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TED ROCKSON: ULTIMATE AMERICAN (Barbarian Snark #6)

MinDonner

By MinDonner,
in Literature

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MinDonner Council Member

MinDonner

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If Killov has a full name, I can't remember it either. It's probably something cliché-Russian like Vladimir if so. But, we did get Dean Keppel whose first name turned out to be his title, so it's always possible that Ma Killov decided that Colonel would be a good name for her firstborn. :uhoh:

Not a proper update today, as the next chapter's a doozy and I don't have time right now* to do it justice. But, I just started playing Minecraft*, and it occurred to me this morning that there are certain... similarities. I mean, here I am, building a city underneath a mountain, with a pickaxe that I made by PUNCHING A TREE with my BARE HANDS, while scary but block-shaped mutants roam around outside... :D

*these facts may or may not be related

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MinDonner Council Member

MinDonner

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OK, OK! I shall crack on. Cos I really want to get to the Sikhs and that's not gonna happen by itself.

Still not quite there yet though, there are *peeps ahead* two more chapters to get through before they ride in. So onwards to Chapter Eight!

"I love your nails," Rona smirked sarcastically from atop her loping 'brid to Kim, who rode just yards away. "You must tell me who does them."

"No-one does them," the president's blond-haired, blue-eyed daughter smiled back icily. "They're beautiful naturally - just like every part of me. But I hear you're having a lot of trouble with your own 'natural' attributes - things starting to sag and wrinkle. I know a plastic surgeon in a cave outside Topeka who can do wonders with - well, anyone - even you."

Rona grits her teeth and resists the urge to kill Kim with a single karate chop to the face. I can relate, especially as this masterful dialogue continues down the page. So good to see contemporary beauty standards outlasting even the nuclear apocalypse, to such an extent that a plastic surgeon gets enough custom to set up shop (in a cave)! "Who does your nails," indeed, which means that the manicure industry is still thriving also.

Rock rides a few yards ahead, hunching his shoulders, trying not to listen, and regretting the fact that he invited both his girlfriends on this mission. But he "knew there was no way in hell he was going to be able to argue them both out of it, so he simply surrendered." Badass.

All the regionally-stereotyped American forces have returned to their home bases to prepare for the attack in 14 days. Which seems a rather short time-period for a plan they only just concocted yesterday, but whatevs. Rock, of course, is on the Most Important Mission (with full Rock Squad in tow, as well as the hilarious bickering females) to lead the 5000-strong CC army against Fort Minsk, where Killov is (of course).

Rockson felt the takeover of Minsk was essential to the success of the war. If they could take out the brain - the arms, the legs, would fail. If not... but failure was not something Ted Rockson dwelt on. If he did, he would have given up long ago and crawled back into the radioactive dirt.

Kim and Rona resume bickering again at this point, causing Ted to, er, dwell on his failure.

Paces ahead, Rockson didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Men always said they liked that kind of problem - two beautiful women in love with you at the same time. But in reality, it was a different matter. For they spent so much time arguing, there was no energy left for him. But at least they weren't pulling at each other's hair and scratching at one another's eyes.

Firstly, tiny violins for Ted, whose attempt at two-timing has left him getting no attention at all (I think the narrative wants us to feel sorry for him, which makes it even funnier). But secondly... hair-pulling and eye-scratching? Does Stacy even know what he's doing here? In the hands of a better author, we could maybe take this as a statement of Rock's misogyny, believing that lady-fights are all about slaps and nails, when we the readers have seen Rona's POV about wanting to do MANLY PUNCHING... but this isn't a better author. This is Ryder Stacy. And I bet you anything that he just paid no attention to what he'd already written, and just went with Stereotypical Catfight Description and paid it nary another thought.

There follows a reminder of how hot and awesome the chicks are that Rock has fighting over him - Rona gets three paragraphs of potted backstory (we already know all this - circus trapeze artist, "140 pounds of muscle and pure fighting ability", radiation-resistant mutant, red hair and pneumatic boobs), and Kim gets one (petite and pretty and... that's it). Kim's description does have some typical have-cake-and-eat-it Stacyisms though:

She was the all-American girl and, had she lived a hundred years before, would surely have been a model, with a near-perfect look of a certain type of girl who only existed here in the USA. It wasn't really that she was striking in any way, and if her features were looked at one at a time - ivory skin with a few freckles, blue-green eyes, almost pug nose - she wouldn't have seemed all that special.

No. You can have your "girl-next-door"-style alternate girlfriend with the ordinary features that Rock finds strangely irresistable (despite this differing from the OMG BLONDE HOTTIE that Kim has been in all previous books), but you can't ALSO say "she would definitely have been a model". Especially as she's only 5'2" (as mentioned in the same paragraph). Of course both Rona and Kim's attributes are only there to make Rock even more the Aspirational Figure of Envy to the target readership, but Stacy just can't help from overegging it yet again. Rock is banging the Objectively Hot Chick That Everyone Wants to show that he CAN have any woman in the world, and then showing his sensitive side by also falling for the Subjectively Hot Chick Who's A Bit Shy And Plain to show that he's not just shallow.... only, Subjectively Hot Chick has to be fucking model-calibre too. Gahh.

And truly, what the hell is it about models that so many guys think is this Ultimate Woman Aspiration? I mentioned this last time it came up (in this case referring to Rona, somewhat more plausibly at 5'10" and demonstrably hot, who would surely have been a model in Ye Olde Tymes) - harking back to those ghastly GC threads on femininity or that cover-art one, it's a nasty by-product of valuing women only for their appearance, that despite whatever other skills they might have, still the best goal is to have a job where you can be paid for looking pretty in clothes. Or else, we have just wandered into Tyra Banks' Modelland, and Tookie De La Creme is lurking behind a nearby radioactive boulder.

Anyways, it's now time to set up camp for the night, the entire first day of the journey a mere excuse to showcase our jealous rivals. McCaughlin, currently Scottish, cooks (guess what?) some stew, then they all have a nap, Rock flanked by a chick on either side, but all in separate sleeping bags and no-one daring to move. *tiny violins again*. There's also a massive meteorite shower ("pulled by the clutching arms of gravity") with huge meteorites that hit the ground miles away with massive explosions, but as with most things about the sky, this is just for decoration and no-one bothers to flee for their lives or even wonder whether the exploding meteorite hit anything important.

...that may be all I can manage today. But monsters are coming up soon!

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MinDonner

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The next day dawns, following the actually surprisingly accurate(!) giant-meteor shower, and Kim and Rona immediately resume their bitching, this time Rona revealing her "large melon breasts" as a contrast to Kim's petite-ness. Le sigh. But it's finally time for something else to start happening.

...Rockson took his field glasses to scan ahead. A motion on the ground several hundred yards forward caught his eyes. A long, undulating shape, thick as a branch. A snake - a big one. As he moved his glasses to the right he saw another, then another.

"Judas Priest," the Doomsday Warrior cried out.

? Really? Now, I suppose the phrase might have started out as a sweary curse, but even by 1986, the band had been around for plenty long enough to have usurped the original meaning, and with multiple double-platinum selling albums I find it hard to believe that Stacy would not have heard of em. Maybe the point is that, by 2089, the names of metal bands have turned into swearwords? It's as plausible as anything else, I suppose.

Anyway yeah, there's hundreds of snakes in the way, and of course they can't possibly go around them, so Rock has the awesome plan of using the "aluma-tarps" (another of Dr Shecter's inventions!) to wrap up the horses' legs so they don't get bitten. And everyone has to pull their legs up onto the horses' necks so they're out of snakebite range. Because that makes it so easy to control (and stay on!) a large horse which is trotting through a field of snakes?

Apparently the horses look ridiculous with their legs all wrapped up, "but beauty was not the name of the game out in the wastelands of post-nuke America."

I think Stacy is dimly aware of how lame these snakes are in comparison with his other monsters, so he gamely tries to big them up a bit:

...every man in the unit, even Rockson himself, [was] feeling the deep unconscious fear of the man's most ancient enemy - the serpent - deep in his guts.

The 'brids grew increasingly nervous as they approached the gauntlet of living venom-tubes

...and of course, the obligatory feeding-frenzy:

As if with one mind, one living body with a hundred thousand tentacles, the plains all around them came to life in a slithering of slimy bodies. There were snakes of every size and color, thick black ones like eels with their dark mouths open and hissing, green and red ones, moving like slashes of electric colour across the light brown dirt. From little worms the size of pencils with fangs nearly as large as their bodies to pythons twenty feet long with jaws opening like a shark's ready to swallow a man whole - and maybe try a second helping of hybrid horse. And they were all coming in one direction. If there is a universal human phobia, it is that of snakes. What man can look upon the face of a viper, stare into those diamond eyes as orange as the back side of the sun, and not fear that forked tongue flicking in and out, endlessly tasting the scent of evil in the air? Who can look and not know that that face is descended from Eden's demon?

*diez and iz ded*

SNAKES. SRS BZNS.

Who else thinks Stacy has a phobia here? No, dear author, many people are quite capable of staring down a snake, and those tongues? Not that scary, and also probably not tasting the "scent of evil". :lmao:

Continuing the Old Testament theme, the snakes close in from all sides "like the twin walls of the Red Sea crashing together" and start jumping up and trying to bite things. The only solution is to try and panic the 'brids into stampeding, so all the Freefighters start shooting their guns and screaming, which unsurprisingly works - though they all manage to stay in the saddle despite having pulled their legs up.

The streaks of black and grey erupted in explosive blasts of snakeskin and innards as the .45 cal., 7mm and 9mm, along with Rock's own .12 gauge death-presents all turned the air around them to putrid mists of red.

The horse-stampede seems to be working, and allows them to get through what would be certain death even for a "three-horn grizzly". But! We can't get through this without losing at least one redshirt! And this time the unlucky token death is new boy Matheson, who we'd never heard of before and never will again. A snake manages to jump up and bite him on the neck, and he immediately has convulsions and falls into the "sea of death". But no time to stop and rescue! The stampede must go on!

Says Detroit:

"I have had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plain!"

(no, he doesn't really. But by god he should have!)

The stampede continues "for minutes which seemed like days", until finally they get past all the snakes. Rock warns everyone not to touch the venom-coated aluma-tarps, but he "knows this area" and leads them to a stream where they can wash it all off. Good job, Rock, if you knew this area so well, then why go across the Plain of One Million Snakes in the first place? Pah, sense, who needs it?

But the chapter, of course, would not be complete without a follow-up on what had happened to the body of Matheson.

Unlike snakes of the pre-nuke era, which had but two fangs and swallowed their prey whole, the post-war monstrosities that Rockson and his team had barely survived had rows of inward-curving teeth about a quarter-inch long. This enabled them to actually chew off pieces of their victims, rather than having to eat them all at once or have nothing at all.

...

Thus Matheson's body was shared by hundreds of the undulating serpents, who ripped the carcass apart like lions at a feed.

Big snakes tear off chunks with their taxonomically-dubious lion teeth! Small snakes get in through the mouth, nose and eye sockets and rip their way through the intestines! They ate for hours in this warm dream sea of consumable flesh! Man, for someone with a snake-phobia, Stacy really does seem to relish this passage. It's just like a small boy trying to gross-out his sister.

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Maithanet Council Member

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so he simply surrendered." Badass.

:lol: Great stuff Min.

Rock, of course, is on the Most Important Mission (with full Rock Squad in tow, as well as the hilarious bickering females) to lead the 5000-strong CC army against Fort Minsk,

You couldn't have even made up an impressive sounding number? That's less than 1/1000th the troops from some WWII battles.

A long, undulating shape, thick as a branch. A snake - a big one.

As yes, thick as a branch. I just picture a branch, and now I know the exact thickness. Vivid.

Kim and Rona immediately resume their bitching, this time Rona revealing her "large melon breasts" as a contrast to Kim's petite-ness.

I'll admit, this is probably my misogynistic memory at work, but I'm certain that Kim's breasts were compared to melons in the past. Likely several times, since Stacey seems to use that exact simile in every sex scene. I can only assume the apocalypse has weeded out the flat-chested women. Or perhaps we should assume that these melons are quite branchlike, and could be of any size.

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Lummel Council Member

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I think I've seen big melons and small melons. They are a bit like sticks in that way.

I generally assume that melon like breasts mean that they have a very hard outer skin, that could be green or yellow in colour, that you have to cut through to enjoy the soft flesh inside.

Surely green breasts with white nipples would look rather striking?

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