by Ryder Stacy
Kuzminski assembled thirty men and armed them with flamethrowers and tanks filled with the fuel for the dreaded weapons at Depot C. Authorization to go in and burn out the sewer holes, the basements and alleyway homes of the vermin of Little U.S.A. had been granted. There would be no meetings with trustee civilians this time, no asking for ringleaders to be shot as examples, as in the past. No! This time the flames would cleanse the filthy resisters.
Grim determination etched the faces of the tall, black-shirted extermination squad. Their face shields were pushed up over their cold, intense eyes. Eyes of hate and murder beneath black, steel helmets. Batons hung from their belts—the stun batons of the KGB. Laser electrode firing pistols in long, narrow holsters sat on the other hip. They wore acid-resistant jackets and pants; the scum of Little U.S.A. had started making sulphuric acid bombs from canisters of acid stolen from Russian supply trucks. The little bastards would rush from the shadows and splash the burning acid into Red faces. Eight soldiers had been blinded.
The thirty men were from a special KGB counterinsurgency squad trained to kill without mercy, to spread terror through the populace. The damned regular army troops would let the tots get away with valuable property, hesitant to shoot five and six year olds. But this KGB “Special Unit” had been thoroughly indoctrinated into the realities and necessities of occupation in a hostile country. Children are our enemies too. Especially children! With their hand grenades hidden in little paper bags, their acid vials, their hurling of garbage cans filled with rocks from rooftops onto passing troops below—they had a million little tricks. And they were without fear.
This “burn out” should have been authorized long ago, Kuzminski thought, as he hefted his flamethrower, checking the nozzle opening. The way the graffiti got out of control! Imagine a Soviet fortress city scrawled with “USA LIVES” and “BETTER DEAD THAN RED” and the inevitable “THE ULTIMATE AMERICAN WAS HERE.” Ted Rockson, the legendary mountain brigand that the rebels and the bagpeople all worshipped like some goddamned god. Kuzminski sized up the thirty-man force, making sure every bit of the dangerous equipment was properly sealed. If gas started leaking once flames were thrown . . . Was this Rockson even a real person? the pale-faced commandant wondered. Or just a myth. Supposedly he could slip through any defense, surmount any obstacle—be everywhere at once. Whenever anything went wrong, even when an accident blew up some ammunition, the writings went up on the brick walls, on the sides of parked Red trucks: ROCK WAS HERE! Fantastic that the higher authorities had let the city walls be smeared like this without taking reprisal action long ago. Kuzminski would have. Now they had learned the hard way what he had been telling them for months in his capacity as KGB Special Units commander for the fort. These incidents will build until there is a disaster, he had warned. They had scoffed. Now the third highest ranking KGB officer of Stalinville was dead, stabbed through the throat with a maniac’s ice pick. He shuddered, thinking of the major gasping for breath, hands covering the red blood pouring out of his severed neck. But now he was gone. The commandant was glad. He had been a bastard, always putting the lower-ranked Kuzminski in his place. Always commanding him imperiously in front of other officers and troops. Screw him, he thought with a grin. Now there is more room for the ranks below to be promoted. If he could pull this incineration action off without any casualties he would look good. Very good. The dead KGB officer’s position beckoned Kuzminski like the very gates of heaven.
He inspected the gauges of all the fuel tanks strapped to the Blackshirts’ backs. Full to capacity. The Death Squad snapped their shields down and, single file, smartly exited the supply station.
Sally, a garbage lady, was picking through the rubble at the southern edge of the Little U.S.A. sector. Overhead, split and twisting radioactive clouds crawled along in a deep indigo sky of death. Though no one in the city even noticed, it was a date that once had made Americans jump and scream in joy: Independence Day. July 4, 2089 A.D. She systematically poked through the sprawling refuse heap in which the Reds dumped all their waste, content to let the Americans smell it and pick over its rot. She had found many things in these piles. Once a comb, once a piece of flashlight that had matched another piece she had uncovered. And now she had that flashlight to reach her deep cellar home inside a broken oil tank—a good place for the past few years—warmed by her six scraggly dogs, safe. Safe. Sores of pus oozed down her chin and she wiped at them with cramped hands and arthritis-twisted fingers. She ate the plum peels and banana skins. Imagine, they wasted all that. Her dogs scrounged for bones and chewed hungrily at them. Children and an old, bent man in the muted gray stripes of a Russian prison uniform—an escapee?—loomed nearby. Everybody kept an eye on everyone else but let each other be. They were, after all, Americans. Still, there were always fights for little treasures. It was survival. The first priority was to live and Sally was a survivor. She had killed other Americans. Yes, but only to keep her strength up for Resistance Day. The day Ted Rockson’s hordes would sweep through the city. Then her strength would be needed. Not the half-strength of the weak ones she had killed to take away their food. They would have died anyway. She needed it.
Suddenly she heard steps—locksteps like she had never heard before. It was the dreaded Death Squad, KGB soldiers in their midnight black uniforms with the red skulls on their sleeves. They marched like robots over the rolling hills of trash. They were coming with . . . what were those tubes on their backs? What were the long tubes in their hands connected by black hoses to the tanks? She fought through her childhood memories. Memories repressed, finally forgotten—for good reason. Then she remembered. She screamed a scream to wake the dead. Screamed out a warning. Screamed in the loudest, shrillest scream that had ever issued forth from her lungs.
“Flamethrowers! Flamethrowers!” She began running, slipping, stumbling. The children didn’t know what was coming. They stood on the rubble piles laughing and jeering the oncoming Red troops as they had learned to do. They picked up rocks and began throwing them as the Blackshirts marched closer and closer. Their face plates reflected the random rays of purple-tinged sunlight that reached down through the poison clouds. They came in four phalanxes. The children weren’t listening to her screams. They weren’t—
Whoosh. The first flames shot nearly a hundred feet out from five roaring flame-throwing nozzles. The flames just reached the most forward children, the ones advancing to throw fist-sized rocks. Instantly they were aflame, burning candles of flesh. Steam poured out of their sweaters and overalls as the moisture of their flesh instantly evaporated and the pink skin turned charcoal black. Flames shot from out of their bubbling eyesockets, and grotesquely ballooned out of their mouths. The other children’s voices died out behind them. There was an unearthly silence for a second. Then they dropped the rocks and turned to run.
Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. Fifty children fell, twisting in shrieking agony; others continued to run, human torches. They ran among the other children, still further back in the rubble piles, grabbing at them, screaming for help, dragging them along in their mad death hysteria. Sharon, Stella, Rita, Maya, Henry, Cal, Mooney, Flatface—all the garbage children Sally knew, dying, dying as she watched in horror, from her hiding place in the ruins of a wrecked building.
The Death Squad didn’t lose step. They just kept advancing in lock step—thrump-thrump—goose-stepping to the junction in the road ahead. The Blackshirts stepped over the steaming, eyeless bodies, avoided the still-brightly burning corpses. The streets were deserted. Kuzminski led the second unit down the main avenue of Little U.S.A., a potholed dirt road about forty feet wide. No one was in sight—no resistance. He smiled. True force and they ran like dogs. Treat them severely. Make them hear death screams and they disappear. It’s easy. He had an erection in his leather pants as he searched the surrounding crumbling buildings with his cold blue eyes.
There! A hidden entrance, a partially opened cellar door—a way down into the tunnel system of the bag people, beneath the streets.
Wordlessly he raised his hand; the unit stopped. He directed his men to the doorway and they poured their flames down. Whatever was there will no longer bother us, the commandant thought with deep satisfaction.
Deke, the leader of the Black Dukes, was the meanest, most feared of all the teen gang leaders of Little U.S.A. He had taken on all the other gangs—the Desperados, the Live Skulls, the Minutemen—and beaten them down. He had ruled his turf in the southern sector of the American town for two years, collecting money from the peddlers, ripping off the stragglers. But as tough as he was, Deke could see that his time had come. He looked out from the third-floor window of the abandoned firehouse that served as the Black Dukes’ headquarters. The Reds were coming down the streets with weapons that were pouring fire onto everything. Men and women ran screaming before the onslaught. Within a minute they would reach the Duke’s hiding place.
Well he had to die sometime. It had almost happened last week—they were fighting with the Minutemen over a gallon jug of wine. He had been stabbed in the groin by an opposing gang member. He had slashed the guy’s throat from ear to ear. But he had known that his days were numbered. He kissed the rabbit’s foot on his necklace dangling from his neck along with charms of other animals and tiny, gold-colored cowboys. He woke the other gang members quickly. “The Black Dukes die today,” he said to each one. They stood in front of him, their knives at the ready in their hands.
“Nothing much to say, my brothers. We’ve had good times and bad times together. But we were brothers. Now we’ll die as brothers.” They slapped hands for the final time, gave their gang war cry and, swinging their bolo nunchakas, flew down the rotted board stairs and out through the slopes of rubble that lined the street.
The Death Squad, with Kuzminski in the lead, had just sent a wall of flames down a stairwell and were now heading toward two crumbling, four-story buildings. Suddenly a group of five animal-like black youths wearing black leather jackets attacked, leaping from behind a partially standing brick wall. The sharp blades of the Black Dukes dug into Red throats. The Russians stopped resisting. The gang members rose to their feet and charged toward the remaining troops who stepped quickly back. The flames poured forth again. The five Dukes lit up like Roman candles. Their eyes melted, their faces twisted in unspeakable agony as the liquid fire met their black flesh. Their faces were dissolving, their screams issued forth continuously like the shriek of a siren blaring out death. They staggered forward, toward the Reds. The Death Squad looked nervous. Some cut their throwers and ran as the Americans stumbled forward—flaming, insane, faceless monsters with groping, burning hands. The arms of flame caught one Russian and engulfed him in a death hold. A sound that was recognizable as some kind of twisted laughter screamed out from the sizzling vocal cords of the gang member as he and the Blackshirt exploded in flames. A second and third walking, fiery corpse-thing staggered forth as a second Red was caught in a hold by one of them, its charred black flesh spitting orange and red flame as it reached forward with strangling, smoking hands.
Commandant Kuzminski stared in horror from twenty yards away with the third unit. When would these Americans value their wretched lives? He turned to the right as he heard yells of defiance. A horde of pipe-wielding adult men—of all races, their clothes ripped, their shoes falling off their filthy feet—came storming at the Reds. They came in fast, knocking some of the Russians off their feet, before they were hit with a wall of fire from more flamethrowers. Dead men all, they came forward, most dying within two or three steps, falling forward on their sizzling faces. But some kept coming, even as they burned, cursing black oaths, diving onto the Red killers, igniting them. The screaming Russian troops who were chosen for the sacrificial flames ripped at their burning plastic helmets and their thick clothing.
Incredible insanity—surely not bravery—thought Kuzminski as he quickly dropped back to the rear. As they retreated, sending up wall after wall of flame at the still-advancing crowd of ghastly attackers, the fourth squad met them. Six men sent into one of the deep cellars; they had been lucky to get out. One was limping, one had his hands to his eyes, moaning and blubbering until he fell. A soldier gasped, grasping at his profusely bleeding shoulder, a small dagger still protruding from it. “We went in, but the children—they—they had acid and—” He fell forward, his eyes rolling up as a second knife stuck deep in his back, thrown some forty feet from the cellar entrance.
Kuzminski called a halt to the extermination. A planned careful withdrawal. Soon it became a rout. Then it was only Kuzminski and his second-in-command, Lieutenant Lysenko. Then Lysenko was down. Kuzminski ripped his liquid fuel tank from his back and threw it down along with the flamethrower. He ran in a mad dash toward the fence that separated Little U.S.A. from the Stalinville Soviet army sector. He was at the fence, the Americans were far behind. Just a hundred yards to the gate—he would make it. He would. He began sprinting.
The ax came out of nowhere. Sally’s hands were holding the handle. The head of the commandant severed cleanly at the base of the neck and rolled backwards, toward Little U.S.A. Kuzminski got a rolling, topsy-turvy view of the sky and buildings and ground. Something had happened—blackness closing in—the head stopped rolling. It was upright, eyes opened but no longer seeing. The Americans gathered around it. A young boy, burned on the leg and arm, his bubbling flesh peeking through the disintegrating material of his clothes, picked the head up and stuck it on a wood spear. He walked over to the garbage piles and found the highest one. He put the head on top, slamming the spear deep into the moldering rot and walked down.
Other filthy American bag and garbage people gathered silently below, slipping out of the surrounding ruins. Sally, standing nearby with her still-bloody ax, did a macabre dance, holding the weapon high over her head. One by one, the Americans joined the impromptu celebration around the garbage pile as dead Red eyes stared down at them uncomprehendingly.
Later, a boy not older than five, his face a mess of scars and oozing sores, found the body of the dead Red Death Squad leader. He dipped his fingers in the still-lightly bubbling blood that rose from the neck and used it to write, “Ted Rockson was here” on the brick wall that the corpse rested against.
So ended July 4, 2089 A.D. A good day for America, a bad day for the Red occupiers of America.
Twelve
In Washington, President Zhabnov lay in his recliner in the Blue Room, trying to relax. He couldn’t. The events of the past few days seemed to confirm Killov’s ravings about a real threat of overthrow actually existing in America. The rebels were strong. Events were showing that. The hidden city that had recently been destroyed—what did they call it? Westfort—had four thousand bodies in it when the radiation cleared enough for Red troops to go in and check things out. Killov had overridden his authority by the use of the neutron bombs, but the success of the action and valuable information that was uncovered would preclude a reprimand from either Zhabnov or Premier Vassily. Killov had lucked out this time, the president had to admit.
When the ruins had been thoroughly probed it was discovered that Westfort was filled with quite advanced weaponry and industrial machinery. It was well-equipped with both stolen and self-made tools. Most frightening of all, several areas that contained their most important undertakings and records had been destroyed with preset bombs designed to go off in case of attack. And Killov had said to Zhabnov over the phone after the attack, “I believe this Westfort is really one of the smallest of the American rebel cities.”
Smallest? With ground-to-air missiles and machinery capable of producing tractors? Zhabnov turned nervously on the blue velvet recliner. Perhaps he should speak to the premier about letting Killov have his fun with a few dozen neutron bombs. After all, it was nice here in the White House. Much nicer than it had been in Murmansk. He wouldn’t want to lose his position in the United Socialist States if he could help it. Besides, he would lose face if the rebels attacked any further. No, let this sadist Killov have his neutron bombs.
> The portraits of his Russian predecessors in the presidential office stared down at him. What would they do? His eye caught the picture of Abraham Lincoln: stern, penetrating, watching him from across the large, carpeted room. What would he have done? Lincoln had a rebellious area to contend with. He had freed the slaves, the blacks, and sent in armies of blue-coated troops to stop the gray-uniformed slaveholders. Zhabnov let a little smile cross his thick face. There! He knew his history. He had read a book or two when he came over, feeling it only proper to know something about the history of the beaten Americans. Lincoln had burned and destroyed Atlanta and half the South, 230 years ago. He had acted forcefully. I must act! But there are no slaves to free in the rebellious areas. Could I free the slaves in our cities to fight the rebel cities? His eyes lit up at the thought. This Mind Breaker device—if it could be used to make the American workers completely docile, or better yet make them fighting soldiers of communism—on our side—perhaps we could send them out to do our fighting for us. What a clever idea, President Zhabnov thought, totally taken with his own imagination. That is why Vassily made me president. I am so clever.
He rose, walked across the Blue Room until he came face to face with the portrait of Lincoln, “Ah, Mr. Lincoln, you have given me an idea. Thank you. Like you, I will free the slaves. Free them to fight for Russia. I will call in all my scientists and this expert on the Mind Breaker and tell them to convert half a million of our work-slaves into soldiers. American against American—as in your own time Comrade Lincoln. What do you think of that?”
He stood back, looking at Lincoln’s stern face. The president didn’t seem pleased. Zhabnov turned away and headed for his office. He would have to start right away on this brilliant plan. This would be something that even Killov would have to admit was a good idea. Not that I need him for help, but he could be useful. Yes, I will invite Killov and his technical people and we will discuss implementation of Plan Lincoln.
