Doomsday Warrior 17 - America’s Sword (16 page)

“Well, that’s all well and good,” the Doomsday Warrior replied with a slight smirk. “But since my oversized pal here can’t write or read, in fact he can hardly speak, I’ll be helping him.”

Archer sort of snorted. The bureaucrat looked up at Archer, who stared back down, the right side of his mouth starting to curl up in a definite animal-growl expression. Generally, the near-mute could hold his anger. He knew how strong he was. But once in a while, when he got riled up, he started losing it.

“I think he feels bad that he’s not educated,” Rockson leaned over and spoke softly. “He can get pretty upset when he’s mad, so—”

The bureaucrat gulped and glanced at Archer and then turned quickly away. “Well, I guess in this particular case an exception can be made,” the form taker said, coughing hard, somehow pretending that it didn’t really matter all that much anyway.

When all their forms were complete the bureaucrat got up, huffing and puffing from his chair, and led them down an aisle toward the back of the room. Shelving extended for hundreds of feet, floor to ceiling. Many of the spaces were already filled with firepower. From shotguns to immense blunderbusses. The place had enough death-potential stored up in here to take on an army. One by one they handed over their own firepower, not liking it at all.

Rock gave his shotpistol but kept his mini-derringer, a two-shot affair, in his shirt. If you could hang onto the thing when it bucked, you could probably take out a wall with the mini-.357! He was going to keep his Bowie blade which was hidden beneath his jacket too, but the bureaucraft was apparently used to such shenanigans and pulled the jacket back, taking the long blade out.

“Can’t fool me, fellows,” he laughed for the first time. “I’m an expert when it comes to ferreting out all weapons.”

Detroit undid his grenade-bandoliers and with a grim look handed them over as well. Then his .9mm Liberator went. He kept a small blade that unfolded hidden in his belt, which the form man somehow didn’t see.

Chen gave his blade and a small .9mm that he carried sometimes as well. He didn’t mention that he had about a half-dozen shuriken, two of them explosive. And again the bureaucrat couldn’t find them when he patted the Chinese Freefighter down.

The bureaucrat reached for the huge crossbow nervously as Archer swung it back around his shoulders. He held onto the thing as if it were his firstborn. And let out a little snarl again. “NOOOO BREEEAAAKKK!”

“I’d make sure that thing doesn’t get damaged,” Rockson warned the weapons taker. “Not even a scratch.”

“Oh no,” the man replied, shaking his sweat-beaded brow. He held out his arms to receive the weapon, but Archer wouldn’t let go of it until Rockson gave him the go-ahead sign. Mumbling and looking quite perturbed about the whole thing, Archer then handed over his alumisynth quiver, which held all kinds of arrows. But he managed to hold onto something—his long knife inside his deerskin pants. The bureaucrat wasn’t about to search him. In fact, he pulled back quickly, wanting to be as far away from Archer as possible.

And with that, the Freefighters supposedly all searched and weaponless, the bureaucrat handed each a slip of paper—the last sheet of the triplicate form.

“Now, you’ll need these when you come to retrieve your things.”

“Great!” Rock replied with an undercurrent of sarcasm. Though the bureaucrat in charge of firearms forms didn’t even seem to notice. That was one of the good things about that type—they didn’t see or hear a hell of a lot of what was going on around them, as they were usually too busy getting fat, or filling out meaningless pieces of paper!

“Okay, let’s get the hell out of here,” Handelman said gruffly, as he looked at his ancient wristwatch held on his wrist by a cord. “We’ve got a lot to do, and see.” He led them down the main lobby, a good two hundred feet. They reached another wide opening and walked through.

“Jesus—” Rockson whistled through wide-open lips while Detroit and Chen just stared ahead, as if in a daze. For they were looking down over the insides of the great Caucus Stadium. Rockson had never been inside a structure so immense. It was hard to believe it was man-made, so huge was the inner main area. The huge curved ceiling seemed impossibly high. From one end of the sports complex to the other it must have been four football fields wide, perhaps two long. Steel beams crisscrossed on every side and along the plastic ceiling. Light came in from various plastic-light-sheets set into symmetrical designs. Whoever built the place had done a damn good job. For the giant sports dome had to have been completed a hundred and twenty years ago, maybe more.

Rock looked all around the dreamlike structure. There were so many levels, tiers everywhere, rising up so there were five different levels all around, circling the entire stadium. There were just a few people around, and it was obvious that they weren’t regular delegates but rather cleaners. They went around in the endless rows of chairs dusting, making sure that everything would be in spotless, shipshape condition in preparation for the upcoming convention. Men were down on their hands and knees, dusting and scrubbing the floor; waxers and shiners worked on the chairs, on the walls, on the immense stage and podium that stood in the dead center of the stadium floor.

As Rock turned his head from side to side, the place just overwhelmed him more and more. From the outside of Caucus Dome, the structure had seemed huge, impossible to comprehend. But once inside, the huge structure seemed even more impossible to take in mentally. The top of the curved plastic dome, with all its beams, seemed larger than the sky itself. It just seemed to rise up and off in every direction. Rockson’s eyes kept moving around as he tried to take it all in.

“Come on,” Handelman said, bored with it all, since he had lived and caucused in the Caucus Dome for years. He led them down the aisle, one of a dozen or more of them. Down toward the stadium stage. Folding seats ran off in both directions. There must have been tens of thousands of seats that circled the inside of the stadium, forming tiers that circled around the entire space.

“Some son-of-a-bitching place,” Detroit commented as the Freefighters followed just behind Rock, Handelman in the lead.

They walked down the aisle for a good five minutes, so much area was there to get to the center. They were all in a state of awe.

As they reached the end of the aisle, they looked across the floor. It had once been astroturfed for the games that had gone on a century before. But even the toughest material would have started breaking down after the decades. In the center of the areas of faded green covering was the wood plank platform. This was huge, too, raised up about ten feet from the floor. It was a good hundred feet in diameter. And it was centrally situated, so anyone in the stadium could see it from any of the seats. If nothing else, the whole thing had been well designed.

They stood there for a while watching the work crews tear ass all over the place. There must have been hundreds of workers moving around as if they had only minutes to complete their jobs. Rock glanced around at what he had thought were large waxing machines until he got up close. Men were driving these machines that he suddenly realized were motorized carts with red, white, and blue stripes on the sides, making a loud chugging sound. The drivers wore straw hats, and had plump-faced, blank expressions. It was like America of the years just before the atomic clouds hit. The world-gestalt of a century before permeated the place, creating an aura of a time that would never exist again.

Handelman walked right up to the speaker’s platform and pointed around with pride.

“There aren’t a hell of a lot of places this big and still kept in such good shape. Pretty amazing, isn’t it?” The man was clearly proud of the domed stadium.

Men in golf carts were scooting around the platform, putting finishing touches up with the carts’ long-reaching mechanical arms. Flags were carefully set up in each corner of the podium.

In the dead center of the vast stadium, sitting on a gold-colored table approximately ten feet in diameter, about six feet high, Rock saw the strangest “sculpture” that he had ever seen. It was all rather amorphous, fused together like some mutated statue. A glowing glob of granite? No, it looked smooth, with an occasional bump, like melted plastic. “What the hell is it?” Rock asked.

“It’s the Soul of Nixon,” Handelman said, making a little crossing motion over his fat stomach. “Our sacred God, the Oneness! Be careful. It is not to be touched. Only the Nominee may touch it.”

Rockson went closer and squinted as he tried to decipher just what the hell the damn thing was. It indeed was like a glob of semitransparent plastic, and there was a mixture of different symbols from America’s past embossed on its slippery surface.

He jumped back a foot when the mass started to glow dimly. As he watched, the object’s glow grew in intensity, then various neon signs imbedded inside the thing started to light up. Advertisements! Miniatures of the kind of advertising that had once adorned the buildings on Times Square in New York City!

“DRINK KOKEY-KOLA,” and “BUY JOU-JOU’S” came on; and “ROMMEL CIGARETTES—NOT A COUGH IN THE CARAVAN LOAD.” But the best one was the largest—a life-size, full-color neon portrait of NIXON. “NIXON’S THE ONE. ONLY HE CAN SAVE US,” flickered on and off above the smiling, waving neon picture of Nixon. And the neon representation of one of America’s legendary presidents started to move. He would go from giving the “V” for victory sign to kneeling down with his hands grasping the hilt of a long golden sword that was sunk into a huge Kokey-Kola Can. The sword appeared to be real, and the end of its hilt actually stuck out of the glob of strange plastic.

Soul of Nixon my foot! Rockson thought, this is some kind of nuke-fused junk left over from the day the bombs fell, probably powered by some sort of radiation source imbedded inside.

“It’s something else, isn’t it?” Handelman said, almost softly, his eyes starting to fill with tears. “We found this great wonder in a nuked-out town called Reno. God in His Almighty wisdom has given it to us, gave us the Nixon-soul to worship. My ancestors brought it here a hundred years ago, when the Nominee was merely a young man. Nixon, you know, was the creator of all modern politics and debates. See that sword—no man can take it out save the Great Nominee, whom we will renominate in the ceremony coming up! It is the source of power. That is the Sword of Nixon. It is our most sacred symbol of the indestructible self-nature of Caucus and endless debate.” The man got a fanatical look on his plump face. He just stood there with his eyes completely unfocused, bathed in the flickering psychedelic light-display of the Nixon-glob.

Nineteen

“I
’m quite a historian on the place,” Handelman went on, as he focused on the Freefighters again and took off his straw hat. He waved it at some of the assembled workers on stage, and those all around the Great Dome, who waved back.

They walked around the fantastic ancient stadium, each of the Freefighters following Rockson’s command, observing all, each man storing his own bit of what he felt was vital information.

“My father, bless his political judgments and forethought,” Handelman said, looking up at the great dome ceiling wistfully, “was in the first vote. It is a shame he had to kick off while such a very young man. A good twenty years ago, before some of the major changes were made here, he entered the Eternal Meeting.”

“Yes . . . a shame. So, how did you all survive the holocaust?” Rockson asked.

He glanced here and there at the cart vehicles, at the hundreds of workers carrying chairs, moving screens, doing various jobs that Rock couldn’t even quite figure out. Everyone wore the same khaki slacks, short-sleeved white shirts, and those dumb straw hats. Rock could see, as he got used to it all, that the hats and clothing were actually slightly different from one man to another. Some hats had bands with more red, white, and blue stripes, probably a sign of rank.

“Well, as I mentioned to you,” Handelman went on, turning from the no longer lit-up Nixon sculpture, “the Great Dome of the Republam Party was somehow spared the nukes. Though there was a little bit of damage on the outside walls, which was repaired quickly. Oh, it was terrible back in those days,” Handelman went on with a sigh, looking up at the misty rafters all around them. The yellowish colored mist seemed to ooze down toward them from on high, in myriad, twisting streams. “Not that I was around,” he went on, lifting his straw hat and combing back almost nonexistent hair.

“We sent out hunting and exploration parties after a few months. But the men never came back. The next exploration group, as well, just disappeared. Whether it was because of radiation, wild animals—who the hell knows. But for the first years, our ancestors couldn’t find a goddamned thing. A huge all-dome meeting was called. Nearly two thousand of us were gathered here when the nuke-bombs hit America. Candidates were to be picked, convention chores divided up. They decided to go on with the Convention. And, of course, the Nominee had to be sanctified. And that annual event has become our reason for existence, our philosophy: To keep the delegations, the meetings, the very convention itself moving along. The Nominee is so great . . . He helped us; no, indeed, he helps us control our lives.

“We adapted much of what we could find around here—these straw hats, the pinstripe and blue blazer outfits. And we developed a ranking system. Everything perfect in its own way. And we must be doing something right—because we’ve been around for over a century! We carry out the same roles that our forefathers did, the Nominee’s perfect ways that cannot be questioned.”

“But how do you actually survive?” Rock asked, as the rest of his team took in everything around the huge Dome, trying to pick up all the extras they could. “I mean,” Rock clarified, “what do you eat?”

Handelman laughed as he swept his hand around the place. “Huge amounts of supplies, frozen and dry, are stored in a vast series of warehouses and tunnels for many sublevels below the dome. There’s enough there to feed ten armies.”