by Ryder Stacy
The chopper landed in the center of a clearing with a swastika burned into the grass. Then the red carpet was literally rolled out for Killov, along with all the amenities of supreme command—twenty-one gun salute, goosestepping Nazi troops, the requisite reviewing of the honor guard. Von Reisling in sparkling patent leather riding boots came eagerly forward. He kissed Killov—with a hidden grimace—on both cheeks, so sunken and discolored. My God, Von Reisling thought to himself, the man was like a living skeleton, almost without real flesh at all.
“Thank you comrade, for coming here,” the Nazi leader said, saluting stiffly. Were it not for the pressing affairs of the Fourth Reich, I of course would have come to you. But for the moment, you are my honored guest.” Killov mouthed a stiletto smile.
“Let’s get down to business Von Reisling. You have, I assume three drafts of the agreement worked out between us by our staffs?”
“Yes,” Von Reisling replied firmly. “Typed in triplicate for our final signatures. It’s in my office.” They went into the 10-story stainless steel tower that housed Von Reisling’s staff.
“My men will bring them in to us,” Von Reisling said. “But first, I insist that as my guest, you share in German hospitality. Here, this way.” He took Killov gently by the arm, a gesture which the KGB commander, who hated to be touched, pulled slightly back from, but continued to let the Nazi guide him. Together, two of the most powerful and ruthless men in the world walked into Von Reisling’s ornately decorated dining room. They seated themselves at the table, covered with embroidered white linen and a waiter poured them each a glass of sherry. A needless time waster, Killov thought, but it was protocol to drink before signing anything important.
“To the great American Reich that is now born. And to its visionary leader—Führer Von Reisling,” Killov said, clinking glasses with the eye-patched general.
“And to the new president of the U.S.S.A. and someday premier of all the world, Commander Killov,” Von Reisling said returning the toast.
Killov merely skimmed the two-page treaty set before him by an underling. It hardly mattered what it said, since the KGB colonel had no intention of honoring it beyond what was needed to carry out his plans. Then he would destroy Von Reisling without hesitation. There were enough ambitious men already vying for the earth’s rule—he didn’t need another one. Especially not one with such a strong force as the German. He quickly penned in his signature as did Von Reisling. They smiled crocodile smiles at one another and then toasted again. At last Killov said he must be off and Von Reisling replied how sorry he was that they could not enjoy each other’s company any longer.
The KGB commander walked back to his wasp-shaped black command chopper and ordered his pilot to take off at high velocity from the wretched city. Killov began shaking from the tension of the meeting and quickly took out two arthovalium pills to charge up his tired body. The pills gave him a certain sexual charge, hot sensations that streamed through his body, bringing a smile to the tight face. A sexual thrill he could not get from his missing testicles—the ones he had never been born with. He would use Von Reisling for a time, let the proud Nazi be his stooge, until it was time to topple him along with Vassily and Zhabnov. And that moment was drawing closer every day.
Closer even than he realized as he heard the news relayed to his chopper as it flew back to Denver. “The premier has had a stroke,” his Intelligence chief back at the Monolith broadcast. “He is not expected to live beyond the next few hours.”
Killov smiled so broadly that his thin dry lips cracked in the middle, emitting a trickle of brownish blood, half coagulated.
“Wonderful news,” he muttered to the pilot. “Now we will see how long the fatman Zhabnov can avoid fulfilling my vow to roast him like a pig on the White House lawn. I will garnish the pig with his own precious rose petals from his garden, then feed his meat to the dogs—and those who supported him.”
“Yes sir, yes sir,” the pilot nodded vigorously to his supreme commander, terrified to even look him in the eyes. For Killov at that moment with his translucent skin, his eyes filled with murderous madness, his face as narrow as a skull, looked like nothing less than death itself—searching for souls to take back to hell.
Ten
The days dragged on like funeral dirges for Rockson and the other slaves. Each day they were awakened at six from their hovels and sent out to work—work for 10 hours, break for a quick meal of nearly rancid gruel, then work for another six hours before being sent back to their barracks, passing the nightfeeding station at the gate of the slave sector of the fortress, where they were given a bowl of potatoes and a slice of bread. It was not exactly a paradise on earth. And for Rockson and his work crew of the corpse squad, an endless procession of bodies. After a while they blurred together, just white bloody sacks of rotting flesh. All traces of their humanness, their personalities vanished beneath their cold flesh.
Whenever the Doomsday Warrior worked at the swamp he felt the strange sensations again. It was as if he were listening in on a conversation between dozens of creatures all screaming in some foreign language and broken with a fuzzy static. It made him dizzy, draining some part of his senses that he couldn’t even locate. So he was extremely careful when unloading bodies into the swamp, making sure that he never was within calling distance of the mysterious voices. The swamp just kept taking all that they dished in, its wet green jaws more than ready to take everything that the Nazis could dump—bottomless, voracious.
Back in the hovel, Rockson had to be equally wary of the man he had bested. Foster avoided the Doomsday Warrior like the plague. There was a strange power vacuum now in the concrete hut. Foster 236 had ruled them all with an iron fist, taking what he wanted, but also in his own cruel way he kept order among the savage group. Now, when Rockson was not there, he still ruled, instituting his commands with snarls, demanding this scrap of hidden bread, that shoelace. But when the Doomsday Warrior returned from the swamps at night, there would be an eerie silence when he walked in. Foster 236 did not want him to know he still ruled. He was sure Rockson would kill him. Unless he was killed first. The Doomsday Warrior could sense the strange chill, the nervousness in the air when he returned. Each night he went straight to his sleeping square at the far end where he would sit in the near darkness watching the others watching him. Like savage creatures of the wild, they were mere shadows of men, Rock thought with disgust. Mindless, filled only with their own greed, like dogs ripping at one another for what few scraps came their way. But they hadn’t been born that way. These were Americans. They had been taken by the Reds and the Nazis, and had their minds slowly eaten away by years of suffering, the constant humiliations and lack of any pride—anything by which one could call oneself a man.
On the fifth night, as they glared at him with narrow wolfish eyes, as Foster sat yards away, his hand gripped tightly around the large kitchen knife he carried, waiting until the right moment, the night the man let his guard down and fell into too deep a sleep. Then he would strike. Then all would be as it was before. Suddenly, Rockson jumped up in a rage at the barbarians around him. He stood in the middle of the floor, stepping over men, and yelled out to them.
“You are not men. You’re animals. You’re scum. But not because you are, because you let them make you into it. You believe all their goddamned lies, that you are fools, incapable of anything. You let them break your wills as if they were nothing. Look at your goddamned selves won’t you! You look like cavemen, faces filled with wounds, teeth falling out. Yet you do nothing. Don’t you see, don’t all you goddamned fools understand?”
They looked at him in confusion, incomprehension. Their eyes were wide with fear and curiosity. His words, the stranger’s words hurt them. Hurt their brains. There was too much down there. They knew somehow he was right—that they had once been different, once been men. And now—now were—what?
Rockson let his body go limp and his head drop in disgust as he looked around and saw eyes of oxen staring back
, vacuums into which all fell and nothing registered.
“Ah, the hell with you all,” he said, waving his hands at them. He walked back to his little space, shut his eyes and tried to go to sleep. He knew his senses would warn him of any intruder. And if they wanted to, he was goddamned ready. He fell asleep and once again had the dreams—terrifying dreams filled with darkness and blood and faces he knew so well, yet did not know at all.
He was a child, and everywhere around him was blood. A man lay on the floor in front of him, his body covered with stab wounds. He was dead. And across the room a woman. She was being raped and mauled savagely by a number of men in Russian KGB uniforms. Her face was so familiar. And her screams. God, her screams shook the very marrow of his bones. And he himself was somehow hidden beneath the floor looking up at the scene. Then there was a flash and he was running, running through the snow, through the mountains. He was lost. Just a child without food, water, anything. It was all too much. He sat on a rock and cried as the purple clouds flew far overhead in a swirling kaleidoscope of color.
He awoke, his face streaming with tears. The dream, so painful. He knew it had something to do with his childhood. It was too powerful to just be a fantasy. Again, his unconscious was trying to break through, but couldn’t. Something was blocking his memories with the power of a steel wall.
The next day when Rockson arrived at the central square to be trucked along with the other men of the Corpse Detail, they were instead taken to another part of the Fortress, the troops barracks of the Nazis on the far side of the city. There had been some sort of virus, a mutated Anthrax germ, that the Nazis had been able to stop from destroying the entire fort with a shipment of vaccine from Russia. But nearly 300 troops had died in just 36 hours. Their bodies were already bloating, stretching out in grotesque configurations where they had been brought and stacked in an empty warehouse. Rockson and the others were taken there and given cloths to cover their mouths. They began bringing the corpses out and loading them onto transport trucks to be taken to the swamps. On his third trip out, Rockson looked up and noticed a high steel tower several hundred feet away. He saw someone high atop it, a woman, her hair catching the sun’s rays and reflecting them dazzlingly from her long red hair. He felt a sensation, terrible and wonderful at the same time sweep through his body. The woman, she was beautiful. And somehow he felt he knew her. Knew her intimately. She was the most beautiful woman that he had ever seen—not that he could really remember seeing any women. She was dressed in gold gossamer, a fairy-like gown of brilliant reflections, glints from the sun rippling down her gown, her long fiery hair flowing down her shoulders and back like a waterfall of flame. He stared up the distance separating them and saw that she was looking down at him. Her eyes fastened on him and she began yelling something—he could barely hear—she was calling—a name.
A guard suddenly appeared and slammed the side of his rifle into Rockson’s ribs.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing, scum?” the burly man said. “Load those bodies, or you’ll be one of them.”
Rock turned around, catching one more glimpse of the mysterious woman, and re-entered the barracks of the dead. When he came out and looked up, dragging a body along the ground, she was gone, disappeared inside the conical steel tower in the sky.
They moved the bodies for hours, filling the truck, taking them around the back of the Nazi fortress, on a long circuitous route to avoid contaminating any other part of the fortress, and then to the swamp where they were dumped to join their rotting comrades in the green dankness. The Anthrax germs had done their dirty work fast, and destroyed the lungs and nervous systems of its victims. When the garbage crew moved the dead Germans, blood spurted out of their mouths and eyes. Every touch of their flesh produced spurts of the still bright red liquid from every orifice of their bodies as the entire internal structure had broken down into ooze.
On their third trip back for more of the disease victims, Rockson saw her again, her impossibly red hair, flowing around her head in the stiff breeze. She seemed to be looking down at him, somehow having perceived his energy directed at her, even though hundreds of feet separated them.
“Who is that?” he whispered to one of the slaves.
“She is the goddess. They worship her in the Hitler Pantheon. The reincarnation of the great goddess Eva Braun,” the man said nervously, looking around to see if any guards were near.
“Von Reisling crawls at her feet,” the slave continued. “He licks her shoes. So one of the servants there told me. I believe it. They are all perverted down to the very marrow of their black bones. But don’t look at her. She is a Nazi goddess. If they even catch you looking—there are worse things than hauling the dead—one can be dead.” He headed off, dragging the corpse of a young Nazi trooper by a rope tied around the dead man’s wrists.
But Rockson couldn’t help but look each time he dragged a new corpse out to the transport truck. His eyes were hypnotically fixed on her as if she held the key to his memory, his life. And he felt things—thoughts going into his mind. Strange disturbing thoughts, once again, as if something was calling to him. Only these messages were garbled, unclear. It hurt him, hurt his brain. Yet he couldn’t stop looking at her, yearning to be near her. It took the entire day to clear the barracks of the bodies and at last the final load was taken to the swamp and dumped in by moonlight, the full white rays of the moon lighting the swamp so that it appeared almost translucent, shimmering with waves of fluorescent energy. Rockson heard the sounds again, this time even louder, from the swamp, as if something was singing dark, guttural songs. He swore that just for a second he saw something, something large move under the surface of the swamp about a hundred yards out. Then nothing.
They were trucked back to the fortress after midnight, missing even their bowls of gruel as the kitchen food-dispensing unit had already gone back to their quarters for the night. Rock didn’t even give a damn. He could scarcely think of food, so torn was his mind by all the thoughts that were now screaming around his head like a flock of mad birds, flying, spinning, never settling even for a second. The moment he walked in the door to his dilapidated concrete barracks the stench of the place hit him like a fist. The single candle that was always lit on a small table in the center of the room flickered out a dismal light over the cold concrete floor, filled every square inch by sleeping slaves. They grunted and snored, and tossed and turned, growling and punching out when another’s foot or hand got too close to their precious inches of territory. As Rockson walked between them heading toward his spot, he looked down on the rags, the caked faces, filled with sores, the mounds of excrement that sat between them in little piles as they defecated right where they slept. He saw the roaches crawling among them from body to body, eating crumbs and flecks of sour stew from the slaves’ very lips, he saw rats darting, scampering among the unconscious bodies, grabbing whatever had fallen to the cold floor.
Suddenly he felt his entire being filled with a revulsion beyond words. That men, his own fellow Americans, should be living in such filth, such stench, that even the lowest animal form on earth would not allow itself to sink to! His brain felt like it was going to explode with accumulated rage. He tried to control himself as he felt an erupting explosion of fury rising in his guts and climbing into his chest. But there was no holding back.
“Nooo!” he screamed out at the top of his lungs, instantly waking every one in the barracks, the slaves bolted up, their eyes wide with fear.
“Nooo!” Rockson screamed again, his eyes almost brimming with tears.
“You can’t live like animals, like this. You are men, goddamn it. You are fucking men. Do you hear me? Men!” He reached down and lifted the sprawling filth-encrusted creature nearest him and held him in the air with his powerful arms.
With the man aloft, he looked right into his face, which winced in fear. “Man, say it,” Rockson bellowed into the wretched slave’s face. “Say it. I am a fucking man. Say it!”
“I am
a —fucking man,” the man gasped out.
“Then don’t live in your own shit,” Rockson screamed and threw the slave from him so the terrified creature flew halfway across the floor, crashing over a dozen half-sitting denizens of the horrible barrack.
Now the Doomsday Warrior went half-mad, as if he were under some sort of spell. He rushed among the filthy workers and kicked at them, lifted them, threw them, cursed them, spat at them, raging through the place like a human tornado. Bodies flew left and right slamming into one another, screaming, as the entire slave quarters erupted into bedlam.
A few of them tried to resist as they saw the madman coming at them, his face lit with demonic fury. They pulled knives or pieces of glass, but the mad slave just kicked them from their hands as if they were children’s toys and lifted them bodily off the floor, heaving them into hysterically scampering groups.
This went on for 45 seconds, until the entire center of the place had been cleared. The men huddled along the walls, trying to flatten themselves so as to be unnoticed. They all watched as Rockson seemed to calm down, at least slightly. He lifted the candle from the table and held it near his face so they could see him.
“You are pigs. You hear me? All of you are worse than the slimiest animal, the lowest bug that walks the face of this planet. Do you not know what species you are? What have you allowed to be done to yourselves?”
He held the candle to his face.
“This is a man. Not a pig, not a worm. You hear me fools? An American citizen. See? I have two eyes, and arms, and a brain. I do not allow rats to run on my body or roaches to kiss my lips, nor do I shit in my own bed and then lie in it. And you won’t either. Not while I’m here. From now, we live like men, all of us, or leave this place.”
