Doomsday Warrior 16 - American Overthrow (16 page)

They walked within the line, their arms outstretched, filthy coated faces rigid in looks of horror. The guard barely glanced up as they made their way past him into the darker world of Pattonville which lay ahead. There was a ramp that slanted down, and a lot of the slaves seemed to have trouble negotiating it properly. Walking was one thing, but having to do it on a funny angle, that was a different story.

Chen and Rockson imitated the zombies around them, doing whatever strange sideways walking, bumping into walls, that the others did. It was kinda fun, actually.

They passed through several checkpoints as the line headed back into the main inner dump chamber of the city. Several guard stations were here as well, but none seemed to take any notice of the three who had jumped the line. They all looked the same to the troopers, like
shit.

The smell was atrocious as they rounded a bend and entered the first of the underground supply-depots.

It was a madhouse of motion, both men bringing in raw supplies, mostly what seemed like scrap metal and empty gas canisters, and carting out filled canisters, presumably filled with gas. They had a regular full scale factory city going here too, Rockson noted with alarm.

Pattonville had never been like this when he had visited it years before. It now rivaled C.C.’s own industrial capability.
That
was clear just from the sheer volume of traffic. Hand carts, wheelbarrows, fork-lifts, skids, the works. And all of the work done by a zombie labor force, followed everywhere by teams of heavily armed guards. They were the mules of the place, that was for damned sure. No task too small for some gas-created slave to not be sent to carry it out. Rock and Chen made their way in past the inner guard check where two of Hanover’s lieutenants looked over the moving masses with bored expressions. Who wants to look at such ugly things too hard?

“Come on,” Rock hissed to Chen as he detached himself from the line and headed stiff-armed up what appeared to be the main corridor that led to the rest of the city. The deeper they went in, the more concerned Rockson grew. Gas factories to the right and left churned with mechanical action. Conveyor belts with loaded canisters stretching in long piles, slave-men loading up the cannisters onto dollies and into crates.

Further on, they came to a wide room with shelving that went floor to ceiling. It was filled with ammunition, more gas canisters of every size, plus regular weapons, and uniforms. The whole place was a munitions and parts depot par excellence.

“Hey, you three!” a voice yelled as they walked closer to one of the shelving units. “No gasheads allowed here. Move out. Back to your functions.” He went to raise his rip-whip pointing back out toward the moving lines a few hundred feet off.

Before he knew what hit him, Chen’s index finger drove into the man’s throat like a dagger. Red gushed from the wound as the martial arts master pushed the dying guard back into shadows behind a small concrete wall along a rampway.

Ralph looked on with sheer amazement. The idea of killing guards had not really occurred to him, it seemed. Now that it did, it made him smirk, like it was a nice subject to daydream about. After all that they had done to him, it
was
time to kill!

“Where is Hanover?” Rockson asked as they walked on like the Three Mummies from Seville. “Did you ever see him?”

“General Hanover,” Ralph mumbled, gritting his teeth together in slow burning rage. “Yes, I see. Fingers that kill is good! Me take to him.” The two Freefighters followed the man who actually slowly seemed to be getting a small trace of his brain back. Maybe when they weren’t dosed with their next shot of gas on time, they started coming out of it. Rockson prayed that it was true. To have to live in those twisted bodies and minds for the rest of their lives would be too horrible a fate for any man.

They passed several more guard stations, but after glancing at them the troopers figured if the three zombies had made it through the previous checks they were okay. There were always slaves carrying out odd-cleaning jobs, errands and what not for the upper echelons. There were squads of troopers inside the next depot chamber. This one had been turned, it appeared, into the brass’s personal chambers.

“Five towns today within thirty miles,” Rock heard one of them say to another. “And the general’s set to get another ten towns by the end of the month. We’re moving fast now.”

“But they’ve
bumped off
half the towns,” a second trooper said, not completely impressed. “Used death-gas, not hypno-gas.”

“They’re just having a little trouble with gas quality-control,” the first replied. “Level ones and threes and twos all mixed together. It’s a labeling problem. Shit happens, is all.”

“Here, be general’s quar—quarters,” Ralph grunted, stopping as they came alongside a geometric-patterned steel-chrome wall that ran about two hundred feet down the chamber and up to the concrete ceiling some fifty feet above. It was armored everywhere, with bulletproof windows looking down from near-top, and gunports poking around the thing like a porcupine. Clearly it was the good general’s abode—and armed to the teeth. He surely had nightmares about these zombie hordes coming to get him, if he lived here!

“Don’t stop,” Rock hissed, as their friend Ralph raised an arm and pointed at the quarters. The place clearly had a shitload of guns aimed on them. Rock knew men inside were ready to fire if they made a false move. “Keep going Ralph, good man, keep going—we want to see the next depot,” Ralph got the message and turned stiffly away like Robby the Robot who hadn’t been oiled in eons and walked on past the place.

Ralph led them through three more steel-chambers, all part of the immense warehouse that had been laid down for nearly two miles. There was a lot to see, all of it bad news. They were challenged at a few more points, but managed to bluff their way through. As long as the guards didn’t look too close, a few grunts of, “Me lost—you point.” worked.

They passed through more materials depots, then reached the giant vats where it was obvious the gases were being made and packaged.

The smell was strong the moment they walked through the thick plastic seal curtains that cut off the chamber. Ducts rose up overhead and sucked out many of the gases with giant vent fans as big as plane propellers. This was where they made the hellish substances that had deprived Ralph and so many others of their minds.

They had used huge amounts of gas in World War I, Rock knew and in the Middle East in the late 1980’s—before it was outlawed by all parties concerned as being too difficult to control. Apparently these guys had gotten a hell of a lot more control over it. Rock wondered about how.

And then Rock saw something terrible. Something he wasn’t prepared for, even with all the misery he’d seen today:
The zombie-making plant.

A group of about twenty more or less normal men were lined up on one side of a low aluminum hut about thirty feet long and with a curved roof. In the harsh arc-light, guards prodded them through the opened doors with the word PROCESSING over it as the men cursed and screamed and carried on. These weren’t normal Free-City dwellers. They were tall, bearded men, maybe trappers.

Must be outsiders, Rock realized, who had wandered into town—and didn’t come out again. That’s why the city had been able to hide it’s deadly activities for the last six months or so, how they had gone unnoticed. They had just swallowed up everything and everyone that came along.

The last few men screamed and resisted, trying to keep the doors open as the guards closed them. They smashed away on the prisoners hands until the fingers were bloody and they pulled them away. Rockson and Chen could hear the fists pounding on the walls, rising crescendos of screams of sheer terror.

The troopers doublechecked both sides of the processing-hut and then turned on four faucets at each end. Gas hissed powerfully into shower nozzles that had been fitted up on the walls, out of reach of the flailing hands below. Now the screams were very loud, and coughing and smashing with heads and fists against the walls. Anything to get out of the place. But they weren’t getting out.

Rockson and Chen watched with a rage that burnt to such a level that both feared they’d rush forward, and they had to restrain themselves. They couldn’t just blindly attack. Not in here. Not yet.

So they watched. Watched as the gassing continued for a good five minutes. Then the outer doors of the hut were opened and the zombie creatures that had been humans just moments before walked, stumbled out. More pals for Ralph and his ilk. No more screams, no more pain. And more slaves for General Hanover’s nightmarish army. Rockson vowed something at that moment. That no matter what the cost, he would get the slime responsible for all this. Would take down Hanover, if it was with his dying breath. The man was going to
pay.

Eighteen

“S
on of a—” Chen growled as he saw the stumbling results of the gas chamber. Men who were no longer men, just things stripped down to sheep-mentality. Which were words Chen shouldn’t have uttered to Rockson. For two guards lounging nearby had been eyeing the odd trio for a few minutes. It was unusual to see the zombies acting intelligent, or conversing, or reacting to anything.

Suddenly Chen sensed them first and turned in a blur with Rockson just behind him. Two guards were standing over them with huge Liberator Combo .9mm/.12 gauge units, aiming down at their heads. To add insult to injury, Rockson thought with disgust, the weapons had been produced in C.C.’s own plant. He should know—he’d been on the committee that had helped design the weapon for combat over six years before. And now one of his creations was aimed straight for his eyeballs.

Ralph turned dumbly and started toward the two with his hands out as Rock and Chen froze momentarily. Suddenly the nervous guards whipped the combos around and each let out a thundering roar. The first load missed but the second caught the hapless Ralph in the leg and he went spinning around like a top out of control. As he spun his blasted leg-stump spurted red.

And it all gave Rock and Chen enough time to move. Just a fraction of a second. But enough. Both men leaped up from their freeze and even as the guards ripped their weapons around, one took a foot in his face courtesy of Chen, the other a blade across his throat. Rock sliced the dude’s throat with his custom Bowie blade, the one with the foot in the face didn’t get up. His nose had been driven into his brain.

Suddenly there were more sounds and from everywhere they could see guards running doubletime with submachine guns and rifles and gas throwers and every damned thing you could think of. Even as Chen and Rock looked at each other they knew it was too late. There were just too many of the bastards. They pulled back slightly, standing back to back as Chen took out a bunch of his star-knives. “Might as well use ’em all up, and die fight—”

“No,”
Rock hissed with barely repressed fury at himself for letting themselves get taken so easily. “We’ll fight later. Act
zombie.
They might not have seen all this action!”

They both lowered their heads, twisted their lips up crazily and put their arms out. Rock glanced down at Ralph, who was now lying a few yards away, a scarlet mosaic across his one remaining leg. But he was still
alive.

“Don’t move an
inch,”
the leader of the attack squad, a big beefy fellow with flush red cheeks said, as he came rushing up among the troopers.

“What the
hell
are you zombies doing here?” a man with sergeant stripes asked. “You look like Class D labor. You should be on the other side of the city.”

Before he could get the answer to his question one of his underlings yelled from about twenty yards off: “Sir, sir, two of our men here. One cut up and the other one has a flattened face. Both are dead!” He came rushing over with a sickened look on his young face. He was only a recruit. A lot of the Pattonville army were young, Rock noted. But even a baby could pull a trigger. And a man would find himself just as dead. The captain in charge of the guards rushed through the ranks as the soldiers kept their weapons trained on the Freefighters.

“What the hell happened here?” he asked. “You,” the captain screamed at his sergeant, his white face turning to pink then red as his voice rose. “What happened to those men?”

He went over and slammed his right hand across Rockson’s cheek, but the Doomsday Warrior didn’t even flinch, just turned his head with the blow and then stared back with zombie-composure. He knew the only possibility now was to bullshit, to confuse these army boys, make them
not
suspect.

Neither Chen nor Rockson would utter a word, no matter how many times the captain bellowed at them for some answers. He also cracked them hard several times across the face with a huge leather gloved hand. Again neither made the slightest flinch but just went with the energy, taking most of the sting out. At the level of martial arts that both of them practiced, a man could think he’d hit one of them solidly, when, in fact, only the very edge of his blow had landed.

“Put shackles on them,” the captain addressed two of his flunkeys, pointing at Rock and Chen. Both Freefighters eyed each other fast so it went unnoticed. And both silently agreed to let themselves be shackled. They were just outgunned. Besides, it
could
get them right inside on everything, Rock thought, trying to be optimistic. Thick chains were thrown around their arms which were pulled back behind their backs and locked with padlocks.

“Take him to the repair warehouse,” the captain said, pointing down at the prone Ralph whose leg-stump was being put in a tourniquet. He otherwise seemed not too near death as he propped himself up on one elbow and watched the whole proceedings with a zombie-like curiosity. “See if he can be salvaged.”

Several guards went over and lifted the fallen man up under the armpits and helped him along. The other leg worked okay, so with their support he was able to hobble at near normal speed.

“And as for you two liars, thieves, defective workers, whatever the hell you are,” the captain smirked with pleasure on his thick jowled face, “it’s off to the interrogation basement. You’ll like it there.”