Doomsday Warrior 13 - American Paradise (20 page)

The tall, very gaunt man in a tight black outfit gasped out,
“You,”
and reached for a switch. The door hole snapped shut on Rockson’s body. He was jammed waist high, halfway in, halfway out of the strange dark chamber filled with stars.

Rock winced in pain, trying to pull himself first in, then out. Nothing worked. He was immobilized.

His eyes adjusted to the near-total darkness, and Rockson beheld Killov, the Skull, standing over him.

Mad laughter erupted. Killov’s neck veins pulsed in sadistic excitement when he saw that the Doomsday Warrior was pinned. “Well—you
surprised
and
disappointed
me, Rockson. You are very clever to imitate Nakashima . . . but not clever enough. I wish I could draw out this moment more . . . savor it. You look a fine sight. This is an ingnominious end for the fabulous Doomsday Warrior, wouldn’t you say?”

Killov lifted a shiny automatic pistol in his left hand.

“Fuck you, asshole,” Rock said, expecting a bullet.

“My, my. Is cursing the last thing you wish to do in this life?” That mad laugh again. Then Killov, instead of squeezing off a round, put the automatic down. The colonel lifted his right arm. It seemed to Rockson to be peculiarly thicker than his left one.

“I will make you suffer, Rockson! A bullet is too easy, despite my eagerness to get back to my ultimate weapon. This arm’s sleeve contains a firing mechanism for a compressed air gun. It can fire several very long spikes. And they are tipped with a poison that will give agonizing pain for sixty seconds—then death!”

Killov pulled back his sleeve, and Rockson saw a glint of sharp metal. Then Killov let loose a barrage of steel spikes. The shafts dug deep into Rock’s shoulder—but not his chest—because he twisted suddenly. Still, Rock was seized with immense pain. He groaned as the pain coursed from the poisoned wounds in his body. Then the pain grew and grew.

He screamed out several times in agony. After a minute, he jerked spasmodically, and then his eyes rolled up and he slumped over.

Killov stepped over to Rockson and kicked him in the face.
No response,
even though the trapped man’s nose broke with a crunch.

“So, now you are finally dead, and
I
rule the world,” Killov intoned.

The colonel turned, retook his control seat and started fiddling with the dials.

Rockson lifted his head an inch. All of the death-jerks hid his hands working up along his body. Now he had room to silently pull himself out of the darkened chamber. Rockson, controlling the torturous pain wracking his body, blood oozing from his boot-snapped nose, lept down onto the carpet below Killov’s lair. He dove into the elevator shaft and started sliding down the cable. In just seconds Chen would set off the explosives!

Twenty-Six

K
illov, who had returned to his seat sure Rockson was dead, was set to destroy Baltimore. Then the situation screen lit up. Several lines of green lights were depicted coming up at his space mirror from the Soviet Union. All the lines were missiles, the readout said, and were tipped with nuclear warheads!

“No!” Killov gasped, “no, please . . .” He didn’t know exactly who to address his earnest prayer to. Sometimes the colonel sensed that he was serving a
darkness
beyond the stars. To that dark force he directed his cry. “Please, Dark One, don’t let them destroy my weapon!”

Suddenly the green lines stopped dead, hundreds of miles below the space mirror, and slowly winked out.

Killov smiled; he remembered the manuals told that the space mirror system had its own defenses. The defenses were over a hundred years old—then again, there is no atmosphere to damage delicate parts in space. He dismissed the mystical element in what happened. Systems had powered up and acted, that was all.

He snapped on his worldwide radio connection, beaming his hideously enlarged, echoing voice throughout the planet on all frequencies. “Attention. This is Killov. I have allowed you all a little more time in order for you to see the failure of the missile attack on my space mirror. Now you all know my power is unstoppable. Surrender at once;
that is all!”

Killov put the headset on and listened to a frantic set of surrender offers coming from Russia, from China, and even from President Zhabnov in the U.S.S.A.

“One at a time, one at a time,” he snapped. “I want only one man to answer me—and that is Premier Vassily himself. Vassily? Are you there?”

“Yes, you bastard,” came a dry unsteady voice. The grandfather of the world was on the line! The voice that Killov knew so intimately well, his old boss Vassily, ruler of the World Soviet, said, “I surrender, Killov! Come and take your prize—come take Moscow. I am old and tired . . . and
you win.”

Killov’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. “You are not just stalling for time? Planning another counterattack?”

“No, we surrender. We have seen you destroy so much that we conclude your power is absolute. To save the world, I surrender it. The World Soviet States are
all yours!”

Though such a surrender was inevitable, Killov still had somehow not really
expected
it. He had longed for Vassily
not
to reply, so he could broil the capital city of the world—Moscow—to ashes.

The colonel hesitated. What should he do? Accept surrender? Or laugh in their faces and keep destroying targets?

Killov, after a long minute, said, “Okay, I’ll send my representative to Moscow—to assume power until I arrive. In the meantime, Vassily, I must now eradicate the American rebels in their Century City. I will
not
tolerate the American resistance like you have, Vassily. My rule shall be absolute!”

“Killov,” the premier’s aged voice cracked out. “Don’t! They will call you and surrender, I am sure. It must be some technical problem that has prevented the Americans from replying to you!”

“Too late for surrender calls,” Killov said. “They will all die.” Forgetting Baltimore, Killov started redirecting the space mirror toward the western United States.

The Freefighter force ran in a hail of tracer bullets through a screen of heavy smoke. Dodging around an arriving tank, they reached a department store’s shattered display windows.
“In,
we go in the windows,” the black Freefighter yelled, jumping up and smashing the last shards of broken glass to clear the way. He was followed in by Chen, who together with Archer helped lift a limping Ted Rockson into the display. Rockson had managed to defeat the poison that the spikes had unleashed in him—his mutant constitution—and had reached the lobby. There, he was greeted by the others. Chen had disobeyed orders; their leader was two minutes past the deadline. Then they all broke out of the closing steel ring of KGB reinforcements.

“Rock, how soon do we explode the bomb?” Detroit asked.

“Now,” Rock said. “Everyone—get behind something—Takashimaya Department Store’s walls look thick.”

“By Lenin,” Scheransky uttered. “I sure hope they
are—”

His words were cut off when Chen pressed the button of the remote detonator. The Earth shook; the blast nearly threw them off their feet. Rockson peered from behind a thick support pillar and saw the tower was coming down in two sections. Spinning down separately, end over end, like some gigantic stunt driver, was the crystal.

Rockson and the others watched the KGBers in the plaza try to get out of the way of a million tons of twisted steel girders and fractured masonry—and fail. Then, as smaller debris peppered their sanctuary, they retreated farther into the darkened department store.

Chen said, “We did it Rock! No one could have survived that! Certainly Killov is dead!”

Twenty-Seven

W
hen the heavy dust clouds cleared sufficiently, the victorious Americans and their allies left their shelter. They walked toward a strange glow in the mists. Rockson had an idea of what the flickering glow was, but it was Scheransky, leading the group, who cried out: “God it didn’t break. The crystal is
intact.
How can this be?”

Rock had no answer. He stood up on a pile of debris to get a clear view. The huge crystal was half embedded in the broken pavement of the intersection. It still pulsed with blue and green energy.

Scheransky touched Rockson’s shoulder and said, “It is like the thing is alive, like it has a heartbeat—only colors, not pulses.”

“It
is
a living being,” said Leilani. She shucked her flak jacket and stepped past them, bending to touch its shimmering surface. She was immediately suffused in the crystal’s glow, which turned a pale blue as it engulfed her. Leilani put her ear to the twelve-foot, circular crystal and listened for a while to something nobody else could hear, stroking the thing like a baby. Then she started sobbing.

“What is it?” Rock asked. “What do you hear?”

Leilani turned and said, “Oh Rockson, it is so sorry for what it has been forced to do! The Gnaa crystal wants to die, but cannot. It doesn’t want to live with the memory of all the destruction. It says it is not damaged. Only heat can destroy it. Heat of many thousands of degrees. It wants us to help it die!”

“Let’s get out of here,” implored Scheransky. “We did the job. The tower’s gone, Killov’s gone, and—”

“No,”
Rockson said, as he turned. “Whether or not Leilani’s right about the crystal having a soul, she is right about one thing. The crystal has to be destroyed! It’s the most dangerous thing in the world. We’ve got to melt it down.”

“Maybe,” suggested Chen, “we can set it on fire with gasoline.”

“No,” Rockson said. “I believe Leilani’s right. It needs more heat than that to destroy it.”

“The only way,” sobbed Leilani, “is to immerse it in Mount Fuji’s volcanic heat. That is how it wants to die. We must throw it into Mount Fuji’s crater!”

“Why that’s
ridiculous,”
Detroit protested, keeping his eyes peeled for enemy soldiers. “To drag it there would take hours—if we could even do it at all.”

Rockson had to admit the request seemed unfulfillable. There was a sudden noise. It sounded like air hissing out of a tube. Rock spun around. Everywhere, he saw people pouring out from hiding places in wrecked buildings and heading toward them. The surviving citizens of the city.

Morimoto shouted at them in Japanese, telling them the party around the crystal was friends, not Russians.

The Freefighters stood and watched as the giant crowd surged forward. Leilani stood there in her sarong, suffused with blue light in the aura that pulsed out of the Gnaa. The crowd was surging closer, shouting and pointing at Leilani and the strange crystal.

The foremost of the crowd fell to make prostrations on the street, as if they were worshiping. The others followed suit. It grew very silent, like a religious event.

Still suffused with blue light, Leilani raised one hand and said softly but clearly, “Know this, that I am the Gnaa, a creation of mankind, yet I am the first intelligent creation. I apologize for what I have done and only wish to end my existence before more evil men arise to use me once more. Please—take me to Mount Fuji volcano and put me in its cleansing fire.”

Rock’s jaw opened wide. Leilani had a transfixed expression; her eyes were empty. She was speaking not for herself, but at the direction of the crystal, in some sort of
link
with it again.

She lowered her head and stepped from the crystal; the aura parted from her and faded. Rock put the jacket she had dropped back over her bare shoulders. Leilani smiled up at him. “It spoke?”

“Yes it spoke, through you,” he said, holding her shivering cold body close to him.

Leaders in the crowd now started to cry out directions, and many moved into the buildings again. They returned quickly with lengths of cable and long heavy ropes.

Rock’s troops looked at him blankly, with a what-do-we-do-now expression.

Rockson said, “What the hell, let’s
do it!
Help attach the ropes to the crystal. Run them over to some of those trucks over by the department store. We’ll see if we can drag the crystal up Mount Fuji.”

Archer said, “GOOOD—MEE DRAGG BY SELF!” He jumped down next to the crystal and started to attach the first big cable around the girth of the thing. Rockson had been watching the mountain man as the crystal “talked” through Leilani. The look in the giant’s eyes had told it all—he really empathized with the Gnaa. Perhaps it was because Archer was five percent crystal himself!

Rockson, as the others came to help Archer attach more cables to the crystal, scanned the tumble of smoldering wreckage scattered all about the square. Here and there he saw a jutting hand or foot—bodies buried in the jumble.

Was Killov really dead? He
must
be. All that remained of the tower were a few vertical girders at each of its four legs. And yet, the Doomsday Warrior felt no triumph.

“Hey Rock,” Detroit called, “can you help me with this?” Rockson sighed and moved to help Detroit. McCaughlin, who had received a clean wound—a bullet had passed right through his shoulder—kept a watchful guard with an submachine gun as the Freefighters all pitched in.

Soon a dozen cables were wound around the Gnaa crystal. Its glow could barely be seen, to entwined was its faceted bulk. They ran the cables over the trucks and attached them.

Rockson had worried that the operation would be sniped at, but evidently if there were any KGB left, they had gone to ground.

Unseen by Rockson and his men, a sinewy trembling hand jabbed out of the debris one hundred yards away, clawing for light and air. Another hand popped up, like a sprouting weed. Then the hands scraped and pushed, until a bleeding thin-lipped mouth was uncovered.

The mouth spat out dirt and broken teeth and sucked in air.

Killov yet lived!

Twenty-Eight

W
ith Morimoto and his men shouting instruction wildly, the crowd of Japanese civilians was mobilized. The crystal slowly was dislodged from its impact hole by the combined pull of six trucks on the cable.