Doomsday Warrior 02 - Red America (16 page)

Rock slowly eased his shotgun pistol out and unslung his Liberator rapid-fire rifle from beneath the saddle. He set it on automatic and held it cradled in his left arm, the shotgun pistol in his right. There were at least thirty of the large silver and black-haired predators, nearly twice as large as their pre-war ancestors. These stood nearly four feet high at the shoulder and weighed between two hundred and three hundred pounds. But their leader was even larger—a good four-and-a-half feet tall, with eyes as bright as fire, glowing red and orange in the setting sun. Its fur was a brilliant silver, shiny, almost metallic colored. It barred its teeth at the prey and let out a sharp doglike bark, obviously signaling the other members of the pack that this was their next meal. Snorter shifted his legs nervously and Rock patted the hybrid on the neck. “Easy boy, easy.” Although its instincts told it to run, its trust of Rockson was even stronger and the hybrid stood its ground.

The wolves came at Rock at a quick gait which changed to a charge at about twenty feet. Rock waited until he could see the saliva covering the leader’s immense jaws, the canine teeth shining like pearl-handled daggers in the last rays of the squashed setting sun for off on the radioactive purple horizon. The leader of the pack leaped into the air from nearly fifteen feet away, its powerful back legs propelling it into the air like some kind of immense spring. Rockson let loose with the shotgun pistol which unleashed a spray of .12 gauge shot in an x-shaped pattern. The lead volley flew only eight feet before it made contact with the silver neck of the wolf. It tore through the immense carnivore like a sword, nearly severing the creature’s head. The lifeless body of the two hundred and eighty-five pound leader fell to the stream bed like a rock and lay there, its still beating heart pumping out hot blood through myriad holes in its chest and throat. Its lifeless eyes were wide open staring straight up at the darkening sky.

Rockson disliked killing such a magnificent beast. If they hadn’t run into each other the wolf probably would have lived another twenty or thirty years, growing even larger. But when he was attacked, Rock had no choice but to survive. In the end that was what life was—the contest of many forces against one another—the strongest lived on.

The pack seemed confused by the death of their powerful leader. They, in their dim consciousnesses, must have thought that it was nearly immortal, having fought off every challenge from the other wolves for years. The next two most powerful members of the pack, nearly as big as the fallen leader, snarled viciously at Rockson, opening their foot long jaws to full extension. Their teeth stood out like tusks in the center of their snapping jaws. Both of the wolves, one a grayish color, the other jet black and shiny as velvet, charged at Rock. Snorter whinnied nervously but stood his ground, backing up slightly as the two killers came forward. The hybrid fought back its animal fears, knowing that its stillness would help the master destroy the predators.

The wolves got within about fifteen feet of their prey and leaped, literally flying up into the air, reaching a height of about eight feet above the ground. Their jaws opened wide; one went for Rockson’s throat, the other for the neck of the hybrid. Rock waited until they were a millisecond away and fired pointblank with the shotgun pistol. The gray-pelted wolf took the brunt of the shot, its skull disappearing in a sludge of red spray. It crashed into the hybrid’s chest and then fell to the ground nearly on top of the already dead silver-haired leader. But the black wolf only took the shot in the shoulder shielded by its companion. Its murderous leap continued and it slammed into Rockson’s chest, knocking him clear off the ’brid.

He fell to the hard rocks of the stream bed, the rifle flying from his grasp, the shotgun pistol clattering loudly several feet away. Without a moment’s hesitation Rockson rolled over and over on the stream bed. The second he moved, the black shape, dark as midnight itself, its eyes focused on the fallen man, sprang at the spot where Rock had hit. It spun around as it missed the rolling man and again charged. The guns were out of reach, Rock knew that. He whipped out his Bowie knife and held it straight out in front of him up in the air. The black-pelted wolf flung itself on Rock and felt fifteen inches of cold steel rip into its chest. It continued to slash away with the huge incisors but felt itself weakening. What was wrong? Suddenly it had no strength. It got a grip on the prey’s arm but then felt itself falling into a spinning hole from which it could not rise. Rock ripped his arm free from the dead wolf’s jaws. The teeth had penetrated the flesh and muscle but hadn’t ripped away as the wolves liked to do, shredding their prey into hamburger before they ate.

About five yards away the palomino was rearing and kicking with its powerful hooves. The wolves were trying to circle it, wary of the power of the tremendous legs. One jumped from the ground and landed on the ’brid’s back, trying to get its jaws around the big steed’s neck for the kill. Rock saw the shotgun pistol half hidden under a rock and dove for it, firing from his stomach up at the wolf atop Snorter. The shot tore into the predator’s side, flinging it from the ’brid’s back as if it had been hit with a brick wall, its chest bones exposed and poking through the bloody hide. Rockson ran forward and reached the hybrid’s side. He took the reins and pulled the animal out of the line of fire as a group of the wolves gathered just ahead of them for another charge. There was no time for finesse. Rock knew that if they all charged it was all over. He had to scare them. He aimed at the lead wolves in the pack and pulled the trigger of the shotgun pistol again and again. He blasted away, firing the remaining four rounds of the .12 gauge pistol into the smoke and the bloody flesh, not even stopping to see what the results were. The moment he ran out of ammo he picked up the Liberator. He aimed into the pack, waiting a second for the smoke and floating fur to settle. But there was no need. The battle was over. The remaining wolves fled, their tails between their legs like a pack of frightened puppies. They had no stomach to fight the killing machine before them. On the stream bed were the bodies of five more of the ferocious carnivores. Four were dead, already stiffening in rigor mortis. A fifth yelped and tried to crawl away, its front two legs blasted to stumps, bloody bones poking through. Rock walked over to the creature and looked down at the terrified animal which stared up at him, its eyes watery and filled with pain. Rock raised the Liberator and pumped two slugs into the wolf’s head. It was still.

The Doomsday Warrior killed to survive but never to cause suffering. That was for the Reds. Calming Snorter down and treating his wounds with antiseptic and salve, Rock was soon moving forward again atop the hybrid, wary of every sound, every glowing eye in the immensity of the night. The bodies of the dead wolves lay like monuments to the power of man. The rising moon burned down on the corpses, lighting the red blood with shimmering sheen as nature’s second line of predation moved in for their meals. Wild dogs, owls, blood spiders all dug into the warm flesh. Nothing was wasted, nothing was overlooked.

Thirteen

T
here it lay below him—Pavlov City—stretching off in every direction. Building after building, a maze of barracks in ever larger concentric circles, spreading out across the plains below. And at the outer edge of the largest circle of buildings, trucks, bulldozers, and workers building yet more structures. Rockson looked down from one of a group of low hills surrounding the plains on which Pavlov City stood. He took in the immensity of it. Whoever was building this city of sinister design had plans for it to be truly gargantuan. Sitting atop Snorter, Rock looked down for a long, long time, letting his senses digest it all. He had seen many Red fortress cities before but never one as large as this. Already, it stretched nearly three miles across, absolutely crammed with buildings. Most of the structures were fairly low to the ground, not more than two or three stories high, built in barracks-type design, the favorite of the imaginative Russian designers and architects. In the center of the city, dwarfing everything else, was a concrete windowless building some forty stories high and nearly five hundred feet in diameter. Just from the looks of it, Rockson knew it was where the Reds were performing their tricks. Truckloads of men kept driving up to the front entrance and unloading their cargos of American prisoners, Rock could see through his field glasses.

He unsaddled the hybrid, burying what he didn’t need of his traveling supplies. He spoke to the powerful but gentle animal, holding the big brown head in his hands.

“Good luck, boy. I’m going to tether you here. If we’re lucky we’ll meet again. Make our way back to Century City. If I don’t come back, you’ll be able to break free from these small branches easily enough.” He patted the ’brid on the nose and set off down the steep slopes toward Pavlov City and his destiny. The palomino stared after its master for a long time and then lowered its head, searching for the tastiest clumps of mottled green and brown grass.

Rock took the supplies he had brought with him for his entrance to the Red Fortress out of his small pack—a disguise. He would need it here. His face and name were posted up in every post office and jail in America. TED ROCKSON—WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE—50,000 RUBLE REWARD to the man, Russian or American, who brought him in. Rock put a gray dye in his hair and then a thick gray mustache on. Rath’s Special Services’ people had given him the stuff along with some other tricks of the trade he might need inside. Satisfied with his masquerade after looking in a small metal mirror, Rock threw the pack over his shoulder and headed down the hill.

He hoped that at least a small American community had sprung up on the outskirts of the city. The Reds usually paid no attention to the towns that grew around every fort. No more attention to the filthiest lowest levels of society than they would give to a mosquito. Besides, somebody had to carry the garbage out to the dumps and perform menial tasks. He would make his way into the city as one of those “untouchables” that now roamed America like the hobos of old. He got to the bottom of the range of hills and started along some fairly swampy land, the dirt soft and squishy beneath his feet, reeds growing high as corn. He moved cautiously as these kinds of terrain sometimes had quicksand pits which could suck an animal or a man down in minutes.

Rockson had a good five miles to go before reaching the gates of the fortress and that suited him fine as it would be to his advantage to enter at night when the darkness and the shadows and the tiredness of the troops would make detection unlikely. He had gone about a mile when he saw something sticking out of the swampy ground just ahead. It couldn’t be! He moved closer. Jesus Christ! A body lay half submerged in the muck, just feet and legs poking out from the ground, the upper half of the corpse buried beneath the sucking black dirt. Must have gotten caught, poor devil, Rock thought. But upside down? Did the guy take a running dive? He moved on slowly, cautiously. Anything out of the ordinary in America 2089
A.D.
could mean trouble—death. He pushed his way through a thick clump of high green reeds and emerged into the open.

Ted Rockson had seen just about everything in his life, but even he, as tough as he was, felt himself grow nauseous at the sight before him. Bodies! Bodies everywhere. Strewn around the swamp like so much garbage. Bodies half submerged in the thick foul-smelling mud, buried halfway, heads, hands, feet sticking out like grotesque growths on the soil. He moved his hand down to his pistol instinctively, now hidden beneath an oversized khaki shirt. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands of the rotting corpses—probably all American workers, stripped clean of any bit of clothing. Bodies in every stage of decay from skeletons picked clean as desert bones to foul-smelling, decomposing corpses, ballooned out with the gases of their own rotting bodies. He examined some of the dead bodies more closely, those he could get to close enough to stand the stench of. Strange. None of the bodies had any marks on them except—the skulls had tiny holes at the top of the brain casing. The mindbreaker! These were all rejects of the Red mindbreaking operation. Workers who for one reason or another hadn’t taken whatever fiendish conditioning the Russians were trying to instill in them. Men who had gone insane, screaming their guts out as the devilish probes were thrust deeper and deeper into their brain matter.

Rockson walked on, amazed at the extent of the death. A graveyard above ground. And a testament to the nature of the Red beast. He wished every soft-liner from Century City could see this sight. Their own puking guts would force them to change their tunes of accommodation. It was all too obvious to anyone who would dare to look. The Russian forces of occupation wanted one thing and one thing only: complete domination and control of every American citizen. The sight of so much terrible suffering and wasted life made Rockson realize again with crystal clarity just why he was fighting, devoting his life to the war against the Reds and just how deep his enemy’s evil went.

The swamp went on for nearly two miles, every foot of it crammed full of the human garbage. Finally, he came to the end of it, demarcated by a long barbed wire fence. He had to dart suddenly into the surrounding weeds as two Red trucks drove up and unloaded yet another delivery of death. Another hundred corpses, their faces frozen in the most agonizing death masks, lips spread apart, jaws cracked wide open as they must have literally screamed themselves into oblivion. The trucks rolled off again and Rockson found himself on a narrow dirt road that led to the city.

He felt sickened from the sight of so much death. It was one thing for men to die in battle, or from disease, or even to be eaten by the wild creatures that roamed the wastelands of America, but to go like this, for no reason, destroyed like a rodent and then discarded, nothing but garbage. That was something almost too terrible to contemplate. He felt shaken inside and vowed that he would avenge those poor wretched souls whose minds had been torn apart. Someone would pay. He went on about another mile, out of the swampy terrain and onto flat parched fields, one well worn dirt road through the middle which widened slowly as it approached the city. Already the ever present shantytowns that sprang up around Red forts began appearing at the side of the road. Just a few little shacks at first, lean-tos of gnarled branches topped with rusted pieces of tin and cardboard. Then more and more, until the sides of the road and the flat dry ground beyond was filled with the poverty shacks. The dredges of society, who fulfilled the city’s lowest tasks and were therefore spared the mindbreaker, stood around outside their hovels talking with one another, clothed in rags. Children scampered through the stinking alleyways formed by the rows of crumbling huts, naked, pursued by starving mongrels barking and snapping at their thin legs.