Read Doomsday Warrior 14 - American Death Orbit for Free Online Page B

Anyway, there wasn’t time to play it safe. They weren’t waiting up on the Wheel.
    The air was wet and cold, but it felt good, waking Rock from his sleep-addled brain. Soon, the fog, the thick pine scent of the forest, the wildlife rustling around them made Rockson’s senses come alert one by one. Until he was in that perfect state of battle readiness, a zen of combat, in which ears, eyes, nose, skin are all tuned together, reading out every input from the outer world. Reading every nuance of nuance.
    For death moved in split-second strikes out here. And the slow were fertilizer.
    He kept turning and looking back, hardly able to believe that this hybrid team of men, boys, fighters, scientists, and Rock team vets was holding together. But after an hour or so of riding, and seeing that lo and behold no one fell off the side of a mountain, no one tried to kill anyone else, and none of the six tech boys were puking their guts out from the jerky ride—Rock began relaxing just a little. The animal life crackled through the morning forest and bought a little touch of hope into his heart.
    It was always good to see life-forms, especially non-mutated ones, in the mountain forests. It meant life was holding its own against the radioactive poisons that still swept over the earth in undulating restless bands, releasing dangerous rays, acid rain, and storms of pure poison. But nature didn’t give up that easily.
    He saw a family of white-tail deer, beautiful and graceful as they bounded off. Then a bunch of snow rabbits. He thought of bagging a few, but there was plenty of chow and there was no sense in not letting everything that wasn’t absolutely needed for sustenance survive and flourish. A mangy brown bear skulked off into the woods, only Rock’s trained eye picked it out as he slowed down to see the big ugly brute head off into a den.
    Then, as he came around a bend, Rockson saw a sight that always gave his heart a few palpitations. A nuke mutation.
    And this one a mean and truly nasty one. It was sort of a wormlike creature about ten feet long and as wide as a beer barrel around. It was black, but with an immense buck-toothed pink mouth dripping saliva. It had snagged an elk, which was still alive but pinned down as the worm-thing snapped into the animal’s side again, injecting it with venom from eight-inch-long icepick teeth, which began ripping into the baying creature.
    It didn’t matter to the worm-slug that its prey was still alive. It tore into the stomach, its favorite part, taking huge chomps out even as its victim screamed out, sounding eerily like a man for a few seconds. Then the creature twisted and shook its wet red-soaked head and dove back into the elk’s guts, ripping out intestines, pulling back until it was standing straight up, and then swallowing them down so the whole long neck convulsed, and the pieces could be seen for a few feet as they worked their way down into the hideous gullet.
    “Jesus,” Rock muttered darkly as he pulled his ’brid about fifty yards off from the thing, making a wide circle. The mounts wouldn’t like something like that. Nor the men for that matter. There was no reason to spook them all not yet an hour out. But most of them saw it anyway, even though he made a sharp right angle turn. He prayed as they all did that it wasn’t mutations such as this that were going to take over the world. For if they were, perhaps better to die now and get it over with. No one wanted to go out like that elk.
    The day was long and rotten to the bone. Even the two whiz kids, who rode just behind Rockson, were looking pretty dog-eared and frazzled after just a few hours. No man really knows what it’s like to travel unprotected in the Rockies and the northern states until he’s experienced it. He felt sorry for them. But still he’d had it a lot harder. He’d had only a rusty knife and thin jacket and nothing else when he’d made his way nearly a thousand miles across winter wildness to