by Ryder Stacy
“What is it?” Chen asked, noting Rockson’s expression of dismay.
“The MILIS area is controlled by a sort of band of—er—crazed women warriors,” Rock said, looking up at Chen.
“Shit! How many? Are they well armed?”
“Intel says there’s only a few dozen of them. They call themselves the ‘Millies’, and they have primitive arms. But you know what these feminist groups are like . . . mad Amazons!”
“Yeah,” Chen said, thinking about the Barbaras—wild women who use men for procreation and then kill them.
The roving bands of women warriors in this forsaken desert area were the black widows of the human race.
Archer came to peer over Rock’s shoulder at the info-packet. Rock let him look. They should all know what they were up against. Archer flipped through the pictures of the MILIS rocket, and the diagrams of the hangar area. Then he saw the intel pics of the Millies. He mumbled out the words as he laboriously read the report, then put it down. He shouted, “Wooomens! Sex! We have sex! They look pretty! They let us have rocket?” The simple-minded Archer looked very innocent.
“Maybe it will be that easy, Archer,” Rock said. He patted the mountain man on the back. “Well, let’s all get mounted and get going. Be sure to keep checking radiation levels.”
Archer sang for the next half hour of the ride, one joyous simple song: “Sex! Sex! Good-old-sex!” he repeated and repeated.
Eventually their mood got lighter, even frivolous. The morning air warmed to spring temperatures. They tied their parkas on their saddle packs and sang along with Archer, laughing and feeling very good about themselves. What were a few women armed with spears? And they were kinda cute—tall and lean, and sinewy. Maybe the Millies weren’t like the deadly Barbaras Rock had encountered years earlier. Maybe. One could hope.
Another day of good progress followed. McCaughlin’s cactus stew was perfect even without creeper-juice sauce, which he’d run out of. The bank and old crater they camped on was sheltered from the intense sun and the wind. They sang songs, just as happy campers do. But the pause was brief. Rock kept them going that afternoon at a blistering pace, worried about the weather. But it held.
After a good twilight supper, McCaughlin and Archer bagged a few rabbits and a small elk. The Doomsday Warrior relaxed while they skinned their catch and looked up at the stars coming out. He used the binocs, steadied on a boulder, to peer up toward a spot in the sky near the Pleaides, the seven sisters. There it was, an angry pink star, flickering a bit in the midst of the sisters, right where Schecter told him he should look. Rockson shuddered involuntarily. That pink star was the asteroid of death, Karrak.
Rockson went back to the campfire when it got too cold to observe the sky. Scot McCaughlin sat with him, watching the embers of the fire die out, after the others had all yawned and gone to their sleeping bags. “If you want, I’ll take your watch tonight,” the bearded man offered. “You look bushed. Is it the fact that we might have to fight to get the rocket? We’ll manage. We’ll do this job no matter how hard it is.”
“Not that,” Rock said. “I’ll keep watch. You go to bed.”
“In a minute. I’m not tired. It’s such a beautiful night . . .”
They talked of the old days, days when the war with the Russians was raging full tilt. The titanic battle involved confronting a rekindled Nazi Party back then. Rock spoke of the time Rona was captured and made into an Eva Braun for a new Hitler, and Scot told the story about the time they had fought alongside Australians riding kangaroos. They enjoyed speaking of these days, not that they were the good old days, but because those were the days when the enemy was human, and not some damned asteroid.
After a while, Scot too hit the sack. Rockson stood up, took the Liberator rifle, and walked to take position for the night watch. He knew Detroit was already at the opposite end of the small encampment, in the hollow of the hill, covering his side.
Maybe because Rockson really didn’t expect trouble, his mind kept wandering. He kept thinking of the two women he’d made love to on his last night in C.C. Damn! You’d think a man would be happy about that situation! But Rockson was not. This really could be the end of the world. He knew the chance of stopping such a cosmic disaster was remote. There were too many ifs. He would have preferred to go out of this life married to Kim, his real love. But there had been no time even to contact her in Pattonville. He should have married her and settled down. Polygamy, of course, was allowed for anyone who had undamaged genes. He could have married Kim and Rona both, but neither Kim nor Rona could tolerate the other. Rock sighed. He already had too much of a good thing when Charity was thrown in for full measure.
He thought of the times Scot McCaughlin had taken him sailing in his skiff on Crater Lake. It was winter then, too. He bundled up in his parka and counted meteors. The Perseid Meteors shot by. They were active this time of year. Bright, and long as the sky. The meteors burned up in the earth’s atmosphere because they were just the size of a pea. The damned asteroid was fifty miles in diameter. If only the damned thing would shrink and burn up. Fat chance of that.
At dawn the camp came alive with the sounds of the other Freefighters—a few farts, lots of yawns, a groan of two from those whose sleeping bags had been inadvertently placed over roots or acorns. Soon the smell of hot coffee woke Rockson from a semi-daze. He, too, had dozed off in his night watch. Not for long, though. Rock went over to the others, rubbed his hands together over the roaring campfire, and drank the coffee McCaughlin handed him in his big battered tin mug.
“Any trouble last night?” Detroit asked. “Nothing on my end of camp ’cept for a few wild goats.”
“No, but I might have dozed off a bit,” Rockson admitted sheepishly.
“What? Doomsday Warrior getting old?” Detroit teased.
“I thought I heard soft, crawling noises,” Rock said. “Just some night insects, probably. You can hear for miles out here. It’s so still, and with no trees to snap in the wind. Probably was insects I heard. There was a chewing noise, just before I dozed off.”
“Chewing,” Detroit muttered, thinking it over. “Like—chip-chip-chip?”
“Yes! How did you know?”
Detroit yelled: “McCaughlin! Go over to our horses and check them. Do it now!”
McCaughlin did just that, rounding a boulder to get to the makeshift corral in the arroyo. He yelled out one word: “Shit!”
“What is it?” Rock exclaimed, dropping his brew and running over to where McCaughlin stood. “Shit! Oh, shit,” Rock exclaimed.
“What?” Chen demanded, coming up fast with his shotpistol at the ready. “Where are they?”
“Put the gun away,” Rock moaned. “It’s not a human enemy. Besides, they’re gone anyway. We’ve been attacked by some sort of chewing creature! Look at the food, and our rucksacks! Even the saddles and saddlebags’ leather is half chewed away!”
Detroit sighed. “I knew it the minute you said the sound was ‘chip-chip’—that chewing noise last night, Rock. These critters were the caterpillars known as ‘chippers’ They’re usually further east, in the spring. First time they’ve ever been in Colorado, I’ll bet. They’ll eat ’most anything.”
Quickly Rockson checked the nuke, and the chariot. No damage . . . maybe the insects didn’t like radiation, he figured. Then Rock went over and inspected Snorter. The horse was okay, but its saddle was gone; even its bit and bridle were eaten apart. “What could eat metal?”
“Those chipper caterpillars can,” Detroit said. “They came and ate holes in everything they saw. Lucky they don’t like horseflesh—or human flesh.”
“Assess the damage,” Rock ordered, “and then let’s get the hell out of here. I don’t like the look of those clouds to the east.” He made a mental note to demote himself. Later.
Their saddles were holey messes, eaten up by the bookworm-sized creatures. But the ’brids could be ridden bareback. Most of the food supply had been up on a “sky-platform,” luckily,
to keep away night animals. Rockson was gratified that at least the caterpillars hadn’t bothered to climb. That would have been a total disaster, and all Rockson’s fault.
The Freefighters patched their gear up as best they could and went on their way. “The little bastards were a warning to us,” Rock said aloud. “They told us that we weren’t cautious enough. So let that be a lesson to us all, especially to me. There’s great danger out here, even if it looks okay.”
They rode on under cloudy skies, in a cold wind. At one point, Scheransky saw a clump of beautiful, swaying winter daisies—big flowers with pink petals and very dark centers. He started to steer his ’brid toward the daisies, intending, no doubt, to pick a few and stick them in his hair, as was his custom.
“I wouldn’t do that, Rusky,” Rock cautioned.
“Why not?” the Russian asked, but he stopped in his tracks.
“They’re not ordinary daisies; you don’t want to put them in your hair. Here, I’ll show you.” Rockson lifted his pistol, set it for narrow impact, and fired. He shot one daisy off its stem, a daisy standing off alone from the others. It sagged over, crawled a bit, whimpering loudly, and stopped. Rock prodded it to be sure it was dead, then picked it up for Scheransky. “Look inside the petals, Rusky.”
“My God . . . it has a mouth! And teeth—razor-sharp teeth!”
“I’ve seen these daisies before,” Rock smiled gently. “Weird, aren’t they? They used to be confined to small patches of highly radioactive areas in Utah. But the past few years, they’ve been spreading like wildfire. They’re crowding out indigenous plants everywhere. Keep your eyes peeled for trouble, too. I have a bad feeling about this area. As a matter of fact, I’m dropping back, see if anyone’s trailing us.”
Eight
After not seeing him for five solid hours, the Team concluded that Rockson had disappeared. He had been rear guard, on foot, as the group of Freefighters painstakingly made their way through the tumulus field at the foot of a glacier-covered peak. It was rough going, but nothing unusual or particularly difficult, no signs of trouble. His men, baffled, stopped to discuss the matter.
“I didn’t know exactly when he disappeared.” Detroit shook his head. “It could have been anytime in the last hour.”
Chen added grimly, “Whatever happened had to happen in these damned rocks. Sometime in the past half hour, then. Maybe Rockson fell and hurt himselff or—”
“Yeah,” Scheransky finished, “met someone bad.” Cohen suggested a standard search pattern, leaving Gooligan and Harper to safeguard the nuke. A good idea.
They quickly decided to spread out in a search pattern, each man assigned a particular area to sweep. Every one of them knew it was not like their commander to take a powder on them. They dreaded finding him dead, or worse, not finding him at all. He wouldn’t be the first man to get swallowed up in this wilderness.
Rock was walking along, perhaps a bit carelessly, staring up at the pretty rock cliffs. He suddenly felt no ground under his feet. Nothing except a falling feeling in his gut.
It was a small opening he’d stepped into, but it was a long, long drop down. And Rockson hit hard, and briefly lost consciousness. When he awoke, he quickly realized he was intact, except for a few bruises. He’d landed in a pile of leaves. He looked up and saw the hole he’d fallen through, fifty feet up. There was some dim light coming down from that hole, enough for him to see that he was in a cave, a natural limestone cave.
A quick look around showed there was no easy way out. Rockson leaned against the icy stone wall of the cave and controlled a rising panic. This cave was airy and surely, he thought, large enough so there was no immediate danger of smothering. Plus, he wasn’t hurt. He wasn’t hungry yet, either, and there was a trickling sound—water. So there was time, all the time in the world, perhaps, to find a way to get out. If there was a way out.
Of all the things that could happen to him, being caged, being trapped, was the worst of Rockson’s personal horrors. Somehow he could take other kinds of danger better. But for a man of action, the inability to effect a solution, the total lack of control was what bothered the Doomsday Warrior the most. Somehow, out there, in the open, even in a mega-thunderstorm or a desert tornado, or fighting no matter how many men, he always had an element of control.
To calm his pounding heart, Rockson practiced “chun-chi” breathing, a slow and regular breathing that resulted in calming, concentrating, relaxing his body, one area at a time. He moved an imaginary mental light through his limbs and his thorax, as Chen had taught him. Only then was he able to think: How do I know there are no options? How do I know there isn’t another way out of the cave except by that hole high overhead?
There was no reason to panic now just because he had no rope and grapple. Perhaps he could jerry-rig a hook, tear his clothes to make a rope. His men would come back for him. The hole was small, but they would find it, most likely.
Calm once more, Rockson thought: If I’m going to explore, the first objective is to create some light. He had felt some vines and snaking roots on the damp stone wall. He touched them again, found a pile of dry twigs and fallen vines. They were ancient, covered with cobwebs. He lit a match to a pile of the tinder, blew on it, used its light to find larger pieces of dry wood. He tore some material off his sleeve, wound a torch, lit it.
He set out exploring with burning stick raised high. Now he had some control over the situation. And the cheery, if irregular, glow of his torch.
The makeshift torch lit well, and the brightness made him feel cheerier. Rockson went as far as he could in the twisting, low cave, checking every nuance of the rock walls, walking slowly to see if the torch wavered in any hidden breeze from a crack. But the cave went on and on in one direction, so he walked deeper and deeper. It was a pretty big place—that was a surprise. The twisting passage he traversed wasn’t very wide, but it appeared that someone had hammered out a few of the tight curves in it that were too close for a man to traverse. Someone had been in here . . . maybe someone was still in here, living in here. A bear? A caveman? Just as Rockson thought of this, with mixed feelings, he rounded a corner. A pile of broken shards lay on the ground. They had once been pots, now dusty with eons of dirt. Then Rockson saw a knife. It was shiny, as if it had recently been dropped.
Rock’s eyes widened and he stepped back behind the curve in the rocks. His breath came in short, sharp gasps now. Someone was in here! No, not necessarily: just because the knife looked as if it had just been dropped didn’t mean anything; it could have been dropped a day ago, a year ago. A knife was a precious thing to a primitive; one of them would never have left it behind. It was of a design that indicated foreign origin.
Had someone heard Rockson coming and dropped it in his haste to hide? He cautiously moved forward, bent, picked it up. There was a thin film of dust on it. Rockson realized that its design was somewhat familiar. Not Russian—this was a mountainman’s knife, pounded of salvaged steel. Light and strong, well balanced, faintly blue. It had been here for some time. It could not have bounced down from the hole, however. Perhaps someone had meant to leave it here. There were curious symbols on it, a strange script. He stuck the knife in his belt, went on, determined to explore the rest of the cave. He found no one, no other objects, and no way out.
A breeze disturbed the torch flame. He found a narrow hole in a stone wall, and darkness inside.
Rockson chipped away at it with the knife blade; it widened easily. He crawled inside, once the hole was sufficiently large.
There was a dark dropoff dead ahead, beyond a narrow foothold.
Rockson could barely see the floor of the chamber below, but he climbed down gingerly along the outcroppings of rock. There was no one to help him if he slipped, if he couldn’t get back up again. He dropped to the lower floor, then lifted his torch to see that he was in a wide, perfectly cut circular room. Intelligent beings had fashioned this place. Fine, smooth workmanship! This chamber reminded him of one he had seen in Pattonv
ille, a place they stored spent nuclear fuel.
Feeling along the wall, Rockson felt something—a square indentation. He pressed his hand in it, and a hidden panel slid open in the solid stone. Light poured at him. As his eyes adjusted, his heart pounded wildly. He realized he’d found an ornate chamber much like a temple. Sculpted pillars supported the ceiling, and a stone dais rose up in the middle of the floor. On the dais stood some sort of device.
“Now, this is more like it,” he mumbled to himself, as he approached the dais, for he saw electronic equipment. Looked like a radio transmitter. He hoped to God it was. If this was just a receiver he could die here, lulled by beautiful songs, or news radio, as he starved to death.
No! Don’t think that way, Rock. Better to hope to the last, to the very last. He touched the equipment, found dusty headphones. He put on the headphones and turned knobs. The unit lit up; he’d activated the channel selector! There was a crackle. Rock thought, where’s the mike? He found it, and hands trembling, switched the Broadcast switch. There was an electronic hiss.
“Hello, anyone?” he said. “Is anyone receiving this?”
To his surprise, an image formed in the air of the room. A holographic projection of an old man, in a torn and frayed dungaree jacket. The man had long yellow-gray hair, green eyes, lots of wrinkles. He spoke in crackling radio tones.
“Howdy, son! What’s your beef? Where are you?”
“Hey,” Rockson exclaimed, “I didn’t think this would happen. Are you—”
“Yes, I am real, and I’m receiving your broadcast with this device. It is a television-projector receiver. Like a visi-telephone. Your dime—what do you want, son?”
“Well,” Rock said, “am I glad to speak to you—or anyone. I have a problem . . . I’ve fallen into a cave. I’m near Mt. Jubal—you know where that is?”
“Ah, yes,” said the old-timer. “My, you certainly have an affinity for danger. You must surely have been an explorer in some past life.”
