by Ryder Stacy
Rockson turned the craft sharply sideways and fit through with wings up and down, and made it out into a wider canyon. Good, but he’d lost some more altitude in that maneuver. The area ahead was littered with boulders. Where the hell is a flat area?
Now tight left, his sixth sense told him. His plane swooped low over some rolling sand dunes. His altitude was 300, 250—air speed now 270, 230—he knew she’d drop like a rock at 160 knots. He’d have to bring it in before then—but where?
Altitude 170. The canyon was wide here, but filled with jagged boulders. And now something new appeared—a raging river right in the middle of the scattered boulders. A torrential rapids that would shame the Colorado River’s meek white foams! Come on, flat ground, come on . . .
Altitude 100 feet, speed 165.
This was it. Stubby pine trees flashed below his wings now. It had been all desolation before, and now, all of a sudden, these pine trees. The damned trees were worse than the big rocks. He was going to hit them.
Wait. Over there. Some reddish flatlands ahead, the pines fading out. Rockson’s craft just cleared the last pine trees, skimming off the topmost branches. There was a small clearing ahead, alongside the raging river. The river, Rockson saw, emerged from a waterfall in a mist-shrouded cliff dead ahead. The smooth cliff rose thousands of feet high. No way over THAT baby! Speed 160—GOTTA TAKE HER IN!
Another huge boulder right ahead, with a scruffy pine on it!
Can’t clear it! Rockson jerked in his seat as the belly of his craft scraped the obstacle. Pieces of rock and pine needles and sticky pine cones were jammed onto the wing tips. Altitude 70, 60, 30. Clear sand ahead. For a second he clutched the lever for the landing gear, then desisted. A belly landing was better on soft sand. Otherwise, the wheels would jam, and the plane would tumble over the minute he hit.
Rockson lifted the plane’s nose at the last second, then shielded his face with his arms.
He hit the ground hard, but the plane didn’t break up, at least not right away. He was skidding on the metal belly. Sparks and then flames erupted all around him as he jerked violently against the restrainer straps. He watched wide-eyed as the wings were shorn off by jutting rocks. That slowed his mangled cockpit compartment some more, but still the plane—what was left of it—slid forward toward the high wall of rock at the end of the canyon. Rockson was barreling toward a looming wall of pink granite death. He expected to be smashed like a bug in a second.
The sickening screech of metal and the flames were everywhere around him now; his chances of dying from being smashed were pitted against being burned alive. He bet he would hit the wall first.
The wall of the canyon was coming up fast, maybe 150 miles per hour. He’d win the bet.
What the hell? He saw, strung across the canyon before him, a series of clothesline-thick white ropes. The torn-up plane hit them hard, tore through the first two or three ropes. But the ropes slowed its fatal hurtle toward oblivion. The next two or three lateral ropes grabbed at the plane’s bent nose and didn’t let go. Ten feet from the vertical wall of rock, and his certain death, the plane stopped with a gutwrenching jerk.
The control panel burst into flames and now the billowing, black, plastic-fed smoke threatened to choke the pilot. Rock tore at his restraining straps. They wouldn’t come loose!
“Have to cut them off!” he shouted to no one in particular. Good idea but hell, no knife! Rockson steeled his muscles and jerked himself upward two or three times, his body driven by a bolt of adrenaline that could have revived a thousand heart patients. He tore the straps apart and leaped from the seat, trailing the remnants of the nylon safety straps. “Have to get out. Now!” he screamed at himself.
So Rockson rushed through the cramped and crumpled cabin and spun the door’s circular lock: no go. It was bent in, the frame wouldn’t let go! Thick, plastic-fueled smoke now curled about his body. The door simply had to give.
Rockson stepped back and, holding onto the twisted girders on both sides of him, delivered the most powerful double drop-kick of his entire career.
The bent door flew out and away. Fire and smoke and white hot sparks poured onto him. Rock jumped out through the billowing wall of fire before him. He hit the gravel and rolled through sharp, hot metal debris, wincing in pain as the debris cut through his fire-resistant flight suit and into his skin. Once he hit the ground he kept rolling over and over until his body was out onto cool brown sand. Then he beat out the flames that had begun to consume his sleeves and the sock-tops sticking out of his combat boots.
After that was taken care of, Rockson crawled like a motherfucker away from the heat. No time to even stand up, he had to get away from the jet as fast as he could. There were explosive things in that plane: the heavy caliber ammo left in the nose cannon might go off any second—and the grenades.
KABOOM! The force of the explosion threw him twenty feet.
After the orange ball of flame rose overhead, Rockson dug his face out of the sand and sat up. He watched the mushroom-shaped cloud rising in the canyon. So much for the Soviet plane—and all those hours of work patching it. Obviously he had missed fixing something! Rockson wondered what it was. He grimaced as he stood and surveyed the wreckage of his sky-machine. Not much left. He nonchalantly picked a piece of sharp metal out of his forearm, tossed it away, and started walking away from all the damage, his mind not dwelling on his luck but on all that fucking work repairing the old jet down the drain! Only after a while did he mutter, “Hell, who cares, I’m alive!”
When he took his first step, his ankles hurt. Sprained ankle? Better not be. As he pranced around on them, they hurt less and less. Thank heaven for that!
Next business: Where was he? The map! Was the fucking map in the plane?
He fumbled around in his flight suit, and felt a slight rectangular bulge. “Ah, there it is, right in my pocket.” Rockson pulled out the map, opened it, and in the fading light studied it carefully. After a while he decided that he was in a place the map called Spider Canyon, about thirty-seven miles short of his intended destination. A long walk, but nowhere near impossible. Spider Canyon was a long, many-branched canyon located in a plateau that was a mile high. At this height, in this part of America, the night would be hell-cold. Arctic cold. And he had no parka. That had burned up in the jet.
Might as well start walking—which way? Northeast. Climb up that granite face before dark, get his bearings with the stars. Sky is clear, Rockson reassured himself, the stars should be bright tonight. He could find the way.
Inventory of supplies: Matches for a fire, a map. Brains and brawn. Things could be worse. How about weapons? Oh God!
Rock ran back to the fragmented smoking wreckage and dug around through the scorched debris. He was relieved when finally his hands uncovered his shotpistol. It was looking bad, but it was still functional. He found some ammo in a steel case. Not much—100 rounds. The Liberator rifle was a fused mess. He lifted its melted mass, then threw it down in disgust.
He looked up at the sky above him. The stars were already coming out, along with flickers of blue-green aurora. A cold wind arose. With the shotpistol recovered, things weren’t really so bad. Should he really climb now? As cold as it was here in the canyon, it would be much colder up on the plateau. There would be driftwood to make a fire, near the river. And water—maybe a fish dinner.
Rock quickly decided to stay the night in the canyon. He’d stay warm with a cozy fire, sheltered from the winds by the canyon walls. He’d get going bright and early in the morning. Archer needed him alive, after all.
He headed down toward the river, back along the skid marks and gouges from the crash landing. It was not long before Rockson saw the ripped white lines on the dirt—the mysterious ropes that had saved his life by slowing the plane. Funny, he had almost forgotten about them. He went over to the first rope, lying torn and twisted. He bent down and found that it was warm and sticky to the touch. Maybe it was some sort of creep-vine. He pulled his hand away with
some difficulty. Shit, if it was a creeper, it could be dangerous. Creepers can tangle you in two seconds. He shouldn’t be touching one.
He noticed other broken “ropes” scattered about. They didn’t move, yet he kept his fingers on the butt of the shotpistol he had jammed into his waistband. He’d tangled with all sorts of crawl-vines before. The mutant arms of such plants could wind about your ankles and drag you into the throat of a carnivorous plant in a flash! One of the nifty threats created in the hundred years of radiation since the war.
Rockson edged away from the “ropes,” though they continued to remain inert. He took a more circuitous path toward the raging rapids. He could hear the turgid water’s song of violence. He spotted some driftwood on the shore. When Rockson went toward the twisted branches, he came across animal tracks. Not those of hooves, like a deer’s. The prints were made by three-toed paws.
Very peculiar tracks. He bent down and studied them carefully. A strange, pungent odor came into his nostrils, of something like musk. The tracks were too numerous, too closely packed, for one thing. Maybe the animals that had made them were in a tightly packed bunch.
Rockson followed them along. The tracks were fresher and fresher as he walked toward the river. Mountain lions? By the shallowness depth of the prints, the creatures weren’t very big, he decided. Maybe three feet high. Well, he could handle that kind of cat. Rockson was powerfully thirsty now, and the water ahead was greatly inviting. Rockson walked on in a hurry—and then paused in mid-stride. What if the creatures that had made the tracks weren’t animals? What if they were insects? Many-legged insects could have made those tracks. His heart froze as if an icicle had struck it. If the creatures were insects they were pretty large.
Spider Canyon. Shit. This place was called Spider Canyon. Now the mysterious ropes that had slowed his crash landing made sense. They weren’t ropes! They weren’t creeper vines! They were spider webs!
Just then he heard scuttling noises and dropped quickly to the ground. The noises ceased. After a long while of utter silence Rockson crawled stealthily up to the top of a low knoll and peered toward the river. There, in the dim twilight, he saw a dozen three-foot-wide, furry white spiders! The monster arachnids were devouring the carcass of an antelope-type creature. The carcass was caught up in some of those very same white “ropes” that had saved his life. More spiders came and went.
The hairy white spiders evidently hung around the water line, inside those piles of driftwood. Dens for spiders! They waited for thirsty animals or for humans such as Rockson. The poor animal they had in their clutches now had probably been seeking a little drink. Now it was being torn apart and devoured. The spiders’ rip-jaws made unpleasant slurping sounds.
Rock had seen and heard enough. He’d stay thirsty tonight! He probably could devastate that pack of spiders with the shotpistol, but there were other packs of the bastards around. His ass was grass if he stayed around here!
He crawled slowly, silently, back down the way he’d come, and scanned the canyon walls: vertical, with few handholds, if any. And it was getting dark. But those feeding sounds made him decide. Handholds or no handholds, he’d try a climb. That was better than becoming a meal for the chittering arachnid gourmets behind him. He assumed they were the kind of heavy, land-roving spiders that didn’t climb walls. A shaky assumption, but one that gave him some comfort! He crouch-ran toward the rock escarpment, holding his shotpistol in his right hand. The flickering aurora above seemed shaped like a skeletal hand. In the near darkness, Rockson almost ran into another set of the sticky horizontal spider-ropes. These were fresher than the ones that had snagged his airplane. If Rockson had fallen onto them . . . well, he would have been stuck there until visitors came—white furry visitors.
He slowly circled the web-rope network, not seeing any net manager around. He again ran. This time he ran flat out. The roar of the water should cover his footfalls—he hoped. Jesse Owens would have been left in his dust!
Rockson’s night vision was excellent, and as he raced along, he studied the sheer rock face dead ahead for danger. There were no web-ropes that he could see on the cliff, and no place for the spider-things to hide.
One hundred more yards! He’d better get there while that pack of carnivorous spiders was still busy. He almost lost traction, slipping on a patch of strewn gravel. That made noise, and soon he heard scampering sounds behind him, and the sounds of slavering jaws. It quickly sounded like a horde of little schnauzer dogs were right on his heels.
The spiders started screeching for blood—his blood.
One quick look back. They were gaining!
They were going to get to him at the same time he got to the cliff! Pulling his weapon from his belt, Rockson spun once on his heels and fired his shotpistol on full automatic. The X-patterns of deadly explosive pellets spread out and demolished the foremost ranks of the red-eyed bastards. In a second he’d used up a whole clip.
More of the things just came rushing over the torn and bloody bodies.
This wasn’t going to work!
Three
The furry white eight-legged creatures snapped their sharp, drippy mandibles right at Rockson’s boots, but by then he was up on the cliff, his fingers and feet searching out and finding the tiny indentations in the rock, just in time. In a second, as the spiders, snarling in rage, tried to jump up on his back, Rockson was already twenty feet up the wall, climbing with all his mutant survival-instincts on full go. Imperceptible hand-and-boot holds, tiny irregularities that no normal human climber could have managed to secure himself on, were as good as a staircase to the desperate Doomsday Warrior. Nothing seemed less desirable at the moment to Rockson than falling, winding up as the evening meal of the drooling bunch of eight-legged bastards screeching and yapping below him.
For a second Rock worried that they might be able to climb walls, but as he got further and further up, the carnivore-spiders continued merely to jump up and fall back. The cliff surface became more irregular after a time, with lots of easy grips. This cliff, Rockson realized, was ready made for climbing. Still, it was pretty dark now, and he told himself not to grow too confident. There were a good 2,000 feet left to climb.
Rockson, the immediate danger behind him, began pacing his climb, taking it easy, despite the disgusting slavering of the spiders. When he looked back down to see how far he’d come in twenty minutes, he was disgusted and repelled to see the whole canyon below covered with spiders, millions of them. They seemed to reflect the faint starlight, almost to glow. “Must be a shortage of meat in the area! Or maybe they particularly like two-legged suppers! Is it my Desperado cologne?”
Worst of all, the spiders were climbing over one another. It was like rush hour in Manhattan down there. They just kept coming. God, if he only had a grenade! The damned things were piling up ten, twenty, thirty deep, crushing one another to get to Rockson! No more taking it easy!
Rockson climbed as fast as he could now, and that was plenty fast! After about another thousand feet of breathtaking ascent he chanced again looking back down. And with relief he noted that the piles of spiders hadn’t increased much in height. Rockson listened, but didn’t hear anything except the raging river. It looked eerily alive from up this far. The foaming, turgid waters were luminescent in the light of the rising moon.
Rockson, though evidently out of range of the creatures, didn’t slacken his pace. His fingertips were raw and strained, his toes felt like raw tortured meat inside his supple leather boots. There were just another hundred feet or so to reach the top. He did the distance in about twenty seconds.
When his fingers crawled over the edge, they touched sand. He got one elbow, then the next up over the edge and crawled onto the gritty surface. He lay flat on his aching back, utterly exhausted. Rockson stared up at the brilliant crescent moon and the fields of crystal stars. The red star Regulus was high up in the west, which, at this time of year, made it about midnight. A glance at the Big Dipper, which cruised upside down in the nor
th, confirmed the time-guess.
Within minutes Rockson’s remarkable mutant ability to recover from exertion worked its wonders. His breaths came in more regular and less sharp intakes, and he began to feel the bitter cold. Though he wanted to stand up and get moving, to try to get warm, he did not move. He just listened. For there could be spiders or—other things—up here, too. He watched random meteors from time to time flit cross the strewn-diamond starfields. Now and then a pulse of deadly radioactive energy—the leftovers of a war that had happened over a hundred years ago—briefly created a smoky, twisting, purple curtain in the ionosphere. When he was quite sure nothing lurked nearby, Rock decided he HAD TO move. He was freezing.
The minute he tried to get up, he started to hurt. Every muscle in his body had, evidently, been strained to the utmost by his mad climb to safety. Rockson took a deep breath and stood up anyway, countering the pain with his willpower, which was immense. His ankles throbbed, his leg tendons felt like rusted bridge cables. But he could walk, that was the important thing. As for the pain . . . maybe something could be done about it.
He searched in his beltpack for the antiswelling pills and found the little blue tablets. He palmed two of them, brought them up to his mouth, and swallowed them with a gulp. He barely got them down. After all, he was bone dry.
“Have to get water.” His voice sounded cracked and parched. He jumped up and down, trying to keep numbness away. As the pains in his limbs eased, Rockson, sighting up the stars, turned and headed northeast.
After an hour of steady plodding on flat surface, he came upon a spectacular rock formation. Glowing in the low moon’s yellow light was a sand- and wind-carved arch of stone. It was about a hundred feet high and twice as wide. This, he thought, had to be the so-called Utah Rainbow, clearly delineated upon his map. The moon was bright enough for his mismatched blue mutant-eyes to verify that fact.
