Doomsday Warrior 05 - America’s Last Declaration (6 page)

“Bouvez, bouvez,”
she said insistently, handing him the liquid. They obviously weren’t about to poison him and Archer, not if their lovemaking services were going to be needed, so Rockson opened his lips and she poured in a few slugs. The liquid burned like liquor but went down OK. Reina stood back, looking at him with a wistful expression and then snapped her fingers as she walked away. A bevy of ten women who had been standing near the teepee flap rushed over to the prone freefighter, scrambling quickly to be the first on line. A young, pear-breasted woman got astride him and took her fill. Then another and another . . .

Rock awoke early in the morning just as the sun was coming up. Outside the teepee he could hear the panthers growling at the dawn as if it were some prey they were about to attack. He could barely move; his body felt absolutely drained of every bit of energy. He couldn’t even remember how many women he had had during the night—ten, twelve, fifteen. At a certain point he had lost count as breasts and thighs and moaning mouths grew into a blur of mad sexuality. It was obvious that the blue liquid they had given him and Archer to drink had highly potent ability to keep a man sexually excited—and the wherewithal to keep the action going. Rock wondered if he and Archer were scheduled to have sex with every damned woman in the tribe—just how many were there?

After about an hour of lying in the fur bed wondering if they were ever going to get any food, Reina came in with four Kreega guards and they led the Doomsday Warrior and Archer outside, after helping them on with their clothes. Rock wondered if they might try a break as the rest of the village was still asleep. But with four panthers following closely behind, their orange eyes fixated on the two freefighters, he decided to wait for a better opportunity. They were fed a gruellike porridge and pieces of sweet juice-filled fruit. Reina seemed in a good mood and kept looking over at Rock as they all sat around on logs arranged in a circle around a glowing fire that was constantly tended.

She began talking to him, a strange mixture of French and the few English words she had learned from captured trappers, and gradually Rock was able to learn the history of the tribe. They were the descendants of French Canadians. When the great “boom-boom” as Reina put it, came, their ancestors went as far into the primeval forest as possible—where the trees didn’t wither like they had in all other places. There they had lived for the past century, fishing and hunting. Many babies died, but those that survived were taller and more agile than the ones before. But as time went on there were more and more female children than male—until eventually there were no males at all. The Kreega, after sixty years all women, began raiding the land to the south picking up stray males—scrawny pathetic survivors and traders—and took them prisoner to fertilize the eager and lonely women of the tribe. It was in one of these forays nearly twenty years earlier that they had discovered the remarkably fierce and intelligent cats and found that the virgins of their tribe had the ability to control them. As long as one of the younger virgin women of the Kreega was present the panthers would obey commands of any of the women. But without one around they reverted almost instantly to their savage state.

With the cats at their command, the tribe flourished, but to this day only female children were born to the women. Accepting and integrating this reality into their lives as some sort of divine will, they kept the men they seized only so long as their blue fluid of power permitted the men to fertilize as many Kreega as possible. Most men completely failed in their tasks, going limp after only days of super-studdom. But never, Reina told him in pidgin English, have we had men that lasted so long in just the first night.

“I’m proud to be an American,” Rock said, grinning. He asked her just what happened to the men when they could no longer “function.” Reina explained that they were fed to “Ogre”, the Mother-Goddess who lived in the lake near where they had been captured. The Mother-Goddess who was the source of all good and strength, who lives in the deep blue wetness. Rock made a mental note to tell Archer not to mention the fact that they had done in the Kreega goddess. Somehow he didn’t thing they’d appreciate the deed.

Four

P
remier Vassily, ruler of all the world, was wheeled out onto the infrared heated balcony of the Hitler Pantheon in Berlingrad, the heart of New Germany. He stood on the tiled outcropping near the top of the immense marble-and-stone building, surrounded on all sides by the stern stone statues of the great Russian and German leaders of the past: Lenin, Stalin, Drubkin, Hitler and Goering. He addressed the multitudes below—over a quarter million olive-green uniformed soldiers in stiff straight lines reaching back as far as the eye could see. His frail voice boomed and echoed with authority, amplified and enhanced by the super-sensitive microphone on his throat. He sounded like Thor himself to the crowds, his voice rising over the strains of “The Ride of the Valkyries.”

“Fellow socialists of the National Socialist Party, known here in the New Germany as the Nazi Party: I come in friendship and fellowship to celebrate the 160th anniversary of the pact between the beloved socialist leaders, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin in 1943. Together they made war against the anti-socialist state of Poland. Today, I call again on that eternal bond between our two peoples to unite to defeat another anti-socialist enemy—the American rebels. The same Americans who brought about World War III, the same Americans who persecuted and forced into suicide your beloved Führer, Adolf Hitler, so many years ago. They must be crushed by our combined might.”

The premier paused for a moment as the music rose to a crescendo, signaling the crowd to salute.

“Sieg Heil! Seig Heil!”
they shouted by the hundreds of thousands, in waves that shook the ground. A thousand brown-shirted Nazi youth banged on huge typanies and crashed yard-wide cymbals together, creating a storm of noise and power worthy of Thor and Odin, the fierce gods of the Germanic people.

Vassily continued with his distorted history and his appeal to the masses of uniformed soldiers below him. “The spirit of our beloved Führer is here! I speak with his voice, his authority, with his love and racial purity.” The voices screamed back a quarter-million
seig heils
with raised stiff arms. The premier surveyed the ranks and the vast Pantheon. On either side of the three hundred-yard-wide, half-mile-deep rows of assembled uniformed troops with their horseshoe-crab-style helmets stood immense Doric pillars. Atop each ten-foot-wide, two-hundred-foot-high pillar, a gas-fed fire roared and leaped into the air timed to the utterance of the premier to accentuate his immortal words. The orange flames glimmered in five hundred thousand blue eyes, reflecting their inner fire and mesmerized attention as the soldiers stood with their long bayonetted Goering rifles gripped tightly in their arms like long lost lovers.

Vassily knew he had them. He hadn’t felt this way before a crowd since his inauguration as permanent premier of the Soviet empire some twenty years before. He felt younger, invigorated by the response of the fanatical crowd. Even
he
believed the power of his voice and its righteous tremulous words. Even
he
was swayed by the flaming pillars that cast flickering red shadows across the army of loyal troops before him.

Giant screens raised up on both sides of the elevated Hitler Pantheon on which he spoke as he reached the final page of his speech. Then from hidden holographic projectors the beloved face of
the Führer himself
beamed sternly out. By the miracle of modern science his face moved to the cadence of Vassily’s words. It was as if Vassily
was
Hitler, the two of them merging, becoming a unity, a single fearsome, being.

“There is one Fatherland, one Socialist world community, one master Slavic-German race,” Hitler shouted, his jaw jutting forward in pride, his head bobbing and waving in fanatical zeal. “There must be one world, one supreme goal for us all: the extermination of the radiation mutants. The destruction of the mongrel races of America. The Fourth Reich will stand ten thousand years, a million years, a billion years!”

Hitler himself now spoke Vassily’s words, his face shining with messianic fervor, his fists banging together with a violent rage. His lips spat out the demon’s invective, jingoistic slogans appealing to the basest evil and lusts of mankind’s savage underpinnings. “There is one world and it is Red. It is our destiny to spread the truth, the racial truth to all the world.” Vassily was having a little trouble concentrating as he listened to the slight delay of his words become the booming strident voice of the hundred-foot-high projected image of Hitler. He took a quick sip of water and continued.

“We must strike hard at the mongrel Americans for the sake of the world gene pool. These mutant monkey men and women and their
Jewish
leaders—” he hissed out the word Jewish, so that it sounded slimy, serpentine—“they must feel the iron hand of the master race about their scrawny necks.” He was reaching the climax of his speech but he felt himself growing tired, his lungs straining for air, his heart beating furiously in his heaving chest. He rushed on, his image as Hitler becoming more and more frenzied, the mouth twitching in ecstasy, the tuft of black hair hanging across Hitler’s forehead swaying back and forth with the rapid jerks of his mustached face like a python hypnotizing its victim.

“There is one master race and that is the Slavo-Germanic race. One world of power, and power is rightness. Power is truth. The Jewish conspiracy will be crushed, crushed, crushed!”

The hypnotized throngs screamed back, over a quarter-million
Sieg heils
rocking the Pantheon as if it were in the jaws of an earthquake.

“Was it not we Russians who, when Germany and Russia were tricked by the capitalists into a brief fight with one another, still fed and clothed the cold German troops at Stalingrad like brothers, inviting them into the socialist fold once more?”

“Yes,” thought row after row of wild-eyed soldiers. “It was so. These Russians and our Führer’s Reich will be allies again—like it was at Stalingrad.” Siegfried, one of the masses, standing near the very back of the vast Pantheon seats, screamed along with the rest of his Nazi comrades, yes . . . He remembered something as a child—a book his father had showed him. A book that said the Russians had been the bitter enemies of the Nazis. That they had murdered millions of German troops at Stalingrad and then invaded Berlin, forcing Hitler-the-Great to commit suicide. Siegfried frowned. He
had
seen that book—before his father disappeared, before the men in black leather had come with their long sleek car. The black car. They had never talked about his father after that. Denied he had ever lived there. And now the book was gone with his father. Ah, no matter. The crowd was cheering the Führer’s final words and Siegfried joined in, screaming, his eyes wide and mad, spittle spraying from his lips.

“AND YOU WILL SUCCEED, YOU WILL DESTROY THE MONGREL RACES. FOR YOU ARE GERMANS—GOD’S CHOSEN WARRIORS.” Hitler raised his arm high as the Nazi troops leaped to their feet en masse, eyes blazing in a frenzy of ecstatic hate.

The cheering lasted long into the night. Long after Vassily was rolled away in the waiting wheelchair to the jet that roared back toward Moscow. It was well that his black servant, Rahallah, had his ebony countenance hidden in the monk’s cowl on the Pantheon platform, Vassily thought, as he half dozed in the seat of his luxury AB-131 Airlifter. What if the Nazi hordes had seen Rahallah’s face? What would they think then of racial pride and purity? What if they knew that my most trusted aide, my second-in-command, is a full-blooded African? But deception is the word of the night—in politics.

Rahallah was awake five seats back, his heart pounding, as he looked out the window at the dark forests far below. The scene he had witnessed that evening filled his soul with disgust and repulsion. All these years he had faithfully stood by the Grandfather, thinking him to be the least of the monsters who ruled the world, hoping to affect the premier’s plan through his unswerving loyalty and kindness, hoping to influence the premier with his constant pleas for peace and a free separate African nation.

But tonight, tonight he had seen the black man’s ultimate nightmare—the monstrous Third Reich had been resurrected by Vassily to serve their world military needs, to invade the Rocky Mountains in America and find and destroy Ted Rockson and his famed Century City. But they had created something that Rahallah knew in his heart would not go away into a corner and die when it had served the Reds’ purposes. No, the fiendish display of race hatred and anti-Semitism last night was a harbinger of an even worse dictatorship to come, one that would be so total and consumed with destruction that only one man—one megalomaniacal leader,
a Führer to come—
could rule it. And Rahallah in his heart of hearts, in his clairvoyant churning soul, knew that when Vassily died—when the others like President Zhabnov in Washington fell—it was the evil destiny of the world to have the horrors of a Führer named Killov, the Skull, ruling over all, like the Antichrist predicted in the ancient prophecies.

Rahallah, with the blood of African kings pumping through his veins, at last fell asleep, his hands tightly clenched like claws on his lap. He dreamed horrible things. He saw the death of Vassily, the placing of his frail old body in the Lenin-Drabkin tomb, the solemn looks on all the commissars gathered in the Kremlin. He saw the KGB Blackshirts sweep into the city in helicopter gunships, the mass arrest of all of Vassily’s supporters, the execution by slow garroting and hot pokers of Zhabnov, the fat American president. Then he saw
himself
running, running bloody and wounded through the dark subway tunnels of Moscow. Then he heard the announcement on the radios, over the loudspeakers on trucks all over Moscow. “Killov is premier, Killov is the Führer, the world is united in his omnipotent leadership. All will obey his iron will—or die!”