Doomsday Warrior 01 (34 page)

Rock waded into the remaining group, only eight now, swinging the machete like a sword. Two more stomachs were sliced open, their contents spewing out onto the bloody, charnel ground: a mixture of yesterday’s food and quarts of precious blood from their dying bodies. A hand came out of nowhere, holding its own machete, lunging for Rock’s heart. Rock stepped instantly to the right and swung down with his weapon. The hand, still clutching its weapon, fell to the earth, veins and tendons hanging out from the parted flesh.

Rock glanced to Archer who seemed to be doing fine, as he slammed another would-be killer to the ground, his crossbow turned club now covered with a sheen of red. Rock let his vision dart over to the Freefighters who watched the struggle from fifty feet away, screaming encouragement to Rock and his unknown assistant. Suddenly Rock saw two of the bandits running toward the Freefighters, machetes in hand. So they wanted to take out the ones who couldn’t fight. Ducking from the pitchfork one of the remaining bandits lunged at him, Rock ignored his own little group of attackers and ran as fast as his strong legs could carry him toward the prisoners.

The bigger of the two bandits intent on finishing off their captives picked Chen for his first butchering job. He walked up to the diminutive Chinese and, with a twisted grin, raised the machete to deal the death blow. First mistake—never try to kill a martial arts expert. Chen’s untied foot came flying up in the air with the speed of a ground-to-air missile. It caught the pimple-faced murderer square under the jaw, lifting him a foot off the ground. The man came down in a crumpled heap, his windpipe crushed. He gasped desperately for air, his hands around his throat, but could find none. The second of the finisher-offers had walked to the other end of the row of tied-up prisoners. He looked at Lang, the kid, who stared back and spat in the bastard’s face. He raised his machete. “At least you will die,” he sneered, bringing the two-and-a-half-foot jungle trimmer down toward the center of Lang’s neck.

Suddenly, he was being twisted to the side. The machete buried itself in the ground. He spun around and saw the white-haired killing machine that had taken out half the clan. Rockson looked at the bandit with certain death in his eyes. Then he moved forward. The bandit kicked for Rock’s groin, but his feeble strike was slapped aside with a laugh. The bandit reached for his hook, his personal weapon—a curved loading hook, with a dagger point on the end. He waved it in little circles at Rockson. “Come on, come and get it, white hair,” the bandit chortled, his eyes wide and insane with blood lust.

Rock stepped forward suddenly and the bandit lunged, swinging the hook and ripping back. Rock swung his hips 180 degrees right around the killer, reaching over with his left hand and grabbing the grip of the hook. He jerked back, flipping the bandit through the air, and ripped the hook from the crazed killer as he flew past. The greasy faced, stinking cutthroat screamed and lunged at Rockson with his bare hands to strangle him. Rock moved like a flash, swinging his arm. The hook sank deep into the bandit’s throat, exiting the other side of the stubble-covered neck. The bandit’s eyes grew wide as if in surprise. Rock pulled his hand sharply back and the bandit’s throat ripped out, trailing on the tip of the hook: tendons, windpipe and larynx, followed by a flood of blood. Rock threw the hook from his hand as the bandit gurgled his way to a writhing death on the bloody dirt.

He swung his vision back over to Archer who still battled three of the remaining mountain savages. Rock started forward but Archer slammed another into his kingdom come and the last two fell to their knees, screaming and begging for mercy. Rock quickly untied the Freefighters. They rubbed their wrists and their bumps and bruises from the bandits’ brutal treatment, but they were OK.

“Thanks, Rock,” Detroit said. “What can I say?”

“Say thanks,” Rock said mockingly.

He got to Chen and cut through the leather thongs that bound the Chinese man’s arms behind the six-foot-high post. “What the hell happened?” Rock asked. “How were they able to take you?”

“Rock, they snuck up on the guards. Somehow got ’em. I started in on them, but they held guns to Slade’s and Perkins’s heads and I just couldn’t do my thing. Then they tied us up. Harris made a jump for his Liberator and—”

“Yeah, I saw Harris,” Rock said softly. One of his oldest friends in Century City. A man who had befriended Rock when still a teen, who had taught him much of his wood’s lore and shown him many of his survival techniques. He had seen Harris.

The Freefighters walked over to Archer who was holding the two remaining bandits on the ground as they pleaded for mercy. Everywhere were bodies and severed limbs. Blood covered the scene as if the banks of the River Hell had overflowed.

“Who’s that?” Detroit asked, pointing to the huge, bearded man Rock had rescued.

“Just call him Archer,” Rock said. “I found him stuck in a quicksand bog around the mountain. He’s a super fighter and a good man.”

“We saw that,” McCaughlin said. “Goddamn guy’s a whirlwind.” Archer smiled at the Freefighters and then looked sternly down at the whimpering savages.

“Look over here,” Chen said, his face growing a slightly pale shade of yellow. They walked around to a long metal trough. It was filled with bones and the still-rotting flesh of recent dinners of Homo sapiens.

“It’s incredible,” said Perkins, the archaeologist and anthropologist. “Here in America. I wish we could study this phenomenon more. It’s really quite unusual for an advanced Western society.”

“Yeah, right, Doc,” Rock said drily. They walked back to the two cowering cannibals.

“What the hell are we going to do with them?” Detroit asked. “Can’t take ’em with us. They’ll eat someone else if we leave them.”

“Only one thing to do, fellows,” Rock said, reloading his shotgun pistol. “By the authority vested in me as commander of official United States forces, I hereby sentence these men to death.” Rock motioned for Archer to step back. The big man did so, spitting in disgust on the two wailing and begging bandits.

“Please, mister,” one of them said, his nose twisted and broken, half his front teeth knocked out in some long-ago bandit brawl. “We wasn’t going to eat your friends—just play with ’em a little.”

“That’s right,” the other chimed in in a stuttering high-pitched voice. “We d-d-don’t eat Americans—just Russians.”

Rock walked over till he was about eight feet away. “Sorry about this,” he said. “I’d rather not have to do it. But—” He pulled the trigger and the two bandits, minus their faces, tumbled to the slaughterhouse ground with slopping thuds.

“Should we bury them?” Green asked, sweeping his hands around the blood-soaked yard.

“No, let the mountain have them,” Rock said, his eyes narrow and cold. “They’ll be better fertilizer than they were people.”

Thirty

U
llman sat in a stupor in the hard plastic chair he called home these days. He could barely move. The others were just as listless in their spots around the computer room. They slept and stared at each other. No one talked. There was nothing to say any longer.

Watching a species becoming extinct, Ullman thought bitterly, how exciting. Should be taping it all down for future scientists to study. Unfortunately for the leader of the Technicians, though his body was as weak as a dying blade of grass, his mind, the mind of the scientist, the analyst, was still crystal clear. The curse of consciousness, he thought to himself, to see everything. No possibility of self-deceit. It was so goddamn clear!

They were dying, were eating their own tissue away. Death wouldn’t even have to expend any energy when it came to take them, their stomachs would have predigested them. So? So what? He looked around at the zombielike faces of the thirty-one. Why should we survive? Only those fittest—and all that. We are not fit enough in this postwar America. An interesting experiment by Mother Nature, her claws glowing slightly, that went awry. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Countless races, species and branches in the Earth’s evolutionary history had gone down for the long count. The dinosaurs, the saber-toothed tigers, the Neanderthal man. Really, the Technicians should have gone down in some eternal record book as the shortest-lived creature since the dawn of time. One hundred years. Almost to the day. Surely the Technicians had only two, at the most three days left.

They had used the rest of the paste, a foul-tasting decomposition of flour that had been stored a century earlier. They had gone down in crews of four—and then the murderous struggle back, hoisting the huge barrel. Two of them had been killed in that endeavor. And now even that is gone, Ullman mused bitterly, biting his lips. He felt like he was going slowly mad, witnessing the demise of his people. Death stalked the window of the room, glowing blue and wearing a long, black robe. He stared in at the failing Technicians. Ullman could feel him, could nearly see those hydrogen-bomb red and white eyes glowing in the darkness of the outer room. Mad, he was going mad listening to the sound of his own stomach growl.

Thirty-One

T
he Russian masons built the wall around Little U.S.A. higher and higher. Behind it they could hear the inhabitants gathered, singing:

O beautiful for spacious skies

and amber waves of grain

O purple mountains majesty

above the fruited plain

America, America God shed his grace on thee

And crown thy good with brotherhood

From sea to shining sea

The wall-builders paused in their work and listened to the cacophony of voices, the contrasting, rising choruses of the walled-in Americans who would soon starve to death inside those walls. The masons continued to work. This was a rush job, order of the KGB—and after they were done with the thirty-foot wall, they had to lay the barbed wire atop it.

None of the Americans some hundred feet away in the tire-rutted road tried to stop the masons. If anyone did, the KGB machine-gun squad that strode back and forth atop the slowly rising brick cage would turn them into flopping, bloody dead men. But the Americans were quiescent, not resisting. Just singing and singing. They shifted to another song.

Oh say can you see

by the dawn’s early light

The wall went up inexorably, unstoppable, at the rate of six inches an hour. The fifty-man crew who worked at this end of Little U.S.A. had been on the job two days and were behind schedule. They worked into the night, floodlights lighting up the area as bright as day. At every road, highway and alley into Little U.S.A. similar Red building teams were walling the inhabitants in.

Killov himself had directed the punitive measures. “Since they delight in dying in combat, let’s take that away from them. Let them die without purpose—let them starve, let them die of thirst. The word will go out to the occupied workers—resist and die. I vow this,” he had said to his gathered Death’s-Head officers, “no more KGB Blackshirts will die. For every one who dies, ten thousand Americans must perish. Make them understand those numbers.

“My loyal officers,” Killov had continued, addressing his top thirty men in America. “These are times of change. Great changes will sweep the face of the Earth in the coming decade. Premier Vassily is old. Soon he will be dead. I will be his successor. It is destined. You, my most trusted men, will accompany me to the very peaks of power. We shall rule the world.” Killov went on, growing excited. His eyes strained heavenward, his hands clenched in fists. The officers looked nervously at one another. Colonel Killov rarely betrayed more than the iciest of exteriors. “But there will be much blood and destruction before our leadership will take over. This is necessary. I will call upon you all to make sacrifices and carry out suicidal orders. But I know,” Killov said, “you will carry them out for me. Whatever you are called upon to do.”

“Yes!”

“Of course, your excellency.”

“Our lives are yours.”

The voices bounced back at him, each louder than the other. Killov watched the eyes of every man. Who was the spy? Who was the assassin? He would find out.

At last the wall was thirty feet high, six feet wide and topped with its cherry of razor-sharp wire. Killov himself flew in from Denver to Stalinville to make sure that the demonstration for the whole country would not fail. The senior KGB commandant of the Russian fort, Major Gorky, met Killov at the airport and accompanied him back to the main entrance of Little U.S.A..

The guards on the death-wall saw the official vehicle pull up. Everyone stopped as the honor guard below saluted and snapped their elite guard Kalashnikov Specials to their chests. Killov alighted from the black limo and perfunctorily saluted. He looked up at the ugly, gray brick-and-mortar construction. The KGB colonel ascended the wooden plank stairs and addressed Gorky who stood nervously behind him. “I trust that the wall is this high all the way around the three-square-mile area—with no gaps whatsoever?”

Gorky shook his head quickly no. “See for yourself, Colonel, with these excellent binoculars,” he offered, handing the KGB commander the sixteen-by-sixties. Killov slowly scanned the wall and the crowd of ragged Americans gathered several hundred yards inside the Little U.S.A. compound. The buildings in Little U.S.A. were, at the most, four stories high, so with little obstruction Killov could see that indeed the wall reached around the entire ghetto.

“So,” he said, handing back the binoculars and letting a razor-thin smile etch across his hawkish face, “they think they can do without us. Well, let them do without our food and water. Without our supplying them with any basics, their pilfering and murdering bands will be stopped now.”

“There is one thing, commander,” Gorky began nervously.

“What’s that?” the KGB leader snapped.

“Well, traffic is snarled—some of our convoys used to go through the center of—”

“Ah, yes. Demolish part of the sector, build a roadway through with a wall on each side. Call it Premier Vassily Highway.” Killov watched a group of scraggly Americans gather and begin singing again. If we fire, Killov thought, they will die singing their patriotic songs, like martyrs. He barked out orders to bring up water cannons and mount them on the wall. “Let them be pushed back if they try to assault the wall. But don’t waste the bullets. Let them die starving, not as martyrs. Let them be contained like animals and die like animals. Animals in the pound.” He gave strict orders to mix poison in with the water they sprayed. That would make it undrinkable, of course. He smiled. They wouldn’t know until they started vomiting their guts out if they tried to save any of the water. The wall reminded him of some ancient history—before the Great War. He couldn’t remember exactly where but a wall had been successful then too in keeping order—for a while.