by Ryder Stacy
He began feeling jittery, the shakes that had been bothering him more and more frequently making his hands vibrate uncontrollably. He walked quickly to his desk and took out his pill vials. He took two Alevils, a Methedrine, and a Placadyl. His need for the drugs was growing more intense with each passing day. He didn’t feel like eating, so he swallowed some vitamins and bulk pills as well, washing them down with a large mug emblazoned with the death’s head emblem on the side—a black skull and crossbones—of thick black coffee. He hadn’t had a real meal in weeks. His stomach wouldn’t accept solids anymore—just the pills. How long could he go on like this? But he had to until the crisis was over. At least until his forward positions—Kansas, Texas—were more secure. With the Doctors’ Conspiracy destroyed in Moscow, he was effectively cut off from his scattered forces in Russia altogether. Except Siberia, where Tirkolev, one of his most trusted lieutenants, ruled like a warlord. But they were in effect out of the running—their planes snowed in for the next three months at least, in 105-degrees-below-zero weather. But if the thaw came early, he would use their highly advanced fighter squadrons—against Washington.
Five
After a battery of tests proved that no permanent damage had been done to Rock’s system, he was given a clean bill of health and his first real meal—steak and potatoes and apple pie, with a big pot of coffee to wash it down. He perused the Century City Monitor, one of two independent newspapers put out in the city. HERO RETURNS CRITICAL, said one headline—expected to die, the copy inside read. But the headline the next day—REMARKABLE RECOVERY—made Rock laugh. That would teach ’em to print before all the facts are in. They’d probably been up half the night writing some poetic obituary for him and then were disappointed when they had to can it.
Rath, head of intelligence for C.C., came by to see how the patient was doing. “Any intel from your trip?” Rath, a narrow-faced man who ran Intelligence Services as his own personal fiefdom, asked Rock.
“Don’t get bit by cow-sized spiders,” Rock said. Rath wrote down half the sentence in his omnipresent note pad before he realized what Rockson had actually said. He scowled and put the book down.
“Listen, Rath,” Rockson asked, “what’s the story on the Re-Constitutional Convention? I’ve been hearing people talking, saying that the big meeting is about to happen—to form a new government. At least that was the scuttlebutt.” Rath looked suddenly annoyed.
“No one was even supposed to know about that,” the Intel chief said sharply. “There’s an open meeting in the Council tomorrow to explain the situation and vote for delegates. I can’t understand how that got out.” He looked perplexed. “Only two other people in Century City knew about it besides me—Dr. Shecter and Council President Willis. I can’t believe they would talk.” Rath took it personally when any classified information got out—as it often did. The grapevine of the city was virtually unstoppable, as the citizens loved nothing more than to discuss and debate every issue. It drove the head of Intelligence and Internal Security crazy. “Tell me, Rock, who told you?” he asked, with a hangdog look.
“Forget it, Rath,” Rockson laughed. “You know I’d never reveal my sources. Besides, from what I gather, your secret is on everybody’s lips. That’s what all the people are talking about. Relax, pal. No damage has been done.” The Doomsday Warrior paused, took a breath, and then looked up with a serious expression at the Intel chief. “Listen, Rath, I’ve got to go on this one.”
Rath sighed. “It would be too much of an ordeal, Rockson, right after your spider episode. The four people who will be elected to go must leave within three days. I don’t think you should be among them.”
“Not go? I have a clean bill of health. I’ll be needed to get whoever else is along for the ride through the wilds. You know what it’s like out there. As chief military officer, I should go, it’s my right, my duty.” Rockson didn’t say the other reason—he had to see Kim, Kim Langford, the daughter of the man who was organizing the convention to form a new American government, Charles Langford.
Rock had helped save her from the clutches of the Reds, and they had fallen instantly in love. The memory of her face, her silky blond hair, and her smooth, firm body filled his mind with longing. It was the first time the Doomsday Warrior had ever felt such deep and troubling emotions. He had heard from her once—via a letter sent by the newly formed pony express service that was attempting to link up the different hidden cities. She had expressed her love with the same intensity that he felt, and she hoped that he would be able to come to the convention, where she would be working with her father.
“I’m going!” Rock said softly but firmly to Rath. “Dr. Shecter, Dr. Elston, they all say I’m fit.”
“But psychologically, Rockson?” Rath asked intently. “You seem—withdrawn, different somehow.”
“It’s that experience of being . . . in another consciousness, Rath. When I was so near death—it made me feel at peace in a way I had never experienced before. You really ought to meditate more, Rath—it would relieve some of your tension.” The intelligence chief looked momentarily offended, but quickly brushed it off.
“This is it, Rock—what I’m hinting at is, can you kill? The few others who have had similar experiences to yours, deep, meditative, almost religious experiences near death, have not been able to kill. They’ve lost the capacity to commit violence. I lost one of my best field operatives that way.”
“Kill? Of course . . .” Rock started to respond but drifted off. Something deep inside him was saying NO! How could he kill again after experiencing the harmony of life—the harmony of life within him and the harmony of life among men. How? But he was able, without a lot of conviction, to finish the sentence. “Of course I’ll kill when the necessity arises to protect the party.”
Rath stared at the familiar, world-famous face—the mismatched eyes—one aquamarine, the other brilliant purple, the white streak running down the middle of Rock’s jet-black hair, the rough-hewn face, darkly tanned, chiseled out of stone, out of the thousand battles the Doomsday Warrior had fought in his life.
“Maybe you’re different, Rockson. Maybe even after such a near-death experience you, unlike the others, will still be able to carry on as before. But I have the responsibility of bringing up my recommendations before the assembled Council.”
“Don’t waste your time opposing me Rath,” Rock said, with a coldness that gave even the hardened veteran Rath a chill down his spine. Then Rock seemed to soften. His eyes went from Arctic crystal to the warmth of an emerging sunset. “Really Rath, we’ve been friends in the past. Have worked together. I appreciate your frankness. But I am the same. Harder, if anything. I’ll get our people to the convention.” Rath frowned.
“I’ll have to think about it, Rock,” he said softly. He rose and left the hospital room.
Rock rose from the bed and walked around the room for the first time in nearly two weeks. He did feel normal. His breathing, his muscles all seemed at last to be functioning with their full vigor. The doctors came in once again—en masse—nearly ten of them, each with a notepad, and began their eternal questioning of his physical and mental state. It was beginning to appear that there was yet another defensive armament in Rockson and others of his new mutant species, Homo Mutatiens. He apparently had the ability to pull poison from the body instead of letting it affect vital organs or the brain.
“You seem to have an extra organ in there of some kind,” Dr. Elston, the leader of the medical team, said with a smile. “Eats up poison and spits it out.”
“How nice,” Rock said, sitting at the edge of the bed. “Now can I get out of this prison bed? I’m starting to go crazy in here. Brain damage is occurring,” Rock said. “The kind you get from being bored.”
“No way,” Elston said. “The usual recovery time for these kinds of bites—toxic reactions—is at least a month. Why—”
“Sorry to disappoint your studies, but I can walk, I can talk, so I’m checking out, fellow citizens. I
t’s been swell, but—all good things must come to an end.” He rose from the bed, and in front of the medical assemblage dropped his hospital gown to the floor. The ten doctors looked at the naked mass of muscle and bronzed flesh before them with dilated eyes—the men in envy, the women blushing slightly but keeping their pupils firmly fixed on the rippling muscles . . . and other things.
Rock put on his civilian clothes—khaki slacks and white cotton short-sleeved shirt, plus his boots, taking them from out of the closet at one side of the room. Many of the inhabitants of Century City dressed up with more pizzazz. There were fashion shows from time to time, and people seemed to follow the trends, making themselves colorful and elaborate. But Rock had spent most of his life in the wilds, with nothing but the barest necessities. He couldn’t get into the stylish fads, dressing up to affect others. He wore what he wore and forgot about it. Waving goodbye to the assembled doctors, who scowled nervously at him for his breach of hospital protocol, Rock, feeling really good for the first time in weeks, headed out to the much more interesting levels of the vast underground network that made up the metropolis of Century City.
He smiled and nodded to people he passed—everyone scurrying this way and that, carrying out their workaday tasks. Century City was composed of a complex layer of tunnels that led to large, open chambers where industrial, processing, warehousing, and research activities went on. Rock felt like paying a visit to everyone, seeing everything. He had been given a second chance—for the hundredth time, and felt brimming with excitement and energy. There was something about almost dying that made Rock want to live passionately, to experience himself and the world to its fullest. He knew he had been very, very close this time. Had actually touched the other side, touched the light and the voices that flowed through the ether like birds migrating to the stars. It wasn’t terrible, something to be feared—on the contrary—it was something that drew him. He was curious as to . . . but not yet. He must stay among the living now. He was needed here in this most crucial of times. The survival of all Americans, if not the entire race, was at stake. It was his destiny to fight those who were servants of death.
He passed the Main Library and then made a quick trip down to Hydroponics to see how some extremely unusual hybrid vegetables he had discovered on a past outing were doing. Hydroponics—over fourteen hundred meters of rock-walled cavern, brightly lit with ultraviolet lights. Here, most of the city’s vegetable needs were produced, without one ounce of soil. Staffed with 1,287 people, it was one of the busiest of C.C.’s many subsections, a virtual underground farm, with ten thousand man-made suns. Rock never ceased to be amazed at the wonders of the underground world. He had traveled far and wide, and in general the country was a mess. Even other freefighting cities were often little more than hamlets with a bunch of ragtag fighters and pigs running around in the slop. But here . . .
Century City, the fabulous creation of a hundred years of guts and ingenuity, had had a less than auspicious beginning. It had happened on September 11, 1989, the last day of the Old Era. It was rush hour. The five-mile-long, eight-lane tunnel of Interstate 70, coursing out of the suburbs of Denver and reaching into Utah, was filled with rapidly moving vehicles of every type—vans, panel trucks, huge double tractor-trailers, small imports, rusty old Chevys. Eager commuters going back to another night of TV, roast chicken or pot roast, extra helpings, in their own little homes. The American Dream.
Then it had happened! The strike! Out of the skies they came, hundreds of flaming needles, ripping the heavens with their screaming descents all over the United States and Canada. Each needle spitting up into five, six, as many as ten glowing warheads heading down to its own special target. Some went off into the oceans or devastated the wrong area. But seven hundred of the missiles went off. Hitting Aspen and Cheyenne, Las Vegas and Omaha. Hitting Detroit and Tacoma, Texarkana and Little Rock. Everywhere the same—a retina-burning flash, a towering mushroom-shaped cloud. Millions were incinerated, tens of millions, in the first few minutes. Millions more staggered around, their eyes burnt, their skin charred and peeling, in a shock beyond shock. A world of megadeath.
The lucky ones died straight off. Another fifty million men and women and babies lingered on painfully for months. Their hair and teeth slowly fell out, their flesh wasted away until it looked like something gangrenous and rotted. And then, mercifully—death. Then the cancers, the malformed babies, the plagues of virulent, mutated diseases that took one man by the throat and let the next live. Then the bandit gangs, murderous packs of marauders, armed to the teeth, who roamed the country raping and burning out of bloodlustful nihilism.
The hardest-hit cities were the ones with the large black populations. The survivors concluded that this had been a deliberate racial policy by the Soviets—to get rid of the minorities of the U.S.—to make occupation easier. They knew well how blacks had fought their way up the ladder from slavery in America. They knew that blacks would not accept a new master—ever. So they “sanitized” the largely black cities of Detroit, New York, Newark, Chicago, with multiple hits. So much for freeing the oppressed peoples of the world.
Century City began as a would-be tomb for the people trapped in the five-mile-long tunnel when the war began. Avalanches from the surrounding mountains, exploding from nearby hits, covered both ends of the tunnel, sealing it off with nearly a hundred feet of dirt and rock—but it also protected those inside. Realizing the horror that had occurred, those inside used the situation to their advantage. They immediately elected leaders and formed into work groups, stripping their vehicles to make engines for electricity and rigging up air purification systems through the vent holes in the hillside. Somehow they survived, and soon even began doing well. Names such as Ostrader, Taggart, Meister, and Bonne. Men who took charge and made the tunnel dwellers constantly strive for more. They quelled the panic, made the best of the situation, and kept the democratic tradition alive. They realized that the Russians were moving en masse into Denver, largely unscathed, forty miles to the east, as huge numbers of giant airlifters began coming in each day. For anyone to leave and go his own way would mean death. They voted and it was unanimous. They would gather their strength. There were engineers, scientists, mathematicians, plumbers, teachers, auto mechanics,—even foreign visitors, Scots, Chinese, Swedes—all had been trapped on Interstate 70. They would pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, as their ancestors had done. And there would come a time when they would hit back—hard—against the bastards who were busy enslaving whatever they hadn’t already destroyed of America. The child rapers and the mass murderers would pay back in blood. It would be done if it took a century. Hence the name was given—Century City.
They gradually expanded their small society in the tunnel, hewing out more space under the large mountain that stood above them. At first, just extra storage space was built, but over the years elaborate complexes of tunnels and multilevels were added, and they now contained a bustling, industrious city. And they had changed too—or their children had. Certain minor mutations began popping up more and more frequently in babies born after the blast. Signs like white-star patterns on the children’s backs, or different-colored eyes, like Rockson’s violet and blue combination. Streaks of white on the hair, lack of body hair below the face. But it also became apparent that children with these traits were stronger, more radiation-resistant, better able to survive in the hard new world. These were the children of Free America who would inherit the land, who would retake the U.S.A. from her Red rulers.
Ted Rockson headed over to the gymnasium, which was located on the Sports and Entertainment Level. The large chamber was quite beautiful, with muted light coming from overhanging rocks that gave the illusion of being outdoors with palm trees ringing the sides. He headed up to the track—a round running track that had been built just a few years before. It circled around the edge of the largest gymnasium in C.C., about twenty feet above the basketball courts, swimming pool, and gymnastic equipment, which filled a footbal
l-field-sized workout area. Rockson changed into sneakers and shorts and hit the track. Within seconds he was running at full speed. When Rock worked out he never played at it. He knew what his body had to do out there, in the jungle that was America 2089 A.D. Pleasant jogging or jumping jacks weren’t the thing that would quite do the trick. He ran like the wind, tearing around the track like some sort of uncaged animal. The other runners on the sloped plasti-coated track looked on in astonishment as he sped by, until they realized who it was—Rockson.
At first the Doomsday Warrior’s body felt jerky, a little weak, but quickly his lungs, muscles, and heart fell into synchronization, and the perfect, motorlike machine inside of him took off. He ran for nearly twenty minutes at top speed, probably breaking twenty records of the old days on earth. But nobody was counting. At last he stopped. He let his heart slow and his breathing relax. The poison hadn’t damaged him. He looked down at his muscled flesh, at his thighs and calves. God had given him such a powerful machine, sometimes it hardly seemed to be himself, rather something he was inhabiting, as one crawled into a plane or tank. A piece of heavy-duty machinery.
Rockson headed over to Chen’s separate, enclosed section of the gym—the martial arts room. Some sort of demonstration was going on. From time to time Chen held tournaments, so students and freefighters could test their skills. The ability to fight well meant life. The freefighter’s main business was sending out assaults on the Reds. They could never let up on their hit-and-run tactics. The Russian bear was big, but it howled when stung and if stung enough—
