by Ryder Stacy
He kept a sharp eye out for any game, but by the time the sky was starting to darken up overhead, night rolling down the cloudy hills of sky in its own avalanche of shadows, Rock had only bagged two rabbits with his shotpistol. Chen had gotten an oddly colored pheasantlike creature about as big as a pigeon. Those weren’t going to be more than a single bite of appetizer. And Rockson knew that you could drive men, deprive them from sleep, subject them to countless dangers. But when a man hasn’t eaten, that’s when trouble starts.
He had just about decided they should stop for the night atop a low mountain’s flat summit. He went to the far end to see what lay ahead and below—when Rock’s eyes opened up like a man seeing paradise. For down in the valley below, a thousand feet off, was a long one-story shack with a neon sign above it that read “U-ETE HERE.”
The sign was flickering wildly, and from the rippled tin sides of the place and the windows that surrounded it, Rockson knew it was the real thing—a diner from the old days, the very old days. For nothing like this was even being built since. Just what the hell this restaurant was doing out here, basically in the middle of nowhere, he couldn’t figure. It made him suspicious. But America was a big—and weird—place.
Although the men’s tongues started hanging out of their mouths when they saw the lit-up diner below, Rockson wouldn’t allow them to go down until he had investigated it first. These seemingly inviting, tantalizing places could be death traps. What better way to lure unsuspecting people in to rob, kill, mutilate . . . It had been done before. And doubtless would be again.
He took Chen, as the guy could move faster than light in close hand-fighting. Inside a tight space like the diner they would need speed if things got hairy. The two men took ’brids and stacked themselves up with their respective weapons—shotpistol and .9mm autofire minipistol, which was a new innovation of the Liberator factory for Rock.
Chen took only his exploding star-knives, darts, ropes—and countless other ninja junk hidden away so that not a trace could be seen beneath his black silk suit which covered him from neck to ankle. Chen was the only one of the team who didn’t wear the standard C.C. combat outfit.
The two men rode hard down the slope, skidding to a stop at a hitching post in front of the place.
Other hoof tracks and even tire tracks here and there indicated there was a fair amount of traffic. But none, as far as Rockson could see peering through the windows, right now. But what he did see as he opened the door with Chen right behind him, made Rock’s eyes stretch even wider. Women, and good-looking ones, too.
There were at least a half-dozen slinky beauties around, and he sensed more moving inside the kitchen through some swinging doors behind the counter. They were wearing nearly skin-tight black and white bunny-type outfits, with cute little cotton tails, and penguinlike vests and skirts that came up to mid thigh. They all smiled profusely at the two men.
“Welcome to the U-ETE-HERE,” one of them, a blonde with flowing tresses that cascaded down her shoulders and back, said.
When she walked forward, Rockson felt a moment of sharp tension. He wasn’t sure why and made himself relax as he saw no weapons anywhere, no fast movements.
With Chen covering his back, he allowed himself to cool out some—but not a hell of a lot. Any new situation in American, 2096 A.D. was suspect, something that had to be approached with utmost caution. Teeth lurked inside flowers, butterflies could spit poisons. Death was everywhere, disguised as life.
“What the hell is this place?” Rock asked, smiling back. He could see prepared food behind the glass display counter that ran along the top of the formica counter. Red seats, a row of nearly forty of them sat lined up like a mini-army in front of the counter. A chalkboard menu hung up on the wall with things crossed out and others written in in chalk, it sure as hell looked like the real thing from the history tapes. And the odors of food wafting in from the kitchen made his stomach start loudly demanding that it be fed something, anything.
“We’re the local diner,” the woman said. “Been running the place since the war. My name’s Deidre. I’m the night manager,” she said sweetly, reaching up to help him off with his flak jacket.
“I’ll keep it on, if it’s all the same to you,” Rock said, stepping back an inch or two. The smiles, the instant acceptance of the two men, made Rock uneasy. What if he and Chen were thieves, cannibals? There sure as hell were enough of them roaming around these western hills. How could the women trust everyone? Where were their weapons?
“We’re open twenty-four hours a day,” Deidre went on, as the other comely women went back to work straightening out napkins and silverware on the table, checking to see that ketchup bottles, mustard containers, were all filled and ready for squirting. “We use only homegrown or mountain bagged game. Nothing radioactive—everything is put through a geiger counter—twice.”
Chen and Rock looked at one another and both had to laugh.
“So you got all this stuff on the menu,” Chen asked, looking up at the board that sat midway above the counter. “Buffalo burger, home fries, pancakes? You really got these things?”
“Better believe it sugarcakes,” the over-rouged night manager laughed. “That’s why we’re the most famous restaurant for five hundred miles. Of course, the fact that we’re the only restaurant don’t hurt matters none either.” She laughed, and her eyes hooked onto Rockson’s in a subtle but clearly sensual way.
This place was all right, he decided as he breathed out hard. He was just too fucking suspicious by nature.
Chen was already sitting at the counter eagerly eyeing the menu. Rock made his decision to let everyone come on down and share the bounty. So he went to the window and signalled with a small high-intensity, pencil flashlight. A light flashed down from the mountain peak where the rest of the team waited.
“You got more coming in?” the woman asked as she put her hands on her hips with an even broader smile pasted to her red lips, no doubt anticipating extra revenues tonight.
“Yeah, just wanted to check the place out first,” Rock said sheepishly. “You know how it is.”
“Oh, of course, you can’t be too careful,” she grinned back. She turned and yelled into the kitchen for the girls to turn on a few extra burners as there was a whole load of hungry mouths coming in.
“How the hell do you power this place?” Rock asked, as power sources of any kind in this day and age outside of mule power were rare and far between—unless controlled by the Reds.
“Well, see, this was a real diner,” the blond waitress said, putting her hands on both Rock’s and Chen’s shoulder and leading them over to one of the formica tables that sat along the wall, just below the bank of windows. “When the bombs came they—they didn’t get us. The way those hills are shaped kinda led the poison away. Our ancestors stayed on, what the hell. Had a huge supply of propane tanks, as they’d gotten their own equipment years before and stocked up huge amounts of stuff in shacks all around the area. Over one hundred tanks of the stuff. Anyway, us valley girls have been keeping this place running for the last century,” she said proudly. “Cooking eggs, turning pancakes. I tell you, the people that come in here with scowls—they leaves with smiles on their faces.”
“A primitive paradise,” Chen said, eyeing the Boston cream pie.
“This is about as close as it’s going to get to paradise this side of the pearly gates!” She smiled. “Now, what would you boys like? We got a full menu tonight. Just bagged us some fresh mountain goat; Got bison—the non-mutant kind. So just let me know. And remember we cook to suit your taste—spicey, mild, or no taste at all.” She laughed again and Rock decided he liked her. With her huge breasts pushing out tightly against her waitress outfit, he liked her quite a bit in fact. And Rona was far away . . .
Rock and Chen studied the menu carefully then placed their orders. “A sirloin and garnishes for me,” Rock asked.
“Two hornburgers with slugs,” she screamed out in time-honored diner slang of all th
e hash joints throughout history. “Double Q-B’s triple Frenchie smasher . . .”
It sounded horrible, but it sure as hell tasted good when it began arriving at their table, carried by two smiling waitresses, each one more curvy and uniform-busting than the next.
By the time the rest of the team got their ’brids and all-terrain bikes parked out front and marched noisily in, Rock and Chen were already deep into the main course of their respective meals—Buffalo burger rare, with onions on the side, home fries—real potatoes, not dried spuds or hydroponically grown like C.C.’s, which always left a certain chemical residue in the mouth, no matter how much the eater pretended they were the real thing.
The food was excellent and within minutes the whole place was nothing but chewing and slurping sounds, forks and knives clattering against bowls and plates as the whole crew ate and talked loudly. It was a dream. A taste of mom’s home cooking from the days when there had been thousands of such railroad-car-shaped diners that filled the land. It almost brought tears to some of their eyes, even as it brought orgasms of taste to their tongues.
It was Bernstein who felt a little funny first. Just a queasy feeling in his stomach. But then he had always had a bad stomach, an ornery digestive system going back to his teens. And working with explosives for the last twenty years hadn’t helped to cool a nascent ulcer down any. He excused himself and asked one of the waitresses where the men’s room was. She pointed down to the right side of the diner, where he saw a set of wooden doors. He pushed through, found the men’s room and walked in. He had seen pictures of such in the Century City library, where they had preserved everything they could about the past, every picture, every scrap of writing found in the ruins of old America. For whatever they gathered on their search missions could well be all that would be preserved of Twentieth Century America.
The men’s room, with its porcelain urinal and sink and tile floor sure as hell would have made the archeology boys back in C.C. happy, Bernstein thought with a grin as he did his business into the old ceramic urinal. The place was a time capsule.
He headed back outside, and noticed a piece of plywood nailed up on the windows that faced the back of the diner. Unable to contain his curiosity he walked over to it, still feeling strange in his stomach, and looked through a small crack along one side. It was hard to see at first, like squinting through a hairline crack. But then his eyes adjusted and he gasped. Naked corpses—five of them, lying side by side on wooden slabs. They were horrible looking, all collapsed in, as if their insides had been vacuumed out, their flesh as white and pasty as month-old dough. Whatever had been done to them was something he didn’t want to know about.
Whether it was the shock of the sight, or his stomach really going through a number, Bernstein didn’t know. He stumbled backwards away from the plywood and bounced off the walls like a billiard ball as he lurched back toward the well-lit diner. The rest of the men’s eyes suddenly caught him and all eating stopped as he walked trembling into the room.
“Poisoned, we’ve all been poisoned,” he screamed out, hardly able to make his lips move. And even as Rockson reached for his shotpistol he was suddenly feeling the same deep cramps that Bernstein was already in the later stages of. The cushion-tile ceiling above them opened up, and strange glistening nets dropped down on each and every one of the strike force. And even as they struggled, falling to the floor amidst the food and the broken plates, they saw the waitresses gather around.
And now they were laughing, laughing out loud, as they pointed at the struggling men to one another like it was all of vast amusement to them. But then the drug that they had put in the Freefighters’ food set in in earnest, and amidst the convulsions that shook their bodies before they fell into unconsciousness they couldn’t even see the waitresses’ laughing faces, but only feel their own spasming pain.
Eleven
When Rock started slowly coming to, he felt like slipping right back into unconsciousness again. His head pounded like it was beneath a jackhammer as his eyes opened just a crack. The dim light was so painful to his drugged brain that he slammed the lids shut again as fast as he could. He could feel his heart race in his chest a mile a minute.
Where was he? What the hell was happening? He turned through the melting pages of his mind, searching for answers. And then remembered. The diner—the women. They had—
This time he forced the eyes open whether they wanted to be or not. His brain burst into rockets of pain but he made them stay open even as his heart pounded hard. It took a few seconds for him to adjust to the gray light of the room, then they opened in horror. For the other men were hanging in stand-up position, tangled in the nets that had fallen on them in the diner. They all looked unconscious. Maybe dead. But the two across from him, Rock couldn’t quite make them both out, had red smeared all over their necks.
Blood.
He tried to move his arms and couldn’t—and looking down for the first time discovered that he, too, was wrapped up tight as a bug in a rug in one of their sticky nets. The smell from the thing was awful, now that his nostrils were working again enough to take in scents. It smelled like glue and horse dung and kerosene all mixed together. But whatever the net-ropes were made of, they sure as hell worked. He couldn’t budge an inch, the whole thing stuck right around his body like the web of a spider who has wrapped up his food for later digestion.
As his mind as well came more into focus and function, Rock’s heart started beating fast again, apparently the drug exaggerated his emotions, sending adrenaline into his system. The whiz kids—his own Rock team. Where the hell were they? He strained his head with all his might, a difficult effort, both because the drug had made him feel weak as a baby and because the netting had wrapped around the back of his head and throat making it hard to move. A few of the men were moaning and stirring slightly.
He stared as hard as he could into the dimness. The only light was coming through some windows covered over with opaque plastic material that allowed only a fraction of illumination to come in from the outside. There—he saw them—the two kids far down at the end of the room, the last two in the row on his side. They were clearly out like lights, both of their heads tilted all the way over to one side. He prayed they were still alive.
Even as he searched around for Detroit, Chen, the others, the door across from him opened up and the room flooded with light from some outside hall.
Three of the women came walking in, only this time they weren’t wearing the cute sexy waitress outfits and—they weren’t smiling either. At least not the friendly dumb waitress expressions that they had all mastered so well the night before. These were, rather, sneers of disdain. And as they walked in, high heels clicking on the wood, and switched on a light on one wall, they seemed to exude evil. When the room sprang into brightness Rock saw with horror that they were wearing—human skin.
It was clearly skin, and male, too, as he could still see the hair all over the skin which had been stretched out. The waitresses had cut it into what almost looked like deerskin pants and jackets, half-open, so their breasts poked through like melons being swung on a pendulum.
“Ah, the males awaken,” one of them, the blonde, said with scorn as she walked up and down the two rows facing each other on opposite walls, poking at them, examining their faces, their necks. “A good batch,” she said to the other two who followed along behind her with little tubes of what looked like blood in their hands, and a set of collars which they secured on each man as they went down the rows, putting them around the men’s necks. They were almost like dog collars, perhaps were, and had numbers written on each one.
“This one’s an O-positive,” the leader of the three women said as she pointed to one of the men just to the left of Rock. “We’ll put him on the A-list.”
“Right, Zeran,” one of the subordinates said as she marked it all down in a notebook. Rock noticed that the women were pale now, like death itself, having washed off the make-up and rouge.
“We
ll look here—we got us a live one,” the head woman Zeran said, stopping in her tracks as she came right in front of Rockson. He looked her squarely in the eyes without flinching, even though his brain felt like silly putty which had been filtered through a spaghetti colander. He could feel the pure strength of her will as she gazed at him with burning yellow eyes.
Rockson suddenly realized these were mutants. However, they had hidden it all with contact lenses and other accoutrements that the spider uses to trap the fly—they were clearly mutants. And not of his particular variety of Sapiens new evolution. They didn’t have the star-shaped birthmarks on their breasts, nor the streak of white hair that ran down the center of the true mutants’ scalps like Rock’s. These were of a different ilk entirely. And from the look of them not a very positive branch of evolution at all.
“What are you looking at so strongly, mister?” Zeran asked, as she kept her cat-slit yellow eyes focused right on his, wanting to make him look away, wanting to subordinate his human male will to her female mutant will. But Rockson of all people, who had stared down snar-lions out in the wastelands, wasn’t exactly the one to test wills with.
“I don’t know,” Rock replied softly, discovering that he could hardly speak, that his lips felt like they were made of desert sand with a pinch of salt thrown in. “What are you?”
The yellow eyes burned wildly as he could see fury rise in them. The lips curled back from the mouth revealing two sharp fangs set on each side just beyond the front teeth. She seemed to lose control for a second and then Zeran let out with a catlike hiss that sent shivers up Rock’s back. Then suddenly, fast as a striking rattler, her hands shot out and clawed across his face. Rock felt a stabbing of pain and then warm blood tickle down his cheek and chin. She pulled back and held her hand up, clawed as if ready to strike again, and Rock saw the long nails on each of her fingers, inches long and curved back on themselves like a tiger’s claws.
