by Ryder Stacy
There! In the next dank basement room, a man—a black man in a white shirt—was talking softly to eight seated boys and girls. He read from some kind of book. The bagman hid behind a rusting girder and watched. He had seen books before but had never known what they meant. Americans were forbidden to read or learn anything by the occupying forces.
“And Washington was the founder of our country,” the black man said. “In 1776 the United States of America declared itself independent from its mother country, England, and after a war and much bloodshed found its freedom.” The black teacher spoke in a deep, reassuring voice. “Just as we shall, my students. Just as we someday will. Now today, we will talk about freedom. What it means, what it was like to be free.”
“Teacher, what is free?” one of the older boys, John, spoke out hesitantly. The eight students were part of one of several underground schools in the Russian fort which was holding its daily half-hour class. They could only meet for short periods of time for fear of detection, so the conversations between children and teacher were often strong and emotional.
The ebony-faced teacher looked down with a deep sadness in his eyes. “Free is what you can imagine, my children. Free is beyond what is here around you now. You must look beyond, beyond the destroyed land, beyond this fort, and see the new world that was and will be again.”
“Teacher, you show us books with pictures of what life was like,” Joshua piped up, the youngest and the brightest of the lot, his red hair dancing beneath a blue cap. “You show us strange trees and birds and fields and waterfalls, but we have never seen these things. They’re made of paper. How can we feel them?”
“I know.” The teacher shook his head and stood up. “That’s the hard part. How to imagine something in the middle of nothing. When I was younger,” the teacher said, his eyes opening wide in memory of the discoveries of his harsh youth, “I was taught the books and also could not imagine beyond this fort. Till one day I saw the sky turn a perfect blue. Not with the pink-rad haze or the purplish splotches like sores, but a brilliant, perfect blue. My eyes could hardly look at it, but I did. I made myself see it and I know that this was a blue sky like they had in the old days. It had come back again, just for an hour, to show us. The Earth wants to give us back the life that was here. She is trying. And if we try too, we can build life again and live in its beauty.”
The class was silent. All felt the emotions of the teacher’s secret vision. “Now, I want to try a little exercise. Sit down. All of you.”
The bagman stared from the outer room, unseen by the group. He was fascinated in spite of himself, feeling the stirrings of thoughts and feelings he hadn’t known for years. He sat and watched and listened, his jaw wide open.
“Now, students,” the teacher went on quickly, “today I want to try an exercise. Lie down and close your eyes.” The children lay back on the dusty dirt floor, hardly mindful of the filth they were touching. Their own rags were already nearly as dirty. “Let yourself float,” the teacher continued, his voice whispering in joy. “Imagine you are floating higher and higher. And out of the fort. You’re like a cloud, just floating over everything. You can see down on the fort and it’s just a little nothing now. It can’t hold you anymore. You float over the country and beyond the dust and the pink mists and you see green. There, do you see it? Those patches of green? Float closer—those are trees, hills and meadows filled with flowers and fruits. Bright rainbows of color. Let yourself crumble the walls, let yourself fly.”
“Stop!” a sharp voice barked out, as harsh lights suddenly lit up the illegal class. Five figures stepped from the shadows. They wore black leather uniforms, neck to ankle, and the terrible Red Skull insignia on their lapels. The dreaded KGB—the Blackshirts.
Their captain stepped forward holding a .9mm Soviet Special Service revolver. He aimed it directly at the head of the teacher.
“What are you doing, blackie?” the KGB officer demanded.
“Nothing, sir,” the teacher answered calmly, almost smiling at the officer, absorbing the insult.
“This is nothing?” the captain laughed. “There is no factory here. No clothes machinery, no mills. There is nothing a worker would do here. So I ask you again what were you doing?” He cocked the pistol and held it next to the teacher’s temple.
“Sir, we were just talking about how to survive. To get food, to live in this city. I was giving them some advice about using old food and where to sleep in the cold. Just survival. We must survive!”
The black-shirted officer looked the teacher in the eyes for a long time. Then without a flicker of emotion he pulled the trigger. The teacher’s head turned into a red spray that splashed back onto the students who gagged and screamed in horror. The body of the teacher fell to the stone floor with a sickening thud, its arms and legs twitching violently.
“You goddamn children,” the head Blackshirt screamed in his crude English, “get the hell out of here. If I catch any of you doing this kind of thing again, it will be your death. Let this be your lesson for today, my young ones.” He pointed with his pistol to the bloody corpse on the floor. The children fled from the basement classroom, crying and moaning. Back, back to their shanty shacks, their subterranean refuges.
The officer looked around the damp, dirty room and snorted contemptuously. “Teach them! Teach them what? The fool. There is nothing to learn—except obedience.” He scooped up several books on American history from the floor and slid them under his arm. He walked toward the crumbling doorway, the four KGB underlings fingering their guns nervously as they walked behind him.
Suddenly a figure leapt from the shadows at the Blackshirt. A flash of light, a sliver of steel, a horrible ripping pain in his throat. The bagman pierced the KGB captain again and again with his ten-inch ice pick. He stabbed the Red in the throat, ripping at it, and he screamed as he flailed with the weapon.
“No, no, you killed him. He was a teacher. He was good. No more, no more, more, more, more.” The captain’s face turned a ghastly pale as his lifeblood spurted from his severed jugular. He fell to the floor clutching at the filthy bagman, who laughed now, laughed wildly with all the madness of hell itself. “I done it now. I killed one. I got me one. They took my mind, but now . . .” The other Blackshirts frantically pulled out their pistols and fired at the filthy, cackling creature. The bagman gasped and flew backward against the dusty basement wall as five .9mm slugs tore through his flesh. He slid to the ground, lifeless, his eyes aimed at the ceiling—softer now as if he had stopped searching. Freedom was finally his.
The KGB officers ran to their leader. It was over for him. His world had ended here, on this slimy floor. His mouth was wrenched open in a scream of sheer horror, as he had gurgled vainly for air and realized he had only seconds to live. His eyes were open wide as silver dollars, the red veins almost popping out from the sockets.
“Trouble now,” the second-in-command, Petrov, said ominously. He stood up from the corpse. “There’ll be trouble for all of us now!”
Three
The Freefighters marched for days through the thick forests and valleys of the 150 miles of raw terrain. They could hear the buzzing of the Russian spydrones fly overhead every few hours but didn’t need to hide as the canopies of trees and lush leaves protected them from the spying Red eye. They had come the hardest route back, right through the center of the wooded region. It seemed a good idea with Russian patrols searching the entire area for them. Rockson had been through this region once before but it had been years ago. The land was more strangely vegetated now. It seemed healthy enough, in fact, very healthy. Large, sturdy bushes and trees. But they were different than years before. Pinkish tinted leaves, gray-green bark almost scaly, like reptilian skin. It was as if the plants and trees of the forests, after hovering on the edge of life and death for decades, had finally adapted to the changed environment by changing themselves, through genetic mutation of their germ plasm.
A forest of mutations, Rockson thought, walking at the h
ead of the Strike Force. Mutated trees, mutated flowers. This whole world is changing. It was nothing like the picture books he had seen. The color photos of America. America the beautiful. Well, parts of her still seemed beautiful to him, but it sure didn’t look like the old forests or trees or flowers.
Nothing stayed the same. Everything was evolving. Even he, Ted Rockson. People had not looked like him in the past. His body of pure steel muscle, his skin hard, almost like leather, impervious to cuts, sun and much of the radiation of the surrounding country. He had spent his life on the radioactive plains of the U.S.A., had wandered across her wide terrain. He was different; his eyes, the albino streak of hair down the center of his head—and his toughness. Ted Rockson was as hard as they come.
He had already been through a life of hardships that would have killed most men or left them blithering idiots. He had faced exposure to the elements two nights after he was born as he appeared too weak, too soft to survive. He was placed outside with only his meager wrappings—into the twenty-degrees-below night. He survived. Then the attack on his home by the squad of Blackshirts who killed his father and brothers and sisters after torturing them unmercifully, then raped and mutilated his mother. Rock had watched the horror through a knothole from his hiding place in the floor. He had memorized every one of the Red murderers’ faces, and vowed to track them down if it took his entire life. Then, the struggle across a thousand miles of wilderness in the middle of winter to join Century City after his own village was destroyed by artillery fire.
As a teenager, Rock had joined commando units attacking Russian convoys. Quickly he was filling out, turning into the muscled avenger who would come to strike terror into the hearts of the Russian troops as his name and uncanny ability to survive became more and more widely known. As he grew older he spent much of his time alone, learning the countryside and how to survive in it on nothing but his skills. He strayed away from Century City for months at a time, living in the mountains, spying on the Red troops, entering the Russian-controlled cities and memorizing their defense, their gun emplacements, their prisons—and most of all, the headquarters of the KGB. His life was dedicated to one thing and one thing only: the destruction of the Red armies in America.
His mind snapped back to reality as the roar of some beast hidden behind a clump of trees startled him. It was unusual for him to be caught off guard. He shifted the Liberator from his shoulder to his arm, but the forest predator, whatever it was, stayed hidden. They traveled during the day, from early morning to sunset, resting at night beneath tall, green-barked pines with gigantic, resiny cones. The air was sweet with the sap of a hundred thousand trees.
Birds appeared more frequently as they forged deeper into the forests. Birds, what a sweet sound. The men laughed and cooed back when they heard the birds chirp and sing. There were no birds in the fortresses and the hidden cities, or in entire sections of the country. Birds had been highly vulnerable to radiation and with the winds filled with radioactive dust for months after the nuclear war, almost all of the Earth’s bird life had died within weeks.
But now, as the Freefighters penetrated deep into no man’s land, bluebirds, jays, and redbreasts all dove and competed with one another for attention as if wanting to somehow share their song with these passing Americans. Only Rockson remained fully alert. It was good for the men to unwind and laugh, but he knew that danger was ever present in this new world. It was behind the tree, from the sky. It leapt, charged, spat and clawed—and it was always there. He was at one with the environment—a complex sensory apparatus attuned to the postwar world at every level of its twisted surface. He could feel the vibrations of the life around him, could feel the trouble that bubbled and brewed on every surface. But he did not shy from it. He welcomed it. He welcomed the danger so that he could live, so that he could feel his power, his strength. For Ted Rockson was a man who was defined by his adversaries, who was forged ever stronger by the obstacles and the dangers that he faced.
On the third day, the woods grew thinner. Fields of small, highly misshapen, red and pink poppies took over the terrain. Small field creatures were plentiful here, moles and skunks, mice and chipmunks, darting from cover as the men walked near their holes and hiding places. They entered a field of black wheat—long, thin stalks with purple dandelion-puff seeds on the tips. The Freefighters brushed against the puffs with their clothes as they walked through the waving field and freed the seeds which flew into the air by the millions, floating violet in the evening sun.
They walked on for days, continually encountering meadows of constantly changing plant life. It was as if a different strain of seeds had been planted on every hill. The flowers and vegetation were evolving for some reason in isolated little fields of their own. They passed roses with petals as big as baseball mitts, red and green, beautiful, fragrant and ringed with inch-long poisonous spikes; daisies of black and blue, mixtures of pastel gray and maroon, mauve and ember, dark and beautiful in the white light of the rising moon.
Rockson kept the lead as he always did when on the move, always looking ahead into the darkness, beyond the line of sight. Something ahead! He slowed the Freefighters down with a wave of his right hand, one of many hand signals they used, and crept forward on his toes to investigate. A glow. The ground seemed to be shimmering with a strange, wavering fire. He walked closer now. Whatever it was it didn’t feel dangerous. Before him lay a large circle of constantly shifting white light, a good hundred feet in diameter. As Rock walked closer he could scarcely believe his eyes. “Good God, it’s alive!” he muttered out loud. The phosphorescent circle of light was moving with rippling energy, alive with motion, spinning, whirling. Millions of tiny glowing larvae, wormlike creatures with one eye as big as a penny and bodies that throbbed like a heart from light bulb dim to flash bulb bright. They pulsed in patterns, sending waves of light and shadow across the living pond.
The rest of the Attack Force gathered behind Rockson who stood about thirty feet away from the living organism.
“What the hell is that?” Detroit asked, moving closer.
“No, no, stay away!” Rockson said quickly. “They’re an insect of some sort but I wouldn’t get too close. That pack has to feed on something.”
“Ever seen anything like that?” McCaughlin asked Rock.
“No, never,” he replied softly. “Never! It must be a totally new life form.” They watched in fascination, hypnotized by the warm patterns, the endless mosaics of curves and stretching lines of magnetic pulsation.
Suddenly a forest animal darted near the edge of the glowing organism opposite from where the Freefighters stood. Too close! A pseudopod of the glowing larvae snapped out from the pond and up to the bank, bringing the deerlike creature down instantly. It was pulled back into the throbbing pool and sucked down within seconds into the glow. The millions of larvae now throbbed as one like a great searchlight flashing on and off. After about ten seconds there was calm. The light seemed to dim suddenly and lose energy. The luminescence calmed to a dull glow.
“It ate and now it’s sleeping,” Detroit said with a chuckle.
“Just like a human,” McCaughlin added.
Four
Gen. Mikael Zhabnov peered at his ruddy, fat face in the mirror held in front of him by a trembling barber. The general’s black goatee had been well trimmed, his ruddy cheeks had been smoothed and his thinning wisps of blond hair were combed straight and flat across his nearly bald pate. Oily, the way he liked it. Scented.
The diminutive Afghan barber, who Zhabnov had brought with him all the way from Moscow, grinned as he saw the general obviously pleased with the trimming. Zhabnov smiled somewhere in his jowls and ran his thick, hairy fingers over his chin.
“Your excellency is happy with Abdul’s work?” the barber asked nervously.
“Don’t be presumptuous, barber,” Zhabnov snapped. “Your work is adequate, that is all. If it weren’t—” The threat went unspoken: the labor brigades in the hot zones. The little man stut
tered out a stream of inane apologies to which Zhabnov merely grunted. He pulled the white wrap sheet from his voluminous body and stood up. The barbar ran to him, sprinkling him with talcum powder with one hand and dusting him off with a whisk broom with the other.
“Enough, enough,” Zhabnov, the supreme president of all the Socialist States of America, said, waving his hands in the air. “Why must I be surrounded by fools?” He adjusted his bright olive uniform, pressed sharp as a blade, and the twin golden emblems on his collar, an eagle carrying a hammer and sickle in its huge claws, the symbol of his rank, and strode toward the door stiffly, sucking in his gut, raising his broad shoulders. The guards that were present everywhere in the well-preserved White House saluted and clicked their heels on both sides of the door as he exited the barbershop, located in one of many complexes that ran deep beneath the ancient building. From these offices General Zhabnov ruled America, sending out commands, gathering records and proof-of-shipment of crops to designated ports for transport back to Russia. It was a huge bureaucracy that had existed and grown for nearly a century, until it was as fat and complacent as a slug. And it ran itself—which was just fine with Zhabnov, who didn’t want to be bothered with “paper work.”
He stepped into his private elevator and sped up to the top level and out into the hallway of the West Wing.
Zhabnov was always slightly awed by all the portraits of the past presidents of the United States—Eisenhower, Lincoln, Kennedy, Reagan, and their Soviet successors—and the huge, haunting portrait of Washington, in gilded frame, always staring at him, eyes burning, accusing. He had asked Premier Vassily once if it were not possible to have that portrait of Washington filled in a bit, just around the eyes. Vassily had screamed, “You fool. That painting is priceless. It’s a Stuart. Don’t you know anything about history? You touch one paintbrush to it and you’re out. You serve at my pleasure and never forget it.”
