Doomsday Warrior 02 - Red America

by Ryder Stacy

  Detroit fired a moment after Rockson, sighting the second tank in the convoy. He aimed for the treads, now wanting to disintegrate the tank totally but create a blockage for the rest of the traffic. Then he and Rock could pick off the Reds like tin ducks in a shooting gallery. He pulled the trigger. Again, the beam seemed not so much to move toward its target as just hang in the air, a beam of pure black light, pure energy. The charged particles hit the lower portion of the Soyak, evaporating the section of steel tread along one side. The fifty foot tank lurched sideways, sinking down into the mud as its opposing tread continued to spin frantically, driving the tank around in circles deeper and deeper into the mud until it lay half buried, blocking the highway.

  The entire convoy was now halted by the half-melted tank from which Red officers ran screaming, their lungs singed by the super-heated air inside. The other tanks swiveled their turrets, searching desperately for their attackers. They fired impotently up at the surrounding cliffs. The Red troops were panicking, their eyes darting madly around. There is nothing more terrifying than an unseen enemy. Who is it? How many are there? From where? The Red officers screamed out orders to the next two tanks in the convoy to push the wounded giant out of their path. The Soyaks shot forward and began heaving away at their smoking metal comrade.

  Rock and Detroit fired again, hitting the heavily armored Soyaks. Two explosions ripped through the valley a hundred times louder than the firing guns of the tanks and armored vehicles. The two freefighters fired again at the next in line. The black tubes of light beelined for their targets. The blackness was darker than any blackness of night or natural color. It seemed to pull light in toward it, appeared to have infinite depth. Around the beams was the almost silent crackling energy of one of the most powerful energy bands in the universe. As Rock and Detroit continued down the column, McCaughlin opened up with the mortar at the troops. Lang handed him the shells and the Scot began sending whistling rounds of death into the confusion. Archer sighted carefully down his crossbow, picking off officers attempting to organize a counterattack. Chen, meanwhile, slid off unnoticed down the side of the mountain toward the valley floor below. He moved like a cat among the rocks and scraggly brush of the slope, a star-knife in each hand. If the Reds tried an assault on the peak from which the freefighters were firing, they would be in for a few surprises.

  The Reds were growing more terrified by the second. There weren’t supposed to be weapons that could just take out their tanks like they were toys. Foot thick, titanium alloy melted away. Not even holes in the sides of the monster tanks or twisted jagged metal—but just steaming melting wreckage. Glowing scraps on the dirt highway sizzling slightly as new bands of clouds began moving in dropping sheets of fine rain.

  The colonel in charge of the convoy forces, Colonel Sharynko, screamed through a P.A. on his command car, in sputtering Russian, orders to form defensive formation and fire back on the enemy. One of the tank officers spotted Rockson’s black beam as it hit the tank directly ahead of him.

  “There! Up there on the western ridge!” The tanks wheeled their guns around preparing to fire, but were not given the chance. Seeing that the particle beam rifles were working perfectly, Rockson and Detroit opened up on the scampering Red forces below. They aimed and fired, not even waiting for the explosive implosion to occur. For just a second the beam would hang in the air and then they would move onto the next target. Within minutes nearly all the tanks and armored vehicles had been destroyed. McCaughlin and Lang continued to fire the mortar, sending out rounds every twenty seconds. The mortars landed among the troops trying to find cover among the rocks and blew them into piles of bloody flesh. Smoke and a ghastly odor of death, of burning bone and metal, of boiling blood, filled the air. Some of the trucks at the far end of the valley road began trying to back up, but Detroit and Rock fired nearly a mile and a half down the road and took out the two rearmost tractor trailers. The trucks erupted into fire and toppled over, completely blocking any exit from the trap into which the convoy had driven.

  Chen lay hidden in a grove of red-barked dwarf pines halfway up the mountainside from the Red column. Beams, bullets, and shells from the Red tanks flew past him looking for something to destroy. Suddenly he heard rocks sliding just below him. He peered around the edge of the grove and saw six Red soldiers with submachine guns coming up the slope to outflank the American attack force. With a star-knife in each hand Chen jumped from his hiding place and whipped them through the air at the soviets. One of the five-pointed blades ripped into a Red chest, the other into the shoulder blade. Both exploded on contact, turning the upper half of the two men into a spray of red mist. The legs with no body stood for a second and then crumpled to the ground, suddenly realizing they were dead. The four remaining commando force aimed their subs at Chen and fired but found only air. The martial arts master had flipped backwards behind the pines. As he hit the ground, landing on both feet, Chen whipped out two more of the star-knives and, without stopping his motion, turned and came running out the other side of the grove so that he caught the Reds by surprise from their right flank. He spun the two razor-sharp star-knives which whirled silently through the smoky hillside. Again both made contact with flesh. The remaining two Reds stared in horror as two more of their force were turned into oozing mounds of hamburger. This time Chen came at the two Reds who were left. They tried to lift their submachine guns and fired but missed the leaping, spinning Chinese freefighter. He reached the closer of the Reds, a big red-faced bruiser who sneered and ripped out a foot and a half long bayonet from his pack. Chen feinted to the right and the soldier lunged forward. As the big man came Chen stepped to the left and kicked up with right foot. The leg swung up with lightning speed, catching the Red under the chin, snapping his head back with a loud crack. He fell to the mountainside dead, his spine cracked neatly in two.

  Chen spun as he felt a bead being drawn on him. His years of training, nearly twenty-five of them, had given him extra senses, super fine-tuned perceptions so that he could sense another man’s intention to strike as the attacker himself felt it. He dove forward, rolling down the hill in a ball. He came alongside the firing Russian and knocked him to the ground like a bowling pin. The Russian soldier struggled to right himself, as he reached for his service revolver. But Chen was upon him as the pistol left the holster. He slammed three quick strikes to the man’s stubbly throat, cracking the larnyx, crushing the windpipe. The man threw his hands over his throat, gasping like a fish out of water. He fell face forward, his brain already dead from lack of oxygen. It would take his heart minutes to stop. But already the would-be killer was motionless. Chen surveyed the slope down to the valley road but saw no others.

  Back up on the ledge of the mountain the freefighters didn’t let up their fire for a moment. They swept through the convoy like the tornado of a megastorm. Six men trapping a thousand. Six men destroying over a hundred armed vehicles. Something for the history books.

  Rockson and Detroit fired down the single file line of huge diesels, firing twice at each one. Once into the forward, driver’s cab, then sweeping the beam of purest black across the truck’s side to make sure that all the military supplies were destroyed. To the Red troops it was as if the hand of God had come down to deliver punishment to the Russian occupiers of the once free America. Their eyes grew wide in horror as the black beams made their way towards them. Most of them, even the bravest of the Red troops, screamed in mortal terror in the few seconds before they were evaporated into madly spinning atoms of imploding energy. The line of trucks turned into a row of bonfires, bonfires of flesh and rubber, burning with a flame so hot that it fed on the metal rubble of the trucks. The supplies inside erupted in secondary explosions as bullets, tank .50mm cannon shells, grenades, and other Red ammunition joined in the conflagration.

  The last of the big diesels went up with a roar as both Rock and Detroit sighted it. With the energy of both of the particle beams hitting it at once, not an atom remained untouched. The shower
of glowing particles that had been the truck floated like little seeds of shrapnel back down to the blood-splattered muddy ground.

  The two freefighters stopped firing the weapons and, seeing they had ceased, McCaughlin as well stopped sending down mortars. The freefighters looked slowly along the valley road at a scene of total destruction. A trail of melted, twisted, smoking wreckage fused into the very mud itself; into impossible shapes and configurations that death takes on when it dances among the armies of man. Nothing was left. Just piles of bubbling metal and glowing rubble lighting the smoke above the road as if lighting the way for the souls of the dead to leave this valley of death.

  At the far end of the roadway, just beyond the last of the destroyed trucks, two armored vehicles that had been taking up the rear tore off. Detroit raised his particle beam rifle but Rock yelled over to him, “No! Let them go! Let them tell the others what happened here. I want the whole damn Russian army to understand that the ballgame has changed. We’ll strike at their morale just as we’ve struck at their supply route.” The roadway looked like the bowels of hell itself, smoking metal and human corpses, piles of grotesquely melted Russian bodies, their flesh running into one another, bones sticking from out of red mud.

  The freefighters looked at what they had done and at each other. They felt no guilt, no shame. Nor happiness. They had accomplished what they set out to do. Had done it beyond their wildest dreams. Now at last they had the weapon they needed. A weapon as powerful and awesome as the atomic bomb itself, the twentieth century’s gift of extinction. But now the twenty-first century as well had its weapon of super-death.

  Rockson felt the moment. Let it sink into him. The death, the power of the weapon. It was an historic moment. There was no turning back for man now. Yet another weapon of incalculable destructive power had been unleashed upon the world. Deep in his rock-hard gut Rockson prayed that someday there would be no more new ways to kill men and that the old way would be buried beneath ashes as final as those of the convoy below. But it was necessary for the liberation of America. The Reds would be hopping mad now. Killov in his Denver monolith, ruling the KGB Death Squads across America, Zhabnov in his ridiculous guise as “president” of the United States, in his luxurious quarters in the White House in Washington, even Premier Vassily back in the Kremlin. Yeah, they’d be mad as hell. And scared to death, too.

  Three

  The White House was festooned with large red silk flags. Across the front gate of the Capitol swung a banner with four profile pictures in gold of Lenin, Drabkin, (who had conquered the world through nuclear war a century before), Premier Vassily and President Zhabnov. It waved lightly in the cool November breeze as if welcoming the visiting dignitaries from the global Soviets who walked below. The speeches had already begun though delegates were still arriving at Chekov Airport in monstrous Ilyushin-9 and Tupelov-180 long range jets. They walked as unobtrusively as possible into the halls of Congress, into the Senate chambers where rows of guests, mid and upper-level bureaucrats from the Soviet provinces throughout the world, sat and listened to boring plodding speeches about the greatness of the Russian Empire.

  Where once Democrats and Republicans had debated the issues of a free society, now Red speakers made a mockery of the slogans carved in stone around them. Slogans such as THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE and ONE NATION UNDER GOD. The Soviet delegates approved of everything that was said with thunderous applause, knowing full well that any speeches given were already policy, approved on high. The main speaker of the illustrious gathering, president of the U.S.S.A., General Zhabnov, would speak last. To walk in late on his words was treading on dangerous ground. But the preliminary speakers going on endlessly about improvements in transport and food production, here in the U.S. and the like, were already into their second day of nonstop talking.

  The lower level functionaries who had to listen attentively to these dry messages daydreamed of their soon-to-be fulfilled desires: a Washington D.C. party. The delegates who had attended the bashes in earlier years came back with tales that were unrivaled anywhere in the world for their sumptuous debauchery. The delegates to the 2089 A.D. convention squirmed in their seats, waiting, listening to the plaudits and audits, the pundits and digits, droned out by Pushkins and Drubkovs. They yearned to hear the last words of President Zhabnov’s speech and be off to the parties. Parties supposedly to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the Red occupation of America.

  A cold wind began blowing outside and a few desultory snowflakes fell to the ground with a swirling grace. But the delegates felt suddenly cheered as word passed around that the speeches were to be curtailed as Zhabnov was anxious to begin his speech, a speech the drab brown and gray-suited red-faced commissars from around the globe would listen to attentively. Something was up. Something big. Although two huge banners with pictures of Colonel Killov, the head of KGB in America, stood on both sides of the dilapidated Sanitation Building on the outskirts of the capital, barely visible on the ride in from the airport, there was not another KGB emblem or picture in all of the assembly halls and chambers—an unprecedented snub. Moreover, stiff-collared, blackshirted KGB officers were in a distinct minority among the delegates. Something was going on and it had to do with a power struggle between the two most powerful men in America, Killov and Zhabnov.

  Everyone knew that the Grandfather, Premier Vassily, who ruled the entire world from the Kremlin, was dying. The power struggle of succession had begun already. And both Killov and Zhabnov were vying for the top post. The two were at each other’s throats. Assassination attempts had been tried on both and failed over the past year. But still the two had pretended to have amicable relations, if only to keep Vassily from becoming involved. But here, for the first time, it was out in the open. Would Zhabnov not just remove the banners of the KGB but actually come out and attack Killov in his speech—a speech ostensibly a State of the Union speech—a tradition since pre-war days, devoted in the past to praise of food production under Zhabnov and his benign ability to keep the peace?

  The nearly two thousand delegates rose slamming their hands together in thunderous applause as Zhabnov, sporting a neatly trimmed goatee, appeared at the edge of the stage in full dress uniform, his chest covered with gold and silver medals. He strode jauntily to the podium and stared down at the assembled dignitaries with a beneficent smile. The applause didn’t die for several minutes as none of the delegates wanted to be noticed as being the first one who stopped clapping. Consequently, though the Speaker of the House, General Durgov, banged the gavel several times, everyone remained on their feet, churning out waves of applause until Zhabnov motioned to them to stop with a wave of his hands.

  “Friends, comrades.” Zhabnov smiled out from under the enormous red banner containing his likeness, hand-stitched with silk thread. “You are all good friends to come all this way to my little soiree here in the frontier capital of Washington.” Slight snickers quickly choked off could be heard among the delegates.

  “Friends, how good it is to see you all,” Zhabnov continued. “Each and every one at this momentous occasion. But before I begin let us bow our heads and give thanks for the continued leadership of our great leader, our benefactor, the premier of all the Soviets, may he live for centuries, Premier Vassily.” The assemblage bowed their heads for a few seconds and then caught Zhabnov looking up, unclasping his hands and smiling down at them again. He took a drink of water as each delegate edged forward in their seat—here it comes they thought.

  “Now,” Zhabnov began, “there is the question of food production in America and how it has matched up with the last five year plan. I am pleased to tell you all that we have not only achieved our goals but surpassed them with nearly two million bushels of surplus wheat, which has been stockpiled in emergency warehouses outside Moscow. Furthermore . . .” He droned on and on, citing statistic after vital statistic as the delegates withdrew into themselves in pained boredom. So, there was to be no overt official speech condemning Killov after all. Zhab
nov was just telegraphing his feelings through symbols such as the numbers of KGBers present and the removal of banners. He was not yet strong enough to come out and say what everyone already knew: that the war of succession between himself and Killov had begun. Still, it showed he was perhaps cannier than many gave him credit for. And assuredly there would be plays made to all who attended the wild parties—endowed complete with music, women, vodka—to be loyal to Zhabnov’s faction.

  The speech lasted for nearly three hours and seventeen minutes—sixteen minutes longer than the previous year’s pronouncements. President Zhabnov was interrupted seventy-two times by applause. At last he walked off to more applause and shouts of support. The ordeal was over. Now the delegates would revel indoors as the snow began falling more heavily. Revel and parlay votes for favors.

  It was at the biggest bash that Zhabnov honored the participants by appearing in casual clothes—a cardigan sweater with just one medal, and blue pants. The KGBers were long gone from Washington, walking out immediately after the long applause at the end of Zhabnov’s speech and boarding one of their own heavily guarded skylifters and heading west to Denver to report back to Colonel Killov himself. They had seen the insults and listened for clues of strength and intention in the speech. Their narrow eyes had polled the audience faces to see who might not be smiling too broadly, who hesitated ever so slightly to applaud. All would be reported back to Killov. Secretly even these icy officers longed for the revelry they would miss. Everyone knew of the drugs, the women, the entertainment that would be proffered upon the delegates—the real reason, after all, that so many attended. The delegates always left the three day festivities in America more committed to Zhabnov than before. And this could well be the last such convention before the death of the Grandfather. The delegates prayed that he would hang in there for a few more days at least so they could have their fun.