Doomsday Warrior 01

AMERICA WILL RISE AGAIN!

Ravaged by the nuclear devastation of World War III, America is now a brutalized Russian colony. But led by a unique soldier of survival, Ted Rockson, a loose federation of secret American Free Cities rises up to fight the hated conquerer!

Rockson’s name soon becomes the rallying cry of a people desperate to throw off the shackles of tyranny. Their ultimate freedom, though, depends on Rockson finding a weapon capable of defeating the Russian Empire.

When a remarkable destructive device is rumored to be somewhere deep inside a radioactive hot zone, Rockson’s desperate mission is to find it. Russian patrols and the twisted hell of this savagely mutilated world become impossible obstacles, but Rockson will not give up, will not turn back, will not be defeated. The reason is simple.

He’s been bred by the holocaust to be the . . .

DOOMSDAY
WARRIOR

AT THE EDGE OF DEATH

Rockson rolled down the hill as quick as he could move, oblivious to the sharp-edged rocks gashing his flesh. The ground where he had just been was ripped apart by Russian machine-gun fire. He flew down the hill with animal speed, sliding, dodging, a bundle of pure energy. But it didn’t help him. Two Red choppers suddenly swooped down on him through the smoke and peppered the hill with a blizzard of slugs, digging trenches in straight, deadly lines. Rockson tore to the side and kept heading for cover—until he heard the whoosh of an air-to-ground missile fired by one of the choppers. He knew that sound well. He had heard it a hundred times before. It meant someone was going to die . . .

ZEBRA BOOKS

are published by

Kensington Publishing Corp.

475 Park Avenue South

New York, N.Y. 10016

ISBN: 0-8217-1356-6

Copyright © 1984 by Ryder Stacy

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

First printing: May 1984

Printed in the United States of America

Prologue

2
089
A.D.
Ted Rockson alias “Rock” is “The Doomsday Warrior.” He fights back against the Russian invaders who now control post-World War III America—a land decimated by nuclear missiles from Russia’s first strike.

One hundred years after the massive Soviet surprise nuclear attack much of the United States is still radioactive and impassible. The world now has twenty percent less oxygen, strange and constantly shifting weather patterns, freezing nights and scorching days, purple clouds, storms of black snow. In the United States, regions of land have been torn by chasms, landslides and earthquakes. Mutated animals roam the plains and mountains. Killer dogs, weighing up to two hundred pounds, with dagger-sharp teeth, hunt in hungry packs. Bloodthirsty rats, two to three feet long, move in bands of thousands across the terrain at night, devouring all that is in their path.

And there are tales of the mysterious “Glowers,” who the Russian occupying troops speak of in frightened whispers—radioactive humans who live only in the hottest zones, who glow like a blue flame and whose touch kills instantly. These and even more terrible dangers await Rock as he makes his way across the new America.

Driving stolen Russian vehicles or riding his hybrid horse, shorter and stronger than horses of the past and more resistant to radiation, Rock, armed with his rapid-fire .12 gauge shotgun pistols and the “Liberator” automatic rifle with infrared scope, helps the “Freefighters” of the free American towns and villages fight the Russian occupiers. Rock’s only two goals are to throw the Soviet murderers out of the United States, returning America to its great glory and freedom of the past, and to find and kill the squad of Russian KGB officers who murdered his family, torturing them, raping his mother and sisters when he was a child. Hidden beneath a floorboard he had memorized the faces of all ten of the elite Death Squad who committed the atrocities. One by one he will hunt them down and kill them.

Ted Rockson’s trail weaves swiftly across the land, the mountains, the hidden free cities, the vast hot zones, as he conquers all that gets in his way in the strange, terrifying world of America 2089
A.D.

TIME:
It is one hundred years in the future. An all-out nuclear war has killed two-thirds of the world’s population. The Russians, who were able to get off many more of their missiles in a first strike, were victorious over the United States. Now, in control of virtually the entire world except for China, they ruthlessly rule the People’s World Socialist Republics.

PLACE:
Atomic bombs exploded all over the planet, but primarily in the United States. The United States lost one hundred million people within one hour of the attack. Another seventy-five million died within a year. The Russians immediately moved in with massive transports of troops and weapons and quickly took control of much of the country. They built forty fortresses in vital parts of the United States, huge military complexes from which they sent out search-and-destroy units of tanks, helicopters and radiation-suited troops to extinguish the still-burning embers of resistance.
The Russians use the American citizens as slave labor, forcing them to grow crops and work in factories. The Russian high command lives in luxury, the officers having taken the best housing in the remaining cities. The American workers must make do in shabby shanty towns around the fortress complexes. Thirty-five million Americans are directly under the Red rule. Sullen and docile, they carry out their Russian masters’ orders, but underneath they hate them. They pray for the day when the legendary Ted Rockson, “The Ultimate American,” will come with the Freefighters of the hidden cities and release them from their bondage.

ENVIRONMENT:
The great number of bombs set off altered the Earth’s axis. The polar caps began melting and the forested regions turned to desert. As the world slowly warmed, the higher amount of CO
₂
in the air created a greenhouse effect. Lakes, rivers and streams had dried up in many places. Ecology had been almost dealt a deathblow from the war. Ninety percent of the Earth’s species of plants and animals were now extinct.
The East Coast of the United States is still extremely radioactive. Vast, bare plains stretch hundreds of miles in New York, Connecticut, New Jersey and Pennsylvania on which nothing grows. At the edges of these hot zones are forests of mutated bushes and trees covered with thorns and rock-hard bark. Parts of the Midwest were spared as the Russians had plans for eventually using the farmland to grow crops for their own clamoring masses back home. But the soil is nevertheless too radioactive for anything but weeds. American slave labor has been taken out by the truckload to work, turning the soil in the medium hot zones—meaning death within a year from handling the rocks and topsoil still hot enough to send a Geiger counter needle off the edge.
The Far West was hit hard. Colorado was spared mostly because of bad aim but further on, in Utah, Nevada and California, there has been heavy damage. The area is now a misty, unknown land. Nothing is thought to even live there. Volcanos and earthquakes have become common and much of the Northwest has been turned into a nightmare of craters, some miles wide.
The South was hit in a haphazard fashion as if the Russians hadn’t quite known what to strike. Some states—New Mexico, Georgia—were almost untouched; others—Florida, Texas—had been blasted to bits. Large parts of Florida are gone. Where Orlando and Tampa once stood is now a great jagged, hydrogen-bomb-created canal, stretching hundreds of miles across the interior, filled with red, muddy water.
Slowly, life tries to force its way back onto the surface of the ripped and savaged land. Many forests have expanded over the last century in areas that weren’t hit. Great parts of the United States are now thick with brush and trees, and resemble the country the way it was in the 1800s. In other places the deserts cover the earth for four, five hundred miles in every direction—unrelenting, broiling, snake-filled and cactus-dotted obstacles that stand between other living parts of the country.

THE HIDDEN FREE CITIES:
Nearly seventy-five towns have sprung up over the last hundred years, hidden in caves, mountains and deep wooded valleys. Located at the edges of hot zones which the Russian troops are reluctant to enter, these towns, known as Free Cities, are made up of armed resistance fighters. Each city consists of anywhere from a thousand to forty thousand people. They are fiercely democratic, using town meetings to discuss and vote on all issues.
The Free Americans, who have been bred out in the country, away from the Russian-dominated “clean” areas, have, through natural selection, become ten times more resistant to radiation than their ancestors. They are bred tough, with weak children placed out in the twenty-below-zero nights. If the child lives he is allowed to develop. If not, he is just as well put out of his misery now.
Ted Rockson fights out of Century City—one of the more advanced Free Cities, and the manufacturer of the Liberator automatic rifle, used by freefighters everywhere. They attack Russian convoys and blow up bridges. But they plan for the day when they can begin their all-out assault on the enslavers.