Doomsday Warrior 10 - American Nightmare (23 page)

So that’s what happened, Rock realized. They believe me captured or dead!

Despite his pain, the Chessman still possessed his hypnotic power. He grabbed Rockson and thrust him toward the window. “Tell them you are here—then we finish our contest!”

But the holy man’s spell on the Doomsday Warrior was permanently broken, and Rockson lunged at him.

A pair of RPGs came from the ground below, and missed the Tower window, expending themselves on the impregnable stone walls. Barrelman’s army was sure he was dead, and were using rocket launchers—trying to avenge him. Soon they would hit both the Doomsday Warrior and his opponent. Not to mention Kim and the kids, who were flat-out on the floor, trying to avoid being hit.

Rockson saw the control panel now; it was marked
Force field, City-encircling.
There were a set of switches. The Veil projector. He tried to reach it, but Chessman’s clawing hands bent him slowly in the opposite direction. There would be another RPG soon, then another, until they were all killed. He had to end this!

With Chen’s “number-five twist,” Rockson slammed the Chessman backward into the window opening. The Chessman teetered and fell, but not far. He landed on the ledge that ringed the top of the Tower. Rockson scrambled out and threw himself on top of him. The Runners on the ground stopped firing, cheered.

Rockson had the upper hand now. The Chessman was wounded, and his hypnotism no longer worked on the Doomsday Warrior. But the man had an amazing reservoir of physical strength, and it was all Rockson could do to keep from being hurled over the side of the parapet to his death.

He stabbed his fingers in the Chessman’s throat. The Chessman gagged and jabbed at Rockson’s eyes, missing them by millimeters. The Chessman’s breaths were coming hard; he was tiring!

The Chessman bit and clawed his way out of Rockson’s grasp, then dove for the window opening. Rockson tackled him as he was halfway in, dragging him back to the parapet. The Chessman twisted and fought like a rabid beast.

Rockson struggled to his feet, shoved the Chessman against the ledge. He ripped off the white mask—and gasped. It was Streltsy, his gold tooth gleaming with his words. “You shouldn’t be surprised. You are not the only one with a counterpart in this world! We find ourselves matched again. Only I am much more powerful in this place than I was in the desert. I, fittingly, replaced a giant—the Chessman. You are a mere mortal. Aren’t you afraid? I beat you before, after all. And future-history repeats itself. Now.”

“Streltsy! Your world is about to be vaporized by an atomic attack. Don’t you know this is September eleventh, 1989? Don’t you realize what’s about to happen?”

Chessman rushed around the corner of the tower. He peered around the corner at Rockson. “Shall we play ring-around-the-rosy? I can run faster than you, come up behind you.”

“Streltsy, you’re a fool, not powerful at all. I suppose you expect your force field—the Veil—to protect your city, so that you can keep living here, keep terrorizing the city.”

“Yes! I
like
it here, Rockson. I had little possibility in our other world of running anything except that damned outpost. Here, I have it all.”

“You must listen. The Veil isn’t powerful enough to stop a nuke explosion—a damned car can almost penetrate it! I know, I’ve tried. You’re not keeping the city safe; you’re dooming yourself and everyone in the city to death. Shut off the Veil, let everyone flee the city.”

Chessman’s head
disappeared.
And before Rock could turn, the Chessman was upon him, from behind, strangling, using the powers of his mind to weaken Rockson’s resistance. Instead of the Chessman, Rock felt the coiling strength of a giant anaconda about his neck.

It was so unexpected, so shocking, that Rockson nearly let himself fall. His enemy seized the moment to strike out with his fists, but Rockson recovered in a violent surge of fury. “Streltsy—you will
die
for what you did to me!”

Rockson twisted into a flurry of bony fists and landed a solid punch of his own, square in the Chessman’s solar plexus. The gaunt man reeled backward as the breath was knocked from him. Rockson launched a roundhouse kick to the head. Streltsy lost his balance, teetering for a breathless moment. Then he plunged over the side, screaming.

The scream ended swiftly in a sudden sickening thud. Rockson, oblivious to bullets, looked down just in time to see the Chessman bounce on the horn of the dragon gargoyle above the low window. The mangled body—nearly torn in half by the horn—hit the side of the Tower and continued its plunge to the ground. It hit the walkway with a sickening splat, like that of a melon bursting open, bouncing once and then rolling to rest. The shooting stopped.

A mighty cheer rose up from below. Rockson saw some of the Runners coming out of their cover, waving and shouting with joy. They hugged each other, unmindful that they were exposing themselves to enemy guns.

“Don’t stop!” he shouted, knowing his words wouldn’t carry. “It’s not over yet!” Even as he shouted, the rookies below were taking aim on the Runners who had dropped their guard.

He groaned as he watched several of them take bullets and go down. The other Runners who jumped out into the open scattered back to cover and resumed firing. In the midst of the turmoil, Rockson saw one of the city’s brush-eaters come slowly down the boulevard, hugging the curb, its scoop in the front pulling debris into the metal mouth. Even on this killing field, someone was busily cleaning Salt Lake City’s streets, oblivious to the madness around.

None of the battling fighters paid any attention to the machine, either, as it churned down the street toward the Tower grounds, its headlight beams searching for things to pick up. Rockson saw that the Chessman’s remains were directly in the brush-eater’s path.

Eddie had heard the shooting, and the crackling radio in his twenty-five-ton man-eating machine had told the story—the damned homeless derelicts were storming City Hall Tower!

He had swung his machine around, heading the huge brush-eater out of the park and toward the action. Nobody was going to hurt the Chessman.

It took a full ten minutes to get to the square, and as he tore through the gate, gears grinding wildly, eating up fences, shrubbery—anything that stood in his way—he laughed madly. The windows of his night-prowling hellish death-dealer cracked and shattered as bullets hit at odd angles. Pieces of glass flew about and stuck in his cap, his shoulders. Blood trickled down his hand holding the ten-gear shift. But onward he plunged. Give me a target, he thought, looking at the screen—someone that doesn’t move too fast . . .

Suddenly the radar showed a blip. The autofocus high-intensity headlights zeroed in on a fallen figure on the pavement—a tall thin man wearing a torn robe. Not a rookie or knight, nor blue-blazered consultant . . . therefore—an enemy!

Laughing like a maniac, Eddie turned the brush-eater and roared at the fallen man.

From high above, Rockson watched as the machine drew closer, eating up debris, until it reached the Chessman and stopped. The body was twitching. The scooper tried to suck it in. For an awful minute, the scoop sucked away at the Chessman, the engine whining with the effort. Then the pitch of the motor went up as the eager driver tried to adjust to its obstacle. The tearing teeth came out, and with a buzzsaw-like noise they consumed what was left of the evil dictator.

With a cough, the machine deposited the body parts inside and then continued on its way, leaving only a bloody stain behind on the pavement.

Rockson pulled away from the parapet. He had one more job to do. The Chessman might be dead, but his spell on the city wasn’t yet broken. He had to turn off the Veil machine.

He crawled back through the shattered window into the chamber. The children were huddled on the floor, and Kim was still struggling to free the door of its barricade.

“Kim, it’s almost over,” he said gently, pulling her away from the door, avoiding her tiny fists that flailed in his face. “The Chessman is dead.”

Stunned, she stopped struggling. “Dead?” She could hardly believe it. “The Chessman is dead?” She stumbled away from him in a daze. “No!”

Rockson looked around the chamber. There. There was the control panel. He leapt to it, ready to flick the switches at random. But he noticed a reminder Chessman had made to himself. A small scrawl at the lower switch.
“Remember, turn the Veil off only in coded sequence.”
Rockson hesitated. The code had been lost with the Chessman’s death. What would happen if he didn’t pull them in sequence? An explosion? Think!

But there wasn’t time to think. He’d have to chance it; the Veil had to come down. He pulled the switches from right to left. Nothing happened. No explosion. Then a readout came across the small screen on the console:
UNAUTHORIZED SHUTDOWN SEQUENCE, VEIL SEALED IN
“
ON
”
POSITION, AS PROGRAMMED.

Rockson had made a mistake. He’d sealed the city like a tomb! The only way out now would be through the Portal.
Maybe.

And to convince the citizens to follow him to the portal, he’d at least have to shut off the mind-control muzik.

Though the muzik was broadcast from the radio tower at the Tabernacle, the Chessman must have controlled it from here. Where was the control? Rockson called upon his inner psychic energy, commanding mind-force to let him match the thoughtprint of a dead man. It could be done if he tried hard enough. It
had
to be done.

Muzik control,
he thought steadily, focusing his power. He imaged himself as the Chessman, seeing himself in his mind as he reached out to flick a switch, turn a knob, press a button—whatever would click. He felt a dark, unpleasant energy fill his mind—the Black Force that controlled the Chessman and gave him his power—and he fought to keep it from obliterating his senses.

Muzik control . . . muzik control .
. .

Suddenly Rockson realized he was staring at it—a long, narrow panel that had appeared to be merely ornamental. This time there was only one switch. On-off. Rockson flicked it to the off position. Success.

The air went silent, except for sounds of scattered gunfire, and that, too, went quickly silent. For the first time in God-knew-how-many-years, Salt Lake City was completely quiet.

In the blink of an eye, night became day. The sun rose in a sky that went from black to pearly rose to bright blue; the city sparkled and gleamed and, for a brief moment, bustled with its usual activity.

Then a hush fell as people realized the hypno-music had stopped. At first, many of the citizens didn’t know exactly what had happened—only that something was wrong, dreadfully wrong. All but the oldest residents had been programmed their entire lives by thought control, and without a voice whispering to their brains, telling them what to do and how to behave and how to think, they were suddenly disoriented. And the longer the air was silent, the more disoriented they became.

In the glittering glass-and-concrete skyscrapers, workers stopped at their tasks and stared questioningly at one another. It was a glitch, they thought—somewhere a circuit had broken. The Chessman would get it fixed, the muzik would resume, and life would go on as normal.

In the streets, pedestrians halted in midstride, and then looked around them as though they found themselves in an alien place. Buses, cars, and trucks sat unmoving on the wide boulevards, despite the changing of the traffic lights.

In restaurants, diners put down their silverware and stared stupidly at the food on their plates, as if it no longer tasted good or they had bitten into something bitter. In shops and stores, half-naked zombies wandered out of dressing rooms, and no one stopped them from stepping out onto the streets.

Within minutes after the muzik halted, the broadcast airwaves went dead. The television programmers and radio announcers sat frozen in their chairs, not knowing which buttons to push or what to say. They had never thought for themselves. At the Holy Network, the city’s only television station, someone had the presence of mind to flip a switch and go off the air; snow and static replaced the image of Bishop Pohsib, who had turned into a stuttering dummy.

For what seemed like an eternity, Salt Lake City and every living creature in it was petrified, waiting for the muzik to resume.

But the muzik did not resume, and so anxious chattering and murmuring began to fill the silence: “What’s going on?” “What happened?” “What are we doing?” “What are we
supposed
to do?” The Chessman had never issued instructions to anyone—even his lieutenants—for actions to take if the hypno-music ceased because as far as the Chessman was concerned, the muzik never would stop.

Uncertainty began giving way to fear and panic. Though the hypno-music was a powerful control, no one was completely normal yet, because of the tranquilized food and water. Paranoia gripped thousands, who started to run blindly through the streets as though being chased by unseen monsters. Others crawled under desks and chairs or hid in closets, crying and whimpering like children.

Those who were naturally aggressive—but whose tendencies had been damped by drugs—became antagonistic. Diners dumped their food on the floor and threw it at the walls. Some even marched into the kitchens and threw the food at the cooks, shouting about bad taste and poor quality: “Hell, we ain’t gonna pay for
this
crap!” People who had never uttered obscenities—a crime in the Chessman’s state—were swearing blue streaks, reveling in temper tantrums they had always secretly wanted to have.

Some people reacted with fits of glee and hysteria, cackling and shrieking and doing cartwheels. They jumped out of their cars and hung out of building windows, waving and shouting incoherently at no one in particular. They turned on fire hydrants and danced like maniacs in the sprays.

Others—distinctly in the minority—strove valiantly to maintain control and resume their normal activities. Most of these people were dazed, however, and acted more like whacky automatons who didn’t realize what they were doing. Gas-station attendants filled cars through the radiators instead of gas tanks; garbage collectors dumped out the contents of cans all over yards.