Doomsday Warrior 11 - American Eden by Ryder Stacy Read Free Book Online

followed. He drove its six fan-hitched wolf-huskies relentlessly, and they never tired. McCaughlin and Archer were sliding along holding on each to their own handle behind him.
    Rock hoped that at the end of each day’s trek they could find some sort of shelter—a rock overhang, anything. They had a survival tent, but there was a suspicious wind rising from the east. The worst storms came out of the Great Plains, where they could build and build, unencumbered by mountains. He feared the worst.

Seven
    R ock watched the towering black clouds building over the hills. Though it wasn’t snowing, the increasing winds coming from the blackness ahead whipped through his down coat and threatened to tear off his fur-flapped hat.
    Most snow clouds are gray. Black snowclouds could mean acid snow—the conical-flaked death snows. No one could predict when the black snow would come to devastate an area, they just came out of nowhere.
    A biting cold hit just as the sky became totally dark. It was as if the sun had set, and yet it was an hour before sunset.
    Rockson, anxious to make their goal before all hell broke loose, pushed their teams to the utmost. The cold ate into his hands, his arms, his legs, despite the thermal layers of synseal and goose down. The others too by their grim expressions were feeling the sixty-below temperature—and realizing the danger.
    There was only open, rolling terrain ahead, but hopefully they could reach the cliffs he could see miles ahead, find shelter before the storm hit. Worry about finding the museum later.
    Within minutes, as the seven brave Freefighters whipped their half-wild teams to a frenzied pace, the storm overtook them. A thunderous howl of wind-blown snow obscured the way, and in that blown white snow appeared black specks—the dreaded black snow.
    “Faster, we’ve got to go faster. Shine your flashlights ahead; use your compasses. Keep going west-south-west. We’ve got to find shelter.”
    The sled he was riding started to shimmy in the wind; the dogs were howling, their voices an eerie cross between wolf howl and dogs’ growl. Lightning and thunder rent the air. The black specks increased. Rockson got the first hit on his lips. It burned. Acid snow, all right.
    There appeared a dozen, then a hundred, smoking tiny holes in his snow suit. The acid flakes were eating into his clothing.
    He pulled the hood down over his face—he couldn’t see ahead anyway, so he just kept the luminous compass in sight through the tiny hole he left to see through. “Faster, faster,” he yelled, whipping the howlers.
    It was totally dark now, they were plunging ahead at breakneck speed, but they had no choice. The super-strong wolf-dogs were the one thing in their favor. Snow-wolf pelts were special—they were immune to acid snows, the result of a hundred years of genetic mutation after the nuke war. The dogs would keep going. But the acid snow, though it didn’t blind the teams, still stung their eyes. Therefore the howls of pain. The dogs wanted to stop and huddle together, protecting their eyes. But if they stopped, the humans they pulled would be burned to skeletons in a matter of ten minutes.
    Only the whip kept them going.
    Rock had to look ahead—he uncovered his eyes. It hurt, but he had to look. There . Through the swirling gray-blackness, Rock dimly saw a shape—the cliffs. “We’re almost there, keep behind me, I’m going to find a niche in the rocks for us to hole up in,” he shouted, the wind nearly drowning his words.
    It didn’t take long once they reached the jagged jumbled rocks of the cliffs to find a deep rock overhang. In seconds they were out of the snow and wind. With their flashtorches lit, they unhooded and removed their outer clothing and applied ointment to their stung faces and eyes. Detroit had a space between his left glove and his coat, and the skin was badly burned there. But by some miracle that was the only injury. The parkas weren’t impervious to the acid