Doomsday Warrior 16 - American Overthrow by Ryder Stacy Page B

journey. The slope of the volcano was smooth.
    “We’ll have to chance it,” the Doomsday Warrior said after a few moments of silent deliberation. “Use those nasal gas stoppers that Shecter contributed to our well being. He swore that they’d work.”
    The men took out their nose plugs from their packs and put them into their nostrils. They were uncomfortable at first but within minutes they had gotten used to them. The ’brids were much more highly gas resistant than their human riders and didn’t seem to notice the fumes particularly, although the smoking crater ahead did seem to make them skittish.
    They had gone another two miles, coming within a mile of the volcano so that they could feel the heat of the outermost edges of the hardened and hardening lava flow when there was a thundering sound that shook the very earth around them.
    “Oh shit,” Detroit groaned, as he held on hard to the ’brid’s reins. The whole world seemed to be shaking, as if they had been thrown inside a blender and it was hard for the men to hang on. The hybrids stopped dead in their tracks and spread their legs farther apart trying to maintain their balance. They let out with wild neighs and whinnies of fear and kept looking up and around at their riders as if the humans could make it all right.
    But the Freefighters were only mortals, as magical as they might appear to the hybrid horses. They couldn’t do anything but hang on themselves and pray. And even as they shook so hard that they could feel the earthquake rattling every bone in their bodies, chasms began opening up all around them. The very earth was being rent asunder as the ground pushed up and cracked, as the piles of bones that stood everywhere shattered down into pieces of broken ivory.
    Suddenly the new chasms were more than all around them. They were right under them. And even as every man felt his chest tighten up and his mind go blank, one of the chasms came right toward them as if hunting them down. Before they could make the slightest move to escape, all four Freefighters, still atop their mounts, went tumbling down into a gap of nothingness.
    They fell and fell, as the screams of the ’brids blended with the sheer deafening thunder of the earth cracking open.
    And they each prepared to meet their maker.

Ten
    W hile Rockson and his fellow Freefighters were tumbling down into hell or something approaching it, three hundred miles to the northeast, Kim Langford was reclining on a goosedown bed with silk spreads and with sumptuous pillows lying all around her. She was wearing a gown of embroidered lace with jewels adorning the sleeves, and she wore a choker of real pearls. She stared around the room occasionally, letting her eyes rest on this or that precious and valuable item: A Tiffany lamp, a Vergun Grandfather clock, even a real Van Gogh—The Potato Eaters—up on one wall where its dim luster reflected back from the Victorian lamps around the room.
    Her baby blue eyes had made the route of the room’s possessions so many times she had lost count. And the objects which had at least initially intrigued her, now were dull and as meaningless as flecks of dust beneath a bed. She was bored. Coddled, but bored.
    The one thing she would have wanted in the room was a window so she could look out—or better yet escape. But there were none. With all the “beauty” contained within the room there wasn’t the beauty of freedom. The single thick oak door at the far end of the chamber was locked tight as a crypt. She knew, she had tried many times in the weeks she had been imprisoned within.
    There was a knock on the door, suddenly jarring the honey-blonde’s senses and making her head snap up, as no one had come around for hours. The last person had been the maid, who brought Kim her meals three times a day, with armed guards present of course at all times, and then took them away again.
    “It’s I, General Hanover,” a man’s deep voice said as the door slowly slid