by Ryder Stacy
“Down,” he screamed to the two whiz kids and the remaining combat men as Rock threw himself to the ground. Another hail of the icicles of steel whistled through the air and came down about forty feet behind them.
Rock raised his shotpistol and fired. And kept firing as he waved his arm back and forth. Behind him he heard the whiz kids open up as well, their Liberator automatic pistols burping out steady cracks of death.
There was so much smoke and blood it was hard to even see what the hell was going on. But Rock didn’t take his finger from the trigger until every shot was fired, then he flipped the quick release chamber lever and slammed in another set of shotgun X-pellet shells, then closed it again, all within three seconds.
He raised his head and saw that the pallid vampire women lay dead all over the ground. Without wasting another second Rock jumped up and tore through them, jumping over bodies, some of them still grabbing out at him, half-alive, trying to sink their fangs into man-flesh. The radiation mutations fought to the bitter end, he had to give them that.
He came flying in the front door of the diner, firing as he ran. Two of the blood drinkers were waiting inside with fire axes on each side of the door. But Rock was fast. Both took full loads of shot from just inches away and went flying backward like they’d been kicked by mules.
He scanned quickly up and down the diner where they had sat just the night before and thought they were in paradise.
Right.
There was no one else there, but there was a door which led to an adjacent small building that had been tacked onto the diner.
Rock tore down the center of the place, nearly slipping in the pool of red on the floor, and went through the thin wooden door like a football player slamming into a practice dummy, taking the door right off its rusted hinges. It was bright inside, as there was something going on for which they needed light to see by. Something horrible.
Rockson had seen some dreadful sights in his day. But nothing to prepare him for this. For McCaughlin was laying, eyes glazed, flat on his back, naked as a jaybird on top of a wide metal table. His whole stomach was ripped open with a wide gash and blood was oozing out everywhere. Rock felt his heart tighten up like a sponge. And standing alongside the table was the Queen of the wretched lot. At least he figured she was the head Vampyre.
She had a tail, long and green, that was snapping into the stomach again and again with arching undulating movements depositing—my God—what? Was it one egg after another, into the gash?
“Oh, my Lord,” Rockson blurted out, and for the first time in his life he did something that he had trained men endlessly in Century City combat courses not to do. He froze for a split second. Just long enough for the Queen to see him, and rip her egg-implant tail from McCaughlin’s bloody stomach.
She snapped the tail around with incredible speed and wrapped it around his leg before Rockson could even react. She pulled hard and he went flying down to the floor. Then, even as he raised his eyes and started to swing the shotpistol up, Rock saw the tail coming down at him again with its long stinger. Like a butcher knife with a hollow tube next to it ready to deposit another of the blood-red eggs within.
Even as the egg-tail descended, Rock knew he was dead. There wasn’t enough time. But as he saw it whipping down at his brain, there was a fusillade of shots from behind him, as both whiz kids opened up with their .9mm’s on full auto.
The tail, the Vampyre’s body, all went rushing backward as she was hit by a dozen slugs up and down her long-muscled body.
She slammed into the back wall and slid down it to the floor as one of the eggs wriggled out looking for flesh to bite into so it could attach and hatch over the next month, but finding none.
Rock rose up slightly amazed to be alive. He rushed over to McCaughlin, who thank his lucky stars was out cold. It was hard to even look down into the gaping wound that ran along one side of the big Scotsman’s stomach. But he did, made himself, even as he told the two whiz kids to stay back. There were some things it was better for even whiz kids not to see.
There were creatures moving down inside the big man’s stomach, little ugly fanged larvae, blood-red, about as big as fingers.
He almost started to raise his shotpistol toward the unconscious Freefighter’s head, and then stopped himself. It was impossible of course—but maybe there was a chance—there had to be a chance.
“Reload, and guard him,” Rock screamed out as he rushed outside into the gunpowdered air. They were kids, but there was no time to be a kid anymore. Even the thought of that unholy terror’s tail depositing one of its squirming worm things into him was enough to make him gag.
Outside Rockson was relieved to find that the fighting was over. Vampyre bodies lay all over the place. He ordered the men to search for any other victims of the vampire people—maybe hung on some wall somewhere—and then tracked down Dr. Michaels, the one trained MD on the trip. He had come primarily to deal with space sickness. But they were running into stomach trouble way before that.
“Fascinating, fascinating,” the white-haired, tanned Dr. Michaels said as he walked around the gaping wound, looking down at it from different angles. “Oh, I don’t mean to sound so cavalier,” he said. “It’s just that I’ve never seen anything like this type of mutation and—”
“Neither has McCaughlin, but I doubt he’d find it so fascinating,” Rock said curtly, not able to get into the objective scientific appreciation of such an ugly but rare method of breeding. “Can you help him? He’s been—torn open. Implanted with vampyre eggs!”
“God, I—I don’t know,” the man said, taken aback as he realized what Rock wanted him to do. “It could kill him. Perhaps they’ve attached themselves to his vital organs, gone into his brain, his lungs—his heart.”
“He ain’t going nowhere nice if they stay in there,” Rock said coldly. “Do it—and do it fast. Every second could be vital.”
“My bag—I’ll need that—it’s with the ’brids.”
“Run and get it,” Rock said to the doc, who he knew had been a sprinter back in C.C. “The ’brids and all-terrains are up behind the main warehouse.”
“Back in a second,” Michaels said as he tore off, carrying his still warm .9mm. He had become a killer as well as a healer today. He ran past the bodies, which the men were already dragging in to piles for cremation. Their own men they had piled side by side—the three killed in the refrigerator and the two more killed during the battle. These they began digging graves for under Rock’s orders.
The doc was back in a flash with the bag. The pair of them rushed to the diner, and under Rockson’s squinting gaze, Michaels got out tools and cut into McCaughlin’s stomach.
It was horrible. There were a good two dozen of the red larvae. And even as he reached in and tried to take one small one out, razor-sharp teeth ripped into his thumb and latched onto it.
“Goddamn little monster,” Dr. Michaels shouted as he pulled his hand out and stabbed at the squirming thing with the scalpel. It came off and rolled along the table.
“Rajat, hand me that bucket,” he yelled out as the Indian youth grabbed it and held it out. Rockson thought the slender wide-eyed teen would be repulsed, but apparently there was something to scientific curiosity—for both of the whiz kids just stood there entranced by the operation, neither one turning or flinching.
The doctor had to retrieve each larva with long tweezers and they wriggled furiously as they were taken out. It was apparently instinctive for them to remain in the feast of flesh until they were ready to hatch out. These had only been laid within the last few hours and didn’t want to come into the outside world at all. And who could blame them. For the moment they emerged Dr. Michaels laid them into the bucket and Rajat stabbed at them with another scalpel until they were one hundred percent completely and absolutely certifiably dead.
No one wanted to see even one of these little bastards survive. After twenty minutes, the doctor was pleased to discover that none of them had penetrated any vital organs. All t
he while Rock had been reassured to feel a steady even pulse in McCaughlin’s wrist.
“The initial egg-laying is along the inside of the stomach’s muscle sheath, but not into the organs themselves,” Michaels said. “The mother wants to leave all the goodies for the little suckers to feast on fresh. So it’s unharmed. They haven’t been in there long enough to really move around and do worse damage,” he said, as he took out the last of the blood-red things and threw it with a shudder into the bucket.
“Will he live?” Rockson asked, as the doctor spread various salves down into the wound and then began sewing it all up again, using the coarse but effective methods of emergency trail doctoring, spraying antibiotic spray as he sewed.
“Rock, I couldn’t begin to answer that one,” Michaels said with a frown as he made the first of the stitches, pulling the wound closed. “I know I got all the eggs out—but we know they use poisons. His whole body may be flooded with junk now, plus the infection possibility . . . It’s all new to me. Really we should take him back to C.C. where he’d have more of a—”
“We can’t,” Rockson said almost inaudibly. “We must go forward. There’s just no time even—God—even for my friend! He knew he might be sacrificed for the greater good if it came down to it. Any of us might—even me. Do your best, doc. Sew him, get him as good as you can, and we’ll rig up something on one of the all-terrain vehicles.”
He headed outside as the doctor finished his sewing, and organized the burial of the dead Freefighters and the cremation of the Vampyres—fire to eliminate any possible egg inside the things.
Rock hesitated a long time before telling them to douse the diner as well. It was a sad thing to see such a noble and antique place destroyed. But the blood-drinking women had been able to lure men by the use of the place. And he had no illusions that the Freefighters had gotten all of them.
A number of his men had sighted some of the bat-women fleeing into the woods when they saw the battle was lost. He couldn’t allow the damned place to remain, to lure more unsuspecting victims in. As the military commander of Century City, and under the New Constitution of the Re-United States of America, he was authorized to liquidate cannibals—or anyone who preyed on human flesh—without trial or jury.
He figured blood drinkers fit in that category as well. If mutants wanted to coexist alongside man, that was okay. The New Americans weren’t out to get rid of them. But they sure as hell couldn’t live on human beings. There wasn’t room on the same planet for two predatory species like that.
Within an hour the survivors were all loaded up again, even McCaughlin, still out cold, bandaged and tied up like a suitcase on the back of an all-terrain bike they had fitted with a platform.
Rock raised his arm and they headed slowly out of the encampment as the cremation pyres burned and the U-ETE-HERE diner itself went up in sheets of reds and orange.
The past was gone. And it sure as hell wasn’t coming back again as a perverse trap for unwary travelers.
Sixteen
If someone upstairs had been messing with them for the last few days, he suddenly seemed to give the Strike Force a break. For once they were away from the wretched bloodsuckers’ village, and their hearts had settled down to at least a modicum of normality, they made good time.
The land grew quite flat as they got more northward and Rock thanked his lucky stars for that. They didn’t need any more problems before they reached the site of the Dynasoar spacecraft. His main concern—other that the mission itself—was McCaughlin. The man’s condition wasn’t changing one way or another. He rode along all strapped down to the back of the ATV pale like a corpse. But he was clearly alive, if breathing in shallow gasps.
Every six hours or so, when Rockson called a rest, the doc checked him out, gave him more intravenous antibiotics and glucose as there was no way to get him to eat anything.
The man was in a coma, total and complete. The wound seemed to stop oozing blood but it didn’t really look like it was healing either, remaining swollen and purple all over his whole side and stomach.
Dr. Michaels believed that the drugs the Vampyre queen had squirted into him in preparation for the egg-laying had actually put his body into a kind of suspended animation. Which was good in that at least his metabolism would have slowed down. But neither Rock nor the doc had any illusions about the long-term prognosis. The human body couldn’t take that much shock and abuse without a whole room of life support systems to help it along. Fat chance. But then again, Archer’s skull had been stove in with an ax once, and he still lived.
So Rock prayed every night when they stopped and made camp in a protected area. Prayed to the gods that be that they’d give the overfed bastard a chance. If cats had nine lives, Scotsmen should have at least two. Although, if he started to think about it for very long, which he didn’t, Rock knew that the guy had already used up quite a few of those “get out of death” cards in the past.
Within five more days of hard travel in driving rain and winds, they had made it into southern Montana and headed slightly east, as their maps showed a course deviation. Compasses were used on missions but because of the numerous bombs going off a century before had altered the true magnetic north, one had to keep making compensations for it, which Shecter’s math crew had fortunately figured out the proper equations for.
The only problem with the maps was that they referred to many landmarks and road systems over a hundred years old. Much had disappeared, changed, been covered with sand, or crumbled into dust. Still, there was enough left to carefully chart their course toward the alleged location of the spaceship.
As the skies cleared at last evening fell, the end of their second day into heavily forested Montana. Rock had the force stop and camp for the evening in a well-hidden, pine-treed valley set between a whole little cluster of low hills. He had them post a few guards up and around the plateau which surrounded the place, and taking Chen and Detroit, set out on ’brids to scout ahead. When he got this close to any military target Rockson always liked to go slow—and check things out himself.
They rode straight north for nearly an hour as darkness fell and only a crescent moon lit up the sky as the first stars trickled out. But as night came in earnest with stars like the god’s flaring cigars, they could see by the combined moon and star light.
They came to the end of a series of grassy fields when they saw lights below them. Rock had them tether the ’brids at some scraggly trees and went the final fifty yards on foot, the last few on hands and knees. You never, never knew what lay ahead.
And when he looked down over the edge, Rock’s breath quickened as did the other men’s. For they had obviously traveled farther than they had thought, and already reached their target.
And some fucking target it was! If they had been thinking this Warlord Garr was some two-bit operator—they were sadly mistaken. It was like a goddamned small city spread out below them. Oh a fucked-up, broken-down, ramshackle city—but a city nonetheless. There were countless shacks and mud huts, places made of salvaged metal all tied together with wire, everything was intertwined and built on top of one another, so it looked like an ant colony. And from where they lay looking down they could see the inhabitants spread out over acres.
“Jesus,” Detroit said, through tightly clenched lips. “Rath and his boys didn’t tell us any info like this. This place must have a few thousand inhabitants.”
“They couldn’t have known,” Rock answered as he took out his field glasses and lifted them to his eyes. He quickly scanned around the place searching for any indication of the spaceship bunker and its entrance.
It was clear that the area had been some kind of military base, for there were still pieces of the original machinery and equipment that had been above ground strewn around the place. Only now much of it had crumbled or rusted as well—and what was left of the old base was being used by the inhabitants to live in.
Rock saw three flat dishlike structures and focused in on them. Huge tracker
radar dishes were aimed straight up at the sky where they had doubtless been getting some kind of information until the very last second—a century before. Now they were crumbling around the edges—and inside the dishes—what? It was hard to see, and when he did he blanched.
The dishes were filled with skulls and bones like great sacrificial alters that had seen their share of death. As he got a good look at one side of the huge radar dishes from the light of a fire that raged nearby, Rock saw that he was right, for streams of blood had clearly run over the sides of one and rusted a blackish color all the way to the ground down the support girders.
“Hey, this guy Garr must be some nice warlord to work for,” Chen mumbled in the darkness as he and Detroit also scanned the entire encampment. “I’m seeing some pretty nasty stuff down there.”
“This definitely the place, Rock?” the black Freefighter asked, as there was more than one warlord in these far north territories.
“Damn sure looks like it to me,” Rock answered. “It’s got all the old radar domes, and pieces of equipment.” He took the glasses down and consulted the map which had been compu-drawn for him in a small plastic jacket. “There’s a hell of a lot of stuff missing. But what’s here, as far as I can tell, corresponds completely to the map. You two tell me.” He tossed the map to them.
Detroit who was closer picked it up and started making his own comparisons, looking first through the glasses and then down at the map. Whole platoons of men down there, camped out.
“This is it, baby—at least we’ve come to the right place,” the black grenade-man agreed with Rock after a minute. “So far we’re batting a thousand.”
“Right,” Rock muttered cynically. “All we gotta do now is figure out a way to get in down there, not get killed by a fucking huge army, find the spaceship, pray that it works—and then be able to fly the damn thing out of there up a ramp I don’t see at all. Yeah, we’re batting a thousand all right.”
“Ease down, Rock,” Chen said softly without taking his eyes from his own binocs. He was making long slow sweeps of the place, trying to memorize every inch of it for combat.
