by Ryder Stacy
“Faster!” Killov screamed through the intercom to his driver. But now his grimace of defeat and fear had turned to a smile of contempt. Let them play back there, Killov thought. Soon they will all be bubbling charcoal. He would loose four hundred men—but he would get Rockson and destroy those damn super weapons. The trade was worth it. He would have sacrificed a million men at that moment to see Rockson burned to cinders. “Faster!” Killov screamed again as the convoy of white-faced KGB men sped, wheels spinning on the dirt road to the waiting private jet. Behind them, the black beams continued to slice apart what little remained of Pavlov City that wasn’t yet burning.
Eighteen
Within an hour Rock and his small army of American workers had fought their way to the edge of the city. With the particle beam at his command the Reds fell like flies. Detroit, Chen, and Archer kept up the attack from the roof and arranged to rendezvous with Rockson at a small hill just to the north of the city. Rock led the now seven hundred man force up the steep slope of the first of a series of hills that surrounded the open plain on which Pavlov City had been built. The men stopped at the top and turned to look at the damage that had been wrought. Pavlov City had been reduced to smoking rubble. Everywhere were fires roaring high into the sky, billowing clouds of thick smoke from the burning wooden barracks. From time to time another store of munitions would go up with explosive fury, shaking the ground around them. The men cheered and cheered. Never had they felt such emotions. Emotions of winning, or conquering, of destroying the Reds. They turned to Rockson with worship in their eyes. The Rockson had saved them. Everything they had ever dreamed about the mythical freefighter was true. Rock gathered them around him and quieted them down. With Kim at his side and Perkins and McCaughlin standing proudly in back Rock addressed them.
“Fellow Americans, you are now freefighters. You have earned the right to call yourselves such by your courage and heroism under fire. I have been in many battles—this was your first. I remember the fear I felt the first time. You faced death in the eye and have walked out the other side. I bow to you all.” Rockson lowered his head in a gesture of respect, one of the few times in his life he had ever lowered his eyes to another.
“What now Rockson? Where will you take us?” one of the leaders of the workers spoke out, his arm wrapped with a bandage made from a shirt, blood seeping through.
“Now I take you nowhere,” Rockson said. “You are all free men now. You can no longer return to the fortress cities of the Reds. For better or worse you are criminals in their eyes. You must survive. Make your way to the different Free Cities. Start your own. You are all tough men—you showed that down there.” He pointed down to the maelstrom of smoke and fire that burned ever brighter below. “And you have helped strike a vital blow against the Russians—one that they won’t soon recover from. This Pavlov City was going to turn you and tens of thousands like you into mindless zombies to do the Reds’ dirty work. That city is gone and I feel sure they won’t try again. You have struck a blow for America. Now you must survive. You have weapons. Go into the mountains, into the plains. Build shelters for yourselves. Learn to live in the land that is yours—America—she will help you. Give you the food and water that you need to survive. She will not let you down for you are her children. And you fight to free her.”
Every man was silent as they listened to words the likes of which they had never heard before. Words that stirred their hearts, moved their very souls. For they were men. They had proved it in blood.
“Go now,” Rock said, pointing to the four corners of the horizon. “It is a harsh world out there but it is your world—our world. We must make of it what we can. Good luck and God be with you.”
The workers drew strength from Rockson’s words. They broke up into small groups of thirty to fifty men each, divided up their weapons and headed off under the darkening sky, filled to the very clouds with the towering funnels of smoke from the doomed city.
Rock watched them go. Many would die but some would live. And their children would live to see their land free once again. This he knew, deep in his heart. At last he turned to Kim, Perkins, and McCaughlin. “Come on, we’ve got to hitch a ride with Detroit and the others. They’re supposed to meet us over there.” He pointed to a steep hill about a mile away. The four of them headed off along the rocky slopes, turning their heads away from the flaming city in an attempt to avoid breathing in the acrid smoke. They had scarcely gone a hundred yards when Rock heard a sound overhead. A sound he had heard before.
“We’ve got to run—run directly away from the city, as fast as you can,” he screamed out to Kim, Perkins, and McCaughlin.
“What’s wrong, Rock?” the big Scotsman asked running along side Rockson who took the lead.
“I think our friend Killov has decided to get rid of us by taking out the whole damned city. Atomics—I’m sure of it—the insane bastard is going to kill everyone in the whole area—even his own troops to get us. Run like you’ve never run before.”
They tore over the top of the hill and headed down the opposite slope. Rock stopped for a moment just before heading down to see if he could get a shot with the particle beam which he carried slung over his shoulder. But though he could hear the whine of the jet engine, the smoke and low purple and brown clouds camouflaged the bomber. The three freefighters and Kim ran and slid and rolled down the rock-strewn side of the mountain. If they could just get enough distance and another large hill between them and the detonation—they might—just might survive.
They had just reached the bottom and were heading into a long swampy marshland with ten foot high reeds when the light of an atomic bomb flashed, lighting up the hills and plains for miles with an incandescent glow.
“Hit the dirt,” Rock screamed, throwing Kim down and diving on top of her. The roar of a twenty kiloton neutron bomb hit their ears, literally shaking the ground as if it were being grabbed by the hands of hell. Then the winds and heat came soaring over the top of the nine hundred foot hill just behind them. They could feel the energy of the blast but were shielded from the brunt of it as well as the radiation by the solid rock that stood between them and the slowly rising mushroom cloud that dwarfed all the other fires and funnels of smoke. Rock prayed silently that Detroit, Chen, Archer and the freed workers had had enough time to get behind some sort of cover. Any man who was exposed to the direct force of the blast for at least three to four miles would be fried meat.
They waited a minute, allowing the shock waves to totally die out, and began to rise. Another blast filled the sky, this time just below the rise of the hill behind them. Killov wanted to make sure that nothing survived—not a blade of grass let alone a single human. This time the blast knocked them all to the ground, and into unconsciousness. While they lay in merciful darkness in the high reeds, a second mushroom cloud joined the first. Every bit of living matter that the heat and the radiation made contact with melted into dripping black sludge. Whatever had been alive within range of the blast was now dead and returned to the dust from which it had risen.
They awoke hours later, groaning, mouths dry as parched sand. Rock was the first to totally come to. He sat up trying to remember just what the hell had happened. The mushroom clouds still hung high in the sky. The dark tornadolike chimneys of gray and black smoke stared down as if surveying the total destruction they had caused. Rock leaned over quickly to check Kim. She seemed all right, no burns on her skin. The same for Perkins and McCaughlin. God only knew if they’d received lethal doses of radiation. The hill had afforded them protection from the direct force of the neutron radiation but . . . But at least they were alive. The future would determine the extent of their injuries. Still, they were all freefighting Americans who had lived their lives out in the medium and high rad zones of America. If anyone would make it—they would.
Rock helped the others to their feet. Perkins seemed the most out of it from the blast. He kept licking his lips and twitching. His eyes seemed swollen and red. He had glanced
at the second explosion without thinking and though his retinas hadn’t been burned—if they had he would be blind—he had obviously sustained at least immediate injury. Rock helped him wash out the pupils with water from his canteen and as soon as possible they started off in the orange glow.
“We’ve got to get away from this area,” Rock said. “The radiation will linger for days and fallout from the debris picked up by the blast will start coming down within hours. We’ll head straight south away from the city before we start west again.”
They headed out through the reeds of the swamp, moving slowly at first, as they all felt somewhat dizzy from the blast, but within a few minutes they seemed to pick up a good pace. They reached the next set of hills at the other end of the mile long swamp and climbed the easy slope. They were just passing the summit, a long flat meadow with the flowers burned to a crisp from the blasts, when Kim screamed out.
“Oh God, Rock, Rock.” She stood trembling, unable to move as Rockson ran back about twenty yards to her. She pointed down with one hand, holding the other over her mouth. Five bodies, or what were barely recognizable as bodies, lay on the ground, frozen in time and space. Their flesh had turned to charcoal, black as midnight, their hands and arms held up bent at odd angles. But their faces were the true horror. Eyes burned away so that just black holes stared out, lips thin pieces of dark leather with the teeth still shiny, grinning in their death screams. Five of the freed workers, making their way to a new freedom, caught at the top of the hill when the bombs went off. They hadn’t had time to run even a single step. Cut down by the heat of the first bomb, they looked like statues made of black dust, sculpted by death, bound for hell.
Rock put his arms around Kim and pulled her away. She seemed transfixed, her eyes terrified by the vision yet unable to look away. “Don’t dwell on it, baby,” Rock said. “Death is part of our world, but don’t be fascinated by it.” She broke down and cried. She had been trying to hold back the tears to show him, the man she loved, that she was strong, tough, worthy of being his woman. But the grotesque black corpses were the last straw. Her heart couldn’t take anymore and she burst into tears, her chest heaving spasmodically.
“Cry Kim, cry.” Rock said softly. “It’s good. Tears heal. Go ahead baby, let it out.” The party of four walked on as Rock protectively kept his arms around the shaken young woman who let herself go, tears falling down her cheeks and onto her young breasts; rain—the rain of the body, which lets the spirit release its pain.
Nineteen
They walked for days, barely able to stand at times, hiding in the woods and caves from time to time as Red drones flew overhead. Killov must have been sending them out by the droves, searching for any possible survivors from his atomic massacre of Pavlov City. Well, at least the damned brainwashing city was done for good, Rockson thought grimly to himself. Zhabnov’s plans for a zombie army would die in the radioactive ashes along with untold thousands of men, Russian and American. Kim and the two freefighters were holding up well, though Perkins’s eyes still seemed to be giving him trouble. They had turned a pinkish color and he constantly had to drip water on them to keep them from drying out. They had to get back to Century City and fast. They all needed medical treatment.
On the third day they began heading west as Rockson figured they had come far enough south to avoid the major search-and-destroy effort of the Reds. He had never been through this stretch of land, and the plant life grew increasingly peculiar with fields of large cactuslike growths, bright yellow and nearly twenty feet high. The largest of them had bright red fruits which Rock carefully tried and found to his surprise that they were delicious. They ate a little of the fruit and waited a few hours to see if any deleterious effects occurred. None! Hungry as dogs they pulled down dozens of the grapefruit-sized fruits and ate until they were stuffed. The first good meal they had had in nearly five days.
Feeling somewhat better they headed off into the gathering sunset, a panorama of rippling green and purple waves as the radioactive layers high in the earth’s atmosphere danced under the stars. After several hours a kind of pink fog began rolling in and they moved more carefully as the patches of moisture came up to their knees then their waists. Suddenly in the mist ahead amber lights appeared. Rock stopped with the others just behind him. Was it some sort of optical illusion—fifty or so dancing red lights floating just above the ground, perhaps a mile ahead in the deep blueness of the falling night. They listened. Nothing but the wind whistling softly through the leaves. Then a dim roar—engines—and something else. Human cries, eerie warlike chants in fast singsong rhythms. The dancing, bobbing lights became brighter, closer. The engines’ roar grew until it sounded like a swarm of mega-bees angry at having their hive disturbed.
Rock and his three companions got behind a fallen abaoba tree which was downed. Half rotted and shorn of its red bark the thirty foot tree gave them cover. Rock pulled the particle beam rifle from his shoulder and rested it on the tree which stood about shoulder height. Perkins and McCaughlin both unslung their Liberators and took off the safeties. Kim still had the Russian officer’s machine pistol that Rock had given her back in Pavlov City and she took it from the jacket pocket of the dead Red’s clothing she was wearing. Whatever it was was heading right their way. They could see as the source of the sound came out of the fog that the lights were from some fifty or so motorcycles. Motorcycles—Rock had seen one restored once in the small but growing Century City museum. But here—fifty of them working and ridden by—my God, Indians—feathered, painted Indians screaming war chants, feathers flying in bands around their foreheads. They waved ancient long barreled rifles with one arm while they steered with the other.
“They know we’re here,” Rock said to the others. “Shoot if they get past that boulder field, but into the dirt in front of them. No use killing unless we have to.”
“Ay,” McCaughlin whispered nervously, getting a bead on the lead cycle with his Liberator scope. “I’ve not seen the likes of that ever.”
The whoops and war cries continued to grow in volume as the angry unmuffled cycles came forward at about forty miles an hour in a V-formation. At the lead of the pack, riding an immense bike with a Plexiglas visor and coonskins tied to the handle bars, a blue-painted savage-looking man, with a headdress of brilliantly colored feathers and three green stripes of paint down each cheek, raised his right hand in an obvious motion to slow down. Behind him on the other roaring cycles were men dressed in animal skins, feathers, and strips of brightly colored plastic material. All had their faces and exposed flesh on their arms and legs garishly decorated with every color and geometric design imaginable: squares, pyramids, trapezoids . . . The riders carried an assortment of strange weapons over their shoulders, from antique rifles with huge muzzles to bows and quivers of arrows. Their armaments looked as if they had been taken from some museum of past Americana. The lead ten cycles had mounted short-barreled machine guns tied down between the handlebars. Behind the drivers of many of the motorcycles equally strangely dressed women sat on a second seat, laughing and screaming to one another obscenely. This apocalyptic post-war parade headed directly toward the freefighters hidden behind their fallen tree.
“Should we scare ’em a bit?” Perkins asked Rockson, his lips dry, his tongue licking across them every few seconds.
“No, not yet,” Rock said, keeping his finger at the ready on the particle beam set at lowest intensity. “They’re slowing a bit. Maybe.” The band of warrior Indians slowed to a full stop about a hundred feet away. The leader dismounted, swinging his headdress of rainbow feathers over the seat behind him. It fell to his ankles behind him, rippling with subtle shades and movements of nearly two thousand feathers that made up the elaborate symbol of ultimate leadership. The rest of the motorcycle tribe sat on their leather seats, revving their engines with elephantine screams of anger.
The leader walked forward another thirty feet toward Rock and his team. They could see his full regalia now: a bearskin vest t
o the waist, a necklace of carnivore teeth falling in three rows down around his neck, long loincloth made of some dark hide, and high red plastic boots nearly to the knee. Around his waist the Indian leader wore a long knife on one hip and an old U.S. Army issue .45 automatic pistol on the other. The freefighters watched the approaching apparition with their jaws dropped half open. They had all, in their time, seen some strange sights but this may well have been the strangest. The Indian cupped his hands to his purple-painted lips and yelled out.
“I know you cats are up the ol’ tree—hey man—c’mon down—we dig you!”
“What’s that mean?” Rock asked Perkins, who was one of Century City’s archaeologists and linguists as well as part of the Rock Squad.
“Sounds like he wants to be friends. But Rock, I don’t trust him. This peculiarly evolved culture is obviously warlike—raiders, pirates—”
“I’m going out there,” Rock said. “Do you think they’ll recognize a white flag?”
“It’s a pretty universal symbol here in America, even among isolated groups. Rock, let me come with you—I can speak to them—translate.”
The Indian leader shouted out again. “Hey man, like cool out. You know we ain’t cruising for a bruising. You dig?”
“What the hell is he talking?” Rock asked Perkins. “It sounds like English but—”
“I think it’s a mixture of several things, Rock. American slang plus beatnik jive circa 1950s. Quite interesting, really,” Perkins said, reaching for small notepad he always carried with him to jot down observations of primitive peoples.
“Beatnik?” Rock asked.
“Yes, Rock. They were . . . It’s too complicated. I’ll tell you later.” The two freefighters used a handkerchief of McCaughlin’s to make a little white flag at the end of a small branch. They stepped from behind the tree, waving the symbol of peace, as a school of fruit bats fluttered out of the branches above them and off into the pink-mooned sky, round as a silver dollar.
