by Ryder Stacy
“Your city? Your city?” Yurov continued, slapping him lightly on the right cheek.
His what? Oh, his city. They wanted to know. Yes, his city. But no, he wasn’t supposed to tell. But why? He couldn’t remember. There was a reason, there was.
“Tsk, tsk,” Dr. Yurov said, staring down at the trembling shell of a man. “I’ll have to use the probes again.” He started to lower the helmet.
“No! No!” Preston screamed, bolting up. “It’s just about three hundred miles west of here. Westfort. Just inside three valleys, where the Falls River splits into two. It’s hidden in the trees and there’s . . .” He trailed off, suddenly looking confused, staring down at the floor.
“Good, very good. That’s all for today.” He lifted the helmet completely to the side and applied an antiseptic to the two quarter-inch holes at the top of his skull, followed by a gauze pad and bandage. “We’ll meet again,” Yurov mumbled pleasantly as the guards took the nearly catatonic Free American off to one of the holding cells for future interrogation.
“Excellent, Dr. Yurov, excellent!” Killov said, standing up behind the glass partition and clapping. The other officers quickly joined in. “Your device more than lives up to its reputation. I’m very pleased.” The KGB leader allowed as much of a smile as his officers had ever seen to pass for a split second across his stone face. “I want to see more. But first, this city must be disposed of.”
Killov exited from the viewing booth with the officers following closely behind. Dr. Yurov tidied up. “Such a good machine, such a good machine,” he mumbled absent-mindedly, almost stroking the helmet as he wheeled it on its stand back against the wall.
In his eightieth floor office, Killov began shouting orders over telephones and intercoms. “Immediately, I want an advance reconnaissance plane, two drones, to advance to these coordinates: G-5, T-2 on Western Sector grid map. Transmit only in attack mode code. I want them off the ground in three minutes.” He turned to General Yablonski, commander of the KGB air force. “I don’t want army or regular air force in on this,” he said, his eyes as cold as steel frozen by a Russian winter.
“Of course, your excellency,” the suave air commander answered, lowering his head in a slight bow.
“We will use two of the neutron bombs that I have stored away just for this eventuality.”
“But, sir,” Vice General Sracksin spoke up from out of a group of about twenty assembled officers. “Premier Vassily has given direct orders to all military personnel not to use—”
Killov glared at the offending officer. “You dare tell me what to do?”
“Oh no, not at all, sir,” the admonished KGB officer said, his voice cracking slightly.
“The premier doesn’t want us to go out hunting with atomic bombs—not go setting them off like madmen,” Killov said coolly, addressing the Red brass gathered around his office. “But now we know where these rebels are. This is a surgical operation. Clean. Instantaneous. Believe me, my unthinking comrade, when the premier sees what we have done, he will give us medals.”
“Yes, yes, of course. I didn’t understand,” the vice general whispered, trying to blend back into the group of officers. Killov made a mental note to get rid of the idiot as quickly as possible. The man was probably a plant of Zhabnov’s or the premier’s.
“Now,” the KGB commander continued, “I want you personally—” he addressed Yablonski—“to pilot the bomber that takes these in. You’ve had experience with this sort of thing. This mission can’t fail. You know what’s at stake, and you’re the only man I trust to carry it out flawlessly.” Killov looked at the young rising star of the KGB. If he handled this one right, big things were in store for all of them.
“I shall not fail you, leader,” Yablonski replied. He saluted and walked out the door, heading for the airstrip a quarter mile away. A Ziv staff car picked him up at the door and quickly whisked the general to the air base where his Sukov swingwing bomber was already fueled and waiting. And loaded with the two neutron weapons, mounted under each wing. He suited up and, five minutes later joined his co-pilot, already seated at the controls. Yablonski took command and let the controls ease into his hand with that cool, familiar feel of cold steel. Within two minutes they were tearing down the runway, quickly reaching air speed. Once up a thousand feet, he hit the transsonic overdrive and nosed the death-dealing bomber toward the target coordinates.
Eight
The day began beautifully in Westfort. The green valley was flooded with the clearest sunlight the Free Americans had seen in years. It always thrilled their hearts to see the sky so clear, so open. The town’s mules, hybrids, wagons, all began making their way along the hidden roadways, beneath the overhanging trees and camouflage netting. The sun’s rays trickled down through the green and red and golden leaves, creating patterns of dappled light along the dirt roads, and onto the hides of the animals protesting at pulling their loads.
The people of Westfort were in a good mood this morning. Somehow things suddenly seemed all right with the world. Oh, there were plenty of problems. Westfort was a relatively primitive city. Without the scientists at the disposal of Century Gty and some of the other more developed and technologically advanced Free Cities, and without the equipment or supplies, the city had over the years adopted a laid back, Western style of living, of easygoingness. Farmers, small craftsmen, hunters, the city of about five thousand traded with one another and with neighboring towns to meet their subsistence needs. They lived in wooden cabins, fifty or sixty feet apart, and shared communal bathing facilities. There was a sense of comraderie, of sharing, in Westfort that was worth all the gold or electrical generating equipment in the world.
The farmers and tradespeople on the many winding roads of Westfort waved and stopped to talk to one another as they passed as if the morning could go on forever. Here and there, children ran playing, wrapped in different colored ribbons, Tonight was the celebration of the annual harvest planting. There would be dancing and feasting on wild pig and turkey caught especially for the occasion. The festivities would, of course, be held underground in one of the large mining tunnels that the Westfort citizens had expanded during the eighty years since they had founded a community there.
Many of the Free Cities that now lived a secret life hidden from the eyes of their Russian enslavers had sprung up—just out of nowhere. Two families—the Capstans and the Maldanados—fleeing from the storm of atomic bombs that fell that fateful day, a century earlier, had traveled for weeks in the woods and then come upon these valleys at the foot of some low mountains. They had stopped to camp for the night or two to catch their breath, and had never left. Westfort was populated with their descendants and a few lost stragglers who had wandered in from time to time.
The citizens of Westfort set about their daily tasks—working the fields hidden by ingenious brown netting that let light through but created the illusion of being solid ground to any passing videodrones or choppers. There was much to be done this spring. The earth seemed to be growing more and more fertile every year, now that they had learned the trick of dampening the radiation by burying it deep and constantly adding topsoil from the forests and mulch and organic matter. The last three years’ crops had each been better than the one before it. This year they had added string beans, pumpkins and peas to their growing list of vegetables. Maybe someday, all the ancient fruits and vegetables of America would be brought back into cultivation. They saw themselves as more than farmers but as the regenerators of a new United States. The keepers of the flame of agriculture and a way of life. These seeds were in their safekeeping for future generations to have and hold and plant.
In one of the fields, little Jamie Curtis ran squealing behind her father’s mules as they pulled a large, double-sided plow that swept the dark earth into two mounts on each side of the blades.
“Watch out, Jamie,” Pete Curtis, Jamie’s father yelled as he pulled the reins of the two stubborn mules as hard as he could. “Come on now, you get awa
y from there. You could get hurt!”
The little girl ignored her father, playing in the spray of dirt that flew up behind the groaning beasts of burden. Her blond pigtails tossed in the early morning breeze as she jumped and frolicked in her denim coveralls. Pete stopped and looked at his daughter jumping. He had to laugh. She looked so darn cute. What a lucky man he was. A wife like Jenny and a little girl who could laugh at life and play. His hunting dogs. Life suddenly seemed rich and even in this half-destroyed world. With renewed vigor he returned to plowing the field.
“Get on there, you damn mules.” They brayed back at him, opening their long jaws and pulling back the lips to reveal white, cavity-mottled teeth. This time they weren’t going to move and that was that, they decided. Pete dropped the reins and went behind them to start kicking. “Won’t move, here, why—”
Everyone in Westfort heard the sound at the same moment. The city was only two miles from one end to the other. You could almost yell to someone on the opposite side. The sound grew louder. A machine? From the sky. A plane! They tensed. They were well hidden, but still. The Sukav roared in until it was directly overhead, four thousand feet up. Through the air holes of the netting, the spaces between trees, the townspeople stared up apprehensively. Two small, glinting objects detached themselves from the jet which immediately wheeled sharply to the left and accelerated its departure in a trail of blue exhaust. The people watched curiously as two parachutes opened over the falling objects and slowed them to a crawl as they dropped directly toward the center of the valley.
“What is it, Daddy?” Jamie asked, standing next to her father who stared up, shielding his eyes from the sun with an upturned hand.
“Don’t know, baby, maybe some kind of leaflet, writing or something.” The Russians had, in the past, dropped posters ordering the surrender of all Free Americans. They had dropped thousands of tons over vast sections of the country about ten years earlier. “Surrender and you will not be harmed,” the badly typed sheets read. The Freefighters had had a good laugh at that.
The parachutes dropped lower and lower, hovering right over the center of town. Every eye watched, every heart slowed to a crawl. Suddenly there was a ball of fire in the sky. A blast so hot that it burned every eyeball, instantly fusing it to its socket, turning the faces of the watchers into a black leathery substance in less than a millionth of a second. They didn’t have time to scream as the heat and gamma rays of a million-degree thermonuclear neutron bomb shot through their living cells. They crumpled to the ground, their cellular structures broken down into a mass of putty and charred carbon. Brains oozed out of black eyeholes and wide open, powdery mouths. Fingers slid off of hands and feet dropped from legs as the tissue, the muscle and the tendons dissolved and fell in boiling puddles to the burning ground. Every living thing in Westfort, every man and woman and child, every goat, and dog and sheep and cow, every bird, every plant and tree and blade of grass was instantly and totally annihilated.
The smoke of the two blasts formed into one violently churning mushroom cloud, glowing orange and yellow and black, that quickly stretched up nearly two thousand feet in the air. But with the western wind strong this morning, that soon blew away. Now the town looked positively peaceful. The houses mostly intact, coffee cups standing where they had been set, a canoe drifting silently in a still pond. Only the shriveled bodies, as black as meat cooked for days in a blast furnace, and the stripped and smoldering trees betrayed the fact that something was wrong. Terribly wrong!
Nine
Century City’s main underground thoroughfare was bustling with people and activity as Rockson left the Council chambers and walked slowly through the center of the Lincoln Square, nearly a thousand feet square and a hundred high. Here, the main industrial and assembly work of the Freefighters went on, with large ventilation fans in the raw rock ceiling pulling out smoke and chemical fumes. It had been nearly a month since Rockson had had time enough to slow down and see how things were going. Broad smiles met the appearance of the man who had done so much to free America. The Ultimate American was a legend throughout the continent, to the downtrodden masses who saw in the uncatchable Rock the symbol of all their striving, their anger, their hatred for their Red masters. But in his own city, he was also one of the citizens, who the people knew as a compassionate man. Rock knew many of them by name, always talking with them when he could, helping with problems.
“Howdy, Rock,” an elderly, white-bearded gent said, pushing a dolly loaded higher than he was with chemicals for the hydroponics.
“Hey, Keaton,” Rock said, smiling, slapping the wiry old codger on the back. They had gone out hunting together years earlier and Rock still remembered things the old-timer, who had prospected for years, had taught him about tracking. “We’ll have to hit the plains again,” Rock said.
“Goddamn right,” Keaton replied with a toothless smile, pushing his load forward. Rockson moved on, exchanging greetings with scores of Century City citizens who stopped to talk and press the flesh of their war champion.
The jobs of Century City were divided up by a complex process of lottery and skills. Those who were highly trained in such work as computer chip assembly, weapon making and hydroponics worked continuously at these jobs, but even they were expected to put in their share of free time working on the ever-expanding tunnel network of Century City, which had to be continually added to to accommodate the city’s growing population, storage and industrial needs. Other workers were chosen by rotating lottery to work at the needed labor—changed every few months so that all citizens shared equally in the hardest and least-favored jobs—sewer maintenance, the manual jobs of transporting goods, working on the camouflage materials above the entrances to the city. The most prestigious job of Century City, and the one that all citizens had their names on waiting lists for the apprenticeships to open up, was the building of the Liberator automatic rifle. The rifle, Century City’s main export to other Free Cities for use in the war against the Reds, was the pride of every man and woman of the town. Invented by Dr. Shecter, it was a .9mm rifle that could with a snap of a switch change from single shot to full auto. With a muzzle velocity of twelve hundred meters per second firing fifty-round clips, the non-jamming rifle came with silencer and infrared nightscope. As the Reds had found out, the rifle could rip a man’s chest apart at half a mile. The Liberator was one of the Freefighters’ most potent weapons against the Red invaders and it was much in demand in the other hidden cities who traded back their own small-scale industrial goods, pelts or produce as payment. The Liberator was produced in a large factory assembly-line layout at the northern section of the cavernous industrial square. Work went on twenty-four hours a day in three shifts of two hundred workers each. The need for such weapons was too great and too important to ever stop. Over four hundred of the weapons were produced a day, then shipped out in small ten-man groups on mule and hybrid.
It was Dr. Shecter’s dream, and Rock’s, that within the next ten years, assembly lines for the rifle and ammunition could be built in all the Free Cities. Shecter was busy designing much more powerful weapons that he promised to reveal to Rock as soon as the bugs were ironed out. The more firepower the Freefighters could train on the Red armies, the quicker their asses would be kicked all the way back to Red Square.
Rock walked over to the Liberator factory and moved from line to line greeting the workers who looked up but continued to perform their jobs for they knew one stoppage would snag the whole line. Rock hefted a just-completed Liberator from the end of one of the lines and sighted down its three cylindrical scopes—one of Shecter’s innovations. Perfect! But of course—the men and women of Century City took their work seriously. A faulty rifle could well mean the life of one of their fighting teams. Could be a brother, a son. The rifles were as perfect as human dexterity could produce. Every one they helped turn out had their spirit in it, their guts and dreams for the future.
Rock continued along the assembly line to where about thirty men an
d women were filing away at the super-hardened manganese stocks, putting them into final form.
“Hello, Mrs. Greiger,” Rockson said, putting his hand on the shoulder of a middle-aged woman with deep purple circular lines under her eyes. “How is he?”
“Oh, you must have been away, Mr. Rockson,” she answered in a monotone. “He died four days ago. The fever got so high. His flesh turned dry and flaky. He was in much pain.” She looked as if she were about to cry. “But he never complained. The funeral was yesterday.” Charles Greiger, her husband, had been bitten on the hand by a small albino spider while on a wood-gathering squad. By evening his hand had swollen to the size of a grapefruit. Within twenty-four hours he had lapsed into a deep fever and a semicomatose state. He had somehow lingered on for nearly a month but death was inevitable.
“I’m sorry,” Rock said, looking down at the concrete work floor. “Charles Greiger was a good man. A member of the Council, a good hunter and a brave fighter. I will remember him.”
The words seemed to genuinely brighten her disposition. Her mouth relaxed for the first time in days. “Thank you, Mr. Rockson,” she said in a whisper.
Rockson took the elevator four levels down to hydroponics to see how things were going. There had been a virulent fungus that had killed nearly a quarter of the city’s crops just a week before he left with the Attack Force. He walked to a sliding steel door and held his palm up to a sensor set in the solid rock wall. The door slid open and Rockson walked into a well-lit agricultural paradise, nearly a quarter of a mile long. An entire level had been devoted to farming, not just to provide foodstuffs for the citizens of Century City but to perform experimentation, crossbreeding with different vegetables and fruits—more radiation resistant, disease immune—but still maintaining the nutritive value of the crops. Within temperature-controlled walls the biologists who worked these sections had stored and catalogued nearly half of every variety of plant and vegetable from prewar America. They were ecstatic when a member of the community, hunting expedition or Attack Group came back with new varieties of flora. Someday, every one of these seeds would be the beginning of millions, billions, of plants that would cover the decimated continent once again—when it was free.
