by Ryder Stacy
“Now I know you’re all quite skeptical about this,” Rock said, standing in the middle of the seated circle. “Well—so am I. But I know the damned stuff works, because I’ve experienced it myself. It’s subtle, very hard to use—but it does exist. The Glowers communicate only through telepathy and I’ll tell you when you hear all those minds joining, speaking at once, it’s something you’ll never forget. Scientists have known for centuries that animals, certain species, exhibit communication abilities that cannot be explained except through some sort of telepathic ability. Even ordinary homo sapiens receive dim thoughts from those around them. But we filter it all out—as adults anyway. It would be too frightening to know what the hell is going on in everyone’s mind—so the brain sabotages the potential for ESP by inhibiting these abilities. In us, the star-patterned mutants, who Dr. Shecter believes are the next evolutionary stage of mankind, the ESP capability is much greater. This accounts, I believe, for the so-called mutant’s luck that I’m sure we’ve all experienced. That uncanny ability we have to survive where others don’t—to somehow just know many times what is going to happen next.
“Now I learned from the Glowers how to increase, to amplify our special thought-sending and receiving so that we can consciously use it to communicate—theoretically through almost any distance, through rock, steel walls. The telepathic wave, whatever it is, does not seem to be stopped by solid material. I learned from them out of desperation—Kim Langford, the president’s daughter, was about to die. The Glowers needed my special connection to her to enter her nervous system and put their own healing powers into use.” Rock noticed Rona looking up at him with clenched teeth as he mentioned Kim’s name. But this was no time to hold anything back. With the survival of the very city at stake, Rock couldn’t spare personal feelings—even Rona’s.
“Now the telepathic ability seems to rise in power under situations of extreme desperation, fear, anger, whatever. Hormones are literally pumped into the body that must escalate certain electrical systems within our bodies, so that without even realizing it—we send out calls for help, try to read our attackers’ thoughts. It works the same in mutant’s luck stories—you’ve probably all experienced it. How you got a shiver of apprehension, of danger, and stepped back as someone shot, or moved just as a snar-lizard snapped its jaws. Now, in order for you to learn you have to become desperate, anxious, even terrified. And the situation we’re about to face is—I’m sad to say—tailor-made for those sorts of emotions. Because the key to this battle is communications—safe, undetectable communications instantly between all our scattered forces. If the Nazis can hear us they’ll know our moves—and our positions.” He looked around at them with a quizzical smile. Every face stared up with fascination—and not a small amount of fear.
“Well, let’s give it a try,” the Doomsday Warrior said. “I’ll work with you one at a time to try and get you to feel what I’m talking about. Any questions?” No one uttered a word.
They lined up and Rock pressed his widespread fingers against each forehead. He jagged his thoughts of destruction, hellfire, rape and torture into each brain, sending out the most powerful terrifying images he could muster. And they felt them, drawing back in horror as the death visions entered their minds. They felt both elated and disturbed at the process, wanting to help but feeling that perhaps they were opening up a box that would thereafter never close. But there was no choice.
“OK, now you’ve at least felt the stuff,” Rock said, after he’d worked for a few minutes with each one. “Now I want you to break up into groups of twos and try it yourself. Don’t worry about sending complex thoughts right now—just fear, anger. The strong emotions. We can work on the more subtle possibilities later. Meanwhile I’ll work individually with each of you to help you focus.”
He chose Rona first for his one-to-one. They were already connected by many emotions. She would undoubtedly make the quickest link-up with him—and that would give the others confidence in themselves that it was really possible. They sat kneeling, their faces just inches apart. Rock put his hands over her head and closed his eyes.
“You can hear me,” he sent out, concentrating all his energy into that single mental burst. “I’m going to send you images and I want you to feel them and try to send back to me what you see. OK?”
Rona smiled at him, and said softly, “Go ahead, Rock.”
He began sending out the foulest thoughts he could—images in his memory of death, mutilation, of bodies lying rotting in fields, of the mindbreaker machine drilling into brain cavities sending up funnels of smoking tissue. He sent out thoughts of all the horror and monstrosities he had seen in his life. And he had seen much.
She winced with the pain of the images. At first they were dim, hazy floating circles of death. But within minutes, as she opened her mind in spite of her fear, the images solidified and she felt and saw things she had never imagined in her darkest dreams. Suddenly she screamed out, in spite of herself. The pain was unbearable. Rock stopped for a moment and held her. Without talking, he telepathically spoke to her.
“You’ve done it, Rona. You feel it. Rise above the pain. Concentrate on the ability. Now tell me something—with your mind, not your lips.”
“What should I say?” she sent back.
“You’ve already said it,” he replied telepathically. Their minds suddenly connected like two pieces of a puzzle linking together. They were joined to one another in a way that they had never experienced before even in their most intimate moments of love-making.
She could read his mind. His life was before her, unfolding like a film. Images like a whirling, spinning kaleidoscope flashed through her brain.
She spoke to him, without speaking. “Oh the pain that you live with each, day, my poor warrior.” For the first time ever she suddenly felt she knew him, understood him. And he felt her great courage, her love, her infinite desire for freedom and truth. And he was glad that they would probably die together on the battlefield. For if Kim were his love, then Rona was his faithful heart.
They stopped at last and hugged, exchanging a tender kiss. Then he went on to the next mutant, to try and bring out his ESP abilities. There was no time for the emotions he wished to share with her. And there might never be.
Rona sat on the white tatami mat, weeping. The pain her lover had born. His family being killed, his lonely, starving trek as a mere child across America. She saw all the horrors he had been privy to. She never knew why he was so hard—before. Now she understood.
Fourteen
The dawn broke like a shell-burst on the morning of November 13, splattering the purple skies with fragments of red and green, slicing through the high cloud cover with tongues of orange sunlight. Ted Rockson sat high on one of the northern peaks overlooking Forrester Valley, a pair of electron binoculars in his veined hands. He raised them to his eyes and stared out over the vast valley floor below. The Nazi troops were pouring in from every direction, filling the flat plain set between two ranges of the Rockies. They came from the mountain opposite Rock, far across the valley, from the woods on each side, streaming out like an army of ants, joining into bigger and bigger concentrations. Huge helicopter transporters filled the skies above, setting down every second and depositing their loads of M-2 Panzer tanks, armored vehicles and field artillery. The flat valley floor was a beehive of activity as Jeeps and the immense sixty-foot tanks screeched around trying to position themselves. But the picture was becoming clear even in the midst of confusion as the Panzers pulled up to the front ranks and combat troops began falling in behind them, bayonets fixed to their Kalashnikov-5 Autofires.
Rock pushed two buttons on the side of the computerized field glasses and his range of vision suddenly shot into super-magnification. He could see the faces of the troops and their officers, sweating, tense as they set up into formation. He could see the churning treads of the super-Panzers as they sent up waves of yellow dust from the loose-packed dirt of the valley floor. He turned the glasses sl
ightly as he caught the motion of a Soyuz transport chopper landing. It was the largest copter he’d ever seen, nearly two hundred feet long and fifty feet high with immense swastikas printed in red on its black body. The Doomsday Warrior whistled between his teeth as he slid up a little on the rock outcropping at the very edge of the peak. Something was coming down the ramp from its bay door—Jesus, what was it? He flicked the auto-focus button and the thing came into view. It was a tank, but unlike any Rock had ever seen before. In the place of treads it had immense stiltlike steel legs on it that rolled ahead, moving the ovular steel shape atop it bristling with cannon and machine guns forward. He suddenly remembered hearing two Red officers talk about it when he had infiltrated one of their fortresses several months earlier. Rock-Walkers they had called them—tanks capable of climbing right up the sides of mountains.
“Shit,” the Doomsday Warrior spat out between clenched lips. They hadn’t included these in their defensive plans. Well, it was for damned sure too late now. More of the helicopter transports set down on the near side of the valley, releasing tank after tank, mobile cannons, regiments of men, decked out in full battle gear. “It’s like Parade Day in the Kremlin,” the Doomsday Warrior muttered, as he realized the full strength of the Nazi forces. It was one thing to see it all down on paper—but now that the men and the machine were stretching out for miles in every direction, it was a little overwhelming.
He shifted the glasses up to the far mountain, twenty miles off and pressed the optimum magnification mode of the glasses. The command tents of the German officers sprang into view as if he were right on top of them. Angular-faced blond officers rushed in and out of what was clearly the main headquarters, with a Nazi flag and a Red hammer and sickle snapping in the wind on each side of the entrance. Von Reisling would be in there overseeing the battle, along with all his top staff. And Rock knew that that’s where his team was heading right now. Detroit, Archer, Chen, McCaughlin and Rona, who had demanded to be taken—they were after big game: the entire command of the Nazi forces. He wished he could have been with them himself, not up here on this mountain peak. But the military council had strongly requested that he coordinate the entire scope of operations. The five of them had started out before the sun rose, heading far around the valley to come up behind the German lines. He sent out a silent prayer for their safe return, though God only knew how many of them would be left alive at the end of the day. How many faces he would never see again. He steeled his jaw and banished the emotions deep inside his chest.
The Doomsday Warrior stepped down from the observation post and looked back and forth along the ten thousand-foot mountain peak that he and the main artillery units of Century City stood on. Nearly fifty cannons, some ultra-modern, developed by Shecter and capable of firing .122mm shells at the rate of twenty a minute. Others were old, stolen from the Reds, huge green-painted .85mm’s on self-propelled chassis and even a few .152mm monsters which fired six-inch shells capable of taking out even one of the super-Panzers with a single hit. The artillery was hidden under netting and spread out along a two-mile width, with two hundred mortar men and heavy machine guns interspersed between them.
It was his decision—and his alone—on when to begin the attack. Rock knew they were all waiting, the machine gunners and small mortars on the lower slopes, the teams of hybrid squads, carrying their sapper charges, hidden in the woods on each side of the valley, the ski units carrying light auto-fire poodle punchers and wearing cut-off, narrow skis capable of maneuvering at lightning speed on the snow-covered slopes, the Rapid Deployment helicopter force—all waiting for the red flare he would fire high over the valley to signal the commencement of fire. Just a few more minutes, he thought to himself, his jaw tight as steel. Until they’ve landed more equipment—but are not yet totally organized. We’ll strike them when they’ll be most off balance. Just a few—
“Hey, Rock, thought I’d come up and see the sights,” a voice said behind him, startling the Doomsday Warrior so that he turned, reaching for the .45 strapped to his waist. It was Dr. Shecter, grinning and holding a Liberator, the rifle he had designed and sent out to Free Cities all across America, in his hands. His tall, stooped-over body looked slightly absurd in the flak jacket and army fatigues that he wore, but his aging, mottled face was deadly serious.
“Jesus, Doc, you shouldn’t be up here. We need your brains back in C.C.”
“Rock, if we don’t stop these Nazi slime—there won’t be a C.C. Besides, I couldn’t stay back there while everyone I know and love is out here ready to give their very lives. I couldn’t live with myself, Rock. I’m a scientist—but I’m also a man. And that comes first.”
“I understand, Dr. Shecter,” Rock said softly. “Well, pick a good seat cause the action’s about to start. How’d it go with those phony Century Cities on the mountains south of here?”
“From our transmitters inside the three we managed to build we heard the explosions. I can’t tell you exactly how many men they lost—but a lot. We’ve constructed two more just south of C.C. itself, in case we have to fall back. But they’re just diversions, Rock—you and I both know that. It’s what happens down there,” he said, pointing to the vast assembling army below, “that counts.”
“OK, well, I’m glad to have you aboard,” the Doomsday Warrior said. “Somehow I never thought we’d be fighting together. But just do me one favor—keep your damned head down. I don’t want to have to worry about you when I should be overseeing our battle progress and communications. Sorry to be so blunt but—”
“No apologies, Rock, I understand. I’ll stay low and only fire when I see the whites of their eyes.”
“Well, get down, Doc, ’cause it’s about to begin.” Shecter found a cover behind several large boulders at the edge of the peak as Rockson looked around a final time. The artillery squads were looking his way, their hands itching to fire. Everything was in suspended animation waiting for the curtain to open, the death-show to begin.
“There’s no time like the present,” Rock mumbled to no one in particular. He raised the flare gun, pointing it straight out over the valley and fired. The flare arced up into the morning sky like a meteor, leaving a trail of soft white smoke behind it. Suddenly it ignited, about eight hundred feet up, sending out a burning brilliant light as it began falling slowly toward the Nazi hordes below. Their eyes rose up as a deathly silence settled over the entire army for a split second. Then all hell broke loose.
The artillery units all along the northern peak opened up with everything they had, raining down a tornado of steel death on the army below. From his forward position, Rockson could see the puffs of smoke and hear the thunderous explosions roar through the granite peaks. The German troops began scampering in all directions as shell after shell landed in their midst, sending up little eruptions of dirt, smoke and blood. Within seconds the freefighter helicopter force appeared overhead just above him and tore into the midst of the big cargo choppers still descending with their troops and equipment. They were sitting ducks, with but a few .55s to protect themselves. But the Strike Force wouldn’t even give them that opportunity. They came in like a swarm of bloodthirsty hawks, twisting and turning through the air armada around them. They flew in groups of two, to cover each other’s back, firing their missiles at everything in sight, spitting out streams of red-hot slugs from their side door machine guns.
Within the first thirty seconds they had knocked nearly twenty of the huge choppers from the sky, sending them plummeting into their own forces below in screaming balls of flaming, twisted wreckage. Rock could see German combat soldiers trying to leap from the careening craft even as they fell, bodies dropping like raindrops until they splashed red on the ground below. Thirty swastika-decorated attack copters were mixed in among the transports but at such close range they found it hard to fire without hitting their own aircraft. The element of surprise was working, the attack force ripping through the nearly eighty-copter force like wolves in a chicken coop.
&
nbsp; The artillery continued to pound away by pre-arranged command at the forward tank force and the very rear of the army, trapping them in a barrage of exploding steel. Now it was up to the sappers to create havoc in the mid-ranks, to try and panic them into retreat. Rock edged forward onto the outcropping, hugging it like a piece of paper as bullets whistled by from every direction. He zeroed his field glasses in on the eastern flank, just at the edge of the thick woods. The hybrid cavalry should be coming out just about now . . .
From the vantage point of ground level the battle was a whole different picture. To Rock, far above, it was almost beautiful as the exploding shells and missiles created a vast mosaic of color—reds, oranges, yellows, shooting up like rainbows of death throughout the valley. But to the waiting hybrid units just inside the woods, it was the deafening roar of the erupting shells, the blood of Germans flying through the air like a hurricane of red, the screams of tank crews trying to crawl from their white-hot burning tanks and the shrapnel whizzing by them like bees.
Sergeant Abrams leaned forward in his saddle, patting the thick back of his hybrid steed that reared nervously below him. The ’brids had had their ears stuffed with cotton—but even so they knew something was going on. And they didn’t like it one bit.
