Doomsday Warrior 03 - The Last American Read Free Page B

three of the spiders by the far wall. They erupted into a burning wall of red fur spewing dark blood.
    These pink things were not like their usual prey. These killed and killed again. From far above, the men heard a strange echoing clicking. Rockson raised his pistol at the threatening sound. Nearly three hundred feet above them, almost invisible in the dim blueness of the glowing walls, was a slug-thing a good twenty times larger than the cuties down below. It was their leader or queen, or some damn thing.
    It seemed to be giving orders to the ones below with a series of clicks—FIGHT ON! With renewed vigor, the creeping walls of hundreds of pairs of legs began churning their way toward the remaining freefighters now banded together in the center of the seared-meat-and-cordite-smelling cavern. There was only one chance.
    “Detroit!” Rock screamed out above the bellowing and piercing war cries of the charging spiders. “Up there!” He pointed to the nearly thirty-foot-long reddish sluglike thing high above them, which pulsed with blood, like some immense larva, as it swung slowly in the webbing of hundreds of strands of the thick, sticky webbing.
    “Can you reach it? It’s our only chance.” Detroit Green had the best throwing arm in Century City. Descended from one of the great pitchers in baseball of the late 1980s, Lenny Green, Detroit, with the physique of a cannonball of living black flesh, with arms as wide as the legs of most men, could hit a bird at a hundred yards with a stone.
    “I’ll be damned if I can’t hit that barn door of a thing, Rock,” Detroit said, with a self-mocking grin. “Anyway, if I miss I don’t have to worry about your telling anyone, do I?” He peeled off two of his phosphorous grenades and pulled the pins. Rock warned the other men to get back against the rock wall beneath an overhang of mica-specked black magnetite. The spiders grouping together for an attack from across the hundred-foot space separating them from their dangerous prey shrieked in unison, apparently in an effort to get their courage up. Even Blood Spiders can sense the dead of their own species lying around them. As they came suddenly forward, their flotilla of hairy red legs pumping madly, Detroit pulled his right arm far down and back behind him, like the discus throwers of old, and then swung his entire body back around, whipping the grenade from his hand with the force of a catapult. He instantly followed up with the other arm, which shot the second ball of steel death in just as straight and swift a high trajectory.
    The two phosphorous grenades, fashioned in the weapons shops of Century City, seemed to fly faster as they rose, as if responding to some powerful mental urging from the freefighters below. The slug thing, the leader of the Blood Spiders, all eighteen feet of its jellylike throbbing body coursing with veins of the reddest blood, seemed to sense the twin balls of death as they approached its nest. A row of narrow pink eyes turned slowly toward each intruder. But it didn’t have time to study them too closely. The first of the soaring phosphorous grenades went off with a blast of fiery jell, spreading through the moist air and instantly engulfing the blood slug in an ocean of flame. It raised its multibrained head with two long curving black horns on the top and let out its own brand of pain. A scream that rocked the very walls of the seemingly endless cavern. A second later the second of Detroit’s perfectly thrown grenades went off just feet above the frantically wriggling creature.
    It had never felt pain before. It had ruled, always ruled. Always had the smaller hairy things brought food and obeyed its every command. For years, countless years, it had lived this way—queen of this subterranean world, of this dank hell. And now—SENSATION! Unbearable feeling of pain. Its entire body was throbbing with a terrible aching, ripping apart. Its very flesh, its pumping veins filled with ten