Doomsday Warrior 11 - American Eden Read online

  Because of the dogs, and only because of them, it was over. The dogs were sated, and fell asleep in a pile over by the scrubby Joshua trees. The humans dressed their wounds—Danik was the worst, but he was patched up and Chen gave him one of his potions. He’d be all right, Rock believed, they’d been lucky. Rock only found out later that half the supplies had been consumed by the furry devils!

  “Do you think there are any more of them?” Danik asked, dry-mouthed. “Perhaps we’d better leave this cave . . .”

  “You crazy?” McCaughlin said, “Go out in that temperature and wind in the middle of the night?”

  “Well post a guard,” Rockson ordered. “I’ll take first watch. Keep the fire high, sleep close to it. They shied from the fire—the holes in the ground are no closer than eight feet to the fire . . .”

  “You’re right.” Rona exclaimed. “And besides, I think the dogs might have eaten ’em all—if not, they sure will eat any more that try that act again.”

  Scheransky went over and petted the furry head of Class Act. “I will never call you a mangy wolf again, I swear it by Lenin—I mean George Washington.”

  They had an uneasy night’s sleep but there were no more incidents. Rock, between dozes, listened to the wind whistling by. It was as if it were speaking to him, warning him, “Go . . . home . . . Go . . .”

  The next day the weather was better—overcast but not quite as cold, and they made good progress. Rockson said, “I believe what’s left of Colorado Springs is right over that hill.”

  They came over the ridge and looked down on a glassy-surfaced blackened plain. “That’s the area that took a nuke bomb hit back in the twentieth century,” said Rockson grimly. “The heat of the air-detonated blast melted the sand into that shiny surface. Not a thing grows there to this day. You notice that there is no snow on that mile-wide plain either. There is still some heat from radioactive elements in that surface—hence the clicking you hear on the Geiger attached to the front of my sled. Let’s give it some room.”

  “I remember this place,” Danik said, “the President’s Museum is about a mile away from here—just beyond those boulders shaped like a pile of kid’s blocks.”

  They quickly made for the boulderfield Danik had indicated. Rockson hoped that any roving scavengers attracted by the body of Run Dutil would not have eaten his notebook as well—some species of high-plains bobcat ate even metal cans!

  The building was a two-story affair nestled in the midst of a flat area covered with snow—a parking lot of old. The big rocks had shielded it from the blast effects—everything else in these parts was flattened. It was partly collapsed. Danik was besides himself with feelings, and his voice was choked up when he said, “Through that second door—that’s where my best friend and I stumbled frozen and hungry into the building.”

  Rockson and his Freefighters pulled up their sleds in front of the blackened crumbling structure and gingerly stepped into the ruin. It was dark inside; they lit a flashlight. Rockson gasped as his beam hit a human face. McCaughlin shouted, “Watch out—” and drew his shotpistol, before he realized the face was familiar.

  “Well. I’ll be a monkey’s uncle. Lincoln—Abraham Lincoln—a plastic figure.”

  “His top hat don’t look too good.” Rona said. Indeed it didn’t. There was a pack rat sticking its nose out of the decayed fabric.

  “Let’s move on,” Rockson said.

  Danik took the lead, and they passed a lifelike statue of Teddy Roosevelt riding a horse in the Battle of Bull Run, and then a replica of President Bush signing the Martial Law decree in the Oval Office. They finally came to the Rotunda Room. Light spilled in from above through a hole in the ceiling. The snow flurries drifted in on the figure of John F. Kennedy sitting in his rocking chair. He was staring forever at the three astronauts in spacesuits that had returned from the moon and were coming in to receive his accolades. A tattered and mouse-eaten American flag hung disintegrating on a pole nearby. JFK was up to his knees in snow.

  “It wasn’t like that when I was here two weeks ago,” Danik gasped. “There was no hole in the roof.”

  “Do you think someone’s been here?” McCaughlin said.

  “No,” Rock replied, “The weight of the snow finally got to the roof. Nothing lasts forever, not even the Hall of Presidents. Where is Run Dutil’s body?”

  “It should be over there—in the shadows—propped up against the wall. We found a steel box in here, all rusted and jammed closed. Some other hapless wanderers must have brought it here—we found disintegrating skeletons on the second floor, next to charred wood on a sheet-metal plate. When Run and I broke open the box, we found some canned goods inside. Must have been decades old, but we cut them open and ate the stuff. It tasted flat, but it wasn’t spoiled. Canned Soviet-label meat. It gave me the strength to go on, but Run was sickening from a snake bite he got the sixth day out of Eden. He threw up the food and convulsed and died. I was—was too weak, delirious, frightened. I left him—and his notebook of our travels—right where he died.” Danik’s voice trailed off. He looked down.

  Rockson shone the beam of his light over in the direction Danik indicated. The body was there, stiff and frozen, its eyes wide and mouth gaping, the lips blue. Run Dutil looked a lot like Danik. The body appeared to be untouched; the cold had kept it from rotting. Perhaps the animals had tried to taste the plastic statues over the centuries and found them unpalatable. And so they had desisted from tasting this real human. Rockson fumbled through the dead man’s clothing until he found the small steno pad with pencil notes inside an inner pocket of his frost-covered tunic.

  Eagerly he played the light across its contents. “Direction readings,” Rock yelled exhultantly. “Run Dutil took bearings and direction readings with a sextant. And there are some notes describing the places they stopped.”

  Detroit rummaged around and found the toy sextant Run Dutil had used for compiling his meager notes in JFK’s plastic hands. It would be useful, for if the navigation device had some error in it, they could take that into account in plotting their trek south.

  “Good work, Detroit,” Rockson said. “We can try to reach Eden now!”

  “Can we bury him?” Danik asked somberly.

  Rockson wondered how they would spade the ground outside, seeing that it was frozen solid. Then he said. “We can roll some boulders over him—better that way—the animals can’t get at him.”

  Danik agreed, Run Dutil was solemnly carried outside, still in his frozen, stiff sitting position. As McCaughlin rolled up good-sized rocks to the body and then hefted a capstone in place, Rockson said, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Heavenly Father, we send you our friend Run Dutil, a good and true American. If you can see to do it, please welcome him into your arms. Amen.”

  They all chanted an amen in unison, and then went back and spread out their maps, and compared them to the notes from Run Dutil’s little pad. Rockson drew some pencil marks on the maps, using the meager angles and sun-elevation heights that Dutil had jotted down. He drew estimated margin-of-error lines too—dotted lines that were as much as ten miles to one side or the other of their new route. Then they were off on their quest for Eden.

  The dogs were howling and yapping, apparently happy to be on the trail again. They didn’t like the President’s museum much, it seemed.

  Taking the bearing to the southeast that Dutil’s notes indicated, they moved their sleds along at a good thirty miles per hour through icy weather conditions. Soon they were approaching the old border of Colorado into Arizona. But there was no letup in the cold temperatures, or in the golfball-sized hailstones pounding the hunched-down travelers.

  Eight

  They headed southward, guided by Run Dutil’s notes in the little pad. Hopefully, they would find the next landmark on the route to Eden, the giant teepee that Danik had described.

  Rockson needed every bit of his famed “mutant’s luck” if they were to reach the obscure site. The bearing was vague, as Dutil had meas
ured direction with a sextant that was little more than a toy.

  They came upon an area 235 miles south of Colorado Springs Plain that Rockson himself had crossed years earlier. It was the area around a small hunter-trapper community called Moosehead. Moosehead Township was a set of ten or twelve wooden shacks and a tanning shed for hides. The Soviets usually ignored these primitive American communities, which served their purposes because their commanding officers did a brisk trade with the mountainmen who did fur trapping. Hides and furs were exchanged for rubles. The rubles bought the trapper families some precious supplies like salt in the small free markets in the shadows of the great Soviet forts further east.

  But someone hadn’t left Moosehead alone. When the Freefighters and their Edenite friend came within sight of the town, they started to see signs of destruction. Scattered along the red-stained snows were the bones of several animals—horse bones, dog bones, and what looked like a picked-clean small human arm bone.

  “Wolves?” Rockson asked Detroit, pointing to the paw tracks all around the bones.

  “The wolves ate the meat,” said Detroit, “but see the bullet hole in this human femur?”

  “Reds,” Rona said, and drew her shotpistol.

  Detroit nodded. “Probably. The animals came later—drawn by the blood.”

  “Let’s get up on that hill and scan the area,” Rock ordered. “Keep your weapons at the ready.”

  From the rise Rock could see that the shack-town beyond was a charred ruin. There were many bodies, some reduced to skeletons, wearing pieces of cloth the wolves didn’t like the taste of. There were crates also, some six or seven feet wide. Putting down his binocs, Rock said. “The town was probably hit with artillery, and then mopped up by a squad of commandos.” He swept the area again with his electron binoculars. “The fires are out, whatever happened occurred at least a day ago. Let’s go down and see if we can find out why they hit it, and look for survivors.”

  Scheransky volunteered, “Maybe I should keep the sleds here, in case there’s land mines, they’re a bit hard to steer in exact situations. I can cover for you here, with my Dragunov sniper rifle, pick off anyone that comes near the town.”

  “Okay,” Rock said. “You stay with the dog sleds. The rest of us go down and look around.”

  Scheransky slid the sniper rifle out of his sled’s blankets and covered them, peering around the countryside far and wide through the telescopic sight. Then he left the rifle sitting on top of the blankets of his sled. He unzipped his parka. Crouching behind the sled he took out a small black box. It had lots of buttons on it. He pressed one. The box sprung to life with a dozen blinking lights. He seated it in the snow, and then pulled a whip antenna up to a height of three feet.

  He left the device to do its secret work, then peered over the sled to make sure no one had turned back for some reason. The others must not know.

  This was only the third time he’d had the opportunity to set up the device. If only they would leave him alone more, he could accomplish his job.

  Rockson and his group skiied sullenly into the pathetic settlement’s ruins. There were not only the bodies of adults, but children’s half-eaten corpses too. And one little girl’s frozen nude body had deep gashes in her pelvic area. She was hanging by the neck from a pole, swaying in the cold wind. Her anguished blank blue eyes stared at him as if pleading for—

  “McCaughlin, cut her down and bury her under some rocks,” he ordered.

  “Bastards,” McCaughlin muttered as he worked. “Murdering bastards.”

  There were more bodies—ravaged women, men with missing testes, atrocities of all descriptions throughout the town. And lots of tracks of wolves.

  But what attracted the Doomsday Warrior’s attention most was the booted footprints of men. Soviet murderers’ bootprints.

  “What could they have done this for?” Danik asked softly of Detroit, who walked alongside, surveying the disaster site. “What did they want of these poor people?”

  Rock had no reply.

  The tanning shack was partly standing. The team headed that way. Rock told Danik to stand guard outside the shack. He put a shotpistol into his thin long hand. “Better get used to holding this baby.”

  Entering the shack with Liberator rifles set on full auto, just in case, the search team found a man. He was trussed up by a rope on the one unfallen central wood beam. He was still alive, and he moaned when he saw them.

  The survivor was not a pretty sight. Rock instinctively shielded Rona’s eyes, then withdrew his hand. Who was he kidding? The woman had been in the middle of the worst action a dozen times. She had seen as bad, and worse.

  The man had one eye half pulled from its bloody socket, his lips were cracked and blue from the cold. He wore a torn fur parka lanced with a hundred bloody holes—perhaps the short jabs of a Soviet cavalry bayonet, sunk deep enough to make the man talk and talk. Torture. His one good eye tracked Rock as he approached.

  “I don’t know,” the agonized man pleaded. “Please, kill me, don’t hurt me anymore.”

  “No one’s gonna hurt you,” the Doomsday Warrior said softly. He gave the man a drink from his canteen. He was about to cut him down, when he saw that the man was just a torn mass inside his clothing. The guts of the man had been pulled out of a hole in his stomach. Slippery coils of intestines pulsed with pain. To move him . . .

  “The Reds did this?”

  The man nodded slightly. “They—they wanted information on—on—some modern-dressed stranger they picked up on their instruments. They said they knew he was near here. One of their automatic overflight drones—Midnight Marauders—detected him. That was about—few days ago . . . Thought he might be a Free—Freefighter, ’cause he was dressed—different then us simple folk. I—we—told them we didn’t see—didn’t know . . . they shot our children one by one, trying to find out—but God, we didn’t—”

  Rockson knew injuries—when they were hopeless, when they weren’t. This was hopeless. The man had minutes. His trussed hands were blue swollen dead things, the circulation out of them for hours. The man’s lips trembled, spoke these words: “Please, please . . . kill me. Kill me—”

  Rockson lifted his shotpistol and dispatched the man from his agony. “Well bury him too—alongside the little girl,” Rockson said. “We can’t stop to collect all the bones in this town, but we will bury the two of them as a token of respect for all the people martyred here.”

  On the way to the pile of rocks at the edge of town that would serve as the burial site, the Freefighters came upon two dead Russians. Their faces were eaten away by the wolves, but their uniforms of cheap brown synthetic material hadn’t proved as tasty. “A lieutenant and a sergeant,” Rock noted, pointing to the stripes on their sleeves. “There’s a bullet hole in each of their heads—big caliber.”

  The Sov’s guns were out. Tokarev ten-shot pistols. Fired.

  Behind the rocks the Freefighters found the American shooters body. A mountain man with a blunder-buss single-shot moose gun. He was intact, the wolves had been busy on the Sovs.

  “We’ll bury this brave and good man too. He deserves it.”

  As they returned to Scheransky, who had been watching them with the binoculars as they made their grim rounds, Danik asked about the shot in the shed. Rockson told him they had found a man in pain, but alive. Beyond help.

  “Did you find out why the Reds did this?” Danik asked. “I know from the tapes I studied in Century City that a community like this is usually left alone . . .”

  Rockson saw no point in telling Danik that he was the unwitting cause of this atrocity. “No, we don’t know why the Reds did this,” Rock said flatly. “We have to move on.”

  It was always their intention to save the precious food supply the carried for themselves and hunt food for the wolf-dog teams. But they’d seen no game, not even any tracks, since setting out. Now, when they did see tracks, it was that of a small rabbit.

  The tracks were hours old, Rock saw wh
en he stopped to examine them. “No sense in going after the little thing, it would hardly sate the teams anyway. Let’s push on,” Rock said. “I don’t like the looks of those clouds.” He pointed up to the south.

  “More acid snow?” Rona asked.

  “No, but nevertheless it’s sure to be a bad storm.”

  Indeed in a matter of minutes a wind started rising and soon became a howling enemy. The wind-driven snow, though of the ordinary variety, took their breaths away. It was coming directly from the south, so the choice was either to take a different tack or fight it. Rockson compromised, ordering the team to turn southwest and keep moving.

  The temperature dropped rapidly. Rock glanced at the thermometer reading on his watch—seventy below. He saw Danik falter and let go of his rope and fall. Rock stopped the sleds. McCaughlin raced over and helped Rock put the man on his sled, covering him with everything available.

  “What’s wrong with him?” McCaughlin asked, shouting into the wind.

  “I think he’s still a bit weak from his ordeal getting to Century City. All the vitamin shots in the world can’t make up for a frozen trek like that. The Edenites never had to endure much in the way of low temperatures. We’ve got to find shelter.” Rock replied.

  To make things worse, in another ten minutes of slow travel, the dogs abandoned their fanned-out position at the end of the nylon rope traces and tangled themselves into immobility. They began howling and biting at the strong rope. “We’ve got to untangle them, find shelter.” Rock implored.

  It took twenty minutes of bone-chilling work for all of them to untangle the dogs—and they had to take off their mittens to straighten out the traces. They were well on their way to having frostbitten fingers by the time they got moving again. Danik was barely conscious, bundled down under ten layers of blankets and furs in Rockson’s sled.