by Ryder Stacy
It was the kind of storm that didn’t even exist before the nuke war. The all-out atomic holocaust had set the earth wobbling on its axis, reversing the magnetic poles and beginning a “nuclear winter” which lasted for years over much of the Northern hemisphere. Nearly eighty percent of the earth’s population was dead in three years. Then a miraculous cleansing action began to take place—the cosmic rays, the unfiltered solar rays, began to change the radioactive molecules, reducing their half-lives—the time it took for the deadly rads to become half as virulent. Slowly, ever so slowly, the forces of nature began to reassert themselves. But there would never be an earth that the people of the 1980s would recognize as home. Now it was a world where non-mutant men, except in the lowest elevations, were forced to don oxygen masks when walking or exerting the slightest effort. It was a world with a flashing aurora-filled purple sky at night and green strontium clouds floating like omnipresent symbols of death high in the daytime sky. And the mega-storms—with their winds of hundreds of miles per hour, hurling rocks the size of baseballs through the air, twisters spawned by the hundreds, ripping up all that stood in their path, rains of putrescent skin-dissolving acids, and spiral-shaped black snowflakes of super-hard ice that could tear and rip an unprotected person to shreds.
Or a storm like the one Gunter and his Wolfpack were trying to fight their way through now, crawling along bent over as if they were savage no-men instead of proud soldiers of the master race. Nature humbles even the mightiest, turning them, when it wishes, into mere ants, blown like so much dust in the wind. Gunter was covered head to toe, as were all the Wolfpack in form-fitting plastisynth armored suits with an oxygen mask and radiation filtration system shaped somewhat like the astronaut helmets of old. He had just the slightest opening between his gloves and the snow-resistant suit when one of the black spiral snowflakes whipped into his wrist at 150 mph. Blood poured out, soaking the bottom of the glove. He could hear the agonized groans and screams of his men who had not secured their face shield properly. They had all been warned and briefed over and over about the necessity for complete cover—but men will be men, and their laziness in America 2089 A.D. meant death. A sudden gust of super-wind, over 200 mph, tore off the unsecured helmets, ripping them from nearly a dozen of the Wolfpack’s heads. The razor-sharp spikes of black flakes slammed into their faces like knives, cutting, slicing through cheeks, eyeballs and throats. Men threw their hands over their faces, as blood and flesh poured out like mush and was caught by the screaming winds, sending out sprays of red that quickly dissipated in the blizzard.
Gunter looked around him in horror. They hadn’t even encountered the enemy and already they were losing men every few yards, bodies falling to the black-covered ground, twitching as the ebbing heat of their dying bodies melted little ready-made graves for them. Nature was more than happy to oblige. “Your masks,” he screamed out over the throat mike in his helmet, capable of sending out a signal up to a half mile. “Make sure your masks are properly sealed.” They were barely gaining ground now, the men clutching arms in long lines to avoid being blown away, right off the plateau to the rocks below. Surely the gods—Freya and Thor—must do something to stop this storm, Gunter thought. Or they would all perish. The undefeatable powers of the super race reduced to pitiful midgets against the raw forces of the American hinterlands. Was this their fate? To die here without ever sighting a single rebel?
He pressed the telecommunications button on the side of his mask and radioed a report back to the launching camp at Dzersch. “What are the weather reports? We are being destroyed out here.”
“Clearing expected in two hours,” came the succinct reply. They would have to hold out. As they made their way up the treacherous slope, Gunter bumped into an ancient, nearly faded road marker—still standing long after the road that it demarcated had disappeared beneath trees and bushes. He scraped the black ice from it: MURCHISON PASS, elevation 13,200 feet. He stumbled on, trying to keep the lead, trying to make an example for his men. They must not stop, not for a second, or they would be buried under a shroud of the black death. He placed one foot after another, moving somehow through sheer will power.
He tried to think of other things, force his mind from the storm. He remembered back to his home, to Germany. The beautiful motherland with its history of conquering armies, of imperial wars, of uniforms and whipping flags and great Nazi banners awesome in their splendor and history. And he remembered the breeding farms—the factories for the creation of the master race. Gunter had never known his true mother. The woman he had come to call “mother” was in fact assigned to rear him after he had been created from carefully selected sperm and egg cells with the required Ayran genes—strength, intelligence, fearlessness and obedience—all the things that would ensure that another perfect Nazi soldier had been produced. Embryos were grown in long tanks of fluids; pink fluid, he seemed to remember. There was the haziest image of him staring up at curious doctors who manned the birth tanks, of being manipulated by machines, sent down chutes, sanitized when dirty, lifted by mechanical hands that fed and exercised his young body. He remembered the tapes, played over and over, twenty-four hours a day, that told him Hitler was the father of the German people, of all the test-tube babies—his glorious creator.
Later, he had been placed with a flesh-and-blood mother and father who had been just as cold and uncaring and mechanically systematic in his feeding and caring as the coldest steel. Only sometimes—sometimes at night, as a child, he would awaken from nightmares, the vision of a void so deep and black that he would tremble violently and cry. His foster father would hear the cries and come in enraged, screaming, “What is this crying? The master race of children do not cry, do not fear.” And with that he would tear off his thick black leather belt and beat Gunter into silence. Only once had this human father touched him, held him, caressed his head. Once, but never again.
No! Not to think of that, Gunter thought, suddenly coming back to the here and now—the black storm which continued with unassailing fury as if it wished to wipe every man of his Wolfpack off the face of the earth. The cold—it is the cold and being pinned down by this fierce storm, that and the thin bastard air of America, that is making me hallucinate. Be strong, do not allow emotions to enter. They are weakness itself. Cowards. The race—think only of the master race. His allegiances to the Führer, to the fatherland. If Hitler could see him now. He pulled back the tears that had been welling in his eyes, back and down into the darkest pits of his soul. Emotions are for weaklings, tears for women. His father had been right to beat him when he cried. This was the way of strength. His father had failed when he had succumbed to a child’s snivelings and held him.
The storm winds at last died down, gone as suddenly as they had come. The rad-snows faltered and stopped. Gunter took stock of their losses—the fools who had allowed their face masks to come off were all dead, lying strewn around the slope waiting only to be consumed by the scavengers that would soon emerge from their dank holes and hiding places beneath rocks and logs.
Eleven
The Glowers danced. They heard the music, the harmonies of the stars streaming down like the choruses of the gods. They danced to the music of the heavens, of the clouds, of the writhing molten lava and gravity waves deep within the earth. They moved in concentric circles, their blue bodies crackling with pulsating electricity. Without touching they moved just inches apart, their outstretched violet fingers sending out flames of pure energy to the next of their kind in the spinning circle, cutting through the air like swords of lightning. They danced out the rhythm of existence, the movement of the energy spectrums, the meshing of rays and bands of energy beyond human comprehension, moving with the eternal flow and ebb of the universe.
With their star-blue eyes they could see the waves of gravity of the earth rising up to grab all things, the mega pulses of the quasars shot a billion light years through black space. Through their phantom flesh they could feel the roaring, sucking multidimensional for
ces of the black holes strewn throughout the galaxies like endless black pits—from which nothing returned. They saw the stars, each distinct, different from the next—blue, yellow, white, gold, brown, green—burning with the atomic fires that fueled existence. They touched the meteors with their minds, flashing through the purple skies above, felt the comets winging their vast migration routes through the universe, cold balls of fire, in a neverending trek through infinity.
They felt the magnetic waves of Mother Earth beneath their glowing feet, reaching up with her billion billion arms of electro-magnetism, pulling everything to her bosom. They felt the tidal ripplings of the planet, the great surges of a trillion tons of water, arching, moving forward and backward in great walls of blue. They felt the dance of all things and they moved with it. Their bodies were impossible, grotesque, mad things, that were surely put together by a god who had gone insane. All of their internal organs had been placed on the outside of their blue flesh, pulsing, heart beating like a glistening ultraviolet living creature. Internal organs writhing, sending out their currents and electric blood to one another. Their brains moving slowly like slugs, twisting this way and that within the transparent brain cavities, sending out and receiving the telepathic multi-spectrum messages of their fellow beings.
The Glowers—human beings transformed and mutated into their present terrifying appearance a century before. Descendants of astronauts trapped aboard an orbiting space station who returned to earth after the great war. But the massive amounts of radiation they had absorbed in space from the detonation of twenty thousand nuclear warheads and the fact that they had to return through the highly radioactive parts of the upper atmosphere in their space shuttle made them give birth to children, creatures the likes of which the world had never seen. And their touch could kill. Unwittingly, the first of the new species had destroyed their own parents as they reached out for love.
But now they were together, all seventy nine of their kind. Creatures linked mentally and emotionally in a single telepathic consciousness. But ironically, though they were closer than any living thing had ever been, they could not even touch one another. For that touch meant instant death to anything with a cellular structure. Of all creatures, they were the closest and farthest apart from their own species—their blessing and their curse.
They danced for hours through the long black night, creating a rainbow of throbbing color in the center of their wasteland home in the Far West of the U.S. An energy bond was built between them that seemed to rise in intensity as their bodies grew ever brighter, until the very air was snapping in thunderous explosions from the sheer power of the electric streams whipping between them.
At last they stopped and stood motionless, their hands still extended. Their bodies’ internal organs pumped violently, sending blue blood coursing through their transparent flesh. They no longer ate human food. Anything they touched burned up and evaporated in puffs of radioactive smoke. They absorbed the energy around them, shooting down from the sun, the cosmic rays, the earth’s electromagnetic charge, these were their lifeblood fueling them, filling them with megawatts of power. In the total stillness their minds met, meshing firmly together like a vast mosaic that when assembled reveals but a single total picture.
“The battle is here. The test of the Armageddon has arrived.” They spoke as one—putting forth their thoughts into the single mind. “The Rockson has returned. He has survived his ordeal in Moscow and now he is back. The warrior yet lives. But even his strength is not equal to the evil that is about to descend. He is but a man. We must act.”
“But we have never acted,” a single voice spoke out from the many. “We have always watched, observed. We have been part of the harmony. We have never entered or affected the world of the humans.”
“But now is a new time,” one of the many answered. “The moment of megadeath is upon us. There may be no more humans. No more Glowers. No more Planet Earth. This cannot be.”
“Cannot be, cannot be,” Their mental voices whizzed in the air between their rock-still electric blue fleshed physicalities, their arms outstretched, almost touching, like a circle of nightmarish Christs.
“We must affect time/space,” one of the many spoke. “We must join the humans.”
“Join, join.” There were some voices that spoke no. But the unity was more powerful—was perfect. All was as one. They joined together in a mounting chorus of mental connection, until all were linked in perfect waves of agreement, their minds and emotions in absolute harmony.
“We’ve never destroyed before, except those who came to destroy us. But now—we must stop those who would send our planet into the black ether of frozen space. We must use our power—all of it, to turn the tide of history.” They pulsed together, brighter and brighter until their bodies seemed to fuse and there was but one blue ball of fire, spinning around them so that they appeared to be one solid entity of brilliant flame. Just as suddenly the glow died out and they bowed to one another.
They headed out to their three vehicles—sand ships—with towering energy collecting metallic sails atop the sand ships headed toward the east, soaring just inches above the shifting earth. They quickly reached their cruising speed of fifty miles an hour as they sped past immense black cactuses and wasteland animals that ran off at their approach. The Glowers stood on the bows of their craft staring straight ahead at the dark horizon. The sun began setting as they rushed forward, glowing like blue jewels in the night—to try to alter the destiny of mankind.
Nearly three hundred miles south and east of the Glowers’ advancing fleet of sand ships, a team of hybrid pack horses, their backs weighted down with heavy equipment, marched stubbornly across the rocky terrain. Small bald men, thin as rails and hardly bigger than children, coaxed the ’brids on.
“Stubborness equals will power times the desire to avoid work,” Ullman the Equator said, whipping at the backside of the hybrid in front of him. Nearly thirty of the humanoid creatures, not one over three feet high, worked and yelled at the pack animals. These were the Technicians—a race of super scientists, the descendants of the original missile crew that had manned the complex of silos in the Far West where the radiation had evolved their children into their present spindly form. The Doomsday Warrior had made contact with them nearly six months before and had brought back weapons, the black-beam-particle pistols that the race had created. Weapons possessed of extraordinary power, the silent black beams could destroy trucks, tanks, even planes from miles away with awesome results. A second team had been sent out from Century City to obtain more weapons and try and persuade some of the Technicians to return with them so that Dr. Shecter, Century City’s science chief, could learn how to produce the mysterious weapons himself. Erickson, the tall Swede, and Lang, a star-patterned mutant like Rockson himself, had been chosen to lead the second expeditionary force. After much hardship and struggle they had reached the underground silo home of the scientifically ingenious mini-men and the entire race had elected to return and help the American freefighters.
“We are tired of this stasis anyway,” Ullman had told them, returning with the vote. Now, they moved slowly across the vast no-man’s-land on the way back to Century City. Erickson and Lang, tough as nails with the same blue and violet eyes as the Doomsday Warrior, helped the Techs move the hybrids along. The thirty pack animals were piled high with black beam rifles and pistols—enough to arm nearly half the fighting force of Century City. And at the rear of the force, pulled by two teams of ten hybrids each, were two immense black beam cannons, almost ten feet long, black and smooth as glass, mounted on crude wood-wheeled wagons. Weapons capable of reaching to the moon, though thus far the enemies of mankind had not managed to gain that as a military base.
Lang rushed forward to Ullman who along with Qatar the Algebraic and Stryx the Quantum were leading the head of the hybrid team, pulling at the foul creatures’ reins, coaxing them, yelling at them, doing everything they could imagine to make the beasts of burden speed up.
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“How’s it going?” Lang asked Ullman, who had a black beam pistol perched precariously in the waist band of the plastisynth gray jumpsuit that he wore. The Technicians’ leader’s bald head shone like a light bulb in the shimmering heat of the noonday sun.
“It is progressively linear,” Ullman replied in the strange mathematical jargon that all the Techs spoke. “According to calculations we should reach your habitation within five or six time intervals.”
“You mean days,” Lang said, grinning as he always did when he spoke with the race of mini-scientists.
“Time periods of twenty four hour gestation, affirmative,” Ullman answered, licking his dry lips. “But this physicality needs more liquid sustenance as do all the beings.” He swept his hand over the huffing and puffing hybrids, short stocky creatures bred specifically for carrying heavy loads on their thick, wide backs.
“Yeah, they’re looking a little pooped,” Lang said, slapping one of the ’brids on the thigh, which snorted angrily and snapped its head around in a half-hearted attempt to bite him with its wide cavity-mottled molars.
“Water necessity equals weight of being times metabolism times the square root of temperature times .1222981,” Ullman said matter-of-factly. “My calculations lead to the conclusion that cessation of physicality will occur within 3.2 days, unless liquid sustenance is obtained.”
“We passed a water hole, an underground spring on the way here,” Lang said, trying to reassure the somewhat nervous Ullman. This was the first time that the race of Technicians had gone more than a few miles from their subterranean missile complex, with its machine shops and storehouses of particle beam weapons. They had believed, until Rockson had shown up, that they were the last beings left alive on earth and that the entire planet was as black and charred as the terrain around their base, which had taken nearly a direct hit from a twenty-megaton kiss, courtesy of the Soviet empire, a century earlier. Everything had been killed for miles around them, and even after a hundred years not a blade of grass had shown its green face through the hardened lavalike surface. Now they were out in the wilds of America, excited, brave and terrified.
