Doomsday Warrior 02 - Red America

by Ryder Stacy

  Zhabnov walked around the ballroom shaking hands. Already many of the Red representatives were ensconced in side rooms and upstairs chambers, taking advantage of the seemingly endless supply of young and willing women whom Zhabnov had provided. The rest of the delegates indulged in opium-filled rooms in the subbasement, watching erotic dancers gyrate before them, or passed the time gambling in a fully equipped game room that Zhabnov had provided. The wiliest of them, however, had remained on the main ballroom floor to greet and shake hands with Zhabnov personally or share a toast.

  “To the Soviets. To the World Soviets and all the wonderful things they’ve done for humanity,” Zhabnov shouted, raising his champagne glass. All shouted nazdarovya and drank down the bubbling elixir. They then joined Zhabnov in throwing the crystal glasses into the wide roaring fireplace—in this former vice president’s mansion in Georgetown. Zhabnov pointed to the big oil painting of George Bush over the fireplace. He took another glass from the Negro waiter’s tray and raised it high in the air. “To George Bush—to all the American forefathers of our great socialist republic.” There were a few gasps but everyone knew that Zhabnov was a joker. They all shouted nazdarovya and drank again, smashing their glasses into the fireplace which was now filled with a thousand glistening shards of glass. Indeed the drinking to their ancient enemy’s picture loosened them up a bit. Anything goes here in Washington they thought, both nervous and excited.

  Zhabnov mingled with his guests, walking around the large ballroom, shaking hands, laughing louder than anyone else. He came to Sikorsky, second in command of the Armenian Republic and took him aside.

  “Vlad, how goes it in Armenia? Are the gypsies still stirring up trouble?” Zhabnov asked, putting his hands on the shorter, portly man’s shoulder.

  “Very well, Mr. President,” Sikorsky answered somewhat nervously. With his thick bifocals and hesitant, almost trembling demeanor, the man had a certain comic air about him. “The gypsies are being put into new pacification centers. It’s going very well. Food of course is . . . well . . . scarce. As you know, our region took some heavy losses in the last harvest storm.”

  “I understand that you are sympathetic to our . . . cause,” Zhabnov said, looking reassuringly at Sikorsky. “And not so friendly to the maniac—you know who.”

  “Yes Mr. President,” Vladimar said, looking around nervously to see if anyone was listening. “But how did you know?”

  “Ah, I have my ways.” Zhabnov smiled broadly. “By the way, I’ll speak to some of your production staff about getting some grain out your way. There’s been a surplus for two years now. I don’t think Moscow would mind a little channeling. Do you?”

  “Ah yes, that would be wonderful.” Sikorsky smiled for the first time since he had set foot in Washington. “And of course you can count on me voting the right way in the . . .” he hesitated for a moment before continuing, “in the Post-Vassily era which will soon be upon us.”

  “Good, Vlad, good. In fact excellent.” The president slapped the smaller man heartily on the back, nearly knocking the martini from his hands. “And do feel free to go to the top floor. There is something extra, extra special—for your tastes.”

  Sikorsky flushed. He tugged at his tight collar. “My tastes? I—”

  “Ah, enjoy, Vlad, enjoy. This life is too short.” Zhabnov faded away into the crowd. Sikorsky ascended the stairs. How did he know?

  A guard let him in while stopping others from entering the purple-curtained chamber. He was directed through a white door with the vice-presidential seal on it. It was dim inside. His eyes caught the motion of whips swinging through flickering candlelight. Two six foot tall, very robust women in black leather suits, slapped their whips impatiently across their thighs as they sat on a large bed. In the center of the room, on a plush white pile carpet, snakes slithered across the hog-tied struggling bodies of three naked young girls.

  “Welcome,” the taller blond women said. “Your wishes have been already taken into account here.” She walked quickly over to him and held her long cigarette holder with a lit cigarette in it against his hand. He winced as tears came to his eyes and the tiniest flicker of a smile to his mouth. “Welcome to Washington,” she continued, grinding the glowing ashes into his open palm. The other woman was fooling with one of the snakes, guiding it up the leg of the youngest and prettiest of the girls. She guided it to the light fluff between the girls’ thighs. The prisoner screamed but the room was triple soundproofed. The tall woman handcuffed the delegate and led him to the bed. The representative from Armenia would get his fantasies fulfilled tonight, courtesy of his benefactor—Zhabnov.

  The main entertainment—for the less important personages to the D.C. festivities—was in the Senate theater. There seven women dressed in southern belle costumes flirted with dashing actors portraying dashing Russian soldiers of the Occupation. They giggled and drawled and they were each, in turn, musically and slowly disrobed—to reveal that each was a different kind of mutant—much to the guffaws of the bald delegates who watched. Women with four breasts, extra sex organs, hair covering their bodies . . . they danced and got nastier and nastier as the night went on.

  In other sections of D.C. other entertainments abounded. For the highbrows the finest opera company in the world, The Washington Company, performed at Wolf Trap Auditorium to a packed house. Puccini’s arias swept out into the cold air. In the Negro section to the east of the Potomac, where only the most daring of the Red delegates trod—and then only with beefy bodyguards—dingy barrooms filled with voluptuous femmes fatales who sang the blues from Bessie Smith to Reena Hoarness. Heroin was sniffed and shot up in the wooden booths. In the nearby basement of an abandoned machine warehouse, normally used for cock and pit bull fighting, two terrified black teenage girls ran hysterically around inside a fenced-in enclosure, trying to fend off sex with several large and well trained dogs. An appreciative crow watched them lose.

  In the All Soviets Embassy on the other side of the airport, drunken delegates linked arms and did impromptu dances, spraining several backs as they tried to mimic the Mazurski dancers of Minsk who had performed earlier, flown in especially for the occasion. Vodka flowed like the Volga through the assembly of notables. Three giant roast pigs with apples adorning their orifices were paraded in to toasts and a mad rush at the juice-dripping treat.

  In the New Southern Hemisphere Pavillion atop the former Smithsonian Museum, a stunned group of the most minor delegates watched in horror and amazement as lions devoured mutant men and women, captured freefighters, given only small knives with which to defend themselves. And so on throughout the city of Washington, D.C. where every nook and cranny contained some perversion, some act of violence or degradation took place for the satisfaction of the bureaucrats who ruled the Soviet Empire.

  President Zhabnov sat wearily at his desk looking at the confidential analysis of swayed delegates drawn up by his intelligence staff. He had gotten at least another thirty delegates firmly in his grasp and the possibility of picking up ten or fifteen more. He would need only another twenty to have the premiership sewn up. Twenty men between him and world dominion. He looked up at the unfinished Stuart portrait of Washington across the blue room, where he pondered the affairs of state. He hated the damn thing but Vassily had forbade the removal or destruction of any of the White House’s furnishings, saying that the preservation of history demanded that it be left untouched. But the Grandfather’s days were nearly over. Perhaps Zhabnov would dispense with the hall of past president’s pictures altogether—move a collection of his favorite American painter in instead. He adored those Keane’s with their big eyes and untainted innocent mouths. Yes that would be nice . . .

  Zhabnov walked over to the laced windows and peered down into the snow covered rosebushes of the White House garden. The weathered bronze statue of a very heroic looking Premier Drubkin was ordering the launching of the First Strike that had decimated America. His hand was held up, frozen forever in time, giving the comma
nd to fire, the hand caked in glistening icicles as the temperature slowly dropped. It was now minus twenty degrees Fahrenheit. The premier’s war had not affected the weather in a kindly way, but at least the capital of the Soviet Union wasn’t radioactive, having been spared any close hits by high-rad nukes, so it was able to continue as the seat of power for the entire world.

  Zhabnov wondered for the thousandth time what it was like to hear on the radio that you had only a few more minutes to live. Were the Americans resigned? Scared? Were they told? History tapes said the air raid sirens had gone off and broadcasts were made over radio and television about what was happening. But the history tapes were unreliable, having been rewritten a dozen times according to party ideologues, new lines of propaganda since the war. There was no denying that the Drubkin plan to destroy America while Russia escaped unscathed had gone at least partly awry. About twenty submarine-launched ballistic missiles and several cruise missiles had gotten through the killer satellite defensive network of the motherland. Because their trajectories were so low, the anti-missile systems had not detected them. Minsk, Odessa, Leningrad, Volgograd . . . all destroyed.

  But we had won the war, and that was what mattered, Zhabnov thought, clearing his head of any doubts. Besides, if the intelligence analysis was correct, the history tapes said that the U.S.A. had been about to regain technical superiority and launch their own strike. Then the premier had done the right thing. Otherwise Americans would be sitting in Moscow today. Wouldn’t they? Having power struggles and telling their Red slaves where to live and work. No, what is inevitable is inevitable.

  It was inevitable as well that Zhabnov should rule the world once the Grandfather was gone. He would make a much better premier than that Killov, who was without question a madman and growing more psychotic by the moment. But Zhabnov had no illusions about the looming battle between the two of them. Killov was terribly powerful and clever. More clever than Zhabnov, even the president knew that. But Zhabnov now had a secret weapon that Killov had no idea of—the mindbreaker, a device that his own scientists had invented just months before. At first, the globe which covered a prisoner’s entire head and slowly lowered laser probes into the brain cavity, burning away memory, causing pain more intense than could be borne by the strongest man, was used primarily for torture and trying to extract information from captured freefighters. And it had worked well, forcing several prisoners to reveal their hidden cities location, able to break through the hypnotic blocks that the freefighter’s psychologists and hypnotists had been able to implant in them. But now his researchers had discovered another aspect of the machine: it could be used to change men’s minds, rearrange them, alter the memory patterns and even the loyalties of anyone. Of course, many prisoners’ brains were irreparably destroyed by the device, but then Zhabnov had more than enough workers to play with. They were, after all, his subjects, his toys, his to do with what he wished.

  Thus came Plan Lincoln into being—without question, Zhabnov’s peak of intellectual inventiveness. They would take American Workers from a number of Red fortress cities and brainwash them, change their very brain patterns so that they thought they were Russian troops. Then they could be armed and sent out against their fellow citizens—the freefighters hidden in the mountains and valleys of the vast wastelands. It was ingenious. Zhabnov still smiled whenever he realized that he had thought of it. He had immediately diverted funds meant for the building of several new fortresses into the construction of Pavlov City—a hastily erected center that would be devoted entirely to transforming docile and submissive American workers into a new army for Zhabnov. An army that would give him a whole new power base that could be used against the rebels—and against Killov himself if it came down to that.

  The city was now nearly complete and had been filled with over ten thousand of the mindbreakers. Already, thirty thousand men had been processed. Twenty five thousand of them had either died or been brain damaged beyond repair. But new projects always had a few bugs to iron out, all his scientists agreed. Soon Pavlov City would be turning out fighters for his new army by the thousands. Things were going well for him, very well.

  Zhabnov whistled from between his ruddy jowls as he headed out of the Oval Office and down the hall to his sleeping chambers. He was glad that he was president of the United Soviet States and that he had two pink-faced young virgins drugged and ready in his huge presidential bed.

  Four

  It took nearly nine days of cautious riding, almost entirely at night along mountain trails thought impassable by the Reds, for the freefighters led by Rockson to reach Century City. They had gone down from the mountainside attack point to check out the damage they had caused the Russian truck convoy and had managed to capture five soldiers who had somehow survived the hellfire, one of them the second ranking officer of the fleet. The Rock Squad had then retreated back into deep wooded valleys and mountains toward the west where they had tethered their hybrids: large sturdy mutated horses that freefighters throughout America used as transportation. With the Russian prisoners tied up, they had made their way back to Century City, one of the most powerful of the seventy-three hidden rebel cities.

  Three pine trees next to three aspens was the only sign of the main entrance into the underground fortress, home of Ted Rockson, Doomsday Warrior. The squad rode silently past the trees and into what appeared to be nothing but dense underbrush. But the brush parted easily and the party headed through a tunnel of vegetation and camouflage netting. A bluejay screeched just ahead of them.

  “That’s the signal this month,” Detroit said to Rockson who rode lead. Detroit, who was the birdcall expert of the Rock Squad, put his hands over his mouth and gave out rapid renderings of a hoot owl. The jay screeched two times rapidly—and the owl responded with a long drawn-out hoot. The Russian prisoners marching behind the hybrids looked on curiously. They were short of breath at these heights.

  Suddenly there was a grating noise. The huge granite boulder in front of them slid sideways and there appeared a quickly sloping concrete ramp lit by faint green phosphorescent overhead lights. Ted Rockson, the attack squad, and the Red prisoners headed down the tunnel entrance into Century City, home of over fifty thousand souls, comprised of twenty levels, with thirty thousand miles of electrical and water systems. As the hybrids’ stone-hard hooves beat out symphonies of clatter in the long smooth-walled tunnel, Rock saw a glint of brightness ahead. The second doorway to the Debriefing Center—a large chamber where medical doctors and intelligence aides were seated. Rock and his men handed over their ’brids to members of the debriefing staff and walked through the wide door where Intel Chief Rath, his familiar gaunt face and hooked nose bobbing up and down, greeted them excitedly. He was anxious. So much depended on the success of the mission.

  “Did it go well?” he asked, unable to contain his questions.

  “Scratch one Red convoy,” Rock said laconically. “And I mean scratch. We could hardly find any wreckage to look at when we went down to check damage.”

  “Wonderful, wonderful,” Rath said, rubbing his hands together and beaming as if he’d just received his longed for Christmas present.

  “The particle beams perform miracles,” Rock continued. “Even knocked out their heavy metal tanks—the Soyaks—though it took a second to melt through their thick skins. That’s one shipment of supplies that the Reds will never see again. I’d say it took us a total of ten minutes from commencement of attack to complete destruction of the fleet. It was something to see, Rath. Almost frightening. I felt as if I were seeing a new energy source being unleashed on the earth.” Rock looked down, a strange expression on his face.

  “You were, you were,” Rath piped in. “A weapon that will drive the Reds from America. Oh Rock, this is a great moment. Perhaps one of the greatest in my life.” Rath looked positively glowing. Unlike Rock he was not one to hide his feelings.

  “Destruction, Rath, so much destruction,” Rock said softly. “All my life I’ve spent fighting t
he Reds. Yet suddenly when I was holding that particle beam weapon in my hands and firing down I realized I had the power of God at my fingertips. The power of lightning, of earthquakes. I just wonder if man was meant to ever possess these kinds of weapons. For the first time in my life I actually felt unsure about what I was doing.”

  “But Rock, for God’s sake, man. We’re not killers. If the Reds would leave, we wouldn’t follow them back to the Kremlin. We’re not bent on world domination. This is our land for Christ’s sake, and these weapons will be used to get it back.” Rath was almost shouting.

  “And if the Reds should get their hands on these or discover the energy source? Then what?” Rock stared at the intel chief with glowing eyes, purple and aquamarine. Almost too intense to look into. “Can you imagine if the Reds had them?”

  “They won’t. You can be damn sure of that,” Rath said firmly. “That’s exactly why Dr. Shecter built in the explosive charges. The weapons can be blown up within seconds.”

  “Someday there’s got to be an end to war, Rath,” Rock said. “I’ll fight. I’ll fight until the day I die to free this land. But someday, someday,” he was whispering, with a look in his eyes that Rath had never seen before. “Someday there must be peace. We can never forget that that is what we’re fighting for. Never!” He looked sternly at the head of intelligence who shrank beneath the stare. “Anyway, the things work. That’s for damned sure.”

  The phone rang on the wall and Rath reached over, picking the cordless receiver up. “Hello? Dr. Shecter! When are we expecting them?” He smiled at Rockson who let his own features soften. Rath certainly wasn’t his enemy. Rock let a slow grin fill his face as Rath handed him the receiver.