Free Doomsday Warrior 14 - American Death Orbit by Ryder Stacy Page A

with a grin as he did his business into the old ceramic urinal. The place was a time capsule.
    He headed back outside, and noticed a piece of plywood nailed up on the windows that faced the back of the diner. Unable to contain his curiosity he walked over to it, still feeling strange in his stomach, and looked through a small crack along one side. It was hard to see at first, like squinting through a hairline crack. But then his eyes adjusted and he gasped. Naked corpses—five of them, lying side by side on wooden slabs. They were horrible looking, all collapsed in, as if their insides had been vacuumed out, their flesh as white and pasty as month-old dough. Whatever had been done to them was something he didn’t want to know about.
    Whether it was the shock of the sight, or his stomach really going through a number, Bernstein didn’t know. He stumbled backwards away from the plywood and bounced off the walls like a billiard ball as he lurched back toward the well-lit diner. The rest of the men’s eyes suddenly caught him and all eating stopped as he walked trembling into the room.
    “Poisoned, we’ve all been poisoned,” he screamed out, hardly able to make his lips move. And even as Rockson reached for his shotpistol he was suddenly feeling the same deep cramps that Bernstein was already in the later stages of. The cushion-tile ceiling above them opened up, and strange glistening nets dropped down on each and every one of the strike force. And even as they struggled, falling to the floor amidst the food and the broken plates, they saw the waitresses gather around.
    And now they were laughing, laughing out loud, as they pointed at the struggling men to one another like it was all of vast amusement to them. But then the drug that they had put in the Freefighters’ food set in in earnest, and amidst the convulsions that shook their bodies before they fell into unconsciousness they couldn’t even see the waitresses’ laughing faces, but only feel their own spasming pain.

Eleven
    W hen Rock started slowly coming to, he felt like slipping right back into unconsciousness again. His head pounded like it was beneath a jackhammer as his eyes opened just a crack. The dim light was so painful to his drugged brain that he slammed the lids shut again as fast as he could. He could feel his heart race in his chest a mile a minute.
    Where was he? What the hell was happening? He turned through the melting pages of his mind, searching for answers. And then remembered. The diner—the women. They had—
    This time he forced the eyes open whether they wanted to be or not. His brain burst into rockets of pain but he made them stay open even as his heart pounded hard. It took a few seconds for him to adjust to the gray light of the room, then they opened in horror. For the other men were hanging in stand-up position, tangled in the nets that had fallen on them in the diner. They all looked unconscious. Maybe dead. But the two across from him, Rock couldn’t quite make them both out, had red smeared all over their necks.
    Blood.
    He tried to move his arms and couldn’t—and looking down for the first time discovered that he, too, was wrapped up tight as a bug in a rug in one of their sticky nets. The smell from the thing was awful, now that his nostrils were working again enough to take in scents. It smelled like glue and horse dung and kerosene all mixed together. But whatever the net-ropes were made of, they sure as hell worked. He couldn’t budge an inch, the whole thing stuck right around his body like the web of a spider who has wrapped up his food for later digestion.
    As his mind as well came more into focus and function, Rock’s heart started beating fast again, apparently the drug exaggerated his emotions, sending adrenaline into his system. The whiz kids—his own Rock team. Where the hell were they? He strained his head with all his might, a difficult effort, both because the drug had made him feel weak as a baby and