Doomsday Warrior 04 - Bloody America (5 page)

By the fifth day after the black flood, Rock knew they were getting near the location of the president’s now bombed-out ranch where the convention had been held. The land grew more rocky; small hills were beginning to turn into the very edge of a mountain range.

“Do you want to go back to the convention site?” Rock asked President Langford as they headed up and down the sloping crabgrassed hills.

“I have to, Rock. Whoever’s left there—there must be some who survived—you did—we did. I’ll reorganize. There’s no other choice. We can’t stop this journey of ours. Our trip toward liberation and freedom. There’s no turning back—only one way—forward.” Langford seemed to be regaining his strength, both physical and mental. His eyes burned once again with the fire of leadership.

“Yes, I know,” Rockson answered softly. But he wasn’t thinking of Langford, he was thinking of Kim. Being separated from her again—not knowing where she would be or what was happening to her. In many ways he didn’t like being in love. It hurt. It created an Achilles’ heel in his otherwise almost impenetrable psychic shield. He never had to worry about anyone before. And he never worried for himself. His death was a matter for the gods to decide. He had seen enough to know that when death came knocking, no creature on earth could keep the door closed. The Doomsday Warrior kept his thoughts to himself but turned and looked at her with a feeling of infinite tenderness.

They marched through the lower hills and then up onto the higher rocky slopes by the second day. Mountain goats sure-footedly jumped around them as eagles and hawks flew slow deliberate circles far above, searching with their razor-sharp eyes for the flash of a cottontail or the rush of a raccoon. The land was again rich and vibrant here and made them relax. They took in the perfumed scents of wood and sap and life itself. Out there on the wastelands it was as if they were on an alien planet with something out to get them. But here—this was their land. Tall trees and green everywhere, wildlife crashing through the thick forests, all in harmonious symbiosis.

They were just coming over a rise above a narrow wooded valley as the sun sank into the cloud-covered pit of night, when Rock held his arm up for them both to be quiet.

“I smell smoke—just ahead. Stay here,” he whispered, motioning for them to lie down in the thick, blue-tinged grass. He edged forward cautiously, his shotpistol in his right hand, and rolled quickly over the top of the rise and down a few feet behind a grove of thornbushes.

Voices! He could hear mumbles and the crackling of a fire ahead. And food—the sizzling aroma of fresh-killed venison. It couldn’t be Reds. The Russians would never be camping out in the wilds. They preferred a protective circle of tanks and choppers flying overhead. But he had encountered enough bandits, even cannibals, to know that just being Americans didn’t guarantee safety from strangers. He slid down the hill at the north side of the two hundred-foot-deep valley, darting from shadow to shadow. It was English all right, he could hear as he drew closer, and laughter.

No—it couldn’t be, he thought, disbelieving what his own perceptions were telling him. He moved down the slope and pushed aside the side of a brown, spiked bush. Four men sat around a fire on pieces of a fallen tree. One of them was cooking over low flames, humming softly to himself.
It was—
McCaughlin—and the Rock team. A sardonic smile passed over Rockson’s face as he rose and stepped forward, both hands raised.

“All right boys, don’t shoot me now,” the Doomsday Warrior said, walking toward them. “I’m here to surrender.” They looked up, startled at the sound of the voice. Then their eyes lit up like Christmas bulbs on the trees of their ruddy faces.

“Holy shit, as I live and breathe,” Detroit Green’s ebony dark face broke out in a wide grin. The bull-like man said, “He done returned from the dead.” He spoke in a mocking southern accent, almost dropping the piece of venison he held in his hand. They just sat there looking up, their jaws hanging open as if struck dumb. McCaughlin, Archer, even Chen couldn’t make a sound.

“It’s me boys, but you look in such a somnabulant state right now that if I make a speech I’m afraid you might pass out.” They jumped up and rushed over to their leader, the man they were sure had been killed. The team gathered around him, slapping the Doomsday Warrior on the back, wanting to make body contact with Rockson, to make sure it wasn’t just a pipe dream, to touch the flesh of his breathing body.

“How the fuck did you—” Detroit began, tilting his ebony face sideways above the broad sweatshirt-covered chest.

“It’s a long story,” Rock said. “Too long. And you? I was sure you all were a group of charcoal statues I found.”

“We saw ’em, too,” Chen piped in, running his hand along the dark mustache that curved down across his Oriental mouth, below the deep almond eyes. “In fact when we scoured these hills we found scores of them.” The Chinese martial arts master was nearly invisible in his neck-to-toe black ninja suit. Only the flames of the fire flickering over his face showed the presence of a man.

Rock turned to Archer. The huge near-mute was smiling with a grin as broad as his watermelon-sized face. He cradled his immense steel crossbow in one arm and squeezed Rockson around the shoulder with the other, almost lifting him off the ground. At seven feet plus and at least four hundred pounds, although no one had ever really been able to weigh him, the man had the strength of a grizzly bear.

“He likes you, Rock.” Detroit laughed. “He was sure looking blue in the face when we all thought you wasn’t around no more. We were thinking of electing a new team leader, but we all just looked at each other and said—no way.”

“Wasn’t the same without you, Rock,” McCaughlin piped in back at the fire where he was tending his venison à la campfire. “Kinda’ like steaks without no steak sauce.”

“I’m touched,” Rockson said, putting his hand with the shotgun pistol across his chest.

“Well, if we waited for a signal from you to tell us things were all right,” a woman’s voice suddenly said from the edge of the clearing, “we’d be up there all night.” Kim and Langford walked over to the fire. The men all saluted with respect. They had been at the Re-Constitutional Convention as well and knew who Charles Langford was. They stood at attention, even McCaughlin rising. They were all freefighters and as such, part of the newly formulated United States Army. It sounded good—the U.S. Army.

“Please, please!” Langford said, waving his hands for them all to sit down. “No formalities out here. It seems ridiculous.” The president stood on one leg, rubbing the other. Now that they had stopped walking, cramps were beginning to set in.

“Here sir,” Chen said, offering his log seat to Langford. “Sit down—we have food ready.”

“Good, good.” Langford smiled, dropping to the log with a long exhale of relaxation. The moon was starting to rise now casting a ghostly glow over the assembled freefighters. But at least for now they were safe. And there was food. Things could be a lot worse. And would be.

Five

I
n Washington, President Zhabnov, supreme commander of the United Socialist States of America—the U.S.S.A.—tossed and turned in his large feather bed trying to wake himself from a nightmare. Two young girls, hardly in their teens, lay on each side of him. One was a twelve-year-old Negress, the other a little blond-haired thing. Both were as smooth and formless as children. But the Russian president of America liked them that way. The girls shifted uncomfortably away from the fat hairy man who slept between them, praying that he wouldn’t “take them” again. He had hurt them so.

But Zhabnov had other things on his mind: Killov! Colonel Killov was chasing him, even in his dreams. Was there no escape from the skull-faced madman? Deep in sleep the KGB commander followed him, haunting, threatening. Zhabnov was running down a long well-lit hallway—a hospital corridor, and someone was after him. Then Zhabnov was slipping. He looked down. The shiny white floor was red with blood, a sea of blood coming out from under every door. Then the doors opened and dead men, corpses, their faces pale blue, their arms held out stiffly in front of them, came at him. They opened their lipless jaws to bite at him. Then they were all over the “supreme president,” ripping at his flesh. Killov stood behind them, commanding them to kill, to “eat the pig.” Zhabnov screamed again and again. Then he awoke.

The obese Red general sat bolt upright in the master bedroom of the White House. The portrait of Franklin Roosevelt stared down through the darkness from across the wide, oak-paneled suite. The wide feather bed was soaked down the middle with his sour sweat. Zhabnov reached over and pushed one of a row of buttons on a control panel mounted on the bedboard, nearly crushing the little three-breasted Negress beneath him. Within seconds the door opened and a servant rushed in, snapping on the wall light.

“A drink man, make me a drink right away! Triple bourbon with ice—quick, quick!” He shook his hand impatiently, then wiped it across his goateed red-flushed face. His hair was thinning on top, just wisps flattened down over the shiny skull, his big stomach and breast-fat chest hung out in the air, shiny with cold sweat. The servant, an ancient pale-faced Ukrainian who trembled as he walked and spoke with aristocratic accent, quickly and expertly poured the drink from Zhabnov’s long cherry wood bar that popped out of a paneled wall with the flick of a dial. He brought the bourbon over and handed it to the supreme president, not daring to even glance down at the two naked forms surrounding Zhabnov.

“Go! Go!” Zhabnov waved his hand and the servant rushed out, shutting the lights and gently closing the door behind him.

Zhabnov took a deep gulp from the glass. Three ice cubes just as he liked it, floating, clanking together at the top of the artificially frosted crystal. Within seconds he felt the wonderful glow of alcoholic fire sweep through his gullet, and a warm glow rushed over his face. What the hell was he worried about? He could handle everything. Premier Vassily was allied with him now—against Killov. Even the “Grandfather” had realized Killov’s threat, especially after the conspiracy of the doctors, when Killov’s physician agents had tried to poison and kill the premier with injections of cancer cells.

But the premier had survived and given Zhabnov the word. No more would there be a careful balance of power between the three of them—the Communist trinity that ruled the world. Now it was the premier and Zhabnov to the death against Killov.

“He must be stopped,” Vassily had said to Zhabnov over and over on his last call. “The man is mad. He wants to destroy the earth.” Zhabnov had never heard the premier so frightened. But now President Zhabnov had his own band of assassins after the colonel of the dread Blackshirted KGB. Killov would never know when or where they would strike—or how they would kill him. One of them would succeed. Of this Zhabnov was sure. He finished the drink and felt much better. He turned toward the small blond girl and put his thick hand on her soft, lithe thigh.

“Come here, little one,” the supreme president said, squeezing her young flesh. “Come to me.” He grabbed the sub-teen who tried to feign sleep and pulled her atop his aroused, obese body.

In Moscow, Premier Vassily, the “Grandfather,” ruler of all the world—from the tip of South Africa to the Siberian Steppes, from Argentina to Canada—sat in his wheelchair on the intricate marble terrace overlooking Red Square. Below him, crowds filed past, petty functionaries heading home from their bureaucratic positions, their long days of stamping and denying requests from around the Soviet Empire. They trudged through the snowy streets several feet deep from the early fall snows as more flakes licked down from the turgid sky, thick with undulating Arctic clouds ready to deposit yet another load of their frozen moisture onto the Red capitol below.

The premier turned to the last page of
The Phemonology of Mind,
by Hegel, the philosopher who had created the ideas from which Karl Marx had written
Das Kapital
and
The Communist Manifesto
among others. The books that had shaken the world. Were still shaking the world. It was hard to believe sometimes the power of words, of writing. Two books had caused such explosive reverberations. From Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky, then Stalin, all the way up to the present—Vassily, an unbroken line of leaders who had carried out
The Communist Manifesto
with a vengeance. Vassily was highly aware of his place in history. He hadn’t asked to become ruler of the world. But once he had begun rising in the Red hierarchy, had seen that his intellect and ambitions were of greater power than those around him, the outcome had been inevitable. There are those who are born to rule—must rule. It was beyond the desires of a man. He, Vassily, had been trapped by the forces of history to run things. To run everything. And so he did, and so he would until the day he died.

But there were problems—many. His grip on the world was slipping. Vassily, ever the pragmatist, could see it all clearly. The reports he received via satellite from the far-flung legions, much like Romans, he thought, remembering his history—with their isolated fortresses trying to hold back the barbarian hordes—told him that things were heating up. Every day brought more disquieting reports of rebellion, crop failures, sabotage, attacks on his forces. Years before they had all just been skirmishes, guerilla attacks—a Russian soldier stabbed in the throat in a godforsaken back alley—in Morocco, in Afghanistan, in Brazil. But now the subject peoples were growing more dissatisfied with their lot—and bolder. They had been promised more for years. More food, more autonomy—under the stern gaze of their Red rulers. But nothing had come to pass. The Soviet Empire needed more and more of the raw materials and the few goods that these subjugated countries could produce. The Soviet machine was like some starving creature that ate all that it received and instead of being satisfied just grew hungrier and hungrier. The Soviet peoples in Mother Russia had gotten used to having everything delivered to them. Their own agricultural system had deteriorated to the point where it only supplied about a third of Russia’s needs. Everything had to be “imported,” a euphemism for taking whatever was needed, and leaving the natives to eke out whatever meager survival they could.