Doomsday Warrior 06 - American Rebellion

by Ryder Stacy

  “It’s better than I’d hoped. The cable was neatly severed—only about six inches of it has been destroyed. The boulder is pointed at the bottom, one edge resting right in a small hole. If we could push it straight out, I think we’ll be all right.” Archer got around toward the back of the almost egg-shaped 7-foot high boulder while Rock and Rogers went to each side.

  “One, two, three,” Rock yelled out and they all heaved with every bit of their strength. The boulder seemed to budge perhaps a half an inch and then settled back. They tried again, breathing deeply and then on three, exhaling and pushing to their limit.

  Rogers’ hand slipped suddenly on the outer edge and he flew forward toward the bubbling hell pit. Rockson saw the motion and in a flash let go of the immense piece of granite and swung his arm out trying to grab the falling technician. Somehow Rogers’ hand swung out as he went past and made contact with Rockson’s fingers. He hung on the very edge of the precipice, his body hanging out over the fires below held only by three fingers of the Doomsday Warrior’s outstretched right hand. But the workglove he wore was meant to be used as a heat shield and protection for the skin below—not as a supporter of 200 pounds plus of weight. Slowly, before both men’s horrified eyes, the seams in the wrist part of the glove began giving way inch by nylon-stitched inch. Then it parted—parted the division between life and death. The glove ripped free of Rogers’ hand and he fell backward into the murderous smoke and steam.

  “Jesus God,” Rock muttered inside his mask as he watched the head technician disappear down into the burning depths. He couldn’t even hear the screams above the tornado-like roar. “What a fucking way to go,” he spat out in disgust. The image of Rogers splashing into the white hot lava sea below came into his head and he quickly pushed it away. There were a lot better ways a man could die.

  “Arrrcheer feeeel siiick,” the Freefigher giant groaned out to Rockson as he turned back. It was too hot, too damned hot. They’d be dead in minutes. He looked up at Archer who towered above his own 6' 3" frame and spoke with slow firm words.

  “We’ve got to do this, Archer. You understand what I’m saying. You and me—right now—we’ve got to push this fucker off or it’s over. Just think of that old cow you used to carry around from meadow to meadow so it could graze, that you told me about.”

  “Aarrrchheer uuunderrrsttannd, Roockson. Bouulder deead.” The two Freefighters got around the immense rock and put their legs up against it, both of them getting from behind.

  “One, two, three . . .” They both kicked out, slamming into their stone adversary with everything they had. It was like trying to push a mountain, as the thing barely seemed to move. Their muscles tightened into hard balls within their legs, their faces grew redder and redder as if about to burst. But slowly, somehow, impossibly, the boulder began to grudgingly move a fraction of an inch at a time.

  “Push, push,” Rockson screamed out, knowing they had only one shot to give it their all. Archer reached down into his guts, down into his mountain-man heritage where one is on one’s own and only the toughest of the tough survived. With a howl of animal pain he summoned up everything within him and shot it out against the boulder. As if now wanting to itself fall into the pit, the huge weight came to an upright position and hovered like a perfectly balanced sculpture. Rockson gave it his shot too, his veins popping out on his thighs and calves like worms burrowing beneath the skin. But it was enough—just enough. The boulder leaned over, slowly at first, and then with increasing speed toward the steam clouds. It fell from the ledge and plummeted down end over end to join its laval relatives below.

  Rock and Archer had to fall on their asses and hold on for dear life on the ledge so as not to go over themselves. Then they rose and Rock checked the cable. It didn’t appear to have been further damaged.

  “Pull it up,” Rock screamed up to the men above, waving his arms in an upward motion so they’d understand. Like a snake rising into a tree, the long cable ascended the pock-marked volcanic wall.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here, pal,” Rock yelled out to Archer who nodded vigorously. They made their way back up the ladder, glad to be back on solid footing. The 300 degrees on the cavern floor seemed like a fall breeze compared to being inside the thing. The four remaining technicians quickly placed the two ends of the split cable together and began rewiring.

  “How’s it look?” Rock asked, leaning over.

  “About an hour,” Jenkins, the assistant electrical chief said, making the thumbs up. “Century City will have power by tonight.”

  Twenty

  Explosions! All around Rockson. The walls suddenly caved in in a screaming avalanche of boulders and rocks. He dove forward with a powerful kick and hit the dirt in the large cave ahead, rolling over and over on his side. He came up in a half-crouch and looked back. The entire tunnel for a distance of about thirty feet had been sealed in by the collapse. The men—they could all be dead. He rose, and walked slowly forward, making sure that no more of the sky was about to fall down. He came up to the wedge of rocks covered with a curtain of dust that completely filled the tunnel he had just been leading his men through.

  “Anyone there?” Rockson yelled at the top of his lungs. Nothing. He yelled again. “Anyone there? Archer? Jenkins?”

  Suddenly, he heard a far-off muffled sound. He couldn’t tell what it was, but something. Something human. He began digging with his bare hands, ripping away at the rock wall and throwing debris to the side. It was insane, he knew. It would take days to clear this. But he had no choice. They could be dying right now. He ripped away at the fallen rocks, some of them as big as his chest. His hands quickly turned bloody, his chest scraped and raw as he pushed with every bit of strength he possessed, ready to kill himself like an old workhorse in the process of doing what he had to.

  “Rockson!” Rockson’s ears perked up, as he heaved two pineapple-sized chunks of granite off to the side.

  “Rockson,” again, a voice coming from behind him. But there was no one else with them, unless more C.C. techs had come. He turned and looked back into the large cavern that opened from out of the tunnel. It was dark, hard to see, lit only by an occasional flickering bulb strung up along the wall. He saw a shadowly shape jump suddenly down from an outcropping about 15 feet up on a far wall and start toward him.

  “Who the hell is that?” Rock yelled out, growing apprehensive. He reached for his shotgun pistol.

  “Your doom, Ted Rockson,” the voice said back with icy venom dripping like death itself from those two words. A shiver ran down Rockson’s back. This whole thing had been planned—the cave in, but by whom? KGB? Nazis?

  He saw the figure emerge from out of the shadows into a streak of hot light. A man, all in black, a Ninja with a mask covering his face. Rockson knew the style instantly just from the ankle to neck costume and the short sword at the side. He had spent years studying the martial arts. Not just application but history and lineage as well. The man looked like the genuine article. He walked forward with a flowing, effortless motion, as he carefully placed each foot ahead of the next, as if stepping on rice paper.

  “Look pal, do me a favor,” Rock said, lifting his shotpistol up to waist level. “You can’t even imagine what I’ve been through lately. Wars, amnesia, slavery, swamp monsters. Please. Please do me a favor. Just go home to whoever your master is, Killov or Vassily or the Führer himself. But I’m really not in the mood for fighting.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Rockson,” the voice laughed. “You know you must die—right now. And I will do it.”

  “Have it your way,” the Doomsday Warrior said with a slight twitch of his lower lip, as he pulled the trigger on the shotpistol. The huge gun exploded with a dinosaur-like roar and the x-shaped teflon coated shot roared toward the ninja like an express train looking to crash into flesh. But just as suddenly, where the ninja had stood was only a puff of purple smoke and when it cleared he was gone. Rockson edged back to the sheer rock wall behind him, crouching down, h
is eyes scanning the large natural cavern back and forth like a hawk. His mind ran through every bit of information he could remember about ninja. How they relied on stealth, smoke, and hidden weaponry to accomplish their ends. He and Chen had worked on countering a number of ninja attack styles, but that had been play. This guy was out to kill him.

  Suddenly he remembered—their main attack strategy was to come from the rear, flank their opponent and then . . . Rockson looked up—sheer granite nearly fifty feet in the air with virtually no hand or footholds. He was safe there. Where the hell was the bastard?

  Rock saw a sudden glint of something nearly 200 feet across the cave floor and fired with his shotpistol set on tight pattern. But the hot lead just slammed into the wall sending out a veil of dust. The guy was good—real good.

  The Doomsday Warrior quickly stripped off the white-thermal protection suit. It was both a blinding bullseye for anyone after him and cumbersome as hell. In his loose civvies his arms and legs were completely free. Now he was ready. Rock chose to stay right where he was—let him come after me, that’s what he’s getting paid for. But even with his super normal powers of perception he just didn’t pick up anything. Not a sound, not a blur of movement. Rock searched his mind, trying to remember everything he could about the secret society of killers that had existed for centuries—perhaps the greatest assassins the earth had ever known.

  “They thrive on drama,” Chen had told him. “Each one trying to create a new, more incredible method of attack, each trying to outdo the other. They kill with a flourish, Rock, getting their pleasure from completely breaching their opponent’s defense as if they were paper, humiliating them, before the death blow.”

  The Doomsday Warrior looked everywhere, tried to use his mutant ESP to feel the man. He sensed his presence but it almost seemed diffuse, the assassin might himself have extra-sensory perceptions and be sending out a psychic smoke screen. Where the hell was he? Tunneling underneath? Impossible! Nothing could go through granite. Not even a laser digger. Above?

  He looked up and saw hurtling down dark lightning bolts—two spears, their steel shafts heading straight for his skull. Rockson dove forward in a flash, landing hard on the uneven sharp-edged floor of the cavern as the two shafts ripped into the stone where he had been standing, sending out a shower of yellow sparks. Then they fell harmlessly over on their sides, unbloodied. Rock lifted his shotpistol straight up and fired into the darkness. Again and again, he pumped away six shots, spaced a foot apart, directly from where the spears had descended. On the fourth shot he heard a groan and then a body appeared out of the darkness, plummeting down just yards from him, where it splattered into a bloody puddle on the cave floor. The ninja—dead as a proverbial doornail, huge rubber suction cups attached to his elbows and knees. He had traversed the very upper regions of the cavern. Rock looked back up for a second. There . . . he must have gone just where the wall meets the ceiling. That narrow corridor of utter blackness where the light of the bulbs didn’t penetrate. All for naught, Rockson thought as he stood up. The ninja’s stark black uniform was now drenched with blood, turning it a sticky scarlet. There were no magic tricks that were going to pull him out of this one.

  “Rockson!” A voice called from out of the narrow tunnels that led out from the cavern into different sections of the subterranean labyrinth that ran beneath Carson and Ice Mountain. The voice yelled out again, this time angrily. “Rockson! Turn and look at your destroyer.”

  “Oh no, not again,” the Doomsday Warrior said with a weary look in his eye. He saw the approaching assassin, moving quickly toward him across the cavern floor.

  “You guys don’t give up, do you? They must pay you a fortune in overtime.”

  “Your attempts at humor, Mr. Ted Rockson, are as feeble as your attempts at fighting me will be. I am Tamatsu the Swordsman. I am the best.”

  The assassin was not a large man, slim with long arms. He wore a dark blue hakama, Japanese-style skirt that flowed around his waist, covering his legs. At his side, its scabbard resting in the red sash that criss-crossed his chest and waist, was a samurai sword.

  He pulled it out with a lightning draw and continued quickly forward. The tempered steel blade, hand pounded into shape by master craftsmen in the hills of Japan, glistened with slivers of light from the bulbs. Rock could see that it was as sharp as a razor blade as it turned sideways for a second and almost disappeared from view. And by the way the assassin was swinging the thing around, Rock knew he was good.

  There must be a whole goddamned squad of them after me, the Doomsday Warrior thought as he slammed a new clip of shells into his pistol. In the past he had accepted his designation as “Most Wanted Man in America” with humor and pride. But now, as he stepped forward to face as formidable an opponent as he had ever seen, the responsibilities of the office seemed a little tiresome.

  Tamatsu suddenly rushed forward screaming “Kaiii!” as he whipped the blurring blade at Rockson’s skull. Rock fired the twelve-gauge shotpistol, which sent out its spray of hot death. But somehow the swordsman evaded it, stepping just to the side as he came in swinging, and attacked Rock from a slight angle. The sword flashed down like a bolt of white lightning toward Rockson’s chest. The Doomsday Warrior spun on a dime, using a quick jerk of his hips to pull him around in less than a hundredth of a second. The sword flew past him, but caught the very tip of the pistol, sending it flying from his hands.

  But the Doomsday Warrior was an expert swordsman himself and had studied not just attack but defensive responses to the sword, in a system called Aikido, in which Chen was a master. Aikido was a soft system, which enabled the user of it to blend in with his opponent’s motions, in a perfect harmony of movement. Against the slashing sword of Tamatsu, Rock had no other option open to him. To go face to face against the perfect curved blade of that lethal weapon was to invite annihilation. He would have to go with the attack.

  Tamatsu grinned darkly as Rockson jumped back several yards and stood facing him, his hands held straight up in front of him, firm yet relaxed.

  “Others have tried, but I, Tamatsu, will succeed,” the cocky Japanese said as he slowly placed one foot forward at a time, the ankle always turned to the outside for instant footing and lightning strikes. Rockson duplicated his advance, moving the corresponding foot back as Tamatsu advanced, keeping exactly the same space between them. He would make the swordsman attack off balance, draw him forward, and then make his move. He had to cut through the training of the man, force him to make the slightest error.

  “Yes Tamatsu, I have heard of you.” Rockson said as he kept his body just out of reach of the poised sword held above Tamatsu’s face, the point aiming down at the cavern floor at a 45-degree angle. With a twist of his hip, Rockson knew, Tamatsu could whip that sword around and down at hundreds of miles an hour.

  The assassin’s face brightened. “Ah, so my reputation is worldwide. I am known even in the U.S.S.A.”

  “Yeah,” Rock answered, readying himself for what he hoped would be the response to his next words, “known for having killed your mother and father, raping female goats and urinating on the graves of Tarihawa and Ukidai—your sword style’s founders.”

  The assassin’s face grew hard as stone as his entire body seemed to freeze in a state of apoplexy. Then he let out a roar that shook Rockson’s eardrums and leaped forward swinging the sword around in a steel wind of death. No man on earth could have avoided that speeding blade, but Rockson had gambled on its coming exactly at that angle and spun around, body pulled low to the ground, and to the side of Tamatsu. The sword flew past Rock’s head about a quarter inch above, the breeze from the barely missing blow ruffling his dirty black hair, the white streak in the middle starting to fully grow out once again.

  There couldn’t be a second chance. Rockson, still crouched down, facing Tamatsu’s back, pulled at the man’s right ankle and slammed the blade of his hand into the nerve behind the knee. Tamatsu crumbled to the cave floor as if an electric jol
t had gone through his leg. He slammed down hard, the sword hand cracking against the floor, sending the sword flying off along the pointed rocks in a hail of spitting sparks. The swordsman pulled his leg with a snap, freeing himself from Rockson’s grasp and he jumped to his feet, pulling a second, smaller blade, about a foot long, from inside his blue top. They circled each other, the swordsman’s face suddenly less confident, staring at Rockson in disbelief.

  “You de-sworded me,” he said with both fear and respect. “No man has done that before.”

  “No man will again,” Rockson said dryly as he waited for the attack. Tamatsu rushed in, ripping the knife around in a figure eight pattern, slicing at every part of Rockson’s body. The Doomsday Warrior feinted to the right and as Tamatsu followed, he jumped back to the left, throwing a handful of rock and dust he had gathered in his palm seconds before when lying on the cave floor. The cloud of particles flew into the ninja’s eyes, instantly blinding him. Rockson shot in for the kill, slamming his knee up into the man’s groin and lifting him off the ground. The assassin screamed out as his testicles burst apart into a bloody sticky soup and dribbled down his legs. But the screaming didn’t last for long. As the assassin came down, Rockson ripped his elbow into the man’s throat, smashing the larynx, the windpipe and arteries into a fused mass of blood and twisted bone. Tamatsu threw his hand around his throat and then sank slowly to the ground, jerking and twisting wildly, spitting up fountains of bright red blood through his pale lips. Then he was still.

  Rock stared down at the motionless form, the hands still clasped around the ripped throat as if he had strangled himself. The eyes were wide open, staring up at the ceiling, and through it into realms only the dead can enter—beyond, beyond, beyond. He had the warrior’s face and had been a brave fighter. But why did all these goddamned fighters have to test themselves on him?