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- Herausgeber: Al-Mashreq eBookstore
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Serie: Tomorrow
- Sprache: Englisch
Thunder Tomorrow by Arthur Leo Zagat is a pulse-pounding thriller that will keep you on the edge of your seat. When a series of inexplicable events threatens to unravel the very fabric of society, a determined investigator races against time to uncover a sinister plot that could change the world. With the clock ticking and danger lurking around every corner, the stakes couldn't be higher. As secrets are revealed and alliances shift, will the investigator succeed in thwarting disaster, or will the thunder of tomorrow bring about an unstoppable catastrophe? Dive into this electrifying story where every revelation adds to the suspense and every twist deepens the intrigue.
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Seitenzahl: 110
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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Table of Contents
THUNDER TOMORROW
PROLOGUE
I. — BOSS OF THE MOUNTAIN
II. — ARMY WITH BANNERS
III. — SEEK THE FAR LAND
IV. — THE DEVIL WEARS GREEN
V. — WALLS OF WEST POINT
VI. — MIDNIGHT RIVER
VII. — LEAD US TO TOMORROW
VIII. — WAR CRY!
IX. — THUNDER IN THE NIGHT
X. — OUR GREEN, OUR PLEASANT LAND
Landmarks
Table of Contents
Cover
Thunder Tomorrow
Fiercely the Bunch charged the Asiafric guards at West Point..
It is the voice of America, this thunder lifted against an alien and savage tyranny. For tonight Dikar leads his army-with-banners into battle, and the hope of Tomorrow will be proclaimed with guns..
PROLOGUE
DICK CARR was four years old when the hordes of the Asiatic-African Confederation, having swarmed in triumph over Europe, began to attack our own country, from the south and west.
Of all this, and of the long and desperate defense that followed, Dick Carr had, of course, no comprehension, and hence when he became the almost legendary person we know as Dikar, he could not remember clearly that terrible past. But Dikar has vague dream-memories, of being always hungry, of being always afraid, of the thunder always in the sky, getting nearer and nearer.
The sharpest of his memories is of a siren howling like an enormous devil in the sky while he runs through the street, holding on to his mother's hand so the other running women and kids won't separate them. They get to a dim cave that once was a subway station, and they all crouch there in the almost-dark, while the earth shakes with great thunders.
In the station is a little girl, brown-eyed, brown-haired and pretty. When Dick shyly asks her name she runs the two names together, making one of them "Marilee." And from Dick's two names she makes "Dikar."
The thunders stop at last, and from the radio in the change booth a Voice announces that America has been vanquished. Yet there is, the Voice says, one last hope.
"A small, but determined force may be able to keep open a certain gap in the enemy lines, to the north, long enough for us to take your little children out through it. We have some arms and ammunition available, but no one to use them except you mothers who hear me.
"It is a bitter thing I ask you to do," the Voice goes on. "I should not ask it except for this one thing. If there is to be any hope of a tomorrow, it must rest in your little sons and daughters. If they perish, America shall have perished indeed. If through your sacrifice they survive, then in some tomorrow we cannot foresee, America will live again and democracy, liberty, freedom shall reconquer the green and pleasant fields that tonight lie devastated."
The Voice stops, and the mothers go out of the station, faster and faster, and there are tears in their eyes but their faces are shining....
Later that same night Dikar is in a truck moving through a dark that is terrible with rolling and imminent thunder. On the driver's seat are two old people, Tom and Helen. The truck is jammed full with kids and in Dikar's arms sleeps Marilee.
They ride for a long time and come at last to a mountain. All around the mountain the rock has been quarried away so that cliffs rise to a great height, unclimbable except where a narrow ramp slants up to a clearing. Here the men who worked the quarry once lived in two long, many-windowed houses.
HELEN teaches the Girls how to cook and to sew, and Tom teaches the Boys how to make bonarrers and hunt with them, how to catch fish and make fire. The Old Ones make a lot of rules for living on the Mountain, a lot of Musts and Must-nots, and they say that because Dikar is the oldest he shall be Boss of the Bunch. And though the Bunch do not know it, Tom has planted dynamite at the bottom of the narrow hill that slants up to the Mountain.
One day a band of Asafric soldiers approaches the Mountain, and Tom and Helen rush down to meet them. Then, when the tumult of a great explosion dies away, Dikar sees only tumbled stones down there, nothing moving. The soldiers are under the stones, and under the stones are the Old Ones.
There is no longer any way to climb the Mountain without help from above, and the Asafrics never find out the Bunch live on the Mountain.
Now the Boys have grown tall, clean-limbed and slim-hipped; and they prowl the Mountain naked save for small aprons of split twigs deftly intertwined. The Girls are clad only in thigh-length reed skirts, their deepening breasts covered by circlets of leaves. Laughing-eyed and lovely the Girls have grown, but to Dikar the loveliest of all is brown-haired Marilee, whom he has taken as his mate.
Their life on the Mountain is a good one, and to all except Dikar the Mountain is their whole world. But Dikar wonders much about the Far Land that lies green and pleasant-seeming at the foot of the Mountain.
FINALLY Dikar goes down into the Far Land, four of the Bunch with him, and they fight and kill a small troop of Asafrics. The Boys bring back to the Mountain a man and woman of their own people. Johndawson and Marthadawson. From these Dikar learns of how the people of America are enslaved; and he learns that America's greatest need is for a leader against the oppressors.
Johndawson has brought to the Mountain a curious device called a radio with which he can listen to the talking of the Secret Net, a far-flung band of brave men who risk death and worse to keep hope alive in the hearts of the Americans. One day this radio tells how Normanfenton, who may be the leader America so terribly needs, is a prisoner of the Asafrics and on a night very soon will be brought along a road not far from the Mountain. Dikar decides to go down to where Normanfenton will pass and see if by chance the Bunch can rescue him.
Down there Dikar is captured by the Beastfolk, men and women who, having escaped the Asafrics, skulk in the wild woods around the Mountain. Hunted and starving, these have become as mindless and savage as the beasts. They are about to kill Dikar when Marilee, who has trailed him unseen, saves him and makes friends with the Beastfolk.
The next night Dikar leads the Bunch down from the Mountain. Aided by the Beastfolk, they hide in the dark tops of trees, and from there they rain arrows on the trucks carrying Normanfenton and the Asafric soldiers who guard him. Leaping from the trees the Boys savagely attack the soldiers; and Normanfenton is rescued.
By dawn the Boys are back on the Mountain, with them Normanfenton and four of the Beastfolk—Nat and Walt, Ruth and Marge; and in the woods of the Far Land they have left no traces that might give away the secret of the Mountain.
In that gray, cloudy dawn, it seems to Dikar that he hears again the Voice of long ago:
"...In some tomorrow we cannot foresee, America will live again, and democracy, liberty, freedom, shall reconquer the green and pleasant fields that tonight lie devastated."
I. — BOSS OF THE MOUNTAIN
"'IN some tomorrow we cannot foresee,'" Normanfenton repeated Dikar's recollection of what the Voice said that dreadful night long ago, "'America will live again....'"
For days Normanfenton had lain very sick on a cot in the Boys' House, but now he was better. He and Dikar had walked deep into the woods, while Dikar told how the Bunch came to the Mountain, how they'd lived here, and why he had led the Bunch down from the Mountain.
"The good Lord grant," Normanfenton whispered, "that at last that tomorrow has come."
"I—I'm not sure I really remember the Voice, or if I only dreamed it." Dikar's nearly naked body was sun-browned, his hair and curly, silken beard bright golden in the sun, his eager eyes blue as the sky. "But I am sure that if we just stay here on the Mountain, safe an' happy, while those things are goin' on down there, we will be doin' awful wrong." He stopped talking. Normanfenton wasn't listening to him.
A strange, far-off look was in Normanfenton's deep-sunken eyes. His thin lips were moving, but Dikar could not hear the words they made. The words weren't meant for Dikar. They were meant for Someone neither he nor Normanfenton could see but Whose nearness Dikar sensed in the sun's warmth, in the birds' singing, in the earth-smell of the woods.
They had come into a level part of the woods where there was hardly any brush. The dark trees marched away from them into a dim and enormous space that was filled with a strange, almost frightening hush. The trunks of the trees rose, without branch or leaf, to the rustling roof of the forest. In places, there far above, frost had thinned and painted the leaves so that the sun, striking through, made patches of flaming color, brilliant reds and yellows and glowing purples. One of the light-beams struck full on Normanfenton.
Clumsily built as he was, there was something about him that reminded Dikar of the giant oak in the Clearing, something of the same gnarled strength, of the same enduring patience. He was naked above the waist, and his tight-drawn skin was criss-crossed with scabbed grooves where Asafric whips had cut, the marks of Asafric chains were still raw on his bony wrists; but his great, black-bearded head sat proudly on his bony shoulders and the suffering and sadness lined deep into his face was not suffering nor sadness for himself.
It seemed to Dikar that very long ago he had seen a face like Normanfenton's on a wall—in it this same tender sadness. Words echoed inside Dikar's head: Oh Captain, my Captain, the fearful trip—
A scarlet bird streaked under the forest roof. A white rabbit scampered across the leaf-strewn forest floor. The words slipped from Dikar and the remembrance of that Long-Ago face faded away. Normanfenton stirred, turned to him.
"Yes," Normanfenton said gravely. "If we just stay here on the Mountain, safe and happy, we shall be doing something awful wrong."
"Then let's get started! Let's go down to the Far Land an' start fightin' to take back America."
"Softly, lad, softly." A gentle smile came to Normanfenton's lips. "That's an army they've got, son. Those blacks are the best soldiers the world has ever seen, and the best equipped. Yee Hashamoto, the Viceroy—the Boss of the whole business—is as shrewd and cunning as he is cruel, and the Yellow officers under him are no man's fools."
"But—"
"And so we must plan carefully, very carefully." Normanfenton's shoulders were stooped a little now. "I must—Do you mind, Dikar, leaving me alone for a while?"
"Sure I'll go," Dikar answered. "Sure, Normanfenton. Anyways, I ought to go see how the Boys are gettin' along with the new little houses they're buildin' for you and the four Beastfolk." He started away, his feet making no noise, his bow, an arrow fitted into it, ready in his hands against the chance that he might come upon a deer.
The ground started to slant downward and the brush became thicker, so that Dikar couldn't see very far. It was cool here, where the sun never reached, and the earth-smell was blacker, the forest smells tangy with the spice of berries and of certain leaves his feet crushed—Dikar stopped still, suddenly, not a muscle moving, head canted a little, nostrils flaring.
AHEAD of him, hidden by the netted greenery of the bushes, there was sound of a big body moving. It might be a deer, but the wind was from Dikar, and a deer would have scented him and fled. A human then? But none of the Bunch would make so much noise moving through the woods.
Whatever it was, it was coming toward him. The fingers of Dikar's left hand tightened on the half-round wood of his bow. The right hand drew the shaft of the arrow back.
Close to Dikar the bushes threshed. A shadow darkened the interlaced leaves of the brush. The leaves parted.
"Oh!" A girl screamed tinily, staring at Dikar with big, frightened eyes. "You—" Not a Girl of the Bunch, but Marge, Nat's mate, only her head visible. "You were going to shoot that thing at me."
"Not your fault I didn't," Dikar said gruffly, lowering his bow. "You have no right bein' here. You were told to stay in the Clearin' unless one of the Bunch is with you."
