals was similar to raccoons of old but three times larger, and its mouth was full of dagger teeth. They were all just as glad it was dead.
Archer’s eyes widened in delight and he grabbed it from Detroit’s hand and rushed the raccoon over to the fire. The near mute’s idea of cookery wasn’t the most refined, as he threw the creature into the blaze, fur and all. It smoked and sent up acrid odors from the burning fur. Then the skin sizzled, crackling like a steak in the broiler. After ten minutes he took out the thing and cut it up with his huge woods knife, handing out immense smoking slabs to each of the men. They took it a little nervously, coon not being their usual fare. But lo and behold, after a few hesitant bites, all four men were digging into the treat. They asked for seconds. It was that good.
They slept soundly that night, glad to be alive and thankful for full stomachs. They took turns on guard duty as it was too dangerous out here in the wilds for them all to sleep, each man doing two hours. Eyes peered in from all around them but none dared approach the fire. Howls and grunts came out occasionally as if the carnivorous nightlife was having fervent discussions about how tasty the humans were.
When they arose the next morning the skies were overcast with a greenish tint as the high strontium clouds migrated overhead with a dark vengeance. They had some raccoon steak and even a few eggs. Chen had found the eggs—species uncertain—in a low branch when he had been out doing his tai chi exercises a few hundred yards from camp at the break of day. Then they set off again.
They headed across the mountain plateau and down the long drop off to the east. It was a breathtaking view out a good thirty miles, even with the low drifting mists. Like a vast Fauvist painting, hardly real with rivers as narrow as pieces of string and forests dotting the wastelands here and there like hair on a bald man’s head. They had to go slowly down the slopes which ran for a thousand feet before leveling off to another plateau which ran a few hundred before beginning the next descent. It was like a set of stairs for giants. The grade was rocky, gravel covered here and there, and the ’brids moved very cautiously as they descended.
It took the recon party a good three hours to reach the base of the Rocky Mountain foothills and then the plain stretched off ahead of them into salt flats. It was barren of course, and almost white, like chalk. The ’brids didn’t seem all that overjoyed about heading out into it, but they had no choice. Each clomp of a wide hoof sent up little swirls of the salt-laden dust. Before long they were all coated with the stuff. The land all around them was covered with the skulls and bones of countless generations of deceased animals. Bison and steer skulls, piles of bones which had been licked clean by carnivores, bacteria, and the unrelenting sun itself, shining the bones down to an ivory, smooth sheen.
As they pushed on farther, chasms appeared on all sides of them. At first just spiderweb cracks in the ground, but as they headed on the cracks turned to real gullies and then ravines. It made the going that much harder as they often had to turn and twist all over the place to get around some of the wider ones.
Looking down into the crevasses was no great recipe for a good mood. The dark cracks in the earth’s flesh seemed to fall forever, disappearing into blackness far below.
“It doesn’t look like you are coming out if you tumbled down into one of those!” Detroit said.
“Just don’t think about it,” Rock replied.
But it was the heat that started to get to all of them, not anxiety over a dive into the deep six. The sun wasn’t exactly brilliantly yellow in the hazed-over skies, but it was still burning down. Especially as the day wore on. The white terrain reflected the heat back up to them so that after a while it felt like they were being baked in an oven. Rockson knew that none of them would complain even if they were near collapse. They were just too macho a bunch. So as he felt the sweat pouring out of every pore he was the one who held up his arm and made them stop.
“Let’s put on the heat gear boys,” the Doomsday Warrior said, wiping his brow. “This kind of heat’s good for no one—man nor beast.” He pulled out his newly created Shecter heat jumpsuit and slid it on, as the others followed suit. They were used to wrapping the heat protecting space blankets around them but these were an improvement as they covered just about every square inch of their bodies with hoods as well, so their heads too could be shielded. They used the blanket heat reflectors on the ’brids backs and heads. The animals didn’t seem to like the encumbrances but once they were strapped on, they could quickly feel that it helped with the high temps. They cooled out too.
The men rode on, commenting to one another that the damned things actually seemed to work. The ride was a hell of a lot better even as they headed deeper into the hellish wastelands. “It hardly seems possible that anything could live out here,” Rock commented.
No one replied. It was too true. There was just salty sand, just bones everywhere, endless. But here and there a lone snake slithered through the white sand or a group of lizards stood sunning themselves on a mound, breathing hard to open their eyes more than a slit as the strike force rode by. Rockson could see Archer eyeing the small green and yellow creatures out of the corner of his eye, probably wondering if any of them were big enough to be worth going after. But a single bolt from his huge crossbow would have left not a trace of its tiny scaly targets.
They had ridden twenty miles into the chasm-riddled desert when they saw a large mountain rising out of the flatlands some five miles ahead. It had a conical shape to it and it was hard to tell if it was an old A-bomb crater or a natural occurrence. As they grew closer Rock took out his field glasses and scanned the nearly half-mile-high structure. To his amazement a plume of white smoke was rising out of the center of the thing and red lava was boiling over the sides, flowing down to create a blanket of hardened lava rock that spread out for a good half mile around the crater.
“Son of a bitch,” Detroit said, following suit with his own glasses. “You don’t see too many volcanos out here, and that one looks like a live wire. Maybe we should make a big go-around. I don’t fancy being fried in that hot rock ahead.”
“ARRCHER LIIIKEE,” the huge near mute squealed with a childlike glee at the volcano which for some reason seemed to tickle his fancy. He kept staring at it like it was some kind of immense toy built just for him.
“We’d better be careful, Rock,” Chen spoke up, coming up alongside the Doomsday Warrior who rode lead. “I smell sulphur in the air. Lots of times these babies put out poisonous gases. Some of them you can smell—others you can’t. Until you keel over dead.”
Rockson stopped them and stood up on the ’brid’s saddle taking a long look around them. If they headed far around the volcano it was clearly even more chasm-riddled to both sides. It could add many hours, even days to their journey. The slope of the volcano was smooth.
“We’ll have to chance it,” the Doomsday Warrior said after a few moments of silent deliberation. “Use those nasal gas stoppers that Shecter contributed to our well being. He swore that they’d work.”
The men took out their nose plugs from their packs and put them into their nostrils. They were uncomfortable at first but within minutes they had gotten used to them. The ’brids were much more highly gas resistant than their human riders and didn’t seem to notice the fumes particularly, although the smoking crater ahead did seem to make them skittish.
They had gone another two miles, coming within a mile of the volcano so that they could feel the heat of the outermost edges of the hardened and hardening lava flow when there was a thundering sound that shook the very earth around them.
“Oh shit,” Detroit groaned, as he held on hard to the ’brid’s reins. The whole world seemed to be shaking, as if they had been thrown inside a blender and it was hard for the men to hang on. The hybrids stopped dead in their tracks and spread their legs farther apart trying to maintain their balance. They let out with wild neighs and whinnies of fear and kept looking up and around at their riders as if the humans could make
it all right.
But the Freefighters were only mortals, as magical as they might appear to the hybrid horses. They couldn’t do anything but hang on themselves and pray. And even as they shook so hard that they could feel the earthquake rattling every bone in their bodies, chasms began opening up all around them. The very earth was being rent asunder as the ground pushed up and cracked, as the piles of bones that stood everywhere shattered down into pieces of broken ivory.
Suddenly the new chasms were more than all around them. They were right under them. And even as every man felt his chest tighten up and his mind go blank, one of the chasms came right toward them as if hunting them down. Before they could make the slightest move to escape, all four Freefighters, still atop their mounts, went tumbling down into a gap of nothingness.
They fell and fell, as the screams of the ’brids blended with the sheer deafening thunder of the earth cracking open.
And they each prepared to meet their maker.
Ten
While Rockson and his fellow Freefighters were tumbling down into hell or something approaching it, three hundred miles to the northeast, Kim Langford was reclining on a goosedown bed with silk spreads and with sumptuous pillows lying all around her. She was wearing a gown of embroidered lace with jewels adorning the sleeves, and she wore a choker of real pearls. She stared around the room occasionally, letting her eyes rest on this or that precious and valuable item: A Tiffany lamp, a Vergun Grandfather clock, even a real Van Gogh—The Potato Eaters—up on one wall where its dim luster reflected back from the Victorian lamps around the room.
Her baby blue eyes had made the route of the room’s possessions so many times she had lost count. And the objects which had at least initially intrigued her, now were dull and as meaningless as flecks of dust beneath a bed. She was bored. Coddled, but bored.
The one thing she would have wanted in the room was a window so she could look out—or better yet escape. But there were none. With all the “beauty” contained within the room there wasn’t the beauty of freedom. The single thick oak door at the far end of the chamber was locked tight as a crypt. She knew, she had tried many times in the weeks she had been imprisoned within.
There was a knock on the door, suddenly jarring the honey-blonde’s senses and making her head snap up, as no one had come around for hours. The last person had been the maid, who brought Kim her meals three times a day, with armed guards present of course at all times, and then took them away again.
“It’s I, General Hanover,” a man’s deep voice said as the door slowly slid open. “I hope you’re decent.”
“I’m decent, pal, it’s you who’s indecent,” Kim replied haughtily as she sat up on the bed, flipping her legs over onto the floor. She realized she was in a semi-daze, her eyes half open, her skin white and pale. She was that way most of the time now. No exercise, no real air, no freedom. It did wonders for one’s constitution and complexion.
“Hello, my dear,” General Hanover said as he strolled into the room. He was in his full military regalia, medals decked across his chest, all kinds of insignias on his collar and shoulders. Pearl handled .45 at his hip. He loved the trappings. “My, you look ravishing tonight,” he said as he made his way at rigid attention across the room, his square jaw jutting forward like he’d taken lessons from Douglas McArthur.
“Bull,” Kim replied with a flash of anger in her eyes. “I look like shit. You’re keeping me caged in here like some sort of trapped animal. And I’m wasting away, I can feel it. What have you done with my father? You promised me we’d be allowed to talk, to see each other.”
“All in good time, my dear,” the general said as he stopped at the foot of the bed and gazed down adoringly at her. “He’s in fine health I assure you. And being the spirited individual that he is, I can see where you got the genes,” he added with a flash of a smile. “His energy level is high, I can vouch for that. I’ve just come from visiting him, in fact. A most intelligent—and most stubborn man. A man much like myself.”
“Did he—did he have anything to say to me?” she asked hesitantly knowing that the general would say whatever he felt like, and it wouldn’t be the truth.
“Just that he hopes to see you soon, and that you shouldn’t be so hostile toward me. Your father and I are working toward reaching an agreement and—you should try to loosen up and realize that I’m not such a bad sort.”
“You’re scum, a mass murderer and a liar! Other than that, you’re okay,” Kim said with utter contempt. She looked hard at the face that she had come to hate. The craggy jaw, the deepset pale blue eyes, the bushy near-white eyebrows that took up too much space over the man’s eyes, and the Hitler-like swath of hair across his forehead. And the damned uniform, God how she hated it, and all the medals. It all represented the very reason why she was inside here, why many people had died opposing Hanover. A face, a uniform signifying sheer, blind, stupid greed and aggression. The opposite of what she and her father had fought for for decades. To Kim the general seemed the very devil incarnate. Not evil in his infernal manner, for the general came off relatively suave, gentlemanly. But in his actions, in the bland uncaring way he could dispose of hundreds of people and brainwash thousands more with his wretched mind-altering gases. And in his plans for America. That was where the real evil lay. That was where hell would begin.
“Don’t you like my new uniform?” he asked from several feet away, as she glared at him with murder in her blue eyes. “I just had it completed. It’s a blending of several uniform styles really—from the Napoleonic era, from the Prussian officers corps—and a few sprinkles of World War II, Afrika Corp. I do like it, the tailors have been working on it for weeks. What do you think?”
“I think it stinks,” Kim blurted out before he could finish his question. “Uniforms don’t make a man. What’s inside him does. And filth and rot are inside of you, mein General. All those medals aren’t worth the small toenail of my father or of Ted Rockson—or countless other Freefighters who would dispose of you quickly enough if they could.”
“Ah, but they can’t, can they?” the general replied with mockery in his voice. “As to my being a man—well, I think I can deliver some proof in that direction.” He started toward her, reaching out with both hands. But before he could grab any flesh she was up off the bed and moving quickly away from him, looking around for anything she could use for a weapon.
“Come near me and I’ll crack this right over your goddamn head,” Kim hissed, her eyes flashing like twin novas. She lifted a valuable Ming Dynasty lamp, one of the many treasures in the room that General Hanover had taken for his own personal use out of the Pattonville Museum.
“Ah, please my dear, do put that down,” Hanover said nervously. She could see that he truly liked the treasures of the past. They added to his stature. A great general should have luxuries surrounding him. And Kim knew that he wanted her to be one of those luxuries. “It’s very valuable,” Hanover went on, “and there’s not many things left from the old pre-nuke world.”
Slowly she lowered it and set it back on the marble top table. He was right about that. These things hadn’t done any wrong. It wasn’t for her to destroy whatever pitiful heritage was left for future generations.
“I am being a little crude tonight,” Hanover apologized, though she knew he was lying through his teeth. “Being around military sorts all the time—you know, it hardens one a little, makes one a little rough around the edges. Do forgive me. Please, let’s have dinner together, and we can talk and relax.”
He clapped his hands twice hard, so that it sounded like gunshots in the luxuriously-appointed room. Instantly the door opened and three waiters in tuxes and white gloves stood there, each pushing a three-tiered cart. The smells wafted into the room before they had even gone a few yards.
Kim was ravenous and at the same time furious at herself for her stomach, which started growling. She didn’t want to need or take anything from the man. But she also knew she had to eat, had to keep
her strength and energy up. Things would change. There would be a chance at escape, at helping her father. She owed it to him, to America itself, to keep herself strong. Still, she felt another surge of contempt for the general. He knew how to manipulate people, people like her. He hadn’t allowed her to be fed since the morning before, knowing she would find it impossible to resist. She swung her head around to keep her eyes from the food.
“Come now, come now,” he said trying to act fatherly toward her as he headed over toward the dining table which the servants were setting with heirloom silverware and Royal Blue china. Then the silver serving bowls filled with delicious meats and vegetables with glazes and sauces running off them like snow down a Rocky Mountain slope.
He sat down at one side of the table and motioned for her to join him as he poured a crystal glass full of champagne. “1989,” he said, eyeing the bottle. “The last year champagne made it to this country before the no-growth years. I’ve been saving it for a special occasion.”
“Well, maybe a little,” she said, unable to resist the call of her digestive fluids which rolled through her stomach in a flood of hunger. She seated herself across from him and grabbed hold of one of the forks, ready to plunge it right into his chest if he tried anything. But for the moment at least, he seemed to enjoy the charade of being “civilized.”
She dug into the rich foods, piling the stuff up on her plates and suddenly decided to go savage on him. She crammed the forkfuls into her mouth, letting food splatter out onto the table, down her chin. She ate like a wildwoman, half out of hunger, half out of wanting to destroy the image that General Hanover was trying to create of her—the fantasy woman. That fantasy was why he had her decked out in such fineries, had the room set up to be suitable for a “princess.”
