Free Doomsday Warrior 17 - America’s Sword by Ryder Stacy

short of a field-nuke.
    “Go where?” the snakeman asked, as Rock saw he had three small snakes wrapped around his right shoulder. Clearly a symbol of rank, he realized instantly, as the creatures were dead, and hung as decoration there.
    “Going through this land to get to supplies in the north that we need for our village, Century City.” Rockson looked hopefully at the guy, like the name might ring a bell.
    “Never heard!” the snakeman said, as he walked around Rock and his ’brid. He seemed fascinated, as the others did, by the big steeds. Apparently, though they had everything from chimps to man-eating snakes in this murderous paradise, they didn’t have horses or any mammal this big. The snakes didn’t seem to take a huge interest in the ’brids; they were just too big for even the twenty-footers to take down. But they sure as hell looked interested in the riders. Rockson remembered just where his pistol was, visualizing the route to it as he spoke.
    “They’re called hybrid horses,” Rockson said with as much friendliness as he could muster. The snakeman reached and stroked Snorter’s flank and the big ’brid made a deep sound, pulling back and rearing up.
    “Whoa, easy boy! He doesn’t mean to offend you,” Rock said as he brought the ’brid back down under control. “He’s just shy—like that with everyone.” The snake-general stepped back a few feet and Rockson could see in his eyes he wanted to take them out. But, just as quickly, the darkness went out and the snake-general spoke again. “You come! Take to King Bailey. He will decide!” He blew the conch again, and the whole trained-snake-and-snakeskinned infantry turned the opposite way, back toward the direction they had come. Two long lines went down each side of the Freefighters, who were barely able to keep their ’brids from bolting. And they were led off through the groves of fruit trees into the mists ahead, surrounded on both flanks by a blanket of the writhing snakes.

Nine
    T hey were marched into an area of well-cultivated fruit groves, which lasted perhaps two hundred yards. Then they came to another extremely swampy area. In fact, all of it was surrounded by swamp, extending out at least a mile or more before the mist-covered hills. Rock prayed that these people weren’t going to ask him and the rest of the team to swim in that stuff, a surface covered with muck and lily pads and centipedes dancing from rotten ferns to bloated dead fish.
    But as they reached the swampline, where the solid earth faded away he saw a number of large rafts made of sections of tree thirty feet long and lashed together with twisted vines. They were marched up to the things, about ten men to a raft, with snake-troopers guarding them and looking them all up and down like they were looking at alien bugs. The snakemen had seen their share of weird nature in their valley—but apparently had never seen other men before, particularly with huge, hairy horse-creatures.
    When they were all loaded up onto the rafts, two snakemen on each side poled into the swampy muck with their long snake-prongs. The things apparently doubled as long push-poles, with the current turned off. The pole-pushers would start at the front and walk down the length of the rafts. It was agonizingly slow going at first, as they pushed off the mud bank. But once they got going and in rhythm, the crafts began picking up a little speed. Nothing to write home about, but a few miles an hour. The trained snakes came right into the watery swamp all around them. It was like the entire herd was a single living entity, so intertwined were the swimming bodies. Rockson wouldn’t even think once about diving into that water to escape.
    The snakemen pushed the rafts along single file and soon were out hundreds of yards into the swamp. The floral and faunal lifeforms erupted around them in a rainbow of color and jungle screams. The blue mists were low, just a foot or so off the black, thick