Doomsday Warrior 07 - American Defiance (16 page)

The captain stopped as he came to the main batteries—ten .200mm cannons aimed at strategic points on the prairie below. They stood side by side thirty feet apart, their immense muzzles extending beyond the fortress as if reaching forward, burning with the need to fire. The captain ran his hands a few times against the cold steel of one. The rebels were up to something—they had murdered four Russians yesterday.

“Let them try,” he whispered to the monstrous steel tube with a smug smile. “Let them come against weapons like you. Let them fight like men—not rats darting from the darkness. Then we shall see who lives and who dies.”

As if in response to his desires, the Russian officer suddenly heard a distant sound—a chorus of shrill notes bending and changing constantly. He rushed past the firing chair of the .200mm and up to the five-foot-high wall that covered the ramparts. Something—something miles off and dim. He could barely make it out. Just shapes at first—and then, as they slowly edged closer, he saw that the shapes were huge. He reached over and grabbed the binoculars from the neck of a subordinate officer, ripping the strap in half, and quickly focused on the mountainous shadows. Only they weren’t shadows he saw, as the blood drained from his face. They were . . . they were . . .

“Man the cannons!”
he screamed out with such violence that the Red soldiers around him jerked back in shock. “Full-scale attack. Every man to his post—fire at will—but fire!” He pressed a wide red button on the wall, setting off bells throughout the fortress. The gunners ran to their posts, jumping into the huge steel seats built into the backs of the cannon, each unit mounted on an immense swivel, giving it a thirty-degree range of fire from side to side. It took two men to carry one of the yard-long 150-pound shells and load it in. All the computerized loading systems the Reds had brought over had seemed to begin malfunctioning the moment they set foot in America. Even the radioactive rays coming from the ground seemed to want to help the American Freefighters by disrupting Russian technology. The gunners turned large geared wheels to the side of them, swiveling the twenty-foot-long barrels until they locked onto their targets far below. But when they pushed the autofocus on their sighting systems, and saw the monstrosities, the spit dried up in their mouths and their hearts slammed against their chests as if trying to escape—like rats from a ship.

Somehow trembling fingers locked their targets into place and pushed firing buttons. The great muzzles exploded out blue fire all along the ramparts at the front of Fort Svetlanya. Missile-sized shells streaked through the dark purple night like comets blazing a red trail as they searched out their kills. All twelve of the high-explosive packages of steel slammed into the front ranks that were advancing on them.

They went off with thunderous roars, sending up mini-volcanos of swirling dust and shredded cactus. The Captain of the Guard looked anxiously through his glasses, his narrow tongue trying to lick moisture back onto his cracking lips. There—he could see—the dust settling, and—

They were coming! The barrage hadn’t done a thing, and in a swath of light cast by the low-rising moon, he could suddenly see the things more clearly. He wished he hadn’t. The long, suckered tentacles reached toward his glasses like arms from the grave and he felt a series of shivers ripple up and down his spine. It was death—death incarnate—and it was stalking
him.

“Fire!”
he screamed again, running up and down the walkway. “Faster, fire faster! Blow them up!” The shell carriers ran back and forth, loading the cannons again and again, their muscles bulging from their efforts, their stripped-to-the-waist bodies covered with a thick sheen of fear-scented sweat. But though the shells landed dead center of them the creatures just kept emerging from the clouds of fire and smoke, not slowing an inch. Their porous bodies shook from the shock waves of the blasts, but their terror of the constantly screaming siren-equipped boomerangs was more powerful than their fear of the shells—and so they kept rushing forward, looming upon the fortress.

Suddenly they were there—the immense gray appendages reaching up toward the walls. The Captain of the Guard stood back, barely able to control his motor functions. In the midst of his fear, he clung to the hope that the walls would stop them. Nearly a yard thickness of reinforced concrete—yes, the megapoids would never break through. He regained control of himself long enough to start for the stairs when he heard a slurping sound behind him. He turned just in time to see the first twenty feet of one of the undulating tentacles slap over the top of the thick wall. Just in time to see it descend upon him, one of the sticky slime-coated suckers slamming over his body. He screamed but no one heard. The others were already running for their lives, the hot cannons abandoned like so much useless junk. The tentacle pulled back, taking the captain for a wild ride through the air, held as if he were glued to the tip of the snake-like limb. Then it lowered the captain down to the big head below to see what it had snagged. The tentacle whipped the Russian right in front of the octopus’s barn door of an eye, and the thing squinted for a moment, making sure that its catch was edible. It decided it was and jerked the squirming prey down underneath the bulbous head. The Captain of the Guard tried to scream again as he saw the gnashing rows of endless teeth, curved and long and glistening with dark brown digestive fluids. But he couldn’t. His body was in such terror that neither his lips nor tongue could move. The tentacle raised up and the teeth moved suddenly at super speed, like a sewing machine. The captain’s legs were the first in and he felt them ground up instantly into a bloody hamburger. Then his stomach and chest were pulled into the thousand-toothed mouth of the mutation, and he was turned into
Homo Sapiens
pâté in a hundredth of a second. He didn’t even lose consciousness until his skull entered the slurping blood-spattered jaws. The last thing the Russian officer saw was a dagger-like black tooth coming right toward him. It ripped into his eye and then the brain itself. What had been Captain Ygor Ivanovitch of the Russian Army slid down the throat of the land-roving octopus in a bloody stream of hot red stew.

Whatever hopes the rest of the Red soldiers had that the walls would stop the demonic forces attacking them were quickly shattered. Shattered as easily as the walls themselves, which fell beneath the ripping tentacles. The octopi came right up to the fort guided on each side by the unyielding curtains of piercing sound. The hundred-foot-long tentacles grabbed hold of the top and pulled. And the walls came tumbling down. It was like a child angrily destroying the toy town he has just built—kicking and smashing it to pieces. Within seconds, the monstrosities had pulled out the entire front wall for a distance of nearly two hundred yards. It was difficult for the Aussies on the left flank to keep up with the rampaging monsters once they entered the fortress—but they had to. The prison building was on the western side, so the boomerangs flew along that flank of the advancing octopi, guiding them toward the other half of the city. Once properly guided, the Australian force at last let their boomerangs shoot back to their hands.

They watched the dozen nightmares head off toward the center of the city, leaving behind a trail of utter death and destruction. Everything they passed over was leveled. Every man they saw running in terror was grabbed up and gobbled down in a flash. What had been set in motion was unstoppable.

Rockson and his men came storming in on their ’brids, which jumped through the rubble that just seconds before had been towering walls. They rode with rifles and pistols in hand, but there was no one to fight—not where the octapoids had been. Not even the remains of men. They joined up with the Aussie force waiting just inside and headed down the side streets together, toward the main prison. The hooves of the hybrids and the camels clattered noisily down the stone streets as Lieutenant Boyd rode up alongside Rockson.

“Between your mad plan and our Aborigine weapons, I dare say it looks like we’ve done a little bit of urban renewal here,” the Aussie said, still holding the weapon in his right hand, its siren deactivated.

“I’ll order a crateful,” Rock yelled out above the pounding of their mounts’ hooves. “Make that a hundred crates.” They tore through the city at full speed as alarms and explosions continued to go off to the right. Smoke began filling the far side of the fortress as myriad fires broke out from severed gas lines and demolished munitions depots. On their own now, the army of octopi seemed to know just what to do. They had found the biggest feeding hall they had ever known and weren’t about to leave.

The Freefighters came to the wide thoroughfare just in front of the prison guards who were waiting behind sandbags, nervously fingering their Kalashnikovs. They had no idea what was going on in other parts of Fort Svetlanya—and from the sound of it, they didn’t want to know. When they saw the motley collection of hybrid horses and camels riding in, it was almost a relief. Almost, but not quite—unless being dead is a relief. For as the two machine-gun emplacements sighted up on the front ranks of the mounted fighters, they didn’t notice Detroit’s two mini-globes soar forward, arcing high into the air and then coming down again. Before they could fire a bullet there were two small explosions and the sandbagged positions filled with smoke as bodies flew every which way out of them.

The Freefighter/Aussie force leaped over the emplacements and rode right toward the wide wooden doors of the front entrance. Detroit yanked two more of the grenades from his chest belt and flung them forward with the accuracy of the best of the pre-War baseball pitchers. Two strikes—the death balls slammed into opposite sides of the thick oak doors, shredding them instantly into toothpicks. Without breaking stride, Rock rode his ’brid through the smoking entranceway and into the main hall, followed by the rest of the Fighters, their eyes darting around, searching out the enemy.

Five Reds suddenly darted from a doorway, submachine guns in their hands, and turned, trying to get a bead on the Doomsday Warrior and the stampede behind him. Rockson clicked his .12-gauge death dealer to auto with one finger and pulled the trigger a fraction of a second later with the other. The wide-barreled weapon jerked back in his hand six times, and five bodies exploded into a blood tornado, splattering the walls and the front of Rock and his ’brid with their sticky remains. He pulled the creature to a sudden stop, its hooves locking, making it skid several yards forward before coming to a halt. Behind him, the rest of the force nearly piled up on one another in such close quarters, but somehow stopped, breathless, and waited for Rock’s orders.

“We’ll spread out—five men to a floor. Free all prisoners—and watch out. Cover the back of the man next to you every fucking second.” They shot up the stairs, Rockson taking the first floor with his main men inches behind him. They exited onto a long corridor that seemed to go on forever, with bright neon lights flaring down every twenty yards. The floors were spotless, the walls as well—white, everywhere. Antiseptic so the murders committed within them could be clean, pure.

“Archer, Chen—that way,” Rock yelled. “McCaughlin, Detroit—come with me.” They split up and shot down the corridor, kicking open every door they passed. Inside, they found prisoners in every state of decay and torture. Men sitting naked on seats, waiting to be fed into the Mindbreakers; men chained to walls, their bodies half-eaten away with whips and electricity and acids. The Reds had apparently tried to raise torture to an art form in this particular fortress, giving each prisoner a taste of every one of the possible mediums of pain. The Freefighters freed them all, and sent them toward the stairs and out to freedom. Most had been so abused for so long they couldn’t understand the concept, and looked at their liberators with dumb eyes. Rockson fired his reloaded pistol into the ceiling to frighten them off. Dumb as cows, they headed meekly down the stairs.

On every floor they found room after room of prisoners and freed them, but no President, no Kim. Rock’s heart was growing cold. Could they already have been . . . ? He refused to think of it. They were too valuable—just too valuable. In a locked office on the third floor, Rock found a cowering official hiding underneath a couch. He dragged the man out and threw him down in the middle of the carpeted floor.

“Speak, slime,” the Doomsday Warrior said, cocking his pistol and holding the half-dollar sized barrel directly between the eyes of the terrified Red.

“Please, please, I’m just the head of operations—nothing to do with torture—or Mindbreaking,” the man lied, wiping his eyes, groveling beneath the feet of the Freefighter.

“There’s only one way you’ll live, slug,” Rock said, pushing the barrel hard against the sweating head. “Tell me where President Langford and his daughter are. I swear—though I want to see you dead on the ground—I’ll let you live. By the Flag of my country.”

“B-b-but they’re not here,” the man stuttered, both of his bloodshot eyes focused on the huge muzzle that threatened to blow his brains out at any second. “I swear to you on Lenin’s sacred mausoleum. They were here for only about twenty-four hours, and then President Zhabnov himself ordered that they be well-treated and flown immediately to Washington. You must believe me. I would give them to you in a second if they were here. Do you think I would die to protect them?” Another flood of tears swept out of the weasel eyes.

“Shit,” Rock said, throwing the man backward so he fell to the floor with a thud.

“You believe him?” Detroit asked, grenades in both hands ready to take out any squads of Red attackers.

“Yeah, he’s too big a coward to lie. Cowards will tell you everything they know in one second. They’d hand over their own mothers—to live. They’re gone, all right.” He looked at the officer lying on the floor who had covered his blubbering face with his arms, and reholstered his pistol. “Come on—let’s get the hell out of here.”

The Freefighters and their Australian compatriots stood on a low rise about a mile from the fort and looked at their handiwork. Flames sprouted like tall trees everywhere among the ruins of what had once been one of the Russian Empire’s strongest American fortifications. Within the rubble, the pack of predatory octopi continued to eat everything that moved, enjoying what had started out as a very unpleasant journey.