by Ryder Stacy
Detroit Green pulled both pins with his teeth on the army-issue G41 hand grenades, counted to three and threw them, one a split second after the other. Detroit dove forward, as if from a diving board, straight down the slope, as an explosion rocked the air above him. Both choppers veered wildly, first away from each other, their control rudders shattered by the force of the blast, and then toward each other, two pendulums of steel death. They met in a roaring explosion of blood and fire, a hundred feet in the air. The rotors of the two MS-18s met and cut through each other like two swords crossed by invisible swordsmen of death. Locked together in a molten embrace they plummeted to the earth and exploded, sending up a hundred-foot ball of black smoke and cherry-red flames.
Rockson tore down into the woods, stopping only when he felt the cool darkness surround him. He looked back through the trees. He had survived. The hill was a charnel ground—a cemetery. The Soviet air attack was wiped out. But nearly a quarter of his own men were dead. Detroit came running from a nearby gully of weeds and small stones. He tore into the forest, laughing and clapping his hands.
“Check me out on that one, Rockson,” Detroit said, grinning from ear to ear. He held out his palm for the five sign. Rockson looked at the man who had just saved his life, one of his few close friends. He let a smile cross his sternly set face and slapped the black man on the palm with his own hand.
“Thanks, Detroit. I owe you one,” Rock said softly.
“Shit, Rock, you saved my damn ass so many times I had to stop counting,” Detroit snickered. “Besides, if we lost you we wouldn’t even know how to get home. You’re the only one knows these hills.”
Rock said a prayer at the edge of the woods as the other Freefighters stood, heads bowed, around him. “We lost six good men today. Six Freefighting Americans. Take them to you, God, or whatever is up there, above this hell. They deserve their paradise. For no finer accolade can be given a man than that he died to make his nation free.” Their faces set and drawn, the Freefighters picked up handfuls of dirt from the forest floor and threw them out toward their dead fellow warriors. Then they turned as one and walked away without looking back.
Dark green cumulus clouds gathered at the horizon as the ocher sun set over the snow-capped Rockies. In the thin, flickering violet air, a few hesitant stars had already appeared.
Two
A group of filthy, grime-encrusted men and women, their clothes tattered, dove into the rank pile of garbage that a Russian soldier tossed out the back window of the Stalinville Officer’s Commissary. They grabbed handfuls of the slop, meat gristle, stale bread and dark brown slimy leaves of lettuce, fighting one another, growling in guttural screams of need, of hunger. Twenty-five descendants of the American dream, now living in a nightmare of filth, poverty, swollen stomachs and death. Their Russian masters took everything of value and shipped it back to Mother Russia, to feed her great armies, her empire of forty million soldiers.
The Russian kitchen man, Lieutenant Sharovsky, from Tuarsk, a small farming village west of Vladivostok, had been in the occupying Red force here in America for nearly two-and-a-half years. Just six months to go! Shit! He looked out the window with disgust and amusement at the groveling American race. They seemed so primitive, so stupid. The Russian peoples were obviously superior—they had won the Great War. Now these pitiful “humans” were hardly worthy of the once-proud name, Americans. Licking their lips hungrily, they pushed against the low barbed-wire fence some six feet from the commissary door and begged. The commander of the fortress allowed the Americans to be fed the Russian troops’ leftovers. “It makes us look good. We help the Americans. We even give them our own food,” he had explained with a laugh. Now, every morning the kitchen crews would appear at the rear swing windows at the back of the fort’s mess halls, and the American dregs would crowd around, scraping up every scrap.
Sharovsky threw them more food, half a steel container of half-rotten beef stew. It flew through the air, a cloud of noxious, meaty spray, and landed on the clamoring beggars. Filthy faces moaning in the growing darkness. “More, comrade. Please, more.”
Around them, the fortress city of Stalinville came slowly to life as the morning sun pierced the strontium green-tinged clouds that flew high above the fort. One of the circling clouds of radioactive dust that now eternally orbited the Earth. It looked like it was dropping down toward the Russian complex. But it would take hours. Life in Stalinville must go on. The narrow dirt-paved back streets of the American sector began bustling with activity as the gray-uniformed occupants of the ghetto made their way off to perform their menial jobs for their Russian masters. Many of them worked in the Red canning factories in the southern part of the fort, the industrial sector. Others headed for the textile mills to make clothes for the Soviet troops. Everything was made for the Russians; the Americans were given the leftovers or the occasional surplus.
Peddlers were opening their small businesses along the winding street that was the main shopping area for the Americans. Shops, hidden, half submerged in doorways and basements, selling everything from old knives and pots and pans to scraps of salvaged material for making clothing. They hawked their wares as the crowds filled the muddy streets. Russian armored vehicles stood every five or six blocks, the crews looking down contemptuously. The workers stumbled from their huts, their crumbling tenements, and filed off to work. Those who didn’t meet work quotas or were absent from their jobs were subject to be sent out to the fields to do what was generically called Rehabilitation Work, but meant being trucked out to the surrounding countryside of Fort Stalinville. There, they would be made to rip the topsoil from the ground and pry out the boulders. The radioactive surface had to be removed so that the cleaner, purer soil below could someday be used again for agriculture.
“Cigs here! Get your cigs here!” a legless man, seated on a wooden pulley yelled out to the glum crowds. “We got cigs of every size.” He smiled cheerfully. “Got whole cigs for a ruble, half for a half, a quarter for a two cent, and a nibble for a pen.”
An old man with a face as long as a shadow came over, his immense, gray coat hanging nearly to his toes, as if to shield him from the darkness of life.
“You got any Marlboros?” he asked hopefully. He had smoked some years ago, when supplies were more plentiful. Before the new Russian premier, Vassily, had started shipping the tobacco out, lock, stock and barrel. The legless man winked, his white face twisting in a strange leer. He reached inside a torn, white corduroy jacket, one of the arms almost totally stained with blue ink, and glanced around conspiratorially.
“Don’t want no one to see this.” He held up a whole Marlboro, perfect, still ripe and pungent. The worker looked at it with a glow of recognition. His face lit up.
“How, how much?” The legless man leaned back on his stumps and folded his arms across his chest.
“For you—and I can tell you’re a connoisseur—I’m going to let you slide, my Amerikanski friend. Two rubles and it’s yours. And I’ll throw in a pack of matches—not full, but still has five left.” The worker looked at him, decided and reached a long arm down into a cavern of a pocket in the coat and extracted two sweaty rubles.
“Here,” he said, handing it over. The cigarette seller handed the man the crisp Marlboro and the matches.
“Enjoy, my dumkov,” the legless peddler said, smirking.
“I will,” the worker replied, rejoining the migrating lines of laborers. “I will.”
Stalinville was one of the larger Russian forts—stretching ten miles in a roughly circular shape, with an electrified wire fence surrounding the city. The Reds had split the complex into four sectors, their own totally separated and secured from the rest by special barbed-wire walls and defensive systems. There was no mixing between the Americans and the occupying Russian forces. The Reds didn’t dare go out into the night. The army had set up whorehouses using American women who were carefully screened, controlled and watched.
Stalinville was responsible for the f
ive hundred square mile area around what had been Omaha, Nebraska. It was a large, modern fort, one that had been built in the last thirty years rather than at the very start of the Russian occupation. Those were hellholes, barely capable of supporting life on an ongoing basis. They were highly vulnerable to radioactive storms, filled with leaks and holes through which the constant, deadly mists of the poisoned country blew with unceasing vigor, as if to fill their very pores with this glowing death.
The Russians, even now, a century after the Great War, had to be on their guard against everything. They were more susceptible to radiation over here, for it was much hotter than Russia. Only a few Red cities had been struck after the sneak attack. That was one of the reasons the Russian troops had to be rotated every three years, before their bodies started to suffer irreversible damage. The Stalinville Soviet sector was fed its own constantly filtered air supply, pumped into every Russian room and office. Outside the Red quarters, within the city, the troops would walk around with handkerchiefs around their mouths. And when out of the fort completely, on missions out in the “hot zones,” they wore the full radiation combat gear, including face masks, oxygen packs and heavy quilted suits. Somehow, the American Freefighters seemed almost immune to the rads and the thin air.
Stalinville was important, not only for her military might which kept the local populace bent under, but for her KGB Operations Center. She was the main fort of this section of the country for the dreaded KGB Blackshirts who appeared from out of the night and dispensed death to whomever they deemed worthy.
KGB Maj. Gen. Alexi Dashkov sat staring out the polarized window of his fifth-story office at the cactus-dotted plains beyond the fortress, stretching off to the misted horizon. Now the KGB had a new toy in Stalinville—the Mind Breaker. Just recently perfected by their scientists, it was now ready for use on the American resistance that still fought them in the unclaimed lands away from the fort—the mountains, the fog enshrouded valleys, the thick forests. The fools who still fought on would soon face their most formidable enemy. Thus far, they had even withstood torture using the hypnotic blocks that their scientists had taught them. They would only recite nursery rhymes and gibberish, even when excruciating pain was applied. But the Mind Breaker—that was something different, something that would change things. Once they could break some of these rebels, these bandits, and find out where their secret cities lay hidden, the resistance forces all across America could be destroyed.
Oh, how easy it would be to drop just one little neutron bomb on each Free City and eradicate the diseased area. If we just knew where, Dashkov thought, staring out the thick-glassed window, probing into the far mountains with his eyes as if searching for the rebels. Already the results were good. Three captured Freefighters, as they called themselves, had been captured and taken prisoner before they could kill themselves with those little cyanide capsules they carried. Strapped into the Mind Breaker they had quickly broken and a city had been found by the Soviet forces—Glennville, not a big city, about five thousand men and women. Their sobbing comrades could take no more of the Mind Breaker’s laser probes. They had told. The Russian MIGs had swooped down, bats of black death from the purple sky, and dropped a 50 kiloton neutron bomb right on the mile-wide grove of camouflaged trees and tunnels that was Glennville. A second later, in a flash of star fire, they had all been taken out. Vaporized, deatomized, riddled with gamma radiation so intense it fried their eyeballs like overcooked eggs and made black blood trickle from their dead, opened mouths.
Not pretty, Dashkov thought, as he had inspected the dead city. But efficient. Oh, how efficient. What a wonderful weapon. I love this neutron bomb. It is a blessing to mankind. And they do not even suffer—out in a second. It is almost humanitarian. And the radiation evaporates in a few days. I must get Killov to allow me to use more of these. Then, if we could just capture Ted Rockson, The Ultimate American, as these rabble love to scrawl on the walls, that would really break the backs of the rebel forces. That would change, as these Americans used to say, the whole ballgame!
The filthy bagman walked slowly down the long, narrow backstreet of Little USA, filled with garbage, excrement and vermin. He was nearly as dirty as the street, covered with a long, flowing, once-brown tweed coat, now more air than fabric, torn and bitten by fleas and mites, and coated with a layer of grease as thick as bark. The bagman’s face was brown, the color of wet mud. His unkempt beard covered the lower part of his face and his neck like some sort of net of filth.
He muttered to himself as he moved, slowly, furtively, like a basement rat. He placed one foot down, then the other, waiting, breathing in, then moving again. And he intoned as he walked:
They will die
Not I
They took my bread
They be dead
They took my eye
They will cry.
The bagman’s singsong kept the rhythm of his motion as he slipped around the corner of the street and onto one of the main thoroughfares of the poorest area of the American sector—if one could call a thirty-foot-wide track of dirt with a thin layer of gravel on top a thoroughfare. But the Russians didn’t care much about the roads of the American section of the fortress. They never came here. They wouldn’t dare come alone. Not here. Not where the slaves, the refuse, the lost ones lived. Like him. The ones with nothing. The Russians kept to their part, the southern sector, with their fortress bunkers, their vast, concrete, barbed-wired sanctuary, filled with kitchens and baths and televisions—things the Americans of Stalinville had never seen. The Reds had their own lives—lives of luxury, especially the officers with their clubs, whorehouses and dancehalls. They lived the good life, above lieutenant that is. Below—even for the Red troops—things were not so great. There was meat and warm bunks, eight in a room, but there were no luxuries. Every Red occupation soldier had been drafted. Plucked from the vast reaches of the Soviet Empire that now spanned the entire world. Soldiers from Soviet Georgia, the Ukraine, Bulgaria, East Germany. Units of men who sometimes could only barely communicate with each other and had to use sign language or English, which for the Reds had become a second language, a trade language, just to get the black market goods, the drugs, the girls they couldn’t obtain otherwise. But the Red rulers back in the Kremlin wanted it that way. The less in common their empire troops had, the less chance of a revolt.
With Red forces now controlling three-quarters of the world, they were like sitting ducks for the enslaved populations. Any Russian soldier who left his compound without a tank, an APC, or a full regiment was looking for death. And he would find it! Especially here in the back streets of Stalinville. Death from a knife, an ice pick, flashing in the darkness, a sliver of steel fire slashing into a Russian gut, a Red throat. The Russians were not well liked in a city they had destroyed and then taken as their own.
The wretched bagman turned the corner slowly, an arm, then a leg slithering around the chipped brick edge of one of the many run-down, collapsing tenements in this part of the city. There was danger everywhere. He dove to the ground. Three Red armored vehicles rolled by guns at the ready.
They must be making a sweep of some kind, the wretched man thought in the midst of his stupor. For me? No! They wouldn’t worry about a nothing like me. Suckers, the Reds called them, those lowest dregs of humanity who slept in the deserted back streets and alleys of the Russian forts. Too dumb or too weak or mad to fit into the Russian plans, the factories, they roamed the streets eking out a miserable survival from the garbage. He was one! Yes, but he was clever.
The bagman felt for the ice pick that he always carried, wrapped just inside one of his big, flapping sleeves. He had used it already and would again if attacked by one of the other lowlifes who existed in this ghetto jungle. He slid through the stark shadows cast by the rising sun, meshing with the orange clouds buzzing with a high-pitched static electricity as they flew by overhead. The APVs rolled by a half block away, not even noticing him. He grinned instantly at his successful avoi
dance of the Reds and then let his face drop back into its set, eye-bulging sneer of pure madness.
Bagman searched for food as he walked, looking in doorways, stopping at the sight of anything that might be of value—an old boot, a broken bottle. In the world of 2089 A.D. everything was worth something.
“What? What?” he mumbled to himself, spotting a dull shine in the dirt. He walked quickly over and got down on his knees and dug for the object. He pulled out a round piece of metal about an inch in diameter and rubbed at it furiously with his filthy sleeve. The dirt slid away like sand from an old tired eye and revealed, “United States of America” and “Quarter Dollar.” He smiled to himself. He had seen these before. Once they had been the money of America. He knew that! Not during his life but once. The ruble had been the currency since he was a boy. The quarter looked strange to him and yet somehow bizarrely familiar as if he had seen it before in another life, another world. His head hurt. He didn’t want to think about it. No, no, it was too painful.
Suddenly he heard a noise. Someone talking. He threw the coin into his “special” inner pocket and moved toward the sound, always looking, darting from shadow to twisted shadow. He moved down a flight of old stone stairs, covered with dust and spider webs at every side, forming a canopy of glistening silk threads. The bagman brushed them aside, watching for the spiders that had bitten him once before. Big they were, and fast. Red and orange striped. But now they were gone. He moved into a basement room using the shadows, the darkness and the broken stumps of furniture as cover. This was his world, the underneath, the behind, the under.
