Doomsday Warrior 03 - The Last American (26 page)

The sun blasted down onto the two of them like the Laser eyes of the gods. It burned everything beneath it on the high-rad desert floor, raising the ground to a hundred twenty-five degrees. Both men erected small aluminized coverings over their heads—gizmos that Mt. Ed had brought along—balanced on small sticks on each side of their backpacks. These worked wonders in sending back much of the sun’s searing heat. Still, it was tough going. Everywhere lay the bleached bones of animals long dead. Huge skulls with horns as long as five feet—twisted, gnarled, straight as an arrow—horns of mutant elk and buffalo who had survived the war but couldn’t survive the heat from the lack of moisture and atmospheric covering. At one site they passed thousands of bones of very large creatures, bigger than elephants, with one immense tusk in the middle of the head and claws on the ends of their feet. How many creatures had been spawned by the radiation of the war and already become extinct, Rock wondered. And no one would ever know—an entire cycle, birth, evolution, and death of a species in just years. Nature was working on a jag, speeding up her once harmonious processes a million times.

As they were passing out of the bone graveyard there was the sound of a drone spyplane from behind them, the familiar, mosquitolike buzz closing in. There was nowhere to run or hide. The red cigar-shaped pilotless plane with video cameras mounted in front and beneath came over them within seconds and dropped down for a closer look. Mt. Ed reached around for one of his always loaded blunderbusses, and, moving amazingly fast for a man of his size, he sighted up the intruder and blasted away. The drone took a direct hit midsides from the big load of lead and jerked violently a few feet to the side. It wavered in the air, as if unsure whether to stay aloft or crash. It decided on the latter, dropping suddenly to the prairie floor some hundred feet below, with a loud, whistling sound. It struck the hard dirt and exploded into a drape of flame that reached nearly fifty feet in the air.

Mt. Ed looked on with satisfaction. “Got that one, hey Rock,” he said, cleaning out the muzzle of his mini-cannon with a long sweep.

“It might have had enough time to transmit our pictures back to control headquarters. We’ll find out soon enough,” Rock answered. He checked the Liberator he had found, burnt around the edges from the blast, but functional, pulling the fifty-round clip out for a second and slamming it back to make sure it was linking. Then opened the strap on the holster of his scorched .45. He was ready—come hell or high water—he was ready.

They had gone only another mile or so when they heard another airborne sound—this one louder, much bigger. Rock turned around and shaded his eyes with his palms. Transport—a big Soyuz II. Rock had heard the sound before.

“Get ready,” he said to Mt. Ed, “we got company coming—and plenty of it.” Within seconds the giant cargo plane, one of the largest in the Red fleet, was over them. It circled in a wide sweep and the bomb bay doors opened.

Suddenly shapes were dropping from the bottom—commandos on parakites. The nylon glider kites with twelve-foot wingspans filled the sky like a swarm of bloodthirsty bats. There must have been forty of them, Red Airborne troops, with olive green jumpsuits on, balanced in their hang gliders on aluminasynth crossbars. They circled above, catching the currents as they adjusted to the wind, yelling frantically back and forth to one another through wireless mikes around their throats. They checked their .55mm machine guns, which were mounted on the front end of the engineless craft, making sure the long cartridge belts weren’t jammed. Then they closed in for the kill, forty black-and-gray wings dropping down like hawks.

With their commander—identifiable by the white lightning bolts beneath his parakite—leading the charge, the attack squadron came in on a tight circle in waves of three about twenty feet apart. As they swooped down to about fifty feet from the ground, they opened up with the .55mms, sending a slicing hail of death onto the two fleeing rebels below. Then they swooped off again, angling sharply to the right and around for another attack as the succeeding waves came in blazing every few seconds.

Rockson had been overwhelmed by Red troops in the past—but this time the odds seemed almost insurmountable. Yet he
had
to live. There was no way in hell these flying death troops were going to stop him from reaching Kim. He looked desperately around for the smallest trace of cover. There—about two hundred feet to the right—there was some sort of drop in the ground. Mt. Ed had unloaded the biggest of his four rifle cannons. He carefully sighted up on the second wave, which was soaring in guns blazing, sending a storm of whistling hot lead into the hard-packed sand, closer and closer to the two rebels. The mountain man waited, waited, and then blasted up in the air with a roar that nearly deafened Rock. The half-pound of shot spread out as it tore up, searching for flesh, for blood, to bathe in. The three parakite gunners of the second wave almost had the two bandits below in their sights—suddenly they were hit with a wall of lead—two of them taking it right in their faces, faces that dissolved into blood and the underlying bone and muscle—sloppy messes that screamed as their parakites plummeted to the earth below. The third man, a second before so proud and sure in his black leather mask, felt a burning pain in his guts. He reached a hand down and it went right into his stomach, so that he felt his own intestines pulsing beneath his fingers. He gagged, spewing vomit through the air as he lost control of his craft. It lifted slightly and spun around like a bird with a broken wing and slammed into the third wave of the gunners, entangling its wings with two of their craft. All of them fell, screaming, to the ground below.

The moment Mt. Ed’s shot had made contact, Rock grabbed the big man by the shoulder.

“Gotta run, man—this way.” Rockson pointed toward the cover. The two of them tore off—Rockson a good deal faster than the bear of a man—but he kept pace as Mt. Ed lumbered after him. Rock put the Liberator he had found on auto and trotted backwards, spraying the sky behind them with a deadly salute of death. The bullets tore a good three hundred feet and into the third and fourth waves, which were confused by the entanglement of the first two groups ahead of them. They swerved out of the way to avoid hitting the spiraling mass of men and kites, breaking their ranks. Rock’s bullets caught one of them just beneath the eye, taking out a good portion of brain as it exited out the back. The dead Red pulled back on his tail control, sending the kite straight up and then over. It slammed into the fifth wave coming down from above, once again entangling, dooming, destroying. The parakite commander, who had been the vanguard of the attack, had swung a wide circle around and was now viewing the proceedings with disgust. He began screaming over his throat mike at the rest of the men to pull up and avoid the killing entanglement at the front. “There is plenty of time—just don’t lose control. We have them.” He gritted his teeth, cocked the machine gun, and came in himself, fingers resting on the trigger.

Somehow Rock and Mt. Ed made it to the ditch and dove in, covering themselves with the high-rad sand—time to worry about that later—if they lived. They were in an ancient creekbed, long since dried up, about three feet deep, the bottom lined with perfectly smooth pebbles and an occasional shell from days gone by.

“We’ve got a defensible position from here,” Rock yelled out to the mountain man above the din of the approaching streams of machine-gun bullets.

“Yah, Rock—we’ll just pick ’em off from here,” Mt. Ed said, taking all four brainbusters from behind his back and leaning them side by side along the sandy rise. Rock didn’t tell him how desperate their situation really was as he ripped his Liberator from around his shoulder and rested it on the edge. Well, he’d soon find out if the gods still held him in their favor.

The parakiters regrouped under the barking orders of their commander and came in again, this time spaced more widely apart so one good shot wouldn’t entangle a whole wave. They flew in three abreast, their guns burping death in three straight lines that came right at the two rebels. Rock and Mt. Ed returned the fire unflinching. The white-hot slugs passed each other in midair and raced on to see who would make target acquisition first. Rock felt a searing pain in his left shoulder as a Red shell passed cleanly through. The three plowing lines of murder ate into the dirt all around them and then passed on. But the Americans’ greetings became a little more intimate with Russian flesh. Three of Rock’s blood presents hit the lead man, turning his chest into a jigsaw puzzle of splintered bone painted red. He screamed and dropped from the sky like a meteor. Mt. Ed’s volley, enough lead to kill an elephant, tore through the right-hand kite and its rider, mixing the two together in a pudding of blood and fabric. He veered sharply to the left, slamming into the third man in the line, the wing tip of the kite piercing the man’s stomach. The kites, wrapped in an embrace of death, spun slowly from the sky like a leaf gliding delicately down. Like a leaf spewing blood and guts—and screams.

“We’re doing great,” Mt. Ed whooped. “This is more fun that shootin’ coons in the moonlight.” But Rock knew they had a long way to go. There were at least thirty of the Red force left—a lot more killing needed to be done. Another wave came in from high up. Three dark parakites, wings filled with the hot air of the afternoon, screaming out a greeting of .55mm shells. Again Rock and Mt. Ed sighted up and let loose with their own barrage of hello—American style. Rock’s slugs traced a course right into the groin of the left-flanking man. He threw his hands down to cover the pain, letting go of the controls, and quickly veered off to the right, another bird out of action. The mountain man’s wall of lead got the proverbial two birds with one stone—as his spinning lead ripped through the steering mechanisms of the nylon craft. Both commandos screamed in horror as they realized they had no control. Flailing wildly, like birds who’ve suddenly lost the use of their wings, the two deathcraft whipped end over end nearly a hundred feet to the dirt, where broken bodies flopped not quite dead in their own oozing blood.

Rockson glanced over at the mountain man and noticed a trickle of red dripping from his long black beard.

“Ed, you’re hit,” Rock yelled. The mountain man put a hand up to his face—it came back wet.

“Just nicked meself shaving, Rock,” he laughed. It was a flesh wound—Ed would survive, Rock thought, feeling the throbbing pain of his shoulder. They were taking the Reds out—but it wasn’t good enough. Even if just one Russian slug got them for every ten they handed out—they’d still be dead by the time it was all over. And Rockson didn’t feel like dying. Not today.

“I got an idea,” he said suddenly. “We need an edge, and I think I know what it is. Pull out your alumnatarp,” Rock snapped. The heat shields, which both men had been using until the attack, had fallen back on top of their packs. Rock smoothed out the metallic-coated cloth until it was flat. Above them the parakites seemed to be regrouping for some new tactic their commander was screaming out orders for. Mt. Ed followed Rockson’s lead, not quite sure what the Doomsday Warrior had in mind. Within a few seconds both of them had a shiny mirrorlike piece of material in their hands nearly three-foot square.

“I think I suddenly see what you got in mind,” the mountain man said, as the sun bounced down off the bright material and into his eyes, making them squint and water.

“You got it pal,” Rock said, aiming the square up at the sun and then tilting it slightly until the rays were being bounced back up at the massing parakite force. “We’ll give them a little more light so they can see us better,” Rock said, holding the stretched-out gleaming fabric in one hand and his Liberator in the other.

“You smart, Rock, plenty smart,” Mt. Ed said softly. “Wish I thought of it—makes me feel sorta dumb.”

“You kidding—you brought the damn things along,” Rock laughed, as the kites came in, whistling a .55mm death song. Their commander’s big move, Rock could see instantly, was to have them come in one at a time, about fifty feet apart—presumably so they wouldn’t tangle each other up as they had a penchant for doing. So much the better.

They let the lead kite soar down like an eagle that had just spotted its prey until it was about two hundred feet away—then both men aimed their squares of mirror fabric at the oncoming death-dealer. The blinding beams of light converged at the same second on the Red’s snarling face. What was happening? He couldn’t see. Everything burning, his eyes on fire. Where was he? Where was the ground? The commando threw his hand over his face, trying to find protection from the blinding light—but there was none to be found. Where was he—where was— The parakite slammed into the ground with the force of a spear, burying the would-be Russian killer headfirst up to his shoulders, smashing his skull into so many brain-splattered fragments.

“It works,” Mt. Ed yelled in delight.

“ ’Course it works,” Rock grinned back, thanking the watchful American deities above that it did.

As each new kite came flying down, its .55mm pouring out torrents of death, Rock and Mt. Ed aimed their squares of aluminized tarp onto the Red driver’s face. Then they blasted away as the craft went out of control. Within a minute they had taken out half the attack force—broken bodies marinating in their own pools of blood littered the prairie, their once firm and graceful parakites now nothing but ripped and shattered pieces of garbage.

The airborne commander, Lieutenant Karnovski, was livid with rage. How dare these two puny rebels knock out half his force of elite airmen? His men were trained, top of the line—not some pig farmers from Poland. These two fools below didn’t have the goddamned right to succeed like this. It was luck—that was all—blind luck. He bellowed out commands to the remaining eighteen men.

“We will come in in one long line—that way they won’t be able to focus those damned mirrors or whatever they’re using on us. Whichever man takes them out—he will be my second-in-command,” the lieutenant screamed. “Formation five—immediately.” The parakites pulled up and around in a wide circle nearly half a mile from Rock and the mountain man.