by Ryder Stacy
There was nowhere really to go, Rock knew. The fallback positions would just slow them down—but even then the freefighting forces would be scattered, what little firepower they had broken down into laughable units that the Germans would run right over. And once they reached the top of the northern ridge, the one advantage the Americans had—firing down from a height—would be gone. When the enemy reached the heights, it would all be over. Death—complete, total—for all of them. Deep in his brain he could hear the desperate messages of the mutant telepaths each with their own frantic plea. “We are being overun. We can’t hold, Rockson. Rockson, what can we do?”
“Jesus,” the Doomsday Warrior muttered through teeth locked tight as a crypt. For a moment he wished he was dead. It would be better than seeing the slaughter of his people. Perhaps a stray bullet would rip into him, a mortar shell would—
Suddenly he saw three huge glowing shapes at the far end of the valley. Strange, floating craft, burning with a blinding blue electricity. He lifted the binoculars to his eyes and broke into a lip-splitting smile. The Glowers—riding into the back ranks of the Nazis on their immense sand ships. The plains below were filled end-to-end with German troops, like a million ants coming forward but the Glowers ripped into them like death itself on a rampage.
The ships sped through the ranks, sending men flying in all directions. The electric force that surrounded each of them individually had been extended through mental power to protect the ships themselves, each with a ball of blue lightning twisting around it like the aurora borealis. The Glowers stood on the bows, their hands just inches apart, like stars in full nova, sending their bursts of death into the universe.
Suddenly he felt the voice of the strange race fill his mind like a rainbow of hope. “We have come, Rockson. We have come as we promised. Only those with evil in their hearts need fear us. The pure shall not be harmed.” The Germans began firing with everything they had at these bizarre new entrants into the battle, but their bullets and shells harmlessly ricocheted off the blue force field that protected the sand ships. The glowing craft sailed back and forth on the valley floor, their energy sails billowing out high above them, collecting energy from the sun and the stars. Oblivious to the intensity of the fire power being leveled on them, the Glowers on board the craft began sending out their mental waves. They joined their thoughts together and created . . . illusion. The waves of illusion flowed into the brains of the Nazis who fought like tigers all around them. The telepathic commands reached deep into the unconscious of the soldiers bringing up their deepest fears, their dark personal hells, the nightmares that they had pushed down into the sewers of their unconscious. Whatever they feared most, they suddenly saw before them—rats, rabid dogs, bottomless pits that they plummeted endlessly down, mutated horned demons chewing their flesh into bloody pieces. Every Nazi soldier in the valley entered a living hell.
Cpl. Wolfgang Schmidt was just at the bottom of the rebels’ mountain, training his submachine gun on a pocket of freefighters ahead when he felt something strange. His body quivered with chills as he heard a sound—a sound he hadn’t heard for years. A sound he had hoped he would never hear again. He was six years old. He was in the German Alpines near Düsseldorf. A shape, a furry body coming at him. A wolf. It was the woods’ wolf with its foot-long fangs bared, coming at him with eyes like burning embers. He fired at the thing again and again, too terrified to wonder how such a thing could be on this field of battle. He clicked his Turgenev sub on full auto and swung it around him. The bullets streamed out and into the chests and skulls of his fellow troops. He mowed down nearly a dozen of them before another tortured soul’s nightmare, firing back, ended his brutal life. He fell to the bloody ground, two slugs through the back of his skull, his brain tissue slowly leaking out, unable to receive the hallucinations of the Glowers anymore.
Lieutenant Von Dressier was just at the peak of the mountain commanding one of the rock-climbing tanks. He sighted up a group of freefighters firing at his death machine without effect. He went to push the button that would fire the big .122mm cannon of his vehicle. Suddenly he couldn’t believe his eyes. Instead of a button he was holding a snake, wriggling, with its fanged jaws arched wide and snapping at him. The snake seemed to leap from the control panel and wrap around his neck, the forked slimy tongue licking in and out in front of his horrified eyes. He ripped his combat knife from its sheath and began stabbing into the thing, trying to break its deadly grip on his throat. But the blade passed through the illusion and into his neck. He stabbed himself three times, the blade running deep into the jugular, sending out a torrent of blood before he grew too weak to continue. His body began jerking wildly as if he was a marionette at the end of a madman’s string, trying to remain upright. The snake was gone. But, but . . . He fell to the steel floor of the tank in terrified confusion as his heart pumped out precious pints of blood through the gaping wounds. Slowly his eyes closed, but the look of sheer horror stayed, even after death. The mountain-climbing tank, without anyone guiding it, came up against a twenty-foot wall of stone and tried to scale it. The stilt-legs ripped deep holes in the granite as the tank careened over onto its side and tumbled down the mountain onto German troops below, squashing them beneath its three-ton iron body.
Everywhere around the battlefield each Nazi found his own doom, his own monster. Demons created by the mind and amplified by the Glowers’ telepathic commands. They turned on one another, screaming, “Jew! Traitor!” They saw what they thought were their enemies and fought back desperately to destroy them—shooting, knifing, strangling one another in total and complete madness.
The tide of war was changing. The Nazi troops decimated themselves as the freefighters on the valley floor dove for cover, letting the enemy destroy itself. Their minds were not affected by the Glowers’ nightmarish waves. Those who fought for freedom were spared; those who fought for evil were consumed.
Far across the valley, Von Reisling and what remained of his general staff watched with growing horror as they saw their troops being laid to waste—by each other. They had no idea what was happening but could see the Glowers’ craft soaring just inches above the ground back and forth across the valley, relentless and overwhelming in their destruction. What had seemed a certain victory only minutes before was rapidly turning into the biggest rout in military history. Von Reisling knew that if something wasn’t done, all the Nazi forces would be destroyed. It couldn’t be. He had spent years, training, building up the roughest fighting force in the world and now—they must retreat. He could not lose the entire army. There would be time for another battle, another assault on the freefighters—without the wretched glowing mutations that cruised below to protect them.
“Withdraw, withdraw,” Von Reisling screamed over his radio to the field commanders on the plain below. “Set up covering fire, but withdraw now.” He peered down through his field glasses and within seconds could see that the orders had been received as the units whose minds had not yet been touched by the Glowers’ nightmares began pulling backwards.
Rockson stared down, his grim expression changing to one of exultation as he saw the massacre on the floor below. The power of the Glowers was beyond belief. He wasn’t sure what the hell they were doing—but obviously some sort of mental signal was being sent out across the battlefield. Something that he couldn’t receive—something he was glad he couldn’t. The Nazi ranks pulled back, slowly at first and then on the run, leaving tons of equipment behind them as they hightailed it back to the southern slopes at the other end of Forrester Valley.
“Keep firing,” Rockson telepathed to the mutants around the plateau. “Send down everything we’ve got. Every Nazi we take out now, we won’t have to fight later.” The mood on the peak, of the freefighting forces, was joyful. They threw their arms around one another and whooped out yells of triumph. Tears of thanks ran down their dirty, scratched faces. Whoever these creatures were that were wreaking such havoc on the plains below—they were clearly friends
of free men everywhere. Century City was saved.
Suddenly Rock heard a crack and then a painful cry for help behind him. He turned. Dr. Shecter, some ten yards away, was bleeding from a wound in his stomach.
“Rock, I . . .” He pointed with his eyes behind them both. The Doomsday Warrior turned. A grimy squad of Nazi soldiers were just coming up from the back of the southern mountain, firing their Kalashnikovs and subs as they ran.
“Shit,” Rock muttered, diving down on the dirt and edging over toward Shecter. He dragged the tall but somewhat frail creator of all of Century City’s marvels up over a rock with one single pull of his muscled arm.
“Stay down, damnit, you hear me?” Rock screamed into the pain-stricken face of Shecter.
“Sorry, Rock, I—” But the Doomsday Warrior cut him off. There was no time for discussions right now. He ripped his .12-gauge shotpistol from its holster and poked his head up over the boulder that shielded them. The Germans were coming full speed right toward them. Rockson fired five times, swinging the spewer of steel death around at the chests of the five lead soldiers. They crumbled to the rocky plateau, their guts bursting out like the stuffing of an old pillow. The rest dove for cover and set up a counterbarrage of fire.
Gunter, who was in the lead of all that remained of his Wolfpack force—only thirty men, shouted out orders to the rest of the commando unit to spread out and flank them from both sides.
“You will soon die, freefighter. Come out now and we will make it less painful than it might be,” Gunter barked out in a thick German accent as he slammed another magazine into his submachine gun.
“There’s been enough dying of freefighters today,” Rock yelled back. “Surrender now—and we’ll let you live. As commander of the free forces, I promise you that.” Gunter answered with a burst from his Turgenev, spraying a line of slugs that ripped into the boulder, cutting out little craters that erupted in a violent cloud of dust.
It was crazy, Rock thought, as he virtually sat atop the wounded Shecter who groaned but lay still beneath him. The goddamned Nazis were beaten—but these fools didn’t even know it. The Glowers’ mental signals must have a limit that they could reach. That’s why they sailed around the valley, so they could hit all the troops. Rock knew his shotpistol, as deadly as it was, was not going to stop this bunch. He turned around to see if he could get any help. The artillery unit closest to him, some fifty feet away were lying draped over the bottom of the big .152mm cannon, nearly fifteen feet long. The Nazis coming up on him must have caught them with their first barrage.
“Stay put,” he screamed right into Shecter’s face. But the scientist was already unconscious. Just as well. Rock shot straight up and unleashed six more volleys from his pistol, sending four of the Nazis straight to hell. He ducked down again as they returned the fire, breathed deeply and shot out from the back of the boulder toward the cannon. It wasn’t that far, but with fifteen crack shots firing with everything they have at him, it seemed like a million miles off. Bullets dug in everywhere around him, knifing into the dirt and rocks at his feet in little explosions of powder. He felt a sharp pain in his right calf, but was able to keep running.
“Get him,” Gunter screamed, rising from the ground and spraying his full magazine of 7.2mm slugs. “He is the leader. Kill him and you will be rich forever.” The Wolfpack squad rose as a man and let loose with a hurricane of fire power, the air whistling with trails of screaming white-hot bullets.
But Rock was already at the artillery post. He dove through the air as he heard the hail of slugs behind him, landing hard on the metal emplacement atop which the big gun swiveled. The migration of shells tore just inches over his head and out into the sky above the valley where freefighter and Nazi choppers were still battling it out. The Doomsday Warrior kicked two of the dead Americans off the turret and hoisted himself up into the firing seat. The damned thing was loaded—great. He pulled a lever and the immense cannon began slowly turning around from its previous target on the valley floor. As it swiveled, Rock cranked a hand-pushed wheel that lowered the muzzle of the stolen SS120 cannon until it was aiming almost straight down.
Bullets slammed into the metal all around him, pinging off the hard steel with sharp cracks.
“Get him, get that damned mutant bastard,” Rock heard Gunter scream out, as the waves of autofire slowly bore down on him. But that was the last thing the Nazi officer ever said. Rock zeroed in through the twin sights down the immense green muzzle and slammed his fist down on the red firing button. The cannon roared out a deafening scream and sent its six-inch shell out in a blast of smoke. The three-foot-long message of death flew only eighty feet before hitting the ground. It erupted in a blinding cloud of fire and smoke, sending limbs and a rain of flesh off in all directions. When the dust cleared seconds later Rock saw instantly that there was nothing left—not a man, not even a piece of a man. They had chosen—and they had died.
The great sand ships of the Glowers at last came to a rest in the center of the valley. The three bows of the two hundred-foot-long crafts pointed at one another, creating, to those who looked down from above, the appearance of a three-pointed star. They stood on the bows and surveyed the damage they had wrought. They felt no guilt, nor pain for the tens of thousands of dead Germans littered around the wide valley, slaughtered—albeit by themselves—like so many cattle.
“We have changed the time/space continuum,” they thought as one. “We have altered the history of the human species.”
“We are the human species,” one of the many thought. “We are human. We are Americans. We are descended from the same womb that our freefighting brothers are. We have done right.” They took in the magnitude of death and devastation around them. Even they had never seen the full extent of what their powers could do. And they, in their own way, were awed.
“We must leave now,” a reply came. “We have done what we must do. Now we must pull back from the human destiny of our brothers. They must work out their ultimate evolution. This is our way.”
“This is the way,” the other voices joined in chorus. They hoisted the great sails up to their full capacity and turned the ships around, heading back toward the valley entrance where Nazi troops were still fleeing in terror for the safety of the far mountains.
“We shall kill no more today,” the voices sang out in a soft harmony as the sand ships’ sails filled with the invisible energy of the sun and the cosmic rays raining down from space. The ships quickly reached cruising speed and tore past the German troops as they exited the valley. The Glowers stood on the bows, staring straight ahead, mindless of the Nazis who screamed in horror and flung themselves to the dirt and behind rocks. But the Glowers had had enough of death. They mentally charted their course back home and vanished like a shipful of shooting stars into the slowly darkening sun.
Seventeen
Colonel Killov looked down through his superscope binoculars from a mountain peak some ten miles to the east of Forrester Valley. He could hardly believe his eyes—the Nazi invasion was turning into a defeat of the highest order, because of these strange glowing mutants. And yet, perhaps it was all to his advantage. Premier Vassily had suffered a mortal blow with the destruction of his German force. The Kremlin power-makers would wonder if he was weakening, would begin casting their eyes elsewhere for a new leader—a stronger leader. And Killov was that man. He could turn the debacle around in his favor by being bold, daring—right at the instant of apparent defeat.
The freefighting forces were spread out over a twenty-mile range—within the valley itself and to the north. He knew that. And Century City, that elusive stronghold of Ted Rockson which he had never been able to find, was somewhere within that twenty-mile width—of that he was sure. He lifted the glasses from his pin-sized eyes and hesitated. There would be problems if he went against Vassily’s orders—the use of nuclear weapons. But Vassily was in no position to get him now. The commander of the KGB quickly dug out two pills from his pocket and slammed them into
his mouth. He waited a minute or two for the chemicals of the Transcednal and the morphine tab to hit his system. Then he felt the familiar, wonderful warmth stream through his veins, giving him courage in this moment of paramount importance.
The colonel reached over to a small radio transmitter next to him and sent out the command to his fleet of waiting jet fighters, each armed with a neutron bomb. “This is Killov. Strike, strike, you understand. Mode Red strike. Immediately.”
“Received and carried out,” a voice at the other end replied. Killov clicked the radio off and sat back, his dark eyes burning with excitement. All these years—and now. At last he would destroy his most hated enemy—and in the process strengthen his chances tremendously to become premier: Boldness—that is why he would rule, deserved to rule. Because he had the courage to do what others only thought about.
The fleet of six Ilyushin-7 jet bombers streaked out of their landing field some thirty miles away. Swept back wings, noses arched forward like a hawk’s beak, they were fearsome weapons indeed, capable of reaching Mach 4 if necessary. Although on this trip there would be nothing to stop them. Major Velinsky piloted the lead jet, the other five, flying in his stream, each a hundred feet apart, forming a V-formation behind him.
“This is not a test run,” Velinsky said over his throat mike. “From orders of Colonel Killov himself, we are to proceed to vector five, sector three and deploy our weapons.” He paused for a moment, straightening the throttle on his roaring fighter as he nosed up into the clouds beginning to gather above the Rockies. “This is a historic moment, men. The day we have been planning and training for for years. Keep calm, carry out your flight patterns just as you have always done—and we will be successful. Tonight each of you will be a hero—will dwell in Paradise. Of this I assure you, for the colonel will reward us beyond our dreams.” His speech given, the major hit cruising speed and straightened out his flight path. There were but three minutes to the target zone.
