Doomsday Warrior 04 - Bloody America Read Free Page A

stop and take a bite.
    “We’ve got to go faster,” Rock shouted to the president and Kim as they began to falter.
    “Can’t Rock,” the president gasped. “I’m usually much stronger than this but—” He looked humiliated, angry at having to slow down the party. “Rock, leave me,” he gasped, lurching around on unsteady legs. “Take Kim and—”
    “Don’t be ridiculous, Father,” Kim said loudly as the four of them stopped as Langford collapsed to the ground, his chest heaving.
    “Kim, can you run?” Rock asked the petite blonde, the woman he loved.
    “Yes—I—think so, but my fath—”
    “Don’t worry.” Rockson placed both arms under the gasping middle-aged leader of America and swung him up over his right shoulder like a sack of potatoes. The president gasped for a moment and then relaxed, resigned. The three of them began running again, faster than before. Kim’s mouth was wide open, sucking in air, and even Mt. Ed, who Rockson knew was made of iron, began to look a little weary. But then he did have over three hundred pounds of flesh on him to carry, not to mention his huge sack of supplies and trio of blunderbusses hung over his shoulders. They tore across the increasingly sparse bushland, just black cactuses and tumbleweeds occupying the yellowish ground.
    At last they reached it. Rock laid the president gently at the base of the seventy-five-foot-high hill. Kim and Mt. Ed fell against the soft curve of dirt at the base as Rockson swung the field glasses back behind them. It was there! Larger than ever. With the binoculars it took up nearly the whole lens: a wall of oily water, of some kind of liquid anyway, dark as a moonless night, stretching like a curtain of death across the horizon. What it was, where it came from, Rock would probably never know. Just one of a thousand ways of dying in America 2089 A.D. He gave them thirty seconds to rest and then said firmly, “Let’s climb.” They protested but rose. The wall of darkness could be seen now with the naked eye as it grew and grew, roaring across the prairie, now less than five miles off. The dull roar was growing to an unnerving rumble that seemed to shake the very ground beneath them.
    It wasn’t an easy climb, Rock could see that right away. The hill was high enough as the flood didn’t look like it would rise over fifty feet, but the sandy, graveled surface of the hill proved difficult to support a strong foothold. Somehow they struggled up the side, kicking dirt in one another’s faces, moving up ten feet, sliding down five. Rockson, dragging Langford by one arm, was the first over the top—and he didn’t like what he saw. Just thirty feet away near the center of the fifty-foot-wide plateau at the top of the hill stood—stood—Rockson really didn’t know what to call it. But he knew he didn’t like it—and it didn’t like him. He quickly pulled the president up over the side of the embankment as he yelled down to Mt. Ed.
    “There’s something here; get some of your mini-cannons loaded up. We’re going to need them.” Rock turned back to face the lizard-thing, now up on its hind legs standing nearly nine feet in the air. It looked vaguely like a snar-lizard, a none too pretty development in the gila monster family. But this thing was a monster far beyond any snar Rock had ever seen. Its face was a twisted mess of throbbing green arteries; its jaws, shaped somewhere between an alligator’s and a tyrannosaurus rex’s snapped at the air, as its long clawed hands opened and closed as if imagining ripping Rockson to pieces. Its entire scaly body, muscles rippling in thighs as thick as Rock’s chest, was iridescent green with streaks of barely visible red veins occasionally shining through. But it was the rows of serrated teeth that seemed to take up most of its face—teeth a good eight inches long and curved inward, set on jaws that looked as if they could snap a tree in half.
    Rock stood in front of the president who