Doomsday Warrior 02 - Red America (21 page)

“Kim, you stay here,” Rock said as he assembled his instant commando team.

“Forget it, Rock,” Kim said defiantly. “We’re in this together.” She held her submachine gun higher in her hands to show him she was as ready as the released men.

“All right then, baby,” Rock said softly, looking at her with a mixture of admiration and concern. “But stick close by me. This, as they used to say in the old days, when they had them, isn’t going to be a picnic.”

With Rock and Kim in the lead and the thirty man force behind them, they headed off down the hall toward the brainwashing operation. Two immense steel doors were tightly shut about two hundred feet down the corridor, clamped tight as a tomb when the first alarms went off. They came to the door and Rock quickly looked it over—no way they could shoot their way in.

“I heard them talking about some sort of weapons cache just before the main mindbreaking chamber,” one of the freed prisoners said coming up to Rock.

“Spread out,” he commanded the workers. “You—down that way. You men—over there. We’re looking for their weapons storage. If you find anything, yell!” They spread out, opening every door. Rock could hear occasional shots ringing out as his men found a cowering Red hidden inside an office. Suddenly there came a noise down one of the smaller hallways.

“Here! We found it.” Rock and Kim tore down the white and red checkered tile floor to the almost hysterical voice. They ran into a large room filled with shelves of weapons. Rifles, submachine guns and—what Rock had been hoping for—small explosives, hand grenades, shells for mortars. It was a regular mini-armory.

“You five men,” Rock said, pointing at the first five workers who showed up at the door. “Run down to the other floors with as many weapons as you can carry. Tell the workers you see to come up here to get arms and more ammo.” The freed Americans loaded up their arms with as much as they could possibly carry and headed down the hall, hardly able to walk. Rock loaded up with grenades and five heavy mortar shells and went back to the steel doors of the brainwashing center. He set them down right at the crack of the two sliding doors and told everyone to get back about a hundred feet down the hall and behind the corner. He pulled the fuse on a ten second grenade, dropped it in the center of his little altar of death, and tore ass back to cover. He had just rounded the corner, when the first of the explosions went off. Even from nearly eighty feet away he could feel the shock waves of the detonation and flung himself onto the floor near the huddled prisoners, sliding nearly ten feet on his stomach.

Behind him the grenade went off, then nothing! Damn, it hadn’t det— The thought had barely reached his brain that it had failed when a roaring thunderous blast shook the floor and walls, knocking plaster down from the ceiling. Then another. The shock waves reverberated through the building. Rock and his team of freed workers waited another ten seconds for any secondaries and then ran back through the smoke and rubble that littered the hallway. The doors had been ripped off their hinges and smashed open as if a giant metal-eating creature had taken some big bites right out of the foot thick steel. Rock rushed in, firing at several shadows moving in the smoke on the other side. Bodies smacked to the floor. The others filed in behind him, grabbing up the fallen weapons of three more dead guards. The lingering wisps of smoke cleared quickly, and Rock nearly gasped as he took in the sight before him.

Men—rows and rows of men, strapped into plastic chairs with the mindbreaker covering the entire top of their skulls. It ate away at them like some hideous parasitic beast, sucking out their brain fluids, burning away at their memory systems with teeth of laser fire. The rows of writhing strapped-down men went on as far as Rockson could see. There must have been thousands on this one floor alone. And they screamed. God how they screamed, their mouths opening as wide as human muscle and bone could stretch. They let out howls of pain—animal screams of the most torturous unbearable sensations of ultimate horror. Their veins stood out on their faces like leather cords. It appeared that their eyes would surely pop out of their sockets, trailing bloody tendrils. And in some cases they had.

Rock and the free prisoners ran down the lines of shrieking prisoners, ripping the helmets up and off their heads. But this only made the confined Americans scream even louder and then fall dead as the laser prongs cut wildly in every direction inside the men’s skulls.

“Don’t pull them out,” Rock yelled above the din of torture. “There has to be a reverse procedure on these devices.” He looked around and saw at the far end of the immense brainwashing chamber windowless and filled with the smell of sweat, fear, and fecal matter which exploded out of the tortured bodies, unable to control their own functions any longer, a control room, glassed in behind dark purple polarized glass. Rockson took off, moving with all the speed his mutant body possessed. Like the wind, like a bullet searching out flesh, he reached the door at the far end before the two Red technicians inside could make their escape down a back stairway.

“Hold it!” Rockson yelled out, jumping through the doorway, “Or I’ll blast your fucking guts all the way back to Moscow!” The two mindbreaker operators, white-coated and unarmed, stopped in their tracks, raised their arms and turned slowly around. Rock continued. “Now, I don’t want any bullshit from you or any stalling. I’m not in the mood to play any games.” He let loose with a stream of whistling slugs from his submachine gun that bore into the floor just in front of their feet. The two jumped nearly a foot off the ground and let out with cries of terror.

“Don’t kill us, no, no,” said the shorter, pudgier one with blood smears nearly covering the front of his laboratory smock. “We can stop them, but we can’t undo the process. What’s done is done.”

“Well, stop the damn thing! Now!” He lifted the gun again and walked up to them, shoving the hot muzzle into the face of the one who had talked.

“I’m moving, I’m moving,” the man positively shrieked and started forward. The pale pimple-faced Red ran to a complicated looking set of controls, dials, and buttons and frantically pressed in the code for the mindbreakers to withdraw from their brain drilling. Within a second, the small lights above each helmet went from green to red and the machines began withdrawing their white-hot laser probes from the screaming prisoners.

“Come with me,” Rock ordered, leading the two back out to the floor where the victims of the mindbreakers were being released from their living hell. They rose from their blood-soaked chairs, those that still could move. Many were mindless zombies who sat staring straight ahead. Others died on the spot, the shock of the entire experience too much for their weakened nervous systems to take. Out of the thousand being brainwashed two hundred and seventy-three were able to act coherently and speak.

Rockson had the two technicians strapped down to the chairs the American prisoners had been in just minutes before. The two Reds grew white faced and stuttered out pleas, too scared even to yell.

“No, we showed you,” the pudgy one begged. “Don’t kill us.”

“We—we—were only following orders,” the older one said, his eyes, usually filled with contempt, now dilated in terror. Rock walked back to the control room and pushed the on button. The computers came to life, lights flashing, meters moving with activity. He walked past the technicians and smiled at them as the helmets lowered and the icepick probes began their descent into Russian skull tissue for a change.

“Have fun boys, You’ll have to tell me what it’s like sometime.” Rockson led the newly released prisoners out into the hall and had his men arm them with as many spare weapons as they had collected. From within he heard the screams of the technicians as the laser teeth began ripping their brains.

“Men!” Rock addressed the new recruits as his own thirty man team stood around him, cradling their pistols and rifles as lovingly as if they were babies. “You’re free now. Free for the first time in your lives. You’re no longer slaves to the Reds. But now you will have to fight.” The newly freed prisoners listened to this strange man of steel strength who addressed them.

“I am Ted Rockson,” Rock continued.

“The Rockson,” they gasped, their eyes widening in confusion. The Rockson was real; they could hardly believe it. All these years just a shadowy figure in their thoughts and dreams. But he was real and if he was real, then anything was possible.

“Yes, ‘the Rockson,’ as you call me,” Rock said sarcastically. “But the truth is that I’m just a man like you and you.” He pointed at two of the freed workers, still trying to get their bearings, blood oozing from the two swollen holes at the top of their head. “Just a freefighter, like ten thousand, a hundred thousand others around America.” They all listened intently, every man around Rock silent with awe. “And what that means is that the Russians are not supermen. They’re not immortal. They
can
be killed. You’ve been raised in fear of them. They’ve tried to make you think that you were all powerless against them. But that is all lies. You are strong. There are Red bodies lying down below, that these men here have already demonstrated their ‘powerlessness’ on.”

The thirty men of Rock’s hastily assembled commando squad raised the weapons proudly with slightly dazed expressions on their faces. Everything was happening so fast.

“Arm them!” Rock said to the workers who carried the loads of weapons stacked high on their arms. The newly freed prisoners crowded around, taking pistols, rifles, submachine guns from the weapons stack. They held them backwards, tried to find the trigger. Rock held each weapon up one at a time and showed them how to use them, firing down the hall into the wall to demonstrate the use. When they were all as well trained as a two hundred man army of semi-brainwashed, stumbling torture victims could be with three minutes of schooling in weapons, Rockson led them back down the hall to the elevators.

“We’re going to split up into groups of forty. Each group will take one of the next four floors above us. We’re going to liberate every damn prisoner in this torture chamber a floor at a time. You know where the chambers are—I’m sure they’re arranged the same on each level. When you free the other prisoners, arm them and tell them what I told you. You’re free men now, fight to save your freedom.” Rockson picked leaders for each team and they piled into different elevators heading out to make war on the Reds.

Seventeen

T
he war between the freed Americans and the Red Army and KGB raged for hours. The workers fought their way up and down the stairs as more and more Red troops, called out from their barracks, poured into the building. But the workers continued to fight their way into each brainwashing sector and freed their brothers after bloody battles that left scores of them dead. About a quarter of all the freed prisoners were able to function enough to join the battle and they were given whatever weapons were available and shown how to point the things and pull the trigger. Below Rockson and his teams of men, pushing down a floor at a time, battled the Reds who tried to come up from the main lobby.

They held them for nearly an hour, laying down a withering fire that the Reds were scared to even attempt to cross, as the first twenty men who had tried lay riddled with bloody holes at the foot of first floor stairs. But then the Reds brought in two men with flamethrowers who started up the stairs, shooting out long streams of thousand degree fire. The workers pulled back screaming. Many or the first two floors burned to death or suffocated from the lack of oxygen. They retreated floor by floor, trying desperately to hold back the Reds. They were free for the first time in their lives and weren’t about to give it up so easily. But fighting against bullets was one thing—weapons that sprayed fire were something else. They tried shooting into the walls from above to ricochet slugs down but to no avail. The bullets whizzed back at them just as much.

New reinforcements of freed American prisoners came down from above, bringing some grenades with them. The workers lobbed down two at a time. This time the fire stopped . . . for a minute. The Reds knew they had the rebellion on the run and quickly had other men pick up the equipment and continue on. Again they threw grenades and again struck paydirt. But the flames soon started up. There was no way to fight it. Within an hour they had been pushed all the way back up to the nineteenth floor where they had started.

Rock joined them, running down with Kim and a group of armed workers whom he had already chosen as his special five-man team for extra hazardous and important duty. They had fought their way up to the thirty-sixth floor where they were meeting stiffer resistance. The leader of the force that had been pushed up from below ran over to Rockson, holding his Kalashikov far out ahead of him, as he still had not quite gotten used to the handling of the weapon.

“We’ve lost nearly two-thirds of our men downstairs, Rockson,” he said. “The Reds are using some kind of rifle that shoots fire. They’ve got the whole lower portion of the building now and, Christ, they must have nearly a thousand troops down there now. They’re just blasting through us. I don’t know we’re ever going to get out of here.” He looked panic-stricken. A lot of the workers, after their initial enthusiasm at escaping the mindbreakers, were beginning to show their anxiety and fear. They looked over at The Rockson too in awe to ask whether they were going to escape.

“I don’t quite know myself,” Rock said, smiling grimly at the leader of the lower forces. “But I’m sure I’ll come up with something. Meanwhile, let’s do as much damage as possible while we’re figuring it all out. If they’re using fire let’s return the favor. There are bottles of alcohol and other flammable liquids stored in closets along the floors. Get twenty men and bring every one you can find back here.” The workers headed off.

Freed workers came running back from all around the building to report to Rockson who had become the general in what was turning into the largest battle between American and Russian forces since the landing of Soviet commando forces a century before. That had been met with violent opposition from small town militia units who had fought back with everything they had. No match of course against Russian armor. But the Reds knew they were in a fight this time, Rock thought to himself, as he surveyed the men under his command running madly up and down the halls, delivering new rifles, pistols, and ammunition to forces under fire from the many pockets of Red counter fire. It made him proud to be part of it. These men who, just an hour before, had been slaves, pawns in the sick Russian designs of total domination. And now . . . now the Red bear had bitten off more than it could chew. A lot more.