Doomsday Warrior 02 - Red America

by Ryder Stacy

  AMERICAN REBELLION!

  World War III shattered the United States and now a once proud nation is ruled by the brutal Russian Empire. But America’s Free Cities, led by a remarkable soldier of survival, Ted Rockson, are making a bold and bloody bid for freedom that has the Soviets girding for an all-out attack.

  Rockson, though, must fight more than just the Russian army and the insidious KGB. He must carry out his war of independence in a ravaged landscape of radioactive hot zones crawling with a deadly new race of beings, “the glowers.” But in this living Hell, Rockson is the one man who symbolizes American defiance. He’s the one man who’s ready to battle for a better world. And he’s the one man feared by the Russian tyrants. He is the . . .

  DOOMSDAY

  WARRIOR

  NO PLACE TO RUN

  Bells! Everywhere! Rockson heard doors slamming and loudspeakers blasting away in Russian. They were on to him. He rushed back toward the fire door through which he had just entered but heard a click just as he reached it. Locked! Rock raced down the long neon lit hall toward the far end some two hundred feet away. He reached it and swung through the door just as a squad of Reds rounded the corner to his right. Another squad suddenly appeared on his left. He was cut off.

  The Russians closed in on him from both sides and, as they approached, Rock saw that they all wore the hideous death’s-head on their shoulders. They were KGB.

  The officer in charged smiled arrogantly at his prey and crowed, “Ted Rockson, I presume? You may as well surrender. We have been expecting you for days. I promise you you cannot escape. The floor is filled with over two hundred of our elite troops. Please—no fuss—yes?”

  “Me? Make a fuss?” Rock asked innocently—and then he went for the KGB officer’s throat.

  It was time to die.

  ZEBRA BOOKS

  are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  475 Park Avenue South

  New York, N.Y. 10016

  ISBN: 0-8217-1419-8

  Copyright © 1984 by Ryder Stacy

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  First printing: August 1984

  Printed in the United States of America

  Prologue

  2089 A.D. Ted Rockson alias “Rock” is “The Doomsday Warrior.” He fights back against the Russian invaders who now control post-World War III America—a land decimated by nuclear missiles from Russia’s first strike.

  One hundred years after the massive Soviet surprise nuclear attack much of the United States is still radioactive and impassible. The world now has twenty percent less oxygen, strange and constantly shifting weather patterns, freezing nights and scorching days, purple clouds, storms of black snow. In the United States, regions of land have been torn by chasms, landslides and earthquakes. Mutated animals roam the plains and mountains. Killer dogs, weighing up to two hundred pounds, with dagger-sharp teeth, hunt in hungry packs. Bloodthirsty rats, two to three feet long, move in bands of thousands across the terrain at night, devouring all that is in their path.

  And there are tales of the mysterious “Glowers,” who the Russian occupying troops speak of in frightened whispers—radioactive humans who live only in the hottest zones, who glow like a blue flame and whose touch kills instantly. These and even more terrible dangers await Rock as he makes his way across the new America.

  Driving stolen Russian vehicles or riding his hybrid horse, shorter and stronger than horses of the past and more resistant to radiation, Rock, armed with his rapid-fire .12 gauge shotgun pistols and the “Liberator” automatic rifle with infrared scope, helps the “Freefighters” of the free American towns and villages fight the Russian occupiers. Rock’s only two goals are to throw the Soviet murderers out of the United States, returning America to its great glory and freedom of the past, and to find and kill the squad of Russian KGB officers who murdered his family, torturing them, raping his mother and sisters when he was a child. Hidden beneath a floorboard he had memorized the faces of all ten of the elite Death Squad who committed the atrocities. One by one he will hunt them down and kill them.

  Ted Rockson’s trail weaves swiftly across the land, the mountains, the hidden free cities, the vast hot zones, as he conquers all that gets in his way in the strange, terrifying world of America 2089 A.D.

  TIME: It is one hundred years in the future. An all-out nuclear war has killed two-thirds of the world’s population. The Russians, who were able to get off many more of their missiles in a first strike, were victorious over the United States. Now, in control of virtually the entire world except for China, they ruthlessly rule the People’s World Socialist Republics.

  PLACE: Atomic bombs exploded all over the planet, but primarily in the United States. The United States lost one hundred million people within one hour of the attack. Another seventy-five million died within a year. The Russians immediately moved in with massive transports of troops and weapons and quickly took control of much of the country. They built forty fortresses in vital parts of the United States, huge military complexes from which they sent out search-and-destroy units of tanks, helicopters and radiation-suited troops to extinguish the still-burning embers of resistance.

  The Russians use the American citizens as slave labor, forcing them to grow crops and work in factories. The Russian high command lives in luxury, the officers having taken the best housing in the remaining cities. The American workers must make do in shabby shanty towns around the fortress complexes. Thirty-five million Americans are directly under the Red rule. Sullen and docile, they carry out their Russian masters’ orders, but underneath they hate them. They pray for the day when the legendary Ted Rockson, “The Ultimate American,” will come with the Freefighters of the hidden cities and release them from their bondage.

  ENVIRONMENT: The great number of bombs set off altered the Earth’s axis. The polar caps began melting and the forested regions turned to desert. As the world slowly warmed, the higher amount of CO2 in the air created a greenhouse effect. Lakes, rivers and streams had dried up in many places. Ecology had been almost dealt a deathblow from the war. Ninety percent of the Earth’s species of plants and animals were now extinct.

  The East Coast of the United States is still extremely radioactive. Vast, bare plains stretch hundreds of miles in New York, Connecticut, New Jersey and Pennsylvania on which nothing grows. At the edges of these hot zones are forests of mutated bushes and trees covered with thorns and rock-hard bark. Parts of the Midwest were spared as the Russians had plans for eventually using the farmland to grow crops for their own clamoring masses back home. But the soil is nevertheless too radioactive for anything but weeds. American slave labor has been taken out by the truckload to work, turning the soil in the medium hot zones—meaning death within a year from handling the rocks and topsoil still hot enough to send a Geiger counter needle off the edge.

  The Far West was hit hard. Colorado was spared mostly because of bad aim but further on, in Utah, Nevada and California, there has been heavy damage. The area is now a misty, unknown land. Nothing is thought to even live there. Volcanos and earthquakes have become common and much of the Northwest has been turned into a nightmare of craters, some miles wide.

  The South was hit in a haphazard fashion as if the Russians hadn’t quite known what to strike. Some states—New Mexico, Georgia—were almost untouched; others—Florida, Texas—had been blasted to bits. Large parts of Florida are gone. Where Orlando and Tampa once stood is now a great jagged, hydrogen-bomb-created canal, stretching hundreds of miles across the interior, filled with red, m
uddy water.

  Slowly, life tries to force its way back onto the surface of the ripped and savaged land. Many forests have expanded over the last century in areas that weren’t hit. Great parts of the United States are now thick with brush and trees, and resemble the country the way it was in the 1800s. In other places the deserts cover the earth for four, five hundred miles in every direction—unrelenting, broiling, snake-filled and cactus-dotted obstacles that stand between other living parts of the country.

  THE HIDDEN FREE CITIES: Nearly seventy-five towns have sprung up over the last hundred years, hidden in caves, mountains and deep wooded valleys. Located at the edges of hot zones which the Russian troops are reluctant to enter, these towns, known as Free Cities, are made up of armed resistance fighters. Each city consists of anywhere from a thousand to forty thousand people. They are fiercely democratic, using town meetings to discuss and vote on all issues.

  The Free Americans, who have been bred out in the country, away from the Russian-dominated “clean” areas, have, through natural selection, become ten times more resistant to radiation than their ancestors. They are bred tough, with weak children placed out in the twenty-below-zero nights. If the child lives he is allowed to develop. If not, he is just as well put out of his misery now.

  Ted Rockson fights out of Century City—one of the more advanced Free Cities, and the manufacturer of the Liberator automatic rifle, used by freefighters everywhere. They attack Russian convoys and blow up bridges. But they plan for the day when they can begin their all-out assault on the enslavers.

  THE RUSSIANS: The United Socialist States of America is run by the red-faced, heavy-drinking General Zhabnov, headquartered in the White House, Washington, D.C., now called New Lenin. A bureaucrat, careful but not cunning, and a libertine, Zhabnov spends his days eating and his nights in bed with young American girls rounded up by the KGB. Zhabnov has been appointed supreme president of the United States for a ten-year period, largely because he is the nephew of the Russian premier, Vassily. General Zhabnov rules America as his personal fiefdom. The only rules he must obey are (1) no uprisings and (2) seventy-five percent of the crops grown by the enslaved American workers must be sent to Russia. General Zhabnov believes that the situation in the United States is stable, that there are no American resistance forces to speak of other than a few scattered groups that raid convoys from time to time. He sees his stay here as a happy interlude away from the power struggles back in the Kremlin.

  Colonel Killov is the head of the KGB in the United States headquartered in Denver, Colorado. He is a ruthlessly ambitious man whose goal it is to someday be premier of the world. Thin, almost skeletal, with a long face, sunken cheekbones and thin lips that spit words, Killov’s operatives are everywhere in the country: in the fortresses, in the Russian officer ranks, and lately he has even managed to infiltrate an American-born agent into the highest levels of the resistance. Colonel Killov believes General Zhabnov to be a fool. Killov knows that the American forces are growing stronger daily and forming a nationwide alliance to fight together. The calm days of the last century are about to end.

  From Moscow, Premier Vassily rules the world. Never has one man ruled so much territory. From the bottom of Africa to Siberia, from Paraguay to Canada, Russian armies are everywhere. A constant flow of supplies and medical goods are needed to keep the vast occupying armies alive. Russia herself did not do badly in the war. Only twenty-four American missiles reached the Soviet Union and ten of these were pushed off course or exploded by ground-to-air missiles. The rest of the United States strike was knocked out of the skies by Russian killer satellites that shot down beams of pure energy and picked them off like clay pigeons.

  Vassily is besieged on all sides by problems. His great empire is threatening to break up. Everywhere there are rebel attacks on Russian troops. In Europe, in Africa, in India, especially in America. The forces of the resistance troops were growing larger and more sophisticated in their operations. Vassily is a highly intelligent, well-read man. He has devoured history books on other great leaders and the problems they faced. “Great men have problems that no one but another great man could understand,” he lectures his underlings. Advisers tell him to send in more forces and quickly crush the insurgents. But Vassily believes that to be a tremendous waste of manpower. If it goes on like this he may use neutron bombs again. Not a big strike, but perhaps in a single night, yes, in one hour, they could target the fifty main trouble spots in the world. Order must be maintained. For Vassily knew his history. One thing that had been true since the dawn of time: wherever there had been a great empire there had come a time when it began to crumble.

  One

  It was a storm like no other. Like no other before the Nuke War anyway. It roared across the sky like a lion, shrieking out peals of thunder, ripping the earth with its claws of lightning. Fifty million volt spears of electricity cracked down out of the sky, lighting up the desolate terrain with blinding sheets of white. Immense purple and black thunderheads filled the heavens. Clouds piled atop clouds, huge, hanging in the air like mountains of the purest darkness. The storm, which extended for nearly two hundred miles in every direction, roared across eastern Colorado, smashing away at the Rocky Mountains with an almost malevolent fury. The storm shot down bolts like artillery shells, ripping at the jagged peaks of majesty. Avalanches of rocks and boulders as big as trucks pounded down the sides of the mountains by the thousands of tons. The lightning blasted away again and again as if seeking total annihilation.

  It was a megastorm, one of the biggest of the postwar blows with winds up to one hundred and fifty mph, and tornado funnels setting down; swirling winds of absolute blackness into which whole trees and screaming mountain animals were sucked; touch down for seconds, minutes, then disappear back up into the writhing clouds, dark as a sea of death, taking their earthly booty with them into the blackness. The storm took as much life as it gave back with its torrents of rain—rain that would make the earth live again. Rain that would heal the radioactive scars and sores that oozed pus red and brown in wastelands across America.

  Beneath this onslaught of wind and rain and fusillades of lightning singeing the very air with their electric heat, beneath the atomic roar of thunder shaking the mountains around them, six American freefighters slipped and slid along a steep mountain trail as they made their way toward their destiny. The destiny of not just their lives but of all Americans. They were going into battle with the Russians and the outcome could well change the course of human history.

  Ted Rockson, his chiseled stone face wet with the cold thick drops of rain from the storm, reached around the edge of the mountain trail for a firm handhold. His eyes, one aquamarine blue, the other violet, seemed to almost glow with power. The power of “the Rockson,” the man the American slaves called the “ultimate American.” The man the Russians had designated as the “most dangerous rebel in America—wanted dead or alive.” Rockson found the hold and pulled his feet in close against the narrow ledge of a cliff. The backpack and weapons on his back pulled backwards, trying to pluck him from the ten inch-wide path, two thousand seven hundred and eighty-nine feet up the sheer rock face of one of the eastern Rocky mountains. Rockson looked down for a moment but could see only an impenetrable cloudy blackness as the storm swirled and whipped around him, snapping the loose sleeves of his jacket. He made it around the outcropping and came to a momentary plateau about fifty feet in diameter. Rock stood back and waited while the rest of the Rock team worked around the edge. Detroit Green, Rockson’s righthand man, came next, his short bull-like body pressing close against the lichen-covered rock. His black face shone like polished ebony as a crack of lightning blasted into a peak about a thousand feet away. Trickles of rain splattered down his cheeks.

  “Damn, this ain’t a good night,” Detroit said as he joined Rockson on the outcropping. He adjusted his twin bandoliers of hand grenades, making sure that none had loosened or become wet during the ascent. Rock peered anxiously back at
the trail he had just been on. The going had been unusually rough—even for freefighters. None of them had ever made this particular crossing of the Rockies and the last two days had been treacherous. Rock didn’t want to lose a single one of his men. They had all been through too much together. McCaughlin came next. The huge Scotsman was the size of a barn door but tough as a grizzly in a fight of which he had had many. Next, Chen, the martial arts instructor of Century City, in his black ninja suit that covered him from head to toe in a warm but supple midnight black material. He came easily around the outcrop, his thin face smiling with that ever present self-mocking grin that sat beneath his pencil-thin mustache. Around the Chinese American’s waist were his only weapons besides his hands—five-pointed exploding star-knives. With these he was an expert, able to nail a man between the eyes from eighty feet. And the explosives, plastic fitted around the razor-sharp weapons, were powerful enough to take out the side of an armored vehicle.

  Next came Lang, the kid, the youngest of the group, but as tough as they came. Nearly six and a half feet tall, Lang reminded Rock of himself when he was in his early twenties—arrogant, smart-assed, and tough as nails. The kid even resembled Rock physically—same stone-muscled physique, same chiseled features as if the skin had been worn away by winds and forces beyond imagination to a pure state of impenetrable muscle. He didn’t, however, share Rock’s white streak of hair running down the center of his scalp nor the different colored eyes. Bringing up the rear came Archer, who despite his seven foot stature and three hundred and twenty pounds, moved with the agility of a cat. His crossbow hung down across his back as the mute mountain man reached around the corner of the cliff and found a hold with his immense hand. Rock breathed a sigh of relief as the last freefighter came onto the outcropping. For his own life he never worried but for his men . . .