Doomsday Warrior 12 - Death American Style Read Online Free

grizzly was dead, crushed beneath the fir’s harsh branches. The broken carnivore lay twitching, stopped in its tracks only ten feet from the two humans it had been about to turn into a pleasant snack. The very tips of the top branches just reached them—stopping perhaps a foot away. But the bear hadn’t made it. It’s powerful head was pulled back, broken, so that it lay at a near right angle to the rest of the body. And through its chest the end of a thick branch had gone like a spear, crucifying the carnivore to the bloody grass covered ground.
    “Well, I’ll be,” Rockson said, holding Rona to him. “Impervious to bullets, but a spear of wood—kills it. Who can figure it?”
    “It’s dead. That’s all that matters.”

Three
    “C hrist, this thing is heavy,” Rona grunted as she helped Rockson hoist the huge carnivore up onto an odd sort of carrying structure they had rigged atop four of the pack ’brids roped side by side. Even so, it was rough going. The damned thing must have weighed upwards of 1800 pounds—and loading it up involved hours of makeshift pulleys, baying hybrids that didn’t at all like the idea of carrying said cargo, and about a million bees that gathered in the air as the sun went down, their funereal buzz incessant as they hovered over the great corpse, licking at the blood-soaked spots here and there on the hide that marred the pure red-orange pelt’s perfection.
    Rock and Rona kept slapping at their faces as the damned black bees seemed to be trying to fly right into their noses, eyes, and ears—and every other sticky place they could find to smash their annoying, droning bodies. But at last the huge carnivore was loaded up atop four unsteady mutant horses and the “expedition” started back the fifty or so miles to Century City—while the going was good. Rock had planned to do some additional hunting. But that would have to wait. This thing would draw wolves and all sorts of smaller meateaters eager for some of the leftovers. They had to move—and fast. He hoped they could make it back before nightfall, but that was wishful thinking, as it was already heading on past two.
    The going, thank God, was almost entirely in a downward direction, at least for the first 20 miles or so as they moved into the lower mountains. The ’brids, once they saw that they weren’t all dying or croaking from heart attacks from the heavy load, got up some good speed going down mountain trails carved out by nothing more than goats’ feet and elk hooves. Rona was only too glad to get out of the woods. She was afraid she’d never quite have the same cheerful feeling about this part of the territory again—after their run-in with “Clyde.” She watched his bleeding snout whipping back and forth at the side of one of the hybrids, coating its dark-furred hide with streaks of red as they rode.
    They had just about reached the halfway point to home base when Rock first heard it—a distinct droning sound coming from the cloud-shrouded horizon.
    “Hide—fast!” he yelled, motioning for her to grab the reins of the second bunch of pack ’brids following behind his group, which he led with tight reins. Rock scouted around quickly and saw a rock shelter created by a long overhang, some hundred yards to the left of them. He headed for it, making the ’brids do double-time, so that the huge bear bounced up and down on their backs. They let out wheezing grunts of air each time, their flared nostrils snorting hot steam. Rockson reached the overhang and got them into the semi-darkness. Rona followed fast with her six-head pack, just as the pilotless Soviet drone emerged from some scattered clouds and flew overhead, a thousand feet up. Rock hoped it hadn’t gotten a pic of them.
    Rock hadn’t seen any of the spy planes in this area for a while. He had thought—or hoped—that the Red Army’s technical equipment and support was starting to fall apart. But this one buzzed along in fine fashion, its spy