Doomsday Warrior 02 - Red America (15 page)

One of the workers made a dash back down the heavily waxed white linoleum floor but got barely fifty feet before streams of Red slugs tore through his chest and stomach. He fell to the floor, a writhing pool of ripped intestine and lung tissue dripping out like badly butchered meat onto the clean shiny linoleum. The guards pushed the prisoners forward with the muzzles of their rifles. Oh sweet Jesus, Chaplin thought to himself, his hands clenched together like little rocks, what are they going to do to me? The workers were led into an immense chamber filled with rows of strange plastic seats with helmets hovering just above them. The rows of seats with what looked like space helmets extended off as far as Chaplin-47 could see. Overhead, burning fluorescent lights hung down, casting the peculiar scene with a merciless brilliance.

“Now sit down in the seats,” the guards screamed out, holding their rifles straight out on the Americans. The workers sat one after another, surrounded on all sides by the Russian guards. Once they were seated, guards quickly made their way up and down the rows of seats and threw hand clasps closed on the terrified workers. They were now strapped firmly in place. An officer of some kind with a white smock covering his uniform stood in the aisle between the rows and addressed them.

“Welcome to Pavlov City, American citizens. You are here to be retrained. Retrained in your minds. The way you think and feel. You will not be killed, I assure you. And any pain you feel is only part of the necessary surgery we must perform on you. Just as an operation for a broken arm or leg causes pain but in the long run is good for the organism, so must we perform a sort of operation on your minds. You enter this chamber as workers, but you shall leave here as soldiers for the cause of world communism.” As he spoke, guards went up and down the rows of prisoners, lowering the helmets down onto the workers’ heads, setting them down so that two long steel prongs, sharp as ice picks, just touched the scalps of the workers.

Chaplin-47 felt the cold steel at his skull. Oh Jesus, no, no—they were going to stick those things in him, into his brain. No, this couldn’t be happening. His life hadn’t been good but he had built his little cardboard home and had saved a few rubles, perhaps enough to buy a woman for himself. There had been
something
—but now . . . He struggled in his steel containment, his wrists unable to move more than a fraction of an inch in their imprisonment. The officer’s words dimly penetrated his panic-stricken mind.

“Go with it,” the Red official continued. “I suggest very strongly that you go with the commands you will hear. Do not resist! If you resist you may well die. I have seen those men who have fought back against this mind processing and they made me want to vomit. So, if you care anything about your wretched lives, surrender your will, go with it. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain.” He looked at the rows of recruits for the mindbreaker and stepped back toward the control panel at one end of the room. The guards, too, stepped away as they had been splattered before by exploding brains and knew enough to keep their distance.

The officer pulled the activation switch and the helmets above the workers’ heads came to life with a dull whirring sound. Ruby red lights came on at the very tips of the prongs which poked down from beneath the helmets. Slowly, ever so slowly, moving at a snail’s pace, the laser probes began lowering into the Americans’ heads, pushing through the bone, grinding down into the skull cavity. The men heard their own skulls, cracking and melting under the laser beam that shot down into their flesh. The bone beneath the laser’s ruby light began melting and went up in puffs of acrid smoke. Then the needles pushed deeper, into the soft gray tissue of the human mind, burning out memories, destroying whole systems of self-regulation and command.

Chaplin-47 smelled his own head burning, the smoke wafting down. He could feel the probes pushing through the bone of his skull and then a sickening slurping sound as the twin laser needles began vaporizing the first layer of brain tissue. He screamed! His shrieks joined the chorus of other human screams. The Russian soldiers stuffed cotton in their ears. Sometimes these Americans could really put up a racket. The pain, the pain was unbearable: razors, knives cutting into his mind, his memories being literally burnt out of him; dreams, hopes, desires exploding in pops of brain sap into nothingness.

Then the rats, the spiders began devouring his flesh. A voice boomed out over the loudspeaker, giving him commands, filling his mind with new thoughts, new orders.

“You are Russian soldiers now. Your obedience is to Mother Russia. Your American self is gone! You are Russian, you are a slave for the Motherland. You will do anything for her. You will kill for her. KILL! KILL! KILL!” The words combined with the pain in his skull and the melting sickening stench of human brain tissue. He was in a new universe, a dimension of pain and torture he had never dreamed existed. He felt himself falling over the edge of his reality like a man in a barrel going over a waterfall. He was falling, dropping, as his thoughts and being, his entire personality dropped away beneath him. There was nothing. NOTHING! He looked down, looked into the face of the purest pain and began the long descent down into the abyss of losing his mind.

Twelve

W
here was he? Who was he? He ached all over. He was in the center of a darkness, a spiraling galaxy of black stars. He was falling up, falling into the light. It grew brighter, piercing! He moaned and opened his eyes. The burning sun smashed into his eyes and throbbing flesh. He was lying in a bed of dark brown grass. He was Rockson. Ted Rockson. He heard a noise and startled, swung his head around. A large furry face loomed large. In fear, Rock reached for his shotgun pistol—no, it was Snorter, trying to awaken him.

Suddenly he remembered. The thorns. The poison. So, he was still alive. The anti-venom had worked. And the Goddamned hybrid was stronger than he. It stood firm, looking down at its master who could barely move after the palomino had been revived for hours. Rock tried to stand himself and reached his knees, then collapsed back onto the cool ground. It was early in the morning. The sun was painting a smooth arc of red light above the purplish brown sky. How long had he been under? Twenty-four, forty-eight hours? It felt like an eternity. Every nerve, every fiber of his being ached and pulsated as if infected. His ears buzzed, his eyes stared straight ahead as he found it hard to focus on anything. But he was alive. He had survived once again.

Rock struggled to his feet and somehow made his way the few yards to the hybrid. He lifted the four quart canteen from the saddle and opened it. His throat was parched, his lips dry as sand. Rock brought it to his mouth and felt a wave of violent trembling sweep over him as the first drops of liquid touched his tongue. No, damn it! He was going under again. He felt himself falling, saw the ground rushing up like a fist and then a strange sensation of smacking face down into the dirt.

When he awoke again it was pitch black. He felt sick and weak, but even as he slowly opened his eyes he knew he was stronger. The hybrid stood several feet away grazing on the knee-high dark grass and wild wheat of the field. Rock again reached for the canteen. Empty! It had poured out when he fell. Shit! He got to his feet still wobbly, dizzy. He felt as weak as he had ever felt in his life. As if his cells had lost their charge, his flesh cold as ice. He needed warmth and food and water. But he knew he wasn’t in any condition to hunt. Rock dragged himself over to the ’brid and pulled himself agonizingly up into the saddle. The thick black and white hide of the hybrid felt warm beneath his thighs. He undid the blue blanket from his saddlebag and pulled it around his back and shoulders. Rock leaned forward so his chest and head were resting against the massive steed’s furry mane. He commanded it to move.

“Giddyup, pal. You’re going to have to take care of things for a little while.” Rock slumped forward but stopped himself from slipping back into the darkness. He would fall out of the saddle at this rate. He undid a rope from the saddlebag and tied it around his back, attaching the ends to the saddlepost. The hybrid moved carefully forward. It knew that its master was in danger, that it had to make decisions. The master leaned nearly all the way forward, his head bobbing up and down. The master was sleeping. The ’brid knew that it must go forward in the direction the master had commanded before he slept. The hybrid kept up a slow, even pace, mindful of its unconscious load. From time to time it turned its huge head around and its orange brown eyes took in the master who hung roped down to the creature’s back. The master was alive but he was hurt. The ’brid walked and walked, keeping its direction with its strong sense of smell which sensed moisture far ahead. It kept a dead course for the life-saving liquid.

When Rockson next came to it was late afternoon. He felt himself rocking slowly back and forth in the saddle and opened his eyes. They were moving through fields of bright, madly colored flowers like a rainbow of dayglo paints. Snorter had kept up the journey on his own. Damn smart animal, Rock thought, managing a thin grin even in the midst of his haze. His body felt stronger now, the poison must have nearly worked its way through, though he still felt quite peculiar. He sat up straight in the saddle and rubbed his eyes and face. The skin was coated with a greasy paste, which he wiped off with a bandanna from his pocket. He needed water. Bad. He hadn’t drunk for what seemed like days, and his lips and throat felt parched as a desert. But there was no water in sight. Suddenly Rock saw something that would do just as well.

He guided the palomino to the right. The hybrid gave over control of its movements to the master as soon as it felt the tug. It felt a kind of relief that it no longer had to decide things. It was meant for the master to rule. Rock halted the big ’brid near a grove of large plants, red stalks with yellow fruits covering them. Rock slid out of the saddle and landed on the ground, barely keeping his balance. He picked three of the gourd-shaped fruits from the plant and hacked one open with his bowie knife. He had learned many secrets of the land when young. This particular plant had been shown to him by a group of mountain men Rock had hunted bear with for several months when still a teenager. He cut the fruit near the narrower end, making a hole about three inches wide. He looked inside. It was full, filled with a supply of liquid that the plant stored within itself for droughts. Rock took a deep gulp of the sweet nectar. God, it tasted good. His mouth and tongue seemed to expand upon contact with the delicious juice, the cells soaking up the liquid and expanding back to their normal size.

Rock drank three of the fruit’s contents down and then fed the hybrid who took to them with great appetite. Then the Doomsday Warrior stripped down to nothing and washed his torn flesh with the cleansing pollen liquid. He looked over his bronze, muscled body, carved from iron. He must have been stabbed over a hundred times by the poison thorns. Little pinpricks still red and swollen blue and purple covered his entire frame. Several wounds were quite infected, puffed up as large as grapes poking grotesquely out from his skin. Rock cut these open with his knife and squeezed the pus and poison out. Then he washed them clean with the plant nectar. The sores burned like the dickens when the liquid touched them but then quickly became cool, soothed. The plant’s juices must have medicinal properties that even the mountain men hadn’t known about. He’d have to return someday and bring some of these back to Dr. Shecter.

Rock then scrubbed down the hybrid who reveled in his bath, whinnying in appreciation, flapping his long gold and white tail in excitement. When they were both in better shape Rock set up camp for the night and ate a meal of berries and fruits which were plentiful in the area. He fell asleep under the splashing diamond sea of the stars.

When he awoke the next morning he felt almost normal again. Jackdaws and crows were fighting madly in some nearby trees, pecking and cawing at one another with rage. Rockson laughed out loud at the commotion and rose to his feet.

“Come on fellows, we’re all fellow Americans. No need to get it on like this.” The birds squawked at Rock a few times and then flew off to a safer distance to resume their quarrel in peace. Rock got off to an early start, and Snorter quickly hit a good pace. They were days behind schedule and had a lot of ground to cover. Rockson felt almost totally normal now. Almost. His eyes continued to play tricks as he kept seeing shadows around him, things jumping from behind rocks, leaping down from trees. As they went through a dense pine forest, Rock kept going for his shotgun pistol, sure that things were attacking him from above. Each time, he would quickly realize that nothing was there and return the powerful pistol to its holster, grateful that no one else was along to witness his hallucinations being acted out.

The next few days of travel were uneventful or as uneventful as the world of America, 2089
A.D.
ever became. Rock found a large inland lake filled with fish and was able to catch a few catfish-type creatures, rows of needle teeth, and a large coxcomb, red as a rooster’s, hanging down from beneath their jaws. But they tasted like heaven. On the evening of the fourth day after his bout with the poison thorns, Rock came to a series of low mountains, very rocky and steep. He found a gully, an ancient dried up stream bed only slightly wider than the hybrid and moving slowly, they started through. He had scarcely gone more than a hundred yards along the primeval stream when he suddenly saw shapes ahead.

A chorus of howls went up as the creatures saw him. Timber wolves, saber-toothed, their fur raised up on their backs, eyes lit up like slot machine windows at the sight of such a big fat dinner that Rockson and the hybrid would make. Rock had had a run-in with these mutant wolves before, but just one or two, never an entire pack. They edged forward, slinking on all fours, until they were about forty feet away. Their huge curved fangs protruded insanely from their jaws, nearly a foot long, glistening with the dripping saliva of their hunger.