by Ryder Stacy
It had been but three months now since Killov had parachuted from the skies but already, he thought proudly, he was rebuilding his empire—more powerful than ever. All that a man needed was his mind, and sheer utter determination. Not any man. Only one as ruthless and cunning as Killov could have come this far. Could have survived his parachute-burning fall from orbit. Could have survived three assassination attempts on his life since then. But then he had survived assassins even worse than anything these desert bastards could throw at him.
Tonight would mark the beginning of the next stage in his plans for conquest. This dawn he would expand his armies nearly twofold with the addition of many of the fighters around him, those who stood on the hills to see the Man-God. They would all join, of that he had no doubt. For he was about to give them a little demonstration of his powers. One they would not soon forget. And above all, men respected power. And obeyed fear.
Ka Amun raised his hands as the entourage came into the great rock field, and a roar went up from the collected warriors. At the very instant his hands, also painted gold, pointed up toward the sky, a blare of trumpets sounded again, and the bellows hidden behind the gargoyle blew harder so as to make the flames within the pit on top of it rise up in an almost blinding blast of white and yellow. At that very instant, the tip of the sun poked up over the far horizon, and another gasp went up from the masses. It truly was the son of the Sun. For he controlled its very rising. No mere mortal man could do such a thing. They prostrated themselves by the thousands, bowing and humbling themselves, hitting themselves with whips and chains on their arms and backs, to show their devotion before the Great One, the Ka Amun.
Killov was carried around the edges of the rock field on his golden sedan chair by a dozen Sudanese warriors stripped to the waist and crisscrossed with leopard-skin belts. He let them all see, feel his power. Then he was seated in the center. He rose from the sedan chair and walked out, moving slowly, like a ghost, floating above the ground. And then he spoke. Killov had managed to get hold of a public-address system from one of the Russian outposts they had overrun a month before. A mini-microphone sat just inside his robe. Through wireless transmitter it was relayed to two loudspeakers hidden inside the chair that would make him sound like the Man-God that he pretended to be.
“Oh, followers of Amun,” Killov screamed out, raising his arms high as if calling the sun to rise just for him. “I ask you to look up as my father, the sun, breaks from his death sleep and brings warmth and golden life to the day once again.”
“Oh, Great One,” they chanted back in English, the sacred tongue, the tongue of Amun, as they bowed even faster, rising and bowing down, smashing their faces into the ground so the Man-God could see their willing devotion, “speak to us!”
“I come down to earth—to free you. To free you from pain, from fear, from confusion. Now that you are to be my warriors, when you fight and die under my banner—there is only eternal salvation, there is paradise in my cleansing flames.”
“Paradise,” they shouted back en masse. “Paradise, Ka Amun.”
“Yea, let the sun rise.” He waved his hands at the sky as the high priests gathered around him, shaking their staffs and chanting various supplications for the sun to rise once again, a ritual they had carried out for over three thousand years. A ritual that always made the sun rise.
“Without us—without the Great Amun,” Killov screamed into the mike as the words blasted out over the ears of the assembled nomad fighters, making them tremble, “there would be no sun. It would not rise. There would be only eternal night. And all would be cast into darkness, cast into a frozen death more horrible than the most terrible nightmares. Bow to Amun!”
“Bow to Amun!” the assembled priests screamed out as they formed a large circle around the Man-God and raised their staffs once again, as if supplicating the sun. And the burning orb rose higher, smoothly riding the morning breezes into the purple sky.
“Without Amun—you are worse than dogs, worse than ants, worse than lifeless sand,” Killov screamed again, and the bowing masses pushed their faces even deeper into the desert, praying that the Great One should not catch their eye, should not single them out for his wrath.
“Yea, look up into the sky,” Killov commanded. “Look up, up. See that sun follow the commands of Amun, see it rise to give warmth and life to the Sudan, to Chad, to Egypt, to the Earth itself.”
“See it rise!” the assembled priests echoed out.
“And see this,” Killov went on, as he raised his glowing red cylinder-crystal—the Qu’ul levitation-stick—and pointed it at three rock slabs each the size of a truck. “Raise your heads,” the Man-God commanded the sprawled masses, and slowly, scarcely daring to, they lifted their heads a fraction of an inch at a time and raised their tightly squeezed eyelids. They weren’t sure whether they dared look straight at the Man-God or disobey his orders. But they decided that it was better to obey, to overcome their terror and watch, as He commanded.
“Behold the power of Amun,” Killov croaked out as he quickly popped down another Orbitol pill, one of the drugs the priests had been supplying him with. He had been up for days now, planning his campaigns, planning this event which would solidify a warrior army around him. But he was growing tired again. The Orbitol slammed into his sagging nervous system like a rocket and his eyes popped open, his heart quickened as if he was in a sprint. “See the power.” He pointed the levitator-cylinder at the three clustered slabs of granite.
They rose up side by side smoothly, about ten feet apart, as the warriors cried out in awe. Killov, after his initial destruction of the Great Sphinx, had learned the art of the anti-grav device well. He had practiced with it night and day, wanting to be its master, wanting to be able to use it to fit his own designs. And he had learned well.
The three slabs, each big enough to crush a house, rose up and hovered over his head about fifty feet up. They began spinning each in a different direction like immense rectangular records on a turntable, not wobbling or shaking a bit. The desert warriors, if they had been frightened before, were positively shaking with fear now. Most of them had not seen the rock-flying powers of the Man-God, though they had heard about them. Some had scoffed at such a power. They didn’t now. Tears flowed from their eyes to be this close to the Ka Amun and witness his miracles.
“Bring out the prisoners, the traitors,” Killov screamed, and from a circle of priests in elaborate jewel-hatted garb were dragged out a dozen men all screaming hysterically. Their hands and feet were chained together.
“These men have betrayed the Sun God, have betrayed Kil-Lov—son of Amun,” Killov bellowed. “They believed they could challenge my power.” He laughed, a cackle that echoed through the hills and made even the priests of Amun shudder inside. The frantic, innocent prisoners were dragged forward to the center of the rock garden, where Killov stood. They were placed side by side, spread-eagled out along a flat rock twenty feet long, eight feet wide. Their chains were pulled tight at feet and wrists so they were tightly pulled down against the rock, unable to move.
“Now watch—watch and remember what happens to any who dare betray Amun,” Killov bellowed into the mike, his eyes growing bright with the anticipation of pain. In fact, the twelve had committed relatively minor infractions—stealing bread or a pair of shoes, being several hours late for guard duty. But Killov allowed no mistakes, not one. And these would be far more useful to him as examples of his iron rule than their meager lives were worth otherwise.
He turned his hand, holding the glowing anti-grav stick, and the three slabs over his head spun slowly away from him and right over the long sacrifice stone on which the sputtering and crying men were chained down.
“Oh, Sun God, we send more souls into your burning mouth,” Killov intoned, and he lowered his hand. He moved slowly, not wanting it to be over too fast, and the three immense slabs dropped down an inch at a time as if on invisible pulleys. They reached the flesh of the men, and then slowly, terribly sl
owly, Killov lowered them further. There was a sudden chorus of terrible screams that even the highest on the hills could hear. Sounds that covered them with gooseflesh. And as they watched the slabs grind inexorably down on the chained victims, a wall of blood shot out from the sides of the rock-sandwich. Under such high pressure it gushed out a good twenty feet in every direction in a red waterfall spray. Killov pressed the huge rocks down even further so they touched against the slab, and then he turned them back and forth like a man squashing an ant beneath his boots.
He let them rest there silently for a few seconds, and there wasn’t a sound anywhere. Then he raised them up again, their undersides covered with blood. The nomad masses looked down breathlessly at the mess that was left behind. It was no longer recognizable as human. It was no longer recognizable as much of anything, really, beyond a tangled mess of red organs crushed like pudding dripping, and skulls and bones smashed into a wet dust. Nothing remained of the men who had disobeyed Him.
Killov raised his hand again, and now the killing rocks rose up over his head and began spinning like tops, spraying out the blood in a circle around him. Spinning like meteors, like red nightmares that would go into the dreams of all the men who had just witnessed the carnage created by Killov’s very special weapon.
“Bow to Amun, swear to Amun,” Killov bellowed out over his throat mike. “Swear your devotion, your allegiance, your willingness to die in his crushing army. Swear!”
“We swear our lives to Amun,” the masses screamed out as one. Screamed out again and again, and bowed and prayed that he would not smite them. Killov smiled the frozen smile of a skull beneath his golden crown, and he smoothed his red-splattered finery. All the while, the three huge rocks spun just above him like the crushing fists of the ancient gods.
Eleven
America was a checkerboard of ugliness and beauty in ever-changing proportions from the air. Rock and his strike team flew across country in the MIG X7 trying to cloud-hop, so as to avoid radar detection. The Freefighters stared out the window in fascination as their great and wounded land whizzed below them. In some places there were just miles of seared black land, sometimes the color of charcoal, filled with craters. Vast wastelands of rad-death.
Because of N-Day, it was all dead, nothing growing even after more than a century.
Yet in other spots, America was beautiful, lush, filled with soothing greens and blues, the colors of the living earth, not of the dead one. The men’s pupils alternately opened and closed as they passed over the different areas. Clearly the planet Earth was trying to heal itself, was trying to grow back in the many spots that had been nuked, burned, raped, mutilated. But it was just as clearly a tough job. Man had been an expert with death and mega-poison. His atomic weapons had killed not just other men and animal life, but the very flesh of the earth itself. Many of the wounds they would see would take a long time to heal—if ever.
“I just never get over it—what we did to the earth, to the Mother Earth,” Rock said to no one in particular. “How could they be so fucking stupid?”
“The bad ones got control,” Chen replied softly. “Just as they’re trying to do again now. That’s why we’re even up here flying to the very ends of the earth. To stop it from happening again.”
“Still, that’s just a fact—it’s not really an explanation,” Rockson went on, grinding his teeth together. “What is it about man, about men? Do they have a fatal flaw that commands them to destroy—or was it just chance that the demented sons-of-bitches got control of everything?”
“A little of both, I think,” Chen said even more softly now, so that both Sheransky and even Archer, who appeared to be listening intently, had to strain to hear the conversation. “The destructive bastards always try to get control. Men who lead are aggressive. That aggressiveness can drive them to the point of—madness, a lust for sheer destruction. And yet there are also more extreme men within that category of destroyers. There’s men like Colonel Killov, for example. And then there’s men like yourself, a leader, a preserver. Yet I know you kill, but you would stop fighting tomorrow and give up all your power, give up your rank in a second if the enemy were to cease his assault.”
“You got that right, pal,” Rock replied, wincing. “Give it all up. Then the whole bunch of us could just head out from that futuristic basement we call home and start some homesteads out there in the great radioactive outdoors. Be just like the old days. Pioneers, trying to reseed the country, make her whole again.”
“I can just see Rona with the reins of a plow around her shoulders out there in the fields,” Chen commented wryly. “As you and her start your little farm! What exactly were you planning on growing?” The Chinese went on, unable to resist needling him.
“Avocados and pineapples,” the Doomsday Warrior exclaimed, as if it were obvious. “They’re in short supply at C.C!”
“Meee liiikeee beee farmmmerr,” Archer snarled out as the three of them laughed, a little surprised that he had understood the conversation. Rockson could never quite tell just how much the oversized near-mute really took in through those big ears of his. But he was definitely getting the feeling as he spent more time fighting alongside him that Archer was far more intelligent than his primitive speech, and sometimes equally primitive actions, let on. Who could figure it out. Maybe his IQ rose and fell depending on the time of the moon.
“It’s the same in Russia,” Sheransky said as he pulled his blond head away from the cockpit window, though he was fascinated by the jigsaw of death and life below. “Many of the common people—they don’t want to fight. Don’t even wish to occupy America, or any other land for that matter. They have no desire for an empire, just for their own little piece of the earth to grow food in. They want to own a small home, to have a family, children. It is the politicians who want only to further their own ends, who use the power to hurt others. I tell you, the common man—he is the same the world over. If we could just get rid of the damn bastards who run the show—maybe things would work themselves out all right. You know, like—burn all the kings and emperors and commissars and presidents. Then the rest of us could live in peace.”
They were all silent after the little speech. In their hearts they believed it was doubtless true. But such an event seemed, to say the least, unlikely. Still, deep inside, they looked down on the wounded earth that had given birth to all races and all living things, and they felt like crying.
They flew on through the early morning as streaks of light undulated above them in crazy patterns. The Aurora Borealis had grown dramatically in size and coloration as a result of the Nuke War. And in the century plus since, it hadn’t diminished, but grown ever brighter, sometimes nearly lighting up the daylight sky as if with magnetic fire. It was a little frightening being up amidst the streaking rainbows of radiation. But though they felt an electric charge around their bodies, sometimes making the hair on their heads and arms begin to stand up when they went through a thick curtain of the stuff, it didn’t seem to be doing anything bad either to the jet or them. But they sure as hell could feel something going through their flesh.
It was seven in the morning—and as far as Rock could tell from the onboard computerized mapping and direction system, they were somewhere over Tennessee—when the colors of the sky started turning a decidedly nastier color. The brighter colors of morning turned dark, deep brown, a blackish green, the colors of a diseased corpse. The weather-tracking functions of the jet’s computer lit up, and warnings flashed across the screen.
“Something’s up, Rock,” Sheransky said as he read the Russian warnings that were coming in fast and heavy now. “Big storm coming up. It says we should get down, that the jet is not equipped to deal with—” Even as he was uttering the words of warning the jet was suddenly shaken around like a leaf in a rapids. They were all over the place, spinning, twisting, rising, and falling hundreds of feet in a second. Rockson felt the craft go completely out of control, and tried to pour on more power to straighten her out, l
ike a jockey kicking a skittish mount.
Suddenly the skies all around them turned utter black. Lightning was cracking, streaking everywhere in spiderwebs of white-hot fire. The men were too scared to utter a word, but held on tight to the sides of their seats as the jet went wild. It was as if they were in the jaws of a white shark and he was just ripping away, trying to get a good mouthful. Clouds the size of mountains formed out of nowhere and rippled with blue fire on every side, as if they were alive with electricity. In the lightning flashes Rock could see tornadoes dropping down out of the great storm clouds, snaking down to the earth below, wide funnels of black air which began sucking up whatever they could rip from the land.
Hoping to outrun the storm, Rockson poured on even more power as warning lights on the other side of the console snapped on, telling him he was approaching the danger point of the X7’s power output.
“You’d better go slow with that,” Sheransky shouted nervously as he saw the warning lights blinking. “It reads danger zone.”
“I know what the hell it reads,” Rock snapped back. It was clear in any language what was going on. The jet was going to come apart pretty soon, ripped open like a sardine can at the seams. He made a sudden decision, praying it was the right one, and slammed the controls forward, hitting the POWER OFF switch. There was a sudden eerie sense of motionless for a second as the g-force almost ceased. They could all hear the thunderous roars of the mega-storm outside and around them. And then the jet dropped straight down. Without power, it just pointed its spearlike nosecone toward the earth and hurtled down.
“Shhiiiiiitttt!” Archer bellowed out as they were all suddenly looking straight down at the cratered, lightning-illuminated ground. He clearly didn’t like dropping like a stone from 65,000 feet. Not that the rest of them were too happy about the idea either, thinking that the storm had somehow caused a burnout in the jet.
