by Ryder Stacy
Rockson walked in and spotted Rona, the redhead who had been much more than a friend to Rock for years, near the side of the audience. She motioned to him and then put her fingers to her lips as he started to say something. He sat down next to her on one of the many za-zen sitting pillows. In the center, Chen was giving instructions to two young women, both not older than sixteen, who had just finished tying boxing gloves on. They were dressed in the black gi that all martial arts students in C.C. wore when practicing. Chen had learned much of his fighting and espionage skills from his father, who had learned from his father—the arts of the ninja. A lifelong study by Chen, until his own father had been taken by the Blackshirts on a mission seven years before. Now Chen, thirty years old, and a picture of the oriental warrior, with his proud, high-boned face and catlike eyes, spent his life teaching others to fight and accompanying Rock on many of his missions. Of all his men—and every one of them was tough as desert rock—the Doomsday Warrior would have to choose Chen as his top man. Many times the two of them had been down to the wire, with Reds closing in from everywhere . . . yet somehow they had made it.
Chen, dressed in his own neck-to-toe black robe, stood in the center of the mat between the two girls, giving them instruction once again for the fight. He stepped back, and the two of them went at it like wild cats, spinning and flailing almost faster than the eye could see. As good as each was on the attack, they were also equally adept at defense, sliding backwards, dodging rains of kicks and punches. The slightly taller one, with long red hair tied behind her in a ponytail, got in a sudden side kick on the slightly smaller brunette, which lifted her right up in the air and carried her backwards nearly a yard. She rolled with the blow and came to her feet spinning around backwards with a flying back kick. The taller girl came at her, pouncing upon the downed girl with the speed of a leopard. She was met with a sudden snapped-out foot in her stomach. She fell backwards to the mat herself, somersaulted over, and came to her feet.
The audience around them was quiet, watching the moves of each of the two—both higher ranking students in Chen’s school. Even Rock, fighter par excellence, was fascinated by their swiftness, their reflexes, and the apparent power of their punches. Rock had seen a lot of women study karate in the past, but it really did little good in the kind of fighting that actually occurred out in the war zone, where nothing came at you the straight route. But these two—if these were the kind of students Chen was turning out on a regular basis—he’d match them against anything the Reds had to offer. A new race was being born—tougher, leaner, stronger than Americans of the past. They would reclaim the land, and they had the strength to do it. The two girls went at it for several more minutes, each getting an occasional punch or kick past the other. But they seemed quite evenly matched, knowing each other’s tricks, feints . . . at last Chen stopped them and they bowed with friendly smiles to each other.
“Now I shall demonstrate some advanced techniques,” Chen said to the assembled nearly two hundred fifty people who sat around watching. Martial arts were well studied and practiced, and the events where Master Chen showed his methods in the martial arts system he had developed himself were highly attended. He had created a combination of many of the classical forms, linked together by his own concepts and observations. He called it Go-Tai-Do, the way of the harmonious and powerful fighter.
“We must kill,” Chen said softly, as he stood near the middle of the thick tatami mat. “That is the nature of things in our age. I pray that someday martial arts will return to the pure process of self-perfection. A way of bringing out all that is good in a man and woman. But for now, we must be able to strike, instantly and with total destructive power. That is why the things I teach are not games or toys. Every one of you is a fighter. Everyone of you will fight. Some of you will die. As perhaps I will, or even Ted Rockson.” He bowed slightly to his friend across the room, who returned the gesture. Every eye turned and then turned back again.
“Today I will show you techniques for taking out an opponent without killing him. There are times we may wish to capture a Red officer, or whomever. In this case, we must disable or hinder their ability to fight back without actually damaging their mental facilities. Broken kneecaps are very good for this,” Chen said calmly, stroking his narrow drooping mustache as he spoke. He pulled a six-inch-long piece of metal from his loose-fitting black jacket. He pressed a switch on the end and the dark cylinder expanded out another twenty-four inches, until the entire thing was nearly a yard long.
“Now you all have these,” Chen said, “it’s standard issue equipment for C.C. fighters. But I can never overemphasize the power of such a weapon.” He went down on one knee and spun around like a top, whipping the thin, pipelike piece of steel, razor-sharp at the very tip. “You can take out twenty men with one of these with this motion,” Chen said, continuing to whip around in a blur, creating a virtual propeller of the rod. “But the spin is important. The tip of the rod must be extended out and the Chi made to flow down through the fingers and into the weapon. The power of the mind keeps the Dobi,” as the weapon was called, “firm and strong, so it cannot be knocked from your hands. When it strikes the kneecap, it either breaks it with the force of the blow or cuts the tendons with the tip. Either will suffice.” The Chinese-American demonstrated a number of other techniques with the Dobi, including strange holds, killing blows on the neck, and ear centers, as well as how to throw the weapon like a spear, if necessary.
“But now for the main lesson of today. The reason for this little entertainment.” The crowd tittered appreciatively. Everyone was a little in awe of the speed and agility of Chen, who was perhaps the one man on the Planet Earth who could take Ted Rockson on, one-to-one. But the two were blood brothers, and had fought by each other’s sides countless times.
“Please!” Chen clapped his hands twice, and two of his students rushed out from behind a side curtain with an archery target nearly three feet in diameter mounted on long legs. They set it up at the far end of the floor of the martial arts room, some hundred feet away, and moved back out of the target zone. Chen reached behind his back, and, with a blur of motion, pulled out something that he flung across the long open space with the speed of a bullet. It hit the target dead center and stuck in nearly five inches into the tough fibrous bull’s-eye. Star-knife. The crowd let out a gasp of amazement. They had all heard of Chen’s legendary star-knife throwing ability. Even the Reds had their stories of the Chinaman with hands of death who threw five-pointed steel stars that exploded.
“Now, this is not my invention,” Chen went on, in his slow authoritative manner, addressing the attentive crowd. “Star-knives have been around for thousands of years. Go way back in Chinese mythology. Even the design of these,” he said, holding up five of the wafer-thin, plasti-steel, five-pointed knives in his hand. “Advantages—they’re light. I carry twenty of them in two bags at the small of my back. With the help of Dr. Shecter’s crew, we’ve put the equivalent of nearly a half-pound of explosive into each of these, using a mixture of plastique and steel and plastic. Built into the very molecules—explosive and knife mixed together. Now these can be used against one man, as in this case.” He dove to the mat in a roll, as if he had just been fired on, and came up in a half-crouch, releasing two of the star-knives, then hitting the ground again and rolling off in another direction. The two buzzing stars of death whipped through the air like birds from some steel hell, creating an eerie high-pitched whisper as their razor-sharp teeth bit the rushing air. Whoomp! Whoomp! They buried themselves about two inches apart, nearly dead center of the target. Chen jumped to his feet.
“Very effective,” he said matter-of-factly. “These little things have helped me out of more situations than . . . a ’brid’s nose can get into. At any rate, I’ve decided to start teaching star-knife usage within the next few weeks. Those who are my regular students already know of this. But any trained fighter of C.C. is welcome to join. I had thought for a long time that I shouldn’t teach
this art, because of the danger and power involved. But I had a recent realization that I am not the judge of what I should or shouldn’t hold back. So I have resolved to teach all that I know to those who wish to partake of it.” He paused for a moment, as if deep in thought, almost lost to the crowd, then began talking softly again.
“And, of course, then there are star-knives with the actual explosives mounted. These are nonfunctional until you push a small lever on the back that activates the electronic sensors at the five points of the knife. Thus, when it hits something . . .” He spun the starblades through air instantaneously. Even Rockson couldn’t see his hand move. The metal teeth dug into the target and released their load. The archery bull’s-eye disappeared in the center as a roar reverberated through the gymnasium. There was now a hole in the target a good foot and a half in diameter.
“Now, I only used approximately a twentieth of the usual load,” Chen said. “Or else we’d be sitting in Colonel Killov’s Monolith, washing windows.” He lifted his eyes to the ceiling. The crowd shifted and chuckled. Chen was a real showman, a ham. He knew how to work the assemblage.
“So that, as they used to say,” Chen said, with a depreciating shy grin, “is the story. If any of you wishes to sign up for fighting or star-knife classes, please sign up with my students by the front desk. Thank you.” He bowed slightly to the crowd, who returned the sign of respect. The group rose slowly to its feet, yawning and stretching. They slowly left the room. Chen rushed over to Rock, who was walking down toward him, Rona by his side, who was looking up at the bronzed freefighter with barely disguised lust. It had been months since they’d been together.
“Rock,” Chen said simply, putting out his hand, which Rockson clasped. “I heard you had a few problems.”
“A few,” the Doomsday Warrior smiled back.
“I would have come to visit you, but I figured you’d already have enough of a crowd. Besides, a warrior does not like to have another warrior see him when he is downed.”
“Exactly right, my friend,” Rock said. “I hate hospitals and everything that goes with ’em.” He dropped the subject. Anything that Rock walked away from he had no special interest in discussing. What was there to discuss? You lived or you died. It was simple.
The two warriors and Rona went to one of Century City’s three restaurants, this one located on the highest level of the underground metropolis, just feet below the second-highest peak of the mountain beneath which the elaborate structure was built. Cleverly disguised baffles and rock formations allowed the sky to be seen from the restaurant. The three drank and ate long into the evening, their pleasure only slightly dampened by the occasional Russian spy drone screeching overhead, searching, always searching for the hidden Fortress City that the Reds knew existed somewhere in the towering peaks of the Rockies. But where . . . ?
Six
In the Russian Fortress City of Norokov, in the northern section of what had once been Pennsylvania, tired workers—the American slave laborers of the Reds—roused themselves for yet another day of backbreaking work. Their lives were nothing more than unending cycles of pain and more pain. They were worked six days a week, sixteen hours a day, and were allowed to rest on the seventh only because the Russian medical staff had warned that they would burn out their labor force almost instantly with a seven-day week. The one day, Sunday, gave the worker’s bodies a chance to regain strength, to heal wounded flesh, just enough to survive. Almost against their wills, they would be more capable of working on Monday morning. Had they been able to choose, most would have opted for the seven-day week so as to die quickly. But their minds didn’t work that way. Born into slavery, living their lives in slavery, accustomed to serving their Russian masters, the American slave labor force was too unaccustomed to free choice to even conceive of suicide.
They rose from their stinking basements, their rundown shacks, their half-crumbled two- and three-story apartment buildings, which somehow still stood from the last century, rotting, cracked, like some old corpses of things that should have been buried long ago. They were all kept in the American sector of the Russian Fortress, approximately a half-mile square, and left to fend for themselves. The Reds didn’t even bother to go into this ghetto, unless after some particular troublemaker or in search of young pretties for their superiors. Within the American Sector, some seventy-six thousand workers were crammed into dilapidated, rubble-strewn structures that they called “home.” Not a slum on earth of the prewar days could have compared to the squalor and degradation the workers lived in. Sleeping on pieces of cardboard or in the dirt, owning nothing more than the tattered rags on their backs, they somehow kept going on. Why—or for what reason—only God could say. And He wasn’t talking.
At the very back of the American Sector, pushed right up against the fifty-foot-high steel wall that surrounded the entire fortress, a group of twenty-one workers slowly came out of their tortured dreams, awakened by the blaring sirens, situated every few hundred yards on high posts, that woke the workers for their morning labor. At the stroke of six every morning they went off, deafening, impossible to sleep through or to ignore. Not that any man would try. To miss work meant beatings, humiliations, before the local Regulatory Squad of the Red military. Or worse.
The twenty-one Americans lived inside of what had once been a cheese-storage room. Its thick walls at least gave them good insulation from the nights, though they had no furniture or utensils or much of anything, for that matter. Just a concrete floor, some thirty by thirty-five feet upon which the men had chosen their little space and drawn a square in chalk, demarcating their turf, with their names in the middle. To take up another’s space could mean a fight to the death.
The men moaned and groaned, their bodies still aching from the night before. One of the workers had stolen some formaldehyde from one of the chemical-processing plants he worked in. They had all sniffed it on their Sunday off, yesterday. One sniff and they would fall unconscious onto the concrete, smashing their faces and heads against the hard floor. And when they came to, they walked back to the plastic jug and took another deep whiff. They wanted not to know, not to feel or think. Sweet oblivion. The chemical, pungent and burning, had cast them over and over into a swirling nothingness from which they prayed they would never return.
But of course they had returned, and now it was time to head off again into the dismal dark rooms of the factories with the machines hissing and the steam rising all around them. James-25 was the first to rise from the cold concrete. He slept on two pieces of thick cardboard folded over so as to form an almost soft mattress. Many of the workers slept on the floor itself, their bones eternally aching. James-25 had a blanket as well, motheaten, ragged at both ends, lime-green and thin as a cracker. It was his prize possession. He had won it in a crap game three years before, and though it was filled with holes and smelled like a sewer he guarded it with his life. The other men didn’t touch it. They knew they must risk their life to win such a prize. James-25 rose. There was no need to put on his clothes, as he had never taken them off. If one took off one’s clothes they might well disintegrate—or be stolen. They smelled, with the accumulated stench of years of sweat and vomit and the poisonous chemical smells of the factories. But the workers had lived in such clothes all their lives and knew no different. The putrid stench was part of their universe. A flower would have smelled repulsive.
James-25 was tall and quite skinny, but strong, with long tendony arms that possessed a strength far beyond his appearance. He carried a razor knife in his worn boot and was quite proficient in its use. He walked over to the hole in the floor where water collected from some sort of leakage from an ancient water pipe built over a hundred years ago that ran beneath the Sector. The men had smashed a hole in the cement floor searching for more room but had found this water, which quickly filled their handiwork and stopped just below the floor line. Still, it could be drunk and used for washing. In America 2089 A.D., in a slave hut with running water, they were at the top o
f the heap. James-25 splashed the refreshing water over his greasy, stubbly face and took a sharp breath as the freezing cold hit his cheeks. He groaned as the ice water brought him to full consciousness. He suddenly wanted to breathe in more of the formaldehyde they had taken the previous day. He turned around. The jug was on its side in the center of the room, the common space of the concrete floor that served as their living room, a circle some six feet in diameter. The jug was empty. After he had passed out they must have continued to use the stuff until some fool knocked the damn thing over. He longed for the sweet unconsciousness, the nothingness of yesterday. The lack of pain.
The other men slowly stirred themselves as the second blast of sirens came screaming through the windowless squares around the cheese chamber. Each man shifted in his little chalked-in rectangle and slowly they rose to a sitting position and then upright. Two of them didn’t rise. James-25 walked over to them and poked them. Herbert-5 and Nicolas-77. They were cold as the concrete—dead. The fools must have drunk the stuff. Their bodies were already hardening, their eyes wide open, their mouths contorted into an exaggerated grimace of pain and pleasure. The pain of death . . . the pleasure of not living anymore. He looked at them for a long time. Herbert-5 he had despised. The man had been a thief and had crapped in his own pants and not bothered to clean himself. But Nicolas-77 he had known for many years. They had visited the whores together several times when they had won money at craps. The man had been good. As good as one ever was now. James-25 felt something strange behind his eyes. A pressure and then wetness running out. He had never felt it before. He reached up—blood? Had he cut himself? No. It was water, water falling from his eyes, like rain from the sky. He touched the wetness with his fingers and then licked it. Salty. He had heard of these things, he remembered suddenly. When he was very young his mother had told him about them—“tears” she had called them. He wiped them away quickly, pushing unknown feelings back into the sewer of his soul. He called out to the others.
