Free Doomsday Warrior 07 - American Defiance by Ryder Stacy Page A

Reston, an old-timer with a salt-and-pepper beard that was as grizzled as a polecat’s rump, to come because of his knowledge of the Northern states. He’d done scouting up there years before. And finally, Ashton and Douglas, two researchers and psychologists from the Century City University. They were green around the edges and seemed somewhat uncomfortable thus far, having spent most of their lives among books, treatises, and questionnaires. But they were the foremost authorities on the Mindbreaker and on the methods of deprogramming those in the beginning stages of the Russian brainwashing program. If the President and Kim were still alive—and if their brains hadn’t been reduced to something that could be strained through a colander—then these two might come in real handy. If Rockson could keep them alive until then.
    But as the team lay around the tree-camouflaged clearing, their mouths and stomachs filled with rich stew, life didn’t seem that bad. Archer shoveled whole bowls of the stew into his mouth like a starving beast and then handed the platter back for more. McCaughlin beamed as he ladled out portion after portion to the seven-foot mountain man.
    “He’s still growing,” he laughed. “My food will add another foot or two to him yet. We won’t even need to fight. When the Reds see something that big coming at them, they’ll say ‘Holy Lenin, a race of radioactive giants’ and skedaddle the whole damned way back to Moscow.”
    The untested members of the force laughed and joked with one another as the rest watched, smiling, but with a secret knowledge that didn’t allow them to laugh quite so freely. For they were already feeling what they did on every mission—the presence of death. Still dim, wavery around the edges—but there. Death had its dark eyes locked on the team. Even the usually placid hybrids seemed quite edgy, munching moist swollen leaves from the trees as they swung their furry heads from side to side.
    Rock waited until the sun had begun to set again, falling gracefully like a burning swan from the cloud-bouldered sky. Nearly half a dozen of the drones had passed nearby overhead during the afternoon. But Rock was sure they hadn’t been spotted. From everything the Freefighting Intelligence had been able to put together, the drones were quite crude, often crashing before they could return home. With so much radiation throughout the country, including pockets of mega-rads, the small cigar-shaped craft often had their guidance and transmission systems knocked out. Rockson suspected that half the time their presence was just to frighten the Underground—make them think that Big Brother had his eye on everything, when in fact—the Red bear was nearly blind.
    “Mount up, boys,” Rock said, cupping his hand over his eyes as he watched the sun completely vanish into its hole. “It’s dark enough now.” Rock jumped astride Snorter, the ’brid which had been with him now for years, somehow surviving, along with Rockson, everything that the merciless, radioactive world could throw at them. Rockson would never forget that the animal had saved his life once, dragging him to shade when he had been poisoned by deadly thorns and had lain unconscious for nearly two days. Ever since then there had been a kind of bond between the two of them, an unshakable loyalty of the kind that can only exist between human and animal. Rock waited a few minutes for the newer members of the force to get their things together as they ran frantically around the camp, hopping with one boot on, searching for their scattered things. Let them play the fool now, but not later, the Doomsday Warrior thought grimly as he watched the comedy from nearly six feet off the ground, atop six hundred pounds plus of the meanest running machine nature had ever produced.
    At last he turned and set off toward the north, keeping a slow pace so the psychologists could catch up. Chen’s martial arts students had been among the