Radioactive mutants vs. Nazi Communists

[MinDonner]

The fangs of the sabre-toothed mountain lion sparkled like chromium ice picks, glistening with saliva in the rays of the setting pink sun. The creature's eyes, narrow and red as blood, were fixed straight ahead on the human who stood in its way. The meanest-looking mountain cat Ted Rockson had ever seen: black spots the size of silver dollars and claws like meathooks came slinking towards him, growling a deep guttural sound that caught in the cat's throat, as if afraid to go past the foot-long ivory teeth on each side of its opened jaw.

Yes, Chapter Two begins with the anthropomorphising of a growl. And is further proof, if such were needed, that America of 2089 AD does indeed have animals. Have we forgotten the singing ferrets so soon?

You'd think this would be cue for some righteous killing on Rockson's part, but no, at the moment he's feeling all in harmony with nature and doesn't want to kill this fine golden specimen of "Maximus Felinus" unless he has to. And, as it turns out, there is no need, for it runs away!

Kim, Langford and Mt Ed are relieved - looks like the posse are on their way home from the Glowers' village still. Rock sidesteps to avoid a bush which is "waiting for something to brush against it so it could inject itself and its poison into (his) flesh", then is surprised by three grey warthogs, also running away from something. Uh-oh!

The plain beyond the bushes has become a superhighway of animals with legs pumping like locomotives. Rock presses his ear to the ground and hears a TERRIBLE SOUND. They have to run! Rock can run fast but Langford and Kim are still weak from getting almost blown up by a nuclear bomb last month, so the best they can manage is a medium jog. And now, with Mt Ed's field glasses, Rock gets a look at their pursuer!

Now he could see it: a wall of sheerest black, like the side of a mountain, coming straight toward them. And it didn't look like water; Rock could see that from twelve miles away. It was thick and oily and seemed to reach forward with pseudopods of its foul grease, grabbing and digesting the poor creatures that hadn't been quick enough.

The only high ground is a small hill about two miles away! They have to make it! Along with all the other animals, including a mangy wolf that doesn't even bother to bite Mt Ed as it passes!

[Seventh Pup]

I bet the wolf is really a communist spy. I have a feeling that the commies have devoted hundreds of thousands of man hours into making pacifist wolf spys. I mean what else would they do?

[MinDonner]

Rock has more pressing things to worry about than a mere pacifist commie wolf. Langford can't run any longer! I'm not sure whether or not to be surprised about this, but Rock now leaves Kim to run and fend for herself, and picks up Langford and carries him the rest of the way. I guess there's always Rona if when? Kim gets killed, but there's only one President! Even if no-one knows about this cos everyone that voted for him got nuked.

At last they reach the foot of the hill and start to climb. The approaching wave is larger than ever! But luckily with Rock's powers of instant super measurement he knows that the hill is fifty feet high and will be enough to shelter them from the thirty-foot wave.

BUT! At the top of the hill something is waiting...

Just thirty feet away near the center of the fifty-foot wide plateau at the top of the hill stood - stood - Rockson really didn't know what to call it. But he knew he didn't like it. And it didn't like him.

It's some kind of "snarlizard"; its face is a twisted mess of throbbing green arteries and its jaws are shaped somewhere between an alligator's and a Tyrannosaurus Rex's. Also its thighs are as thick as Rockson's chest, its scales like hammered pieces of half-inch metal and its eyes like burning orange mini-suns, blah blah etc etc, there's like an entire page and a half describing how badass this thing is. Rock quickly scans it for weaknesses and immediately spots one.

Rock tells Mt Ed to distract it by shooting at it, and then leaps in for the attack. But he is knocked aside by the monster's tail! Luckily Mt Ed comes in to provide further distraction by letting the beast eat him (and then slurp up his blood) while Rock gets back to his feet. Bye Ed, it's been very.

The lizard leaps about with some ninja skillz, but now Rock has "figured out its style" and manages to dodge and shoot, knocking off some scales and then blasting the monster in the chest and groin. Yowch!

Two more pages describing all the bullets that Rock fires and all the blood that comes pouring out of various parts of the lizard. Its eyes glow with murderous intensity even as the entire side of its neck explodes outwards in a "sputum" of green and black liquid; eventually he has to stab it fifteen times as it collapses on top of him before it is dead. Phew!

Resting his elbows on the bloody ground and heaving at the same time, he slid out from under it. It was dead all right! Everything above its chest was just a mess of slimy green twisted tissue. His last three shots had butchered the thing. The heart was seemingly unstoppable as it pumped out pulse after pulse of oily seaweed green blood through the nearly foot wide opening in its neck.

Rock spares a moment to say "shit, goddamned shit" about Mt Ed's death, then remembers to help Kim up onto the summit, who had managed to miss the entire thing. She gets a bit more upset about Mt Ed, then Rock cradles her sweet-smelling body that "contrasted so bizarrely with the fetid stench of the bloody charnel ground that the hilltop had been turned into."

And still the radioactive wave approaches!

[Lord O' Bones]

Rock could have saved a lot of effort and maybe even Mt. Ed had he just shot the thing in the face. I'll bet with a bit of luck, he may have struck an artery. What with it's face covered by them and all.

[Rorshach]

Rock is so badass. He has the powers of instant super measurement, and he can figure out your style even if you're lizard.

Kim and Mt. Ed must have not really been that important cos Rock wouldn't av let them dye otherwize.

Kim is not dead yet. Of course, in a normal novel, you'd expect she'd die in this book. But this is TED ROCKSON, goddammit, and if he wants to forget his love for a novel or two in order to spend more quality time with fuck someone else, it's his right as the ULTIMATE AMERICAN! Yeah!

[MinDonner]

Chapter Three, and the flood of foulest blackness draws ever closer, as screaming animals hurtle past. Looks like this prairie must have been absolutely chocka with animal life, as the black ooze is now full of hundreds of dying creatures - the only ones that made it up onto their plateau are some goats, a panther and a couple of unicorns.

And now Rockson's powers of measurement take an even more impressive turn - despite not having his portable Geiger counter with him, he is instantly able to gauge that this flood is "super high rad", and that if they fell in, they would be instantly killed, cooked like lobster in an atomic pot. I wonder how he knows what lobster is? Probably Shecter grows them in his hypdroponics lab.

But, at last, the flood dies down again, its radioactivity broken down into less virulent levels. Phew! And the long night is over. You thought Lin Carter could write a ridiculous sunrise?

As the pumpkin orange sun rose from out of the purple steam of night, it seemed to push back the waters. The morning sky was laced with a spiderweb of strontium green webs as clouds of radioactive dust circled high above the earth.

Kim and Langford are rather shaken by the whole thing, but Rock can't afford to show any weakness, and so it's time to get moving - even though he senses that the land is "poisoned beyond the norm". And, of course, covered in slimy dead animals.

Back on the plateau, though, there's a touching scene of the Circle of Life, with new creatures being born amid all this death and destruction. Or, at least, this is how I am choosing to interpret this rather egregious piece of grotesquery:

Behind them the body of Mt Ed shifted weirdly, the stomach moving in little waves. The eggs of the lizard-thing - nearly twenty of them that the creature had deposited into the human's stomach with a flick of its long tail, a tail that doubled as its sex organ, moved inside the corpse, twisting and eating. Eating everything in their path, and when they had consumed their host whole from the inside out, they would hatch, little green lizard-things, a foot long, into a world of unfathomable danger.

(Mt Ed also gets consumed by ants at the same time. I guess they can fight it out with the - eggs? - when they get to the middle?)

ETA: I should point out that the lizard-thing only ate a bit of Mt Ed, so there was still plenty left to incubate its eggs. Just in case that wasn't clear.

[Erik of Hazelfield]

Do we ever get an explanation to what that slime was? I mean, it's certainly a nice plot device (moving at the speed of plot and everything) but isn't it sort of weird as far as storytelling go to have a giant slime wave appear out of nowhere?

Also, love the eating eggs. That lizard species is badass.

[Lord of Starfall]

Nothing like a giant lizard that tailfucks people.

[MinDonner]

Do we ever get an explanation to what that slime was? I mean, it's certainly a nice plot device (moving at the speed of plot and everything) but isn't it sort of weird as far as storytelling go to have a giant slime wave appear out of nowhere?

Er, it was a giant underground radioactive lake that got spewed out when an earthquake hit. Which is probably as near as one can get to an explanation, while still maintaining that "plot device from out of nowhere" flavour.

[Lummel]

Also, love the eating eggs. That lizard species is badass.

All the more so since the awesome blunderbuss that shot a commie plane out of the sky in the previous book is useless against the lizard king at point blank range!

[MinDonner]

Anyway. Chapter Four and we're still with our heroes in the middle of a radioactive wasteland - I know a boring Killov chapter can't be far off, but for the moment things are still pleasingly American. :commie:

The ground is, of course, strewn with corpses and already they are beset by flies - which seem unable to tell the living from the dead! Mr Stacy, it appears, may not be aware that there is more than one type of fly, though this is none too surprising for someone who has lizard-things (with predatory eggs) reproduce in the manner of wasps, and can't tell an ovipositor from a penis from a tail.

Langford allows himself a moment of unpresidential swearing ("Damn, these fucking flies!") as his face gets bitten, so Rock sacrifices some of their precious water for some reason to soak a shirt that Langford can wear over his head(?).

Despite this, Langford is getting kinda emo, and for good reason.

Langford was deeply depressed about the decimation of the newly formed government. It had lasted all of an hour before the mushroom clouds had fried flesh into crumbling charcoal. The shortest reign in history, Langford thought bitterly to himself.

Reign? Methinks Mr Langford may be somewhat deluded about the actual role and responsibilities of Prez. Which is confirmed later in the paragraph, where he starts thinking of himself as "the elected moral and spiritual leader of the free men and women of America". :stunned:

Naturally, this is not corrected in the text, which probably says quite a lot about the attitudes of the authors towards His Holiness St Reagan, the First of his Name, during whose reign this was written.

At last they get back to an area with some plants in - in this case, the plants are of the "strange shaped delicious fruit" variety rather than the "deadly poisonous thorns" alternative - and this time there's even a craptacular explanation as to why! Yes, apparently all this land used to be farmland, which Rock can tell because all the mutated crops are still growing in square-shaped fields! That's right, despite having had time to mutate into "greenish-pink banana-shaped fruits" and giant green leafy "lettuce I think they used to call it", the plants have stayed within the same field boundaries.

Kim eats a melon-sized tomato, joking that if only they had some spaghetti she could make a real down-home American meal, then they go to sleep under the trees, until woken up by some monkeys, which merits a page-long explanation of why Rock knows what monkeys are (he spent a lot of time watching films instead of going to school, in short). The monkeys don't even do anything interesting, so I'm guessing that the entire point of their appearance was just another opportunity to show how awesome Rock is at knowing stuff.

A few pages now of fairly dull exposition as they carry on their journey. Langford wants to go back to the Convention Centre to see if any of his loyal voters actually survived, and Rock ponders on how annoying it is to be so much in love and to suddenly have a weakness in his "impenetrable psychic shield". And then they hear voices and smell a campfire!

It can't possibly be Reds, cos (like Charlie who doesn't surf) they don't do camping, but Rock reluctantly admits to himself that sometimes even Americans can be bad, he's met enough cannibals and bandits in his time to know this. So, he approaches with caution, only to find that -

SURPRISE!

- it's the Rock Squad. Of course it is. They'd just been deciding that no way did anyone deserve to be their leader except Rock, even though (oh noes!) he was probably dead, so it was enormously good timing that he showed up right then. :bang: Then they all stand up and salute Langford, cos they are basically the entire US Army, and then everyone sits down for a nice barbecue.

Things could be a lot worse. And would be.

:agree:

Guys, (most of) you have no idea how stupid this book is going to get. There's a scene later on which makes the hipsters look almost sensible. I'm not even exaggerating.

[Seventh Pup]

I admit I have this driving passion to find out how Kim dies. Every time she gets page space I think "death?" It makes things more interesting. But seriously is she going to die? When I must know!

[MinDonner]

Haha, I have to admit, that is one of the reasons I keep buying these books. But as and when Kim's fate becomes known, you're still going to have to wait till I get there... :devil:

[Darzin]

I admit I have this driving passion to find out how Kim dies. Every time she gets page space I think "death?" It makes things more interesting. But seriously is she going to die? When I must know!

This, but knowing Stacy he might just forget about her.

Reign? Methinks Mr Langford may be somewhat deluded about the actual role and responsibilities of Prez. Which is confirmed later in the paragraph, where he starts thinking of himself as "the elected moral and spiritual leader of the free men and women of America".

Lol I wonder what Stacy if thinks of Barack (scarymuslim) Obama, as the moral and spiritual leader of America, or if thats only for real Americans like the Doomsday warrior.

[MinDonner]

It's worse already. Chapter Five is yet another of those hideous Russian High Command chapters. I'll get through it as quickly as I can.

Zhabnov. He is still fat, still hairy, still busy fucking underage girls (currently abed with only two of them, having a nightmare about Killov chasing him with an army of zombies who start eating him). He wakes up, has a drink to calm his nerves, thinks about how scary Killov is and how he MUST BE STOPPED!, then resumes fucking underage girls again.

Vassily. He is reading a philosophy book and pondering on all the commie leaders of times gone by who have "carried out The Communist Manifesto with a vengeance." He muses yet further on the responsibilities and loneliness of command, how difficult it all is, especially with a whole world to run. And to plunder, apparently - all the Russians had grown fat and lazy because they could just steal all their food and goods from conquered territories and stopped doing any work themselves. Carrying out the Communist Manifesto indeed.

There's some nonsensical babble about the creaky and aging Russian military tech, and how they still maintain all these killer satellites and ICBMs, even though "all the nukes were within the Red domain now" - um, don't the Reds control the entire planet anyway? But, Vassily doesn't want to use any more nukes anyway, cos the planet is already radioactive enough. This sparks one of those rare and special attempts at poetical description by our authors:

Vast deserts now stood where once fields of crops had danced in the clear sun. But now the sun was sickly and pale as it tried to beat its way through the dust and strontium clouds that continued to circle high above the earth.

Brings a tear to my eye. If only we could get those dancing crops together with the singing ferrets.

Another page of Vassily contemplating his crumbling empire. So many rebels! Warlords in Asia! Muslim fanatics in China!(?) Buddhist monks in Indochina burning themselves alive in protest at commie-ism! How could you kill people who killed themselves? (Yes, that is an actual sentence). And even worse, that Ted Rockson!

And with barely a pause, he is now considering making an alliance with Rockson in order to strike against Killov. Rahallah turns up with a drink and they have the same old conversation about how maybe one day Vassily will let him be in charge of Africa.

And at last Killov. He is thin, he takes some pills. And he just KNOWS that Rockson is out there somewhere! In fact, probably just down the road, given that the KGB HQ is in Denver and Century City is somewhere out on the main commuting road to that very same city. And he's still pissed off about the face wound Rockson gave him in Book 2:

And the burn scar, nearly an inch wide and a jagged eight inches long was a constant reminder of pain. It made sure he would never forget. Someday he would get the "Ultimate American" as the rabble called him.

An eight-inch scar between his eye and his jaw?? How big is that guy's head, anyway? :stunned:

But first things first! Actually Killov wants to kill Zhabnov first, and Vassily too. Because it was his destiny to become emperor of the planet!

[Seventh Pup]

I am still waiting to find out how Nazis fit into all this. Or was it explained and I'm forgetting?

[MinDonner]

The Nazis don't turn up till the next book (at least I presume so - by book 6 they were already a done deal, so I'm hoping they get some introduction in the one immediately preceding). But I'm sure the explanation will be full of logic and make all kinds of sense. :thumbsup:

[Lummel]

I thought the Nazis were the Communists and that the Communists were the Nazis. It would get kind of confusing if they were two different groups.

Anyhow, they're not Americans so what does it matter?

[MinDonner]

Well, it's been a while since the first* book and the finer details escape me, but I'm pretty sure the Nazis had been subcontracted by the Commies to do some generic oppressing of Americans, probably cos Killov was too busy with being a thin pill-popping megalomaniac to actually do his job. Maybe in Book Five we'll see Vassily put the project out to tender, and witness the aggressive competing bids from various other nations' totalitarian regimes.

*ie. sixth.

[MinDonner]

Anyhoo. Chapter Six brings us back to the exploits of our Freefighting band, who have just been spotted by some Russian helicopters! They need to flee for cover! Rock knows how to get the message across.

"Double time it!," the Doomsday Warrior yelled out, wanting them all to feel the edginess in his voice. There was no time to play it cool.

Immediately they find a cave to hide in, luckily unoccupied by anything except bats. The Rock Squad swiftly arm themselves with grenades, exploding throwing stars, folding fifth millimeter machine guns etc, and Rock peeks out - his sixth sense tells him that they have been spotted! Unfortunately the Russians appear to have nothing better to do than to randomly fly around and attack any people they see in the countryside for no apparent reason.

Rock's priority, it seems, is to stop the Reds from capturing Langford, because of course the loss of the singularly most inept and unelected president ever would strike a crippling blow to the forces of freedom. So, he and Archer head out to create a diversion. Kim is none too happy about this, cos obviously if Rock dies she'll never be able to fancy another man again, but now is not the time for the wailing of women.

Detroit and McLaughlin chuckle about what they will do to the cowardly drugged-up draftees of the Russian army, then Rock and Archer head out, Rock not even giving Kim a farewell hug. Blah, they run down the hill, blah, the Russians pick them up on their "kinetic scanner", then Rock blows up one chopper by throwing a grenade at it, and Archer gets another with an exploding crossbow bolt. Fuck yeah!

A roar of metal turning to liquid and flesh to bloody mud screamed down the slope, sending rocks and pieces of glowing shrapnel in every direction. The chopper burst into a fireball as its munitions section detonated with the force of two tons of high explosive. The fireball reached out in all directions, an expanding circle of fire and metal as sharp as razors. The choppers immediately to the right and left of the leader took bad hits, both bursting into flame, then veering wildly down from the sky.

Now Rock and "the barn door of a man Archer" can run into the forest, sending squealing forest animals flying off into the undergrowth as they run. All they have to do is hide for five more minutes and then the sun will immediately set and they'll be safe!

But oh noes! The Russians drop a net on them! And then threaten them with Kalashnikovs!

"Well now, I may be mistaken," the mustached officer said with a sneer. "But this looks like the notorious Ted Rockson - the Ultimate American." He spat the words out contemptuously. "I've seen your picture enough on every brown wall in every military headquarters in this filthy country. You don't look so tough right now."

Aha. So Killov's inability to get a decent Rockson photo for his dollmaker to use, is not representative of failings across the entire Soviet military. Good to know.

The officer now tells Rockson that soon (soon!) he will be taken to the Mindbreaker, but at least Langford is safe........

Rock had done his job. God help him now.