Doomsday Warrior 10 - American Nightmare (25 page)

With that, Rockson drew his family toward him and turned to leave. He stopped at Barrelman and stuck out his hand, looking the short man directly in the eye. “Brother,” he said, “thank you. I know you’re a survivor. Now save yourself.”

Barrelman immediately began mobilizing his people, shouting at them to commandeer vehicles and round up as many Runners as could be found.

Rockson spotted an abandoned taxicab a couple of blocks away. He scooped up both children, and he and Kim ran for it. His Seiko said 5:30—and he could see the minute hand moving!

He shoved the kids in the back seat, and Kim scrambled in beside him onto the front seat. The keys were still in the ignition. The cab, like the Porsche, was similar to vehicles in his world, and Rockson had no trouble revving up the engine and slamming it into gear. The cab screeched off, burning rubber for the entire length of a block.

Rockson gripped the wheel, careening around abandoned cars and debris in the streets. People jumped out of his way. “What’s the fastest way to the dump?” he shouted at Kim.

“That way!” said Kim, stabbing a finger at a boulevard to the right. “Slow down! You’re driving like a maniac!”

Rockson couldn’t help but smile to himself. That was exactly what the real Kim said to him every time he got behind a wheel. He pressed the pedal to the metal, accelerated toward the turn.

“You’re going to get us all killed!” Kim yelled as a man leapt out of the taxi’s path.

“I always drive like this,” Rockson said. “Relax.”

“Holy fucking hell!” blurted Kim as the momentum of the turn threw her into Rockson. She clapped a hand to her mouth. She had never uttered an obscenity in her life. It was an indication that the tranquilizers were wearing off. She suddenly felt liberated.

In the back seat, Barbara stared to wail. Within moments, Teddy junior also lost control and began crying. Kim tried to quiet them, to no avail.

Rockson tore through the streets. Fires raged in many of the buildings throughout the chessboard sectors, and people dashed about the streets carrying their booty. Some were trying to put out the fires. Frantic men and women tried to flag him down; if he was escaping this madness, they wanted to hitch along. He steeled his heart against them and sped by.

Scattered gunfire came from the sidewalks. Rockson ducked as a man ran out into the street firing a pistol at them. A bullet cracked a corner of the windshield into a spiderweb. “Get the kids down!” he ordered Kim.

Sobbing, she crawled over the seat and pushed the screaming children to the floor, covering them with her body. She raised her head to peek over the seat. “Turn left up there,” she said. “That will take you to the highway.”

Rockson downshifted and careened left, shifting up and accelerating as he executed the turn. Another car turned into the street from an opposite corner, and sped up until it was even with Rockson’s taxi. He glanced to his left. The car was jammed with Runners, driven by a grinning Barrelman. He gave the thumbs-up sign and hit the gas pedal, pulling ahead.

Other vehicles joined in the escape—cars, trucks, taxis, even motorcycles. Soon a ragtag parade was screaming toward the highway out of town. Some contained Runners; others contained desperate citizens who followed in the hopes that the drivers of the fleeing cars knew something they didn’t and were heading for safety.

Not everyone made it, even to the highway. A few drivers lost control at their high speeds, ending in fiery crashes. One car smashed head-on into a telephone pole, pushing the front end into a vee that reached the back seat. A pickup truck took a turn too fast and overturned, crushing the cab in a shower of sparks.

Rockson, at the lead, kept a watch in his rear-view and side mirrors. It pained him greatly to see the wrecks, but there was nothing he could do. He kept his foot on the accelerator.

They reached the highway, an open, empty ribbon of asphalt that stretched away into the shimmering horizon. Rockson pushed the taxi for all it was worth—which wasn’t much, in his estimation, even considering the primitive nature of the car. A hundred miles an hour wasn’t fast enough. At such high speed, the car vibrated so badly Rockson thought it would shake apart.

He kept an eye on Barrelman’s taxi behind him. The leader of the Runners was keeping the second lead position. Behind him stretched the train of racing vehicles that shifted and jockeyed for position.

Barrelman fell further and further behind Rockson—his car simply couldn’t keep up the speed. Then Rock heard an explosion and saw the car weave and bounce all over the road, out of control. Two cars coming up fast from behind nearly crashed into it; the drivers did some fancy swerving to avoid a collision.

“Oh, my God,” said Kim, looking out the rear window. “A blowout!”

Barrelman’s taxi continued to fishtail, then dove off the highway in a cloud of dust, turning over on the sunbaked ground. Somehow it remained intact.

Rockson slowed and yanked the wheel, turning the car off the highway in a wide arc. The tires struck the dirt and the taxi bounced fiercely as Rockson headed back in the opposite direction.

“What are you doing?” Kim yelled.

“Going back for a friend,” Rockson said between gritted teeth. Other vehicles shot by on the highway like bullets, sunlight glinting off the metal.

Rockson screeched to a halt by Barrelman’s crippled car, which sat lopsided, steam billowing from the radiator. Barrelman and the seven other Runners who were jammed into the car were disentangling themselves and crawling out.

“Shit!” screamed Barrelman, jumping up and down. He kicked the car.

Rock rolled down the window. “Leave it and get in!”

“There’s not enough room,” said Barrelman, peering into the windows. “Go! Get your family to the Portal!”

“We’ll make room.” Rockson put the taxi in neutral and pulled the emergency brake. He climbed out and opened the back door. “Double up back here, as many as possible. Put the kids on your laps.” He strode to the rear of the car and opened the trunk. “Someone can get in here. We’re almost at the dump—there should be enough air. I can take two up front.”

The Runners complied, and when everyone was stuffed into the taxi, Rockson got behind the wheel and screamed back onto the highway. The other vehicles were long gone. Within seconds, he was in high gear and pushing the taxi back to top speed. The big engine sounded like a marimba band gone crazy.

Soon the horizon changed. The air had been shimmering but clear; now it shimmered but was increasingly opaque. They were approaching the Veil that surrounded Salt Lake City. And there was the Portal. It had grown larger; it was now the size of a building, and still growing. The spiraling mass of ocher and violet shimmered and danced over the dump.

It looked like the eye of the Devil himself.

The distance to the city dump was deceiving; the mountain of refuse took precious minutes to reach, and then it seemed to burst upon them. Rockson decelerated down the ramp, pulling alongside the cars that had already arrived. The other refugees were standing around or wandering without direction, not knowing what to do next. No one had ever gone through the Portal except for a few of the drunks among them.

Rockson and the others extricated themselves from the car. Those who had never before been to the dump murmured in awe at what they saw. The multicolored swirling Portal struck them silent. It sat directly on mountains of refuse three times as high as a human being. The air around the dump was thick and oppressive, almost palpable; it smelled of ozone as well as of refuse, and crackled with electricity. The world seemed to stop at the dump; nothing was visible through the silver-gray curtain. The Portal beckoned. Mesmeric.

Rockson glanced at the watch on his wrist. Six
P.M.
Four minutes to zero hour. Four minutes to get into the Portal—and hopefully the time-tunnel that had brought Rockson to this mad place.

He saw a change in the Time-Portal’s “Bloody Eye” appearance at the end of the dump. “There’s a clear spot in the Portal—it must be the time-tunnel opening up.” He grabbed the kids, one in each arm, and took off on a run through the middle of the dump, slipping and sliding over loose heaps of garbage. Behind him clattered Kim, Barrelman, and the mob of refugees. They were convinced now, thank God.

The kids, who had simmered down in the taxi, opened up their lungs again, screaming for Mommy. Everyone was crying and gasping, going down in the greasy rubble and struggling up again. As they came upon the Portal, several Runners lost their courage and turned away, choosing fear of the known rather than fear of the unknown.

Barrelman stopped and screamed at them, begging them to keep going. “Come on! You can’t quit now! You’ll be killed!”

Rockson twisted and shouted at Barrelman. “Hurry! We’ve only got seconds!”

With a look of anguish, Barrelman turned and scurried toward Rockson.

A set of long streaks—white vapor trails—appeared high in the darkening sky above, to the north. At first, Rockson thought it was the electricity in the Portal—perhaps the movement of time itself. Then another thought struck him dead in the heart: maybe it was the trails of nuke missiles, launched thousands of miles away and coming down on their targets.

“Faster!” he shouted behind him. “Move it!”

Nineteen

R
ockson didn’t know what would happen when they entered the Portal. He worried that they’d just be pushed back by the invisible force. But maybe this time—as the city disappeared in the flash of atomic hellfire—the Portal would take them to 2092
A.D.
It was a theory, a hope, a chance. A chance they
had to take.

With a sharp intake of air and a tight grip on Kim’s hand, Rock plunged forward. There was a sickening wrench. A blurry nothingness, red, like looking at the sun through closed eyelids—and then howling wind. Cold. Dark.

Kim and the kids were still with Rockson. So were scattered groups of the Runners—but where was he? There was no ground, no sky. Rockson was slowly rotating, floating in a blue-black darkness punctuated by flashes of brilliant color—as if he were hurtling among strobe lights. No gravity.

Rockson’s hand had been wrenched away from Kim, but she was tumbling nearby. He could see her in the flickering colored lights, and he shouted to her:

Kim, I’m here.

He felt his vocal cords move, but heard nothing. No sound. The brilliant flashes moved away, behind him, giving the appearance that he was moving at great velocity upward—though, of course, it must be an illusion.

How much time was passing? It seemed like a few minutes ago at most that they had jumped into the Portal, yet there was no way to tell. Another part of the universe—another dimension—that’s where he might be—where
they
might be.

And they might never return to the world they knew.

Then there was a hissing sound, and the blackness disintegrated like a moth-eaten stage curtain. Rockson, still spinning wildly, was out among the stars. There was no sun, just stars. The Milky Way, stretching all around him. The nearest constellations—Orion, Leo, were there. But their stars were incredibly bright, and
moving.
But that was impossible! For the stars themselves to appear to move meant that Rockson was traveling thousands of times faster than light. Impossible. Unless . . . unless he was also traveling in
time
as well as in space. But that wasn’t the only thing happening that was impossible. In the vacuum of space, he shouldn’t have been able to breathe. His body should have exploded from its internal pressure. Yet he felt fine, and breathed regularly, easily. He just gave up at this point and let it all happen. He relaxed into the trip. Wherever the hell he was going, it sure was beautiful!

A portion of the Milky Way—that hundred-billion-star, disk-shaped group our sun and all its planets belong to—grew brighter in the direction he was heading. Giant blue-white diamondlike stars zipped past him, changing color to red as they passed. The
red shift.
Light itself bending because of intense speed. He’d read of the phenomenon in astronomy textbooks, but had never expected to see the effect personally.

Rock looked around for Kim, the kids, and all the others, but saw no one. He was apparently alone in this silent and beautiful universe. He wasn’t afraid, though, for any of them. It was all too spectacular for that.

Now he entered the center of the galaxy itself. It seemed to be sucking him in, along with half the stars in the sky, as it twisted. The galaxy
twisted.
He knew that a galaxy takes billions of years to turn one complete circuit. Yet, in the past minute, he had seen it turn. A billion years had gone by! And what’s more, as he fell down, down, down into the black hole in the center of the galaxy, as he fell in with a billion suns as traveling companions, he should have been vaporized by the heat, but he wasn’t.

Rockson knew that galaxies come
out
of the black holes in their centers. They don’t go
into
them; they spin
out
of the black hole. That means he was traveling backward in time, a billion years per minute.

Where to next? He soon found out. There was a hissing sound, and as his body became a flat rainbow arching through the black hole, as it became a billion-mile-long strand of varying colors, he momentarily lost consciousness.

Then he was out the other side of the black hole, in the way a string would pass through the center of a donut.

He felt himself still intact, still dressed in the white suit. He should have been dead a million times. Maybe
that’s it,
he thought—
I am dead.
I’m going through what everyone goes through after they die. The Bardo state, the time between death and rebirth—
My God, what a trip!

There were odd shapes passing him now, large globes of twisted, writhing lights, some double—the quasars. The fundamental original globs of universe-matter that had existed before the galaxies. He must be back ten or fifteen billion years now. And he was still spinning onward toward a central light, just like all the quasars. He realized he would soon be at the beginning of the universe, at the Big Bang itself. At the moment of creation, at the joining of
the all!