Free Doomsday Warrior 03 - The Last American by Ryder Stacy Page A

life in the wilds, with nothing but the barest necessities. He couldn’t get into the stylish fads, dressing up to affect others. He wore what he wore and forgot about it. Waving goodbye to the assembled doctors, who scowled nervously at him for his breach of hospital protocol, Rock, feeling really good for the first time in weeks, headed out to the much more interesting levels of the vast underground network that made up the metropolis of Century City.
    He smiled and nodded to people he passed—everyone scurrying this way and that, carrying out their workaday tasks. Century City was composed of a complex layer of tunnels that led to large, open chambers where industrial, processing, warehousing, and research activities went on. Rock felt like paying a visit to everyone, seeing everything. He had been given a second chance—for the hundredth time, and felt brimming with excitement and energy. There was something about almost dying that made Rock want to live passionately, to experience himself and the world to its fullest. He knew he had been very, very close this time. Had actually touched the other side, touched the light and the voices that flowed through the ether like birds migrating to the stars. It wasn’t terrible, something to be feared—on the contrary—it was something that drew him. He was curious as to . . . but not yet. He must stay among the living now. He was needed here in this most crucial of times. The survival of all Americans, if not the entire race, was at stake. It was his destiny to fight those who were servants of death.
    He passed the Main Library and then made a quick trip down to Hydroponics to see how some extremely unusual hybrid vegetables he had discovered on a past outing were doing. Hydroponics—over fourteen hundred meters of rock-walled cavern, brightly lit with ultraviolet lights. Here, most of the city’s vegetable needs were produced, without one ounce of soil. Staffed with 1,287 people, it was one of the busiest of C.C.’s many subsections, a virtual underground farm, with ten thousand man-made suns. Rock never ceased to be amazed at the wonders of the underground world. He had traveled far and wide, and in general the country was a mess. Even other freefighting cities were often little more than hamlets with a bunch of ragtag fighters and pigs running around in the slop. But here . . .
    Century City, the fabulous creation of a hundred years of guts and ingenuity, had had a less than auspicious beginning. It had happened on September 11, 1989, the last day of the Old Era. It was rush hour. The five-mile-long, eight-lane tunnel of Interstate 70, coursing out of the suburbs of Denver and reaching into Utah, was filled with rapidly moving vehicles of every type—vans, panel trucks, huge double tractor-trailers, small imports, rusty old Chevys. Eager commuters going back to another night of TV, roast chicken or pot roast, extra helpings, in their own little homes. The American Dream.
    Then it had happened! The strike! Out of the skies they came, hundreds of flaming needles, ripping the heavens with their screaming descents all over the United States and Canada. Each needle spitting up into five, six, as many as ten glowing warheads heading down to its own special target. Some went off into the oceans or devastated the wrong area. But seven hundred of the missiles went off. Hitting Aspen and Cheyenne, Las Vegas and Omaha. Hitting Detroit and Tacoma, Texarkana and Little Rock. Everywhere the same—a retina-burning flash, a towering mushroom-shaped cloud. Millions were incinerated, tens of millions, in the first few minutes. Millions more staggered around, their eyes burnt, their skin charred and peeling, in a shock beyond shock. A world of megadeath.
    The lucky ones died straight off. Another fifty million men and women and babies lingered on painfully for months. Their hair and teeth slowly fell out, their flesh wasted away until it looked like something gangrenous and rotted. And