by Ryder Stacy
Thus were the workers of America condemned to lives of suffering, lives that usually ended before the old age of forty-five or fifty. Born into poverty and slavery, living out their lives in the dank factories and then dying, skinny, starving, often alone, in the back of some Godforsaken alley.
Yet even within this framework of suffering the Reds were no longer content to let things proceed as usual. According to President Zhabnov’s directives sent out to all the midwest fortress cities Plan Lincoln was now in full effect. Each fort was responsible for shipping half of their workers to Pavlov City for processing in the mindbreakers. They would be turned into zombie soldiers and sent out to fight their own freefighting American brothers. Their Red masters, pulling the puppet’s strings, would stay safely behind the walls of their impenetrable military enclaves.
On the morning of Nov. 15, 2089 A.D., a morning like a thousand others—gray-pink sky cracked with spiderwebs of glowing green from low flying strontium clouds, still highly radioactive after a century, Smith-14 woke with a start on his small sweat-stained cot. Where was he? He had to shake his head to try to remember. In bed! He had been drinking last night. Drinking alcohol from stolen medical supplies from the Reds. He looked around the filthy gray basement dwelling where other sleeping workers lay on blankets, towels, pieces of cardboard, or just the hard-packed cold dirt floor. They lay strewn like the dead, arms stretched out, legs twisted weirdly behind them in impossible positions. The living dead. Smith-14 shared this subterranean “home” with twenty-five others, all of them men who worked in his factory—the Norsky Uniform Plant—where they produced uniforms for Russian Army troops.
In the distance factory whistles began their shrill screams signaling wake-up time—six o’clock in the morning. The workers had to be at their jobs by six forty-five or face punishment: fewer food coupons or after several offenses a visit to the dreaded KGB Worker Regulation and Control Section. The laborers around the basement room slowly roused themselves moaning and grumbling. Unwashed feet kicked stubbly faces. Lice crawled from scalp to flaking scalp. Matted hair hung down in the musty moist air. The stone walls of the basement were cold and sweated with the ooze of the night’s frigidity meeting the heat of the sun’s first rays which looked hesitantly through a single foot wide window at the upper edge of one of the walls. The ray was like a golden blade of hope in the middle of the morning darkness.
The workers were depressed, lethargic. It was hard to rouse themselves for yet another day of meaningless grinding toil, especially after their one day off, the day before, on Sunday. Even the Reds had to acknowledge they needed one day to rest. They were, after all, human. They had spent the day consuming gallons of gut-wrenching alcohol trying to drink themselves into oblivion. They had drunk and drunk and then fought with one another, punching each other’s faces until they were black and blue. When one is unable to attack one’s true enemy one turns to those closest. Now they awoke, puking their guts out, aching as if every nerve and muscle in their bodies were on fire. But the penalties for not showing up at their jobs was something they didn’t wish to think about. They had all visited the KGB Punishment Sector and once was usually enough.
So they rose slowly, pulling on their ragged garments, splashing dirty water from a large wooden barrel onto their faces. They made feeble attempts at combing their hair into place in front of a large mirror that had been cracked into a jigsaw puzzle of shiny fragments held in place with tape. Smith-14 looked at himself in the mirror. An unrecognizable face stared back. Who was this? Big bloodshot eyes bulged from a chalky sunken face. Once he had been handsome, somewhere back in the distant past. There had been a girl, a young girl with blond hair. He couldn’t remember her name. The KGB had taken her away one day for their personal use. He had never seen her again. The past—so painful, razor blades piercing layers of repressed rage and desire.
The rest of the inhabitants of the basement fixed their matted hair into place in the mirror, the prize possession of the basement dwellers. They headed, stumbling, eyes blank and dull, up a wooden flight of stairs and out a door half off its hinges to the dirt-paved street outside. There, other workers were already walking in long lines, few talking or moving with any vigor. They placed one foot down after another, plodding toward their fate.
Smith-14 joined the migrating throngs. He felt strange today. He had had the dreams again. Weird, disturbing dreams with much blood and screaming. He knew he was more than what he was. That inside this mind and body of a scrawny drone was an intelligent man. A man who had been imprisoned all of his thirty-two years of life within the walls of the Russian enclave of Fort Nijinski. Attacked from without by the Red guards for the slightest infraction, attacked from within by his own mind, his own unconscious. The dreams were getting worse everyday now. Dreams of bloody teeth opening and closing around his head and body. Of radioactive creatures from far out in the glowing wastelands pursuing him, catching him and ripping him to shreds with razor claws. Nowhere was he free. No place to run, no place to hide. He felt sick inside as if a disease that had long laid dormant had suddenly sprung to life. A chill coursed through his bones, his heart. He had had enough. Enough of this life. Life? Ha, it was a joke. The others tried to pretend that there was something to live for—their next drink, getting a few extra food coupons once in a while, screwing some grimy hooker every month or two, and spending a full week’s worth of food coupons to do it, too. They all pretended that this living hell was something worth living for. But he knew. Smith-14 knew the truth. It had lain hidden, too. That was it. The disease he felt erupting inside him was the truth. He had caught the incurable malady of seeing clearly, and the pain of his situation was unbearable.
He walked with the other workers down the straight gridlock of dirty streets. Lines of them, streams, then brooks, then a river of the gray and black-garbed slaves heading toward the looming concrete structures that housed the factories. Aimless, windowless—the Reds treated the cattle better.
Suddenly there was noise, yelling just ahead. A checkpoint. The Reds had set up a large wooden barricade blocking the entire main street of the American sector that led into the Russian factory area. Squads of Russian elite troops lined the sides of the intersection, their rifles aimed at the crowds. A captain, beefy, nose as red as an apple, crisscrossed with bursting veins from too many years of too much vodka, shouted out orders over a megaphone.
“All those with even numbers to the right. Those with odd numbers to the left.” The river of workers was being cut in two. One half of the work force was sent on to their factory jobs, the other half to . . .
Some of the workers who were being siphoned off grew alarmed. Large trucks awaited them just the other side of the electrified barbwire fence that separated the two sectors of the fortress. The Red troops herded them onto the trucks which stood parked in long rows, nearly fifty of them. They loaded truck after truck which, once filled, immediately tore off out of the fort, the American workers packed inside like sardines with only holes drilled in the side to provide air. Some of the workers began resisting, more out of fear than bravery, but were instantly met with officers holding electric cattle prods who quickly shocked the resisters on their way.
Smith-14 was even numbered and therefore destined for the trucks. He tried to walk past the gate but a guard asked to see his identity number tattooed on his upper arm. Smith-14 rolled up his sleeve and the guard looked at the identification mark which had been burned on years before but was still red and ugly as the day he had been marked. The guard whipped the butt of his Kalashnikov up in a sudden arc, smashing Smith-14 in the side of the face, ripping open his cheek to the bone. Smith-14 fell to the damp ground, pain resounding through his brain like the echoes of a scream.
“Get the fuck over there, scum!” the guard snarled. But Smith-14 had had enough. Something inside of him snapped. Some little thread that had held him down all these years, that had made him obey all the rules, that had pretended that everything was somehow all right, w
as gone. He knew that he must die. Now! He would not go into the trucks to God knows where to suffer more pain, more torture. He would die today, now. But he would take as many of the Red animals as he could.
As he lay on the ground trying to focus his eyes, trying to make the excruciating pain in his head go away, he thought of all the times the Russians had abused him in his dismal life—had commanded him, had screamed at him, hit him, kicked him, beat him. He thought of the shame, the humiliation, and the pain. And he reached in his back pocket where he had it stashed—his weapon wrapped in a greasy rag. He took it out behind his back as the guard turned his head for a second as another worker made a break for it. Several Reds fired and the fleeing man fell to the ground skewered with 7.2mm slugs. Smith-14 took the jagged piece of glass from his pocket and held it firmly in his hand. It was long and narrow, shaped almost like a knife and sharp, terribly sharp. Smith-14 had killed twice with it already. Holding the rag around the bottom, wider edge of the fifteen inch weapon, Smith-14 leaped to his feet and ran toward the distracted guard.
“What the—” the guard stuttered, sensing the motion. He turned and saw a flashing object in the worker’s hand coming toward him. Smith-14 ripped the glass across the Russian’s throat. It sliced the white flesh open. A curtain of bright red blood splashed out of the throat cut from ear to ear. The guard fell to his knees gurgling madly as he gasped for air but found only blood. Smith-14 ran toward the next guard who also had his back turned and his rifle aimed at yet another dashing worker. He stabbed the glass knife forward with all his might through the soldier’s upper back. The shiny tool of death went in deeply, cutting into the Russian’s heart from the back. He threw his arms in the air and fell forward, blood pulsing out of his gashed back from the severed but still pumping heart.
Several of the other Red troops saw what was happening. They whipped their rifles around, trying to get a bead on the mad American killer. But Smith-14 began running, dodging, twisting. He dove on another Russian, stabbing up from below into the man’s groin which exploded in a shower of red. Then another. He was a killing machine powered with the accumulated rage of a lifetime of submission. He cut and sliced, charging through the troops. Bullets began making contact. His arm, then his calf were hit. But he felt no pain. He killed and killed again. Three, four, five—and as he killed he screamed out. “Join me! Die like me! They’ll kill you anyway.”
The Russians trained their rifles on the yelling mob. Some of the workers began moving in on them, their faces weird, contorted, their mouths moving, issuing forth unintelligible cries of anger. The panic-stricken troops began firing. The first row of workers closest the fence fell but the next group behind them charged and then the next. The Reds opened up with everything they had, firing down from two concrete towers on each side of the entrance with machine guns. They fired even into their own troops trying to stop the rebellion before it exploded. Bodies lay everywhere, writhing, crawling along the blood-soaked ground, leaving trails of their torn flesh.
Still Smith-14 surged forward, now inside the Red ranks slashing away. An officer came at him, his pistol drawn. He got a bead and fired, catching the mad American on the right side of the stomach. Smith-14 lurched forward, slicing at the officer’s face. The glass made contact just below the temple and ripped the top of the Russian’s skull open. The glass knife slid across the eyeballs of the soldier, cutting them in half like boiled eggs. Bubbles of white liquid followed by a gush of blood oozed out of the eyeless sockets as the Red screamed, his hands covering what had been his eyes. He fell to the dirt, letting out a cry that sent shivers up the spines of the other Russian troops.
The endless lines of workers charged. The unrest turned into a riot and then a pitched battle. The workers knew the trucks meant something horrible, more horrible than anything they had ever experienced in their already miserable lives. The hysteria of the mob took over. They had no fear of dying, only a desire to kill. To strike back at their Russian tormentors. They charged the lines of Russian troops who fired as they retreated. Four hundred Russians against ten thousand and more all the time as the crowds behind the forward workers kept coming from their basement lairs, their alleyways, their hidden sleeping holes.
The Americans fell to their deaths by the hundreds but continued to sweep forward, an avalanche of anger, punching, kicking, trampling the Russian troops to death. They grabbed whatever weapons they could find and fired back. The Red troops continued to fall back as many were torn to pieces by the insane mob. Nearly a hundred of them lay on the dirt roadways which converged at the gate separating the Russian and American sectors of the fortress. The rest of the Red troops fled back behind the metal fence under the cover fire of the machine-gun posts. Reinforcements were frantically called in over the tower radio. The workers charged the fence, recoiling at the highly charged metal. They fired with their captured weapons up and across at the Russian gun emplacements. The huge square where the Reds had been totally in control just minutes before was now filled with howling Americans. Screaming in happiness, feeling power for the first time in their lives. It felt wonderful.
“We are free!” screamed Josephson-28.
“They are scared. They are cowards!” yelled out Perkins-209.
“See them run from us,” the crowd yelled in glee. They fired their captured weapons at every Russian uniform they could see and ran in circles, grabbing at each other, their eyes bright with the excitement of the newly powerful. All their lives they had lived in fear and trembling of every Russian soldier. Never had they been able to strike back. And now, together, by the thousands, they had killed hundreds of their hated enemy. The streets were theirs.
“We are free! Free! We won the streets!” Everywhere the voices rang out in a chorus of gleeful rage. Smith-14 lay dying in the blood-stained dirt, the still twitching eyeless corpse of the dead Russian officer lying across his legs. He was doomed but he smiled as he saw his brothers yelling in victory, dancing with the frenzy only the newly liberated can ever feel. They were free, he thought. All of them. It would only last minutes, at most. Smith-14 knew that. They all knew that. They had existed in misery too long to have any illusions about their reality. The Reds would call in their death machines, their helicopters bristling with firepower and they would fill the square with gas and riddle the workers with white-hot slugs that would rip them into so much red meat on the ground.
But for now. For these few moments. For the first time in his life, Smith-14 was a free man. It felt so good. His eyes slowly closed to remain shut forever. But the smile on his slowly cooling gaunt face stayed firm and sure.
Seven
Ted Rockson sat back on the bed in his private living chamber and breathed out a deep sigh of tiredness. Sometimes it seemed that every moment of his life since he had been eight years old, and had fled from the Russian soldiers who had massacred his family, had been filled with fighting and death. He should feel wonderful that the particle beam weapons had performed so successfully, yet he couldn’t get the images of so much destruction out of his mind. Never in his thirty-four years of life had he ever doubted himself or his mission to rid America of her enslavers. And it wasn’t that he questioned the need to chase the Reds all the way home to Moscow. It was just that he held the power of the gods in his hands for a few moments and it scared him.
He wasn’t a god—just a man. Perhaps the toughest man on earth but still, a man, mortal, imperfect. He wasn’t used to self-doubt, or self-analysis, and it felt peculiar, not particularly pleasant. He punched out a code on the computer panel next to the body-contoured plastibed and a small bar slid out from a wall enclosure. Rock poured himself a double scotch, another of Shecter’s miracles. All the drinks in Century City were based on purified alcohol distilled from potatoes grown in tanks—hydroponics, but Shecter and his crew had come up with flavorings that gave the flat-tasting alcohol the tongue-tingling flavor of all of America’s old liquors—from gin to scotch to bourbon. No one really knew if this was just ho
w it had been in the old days, but no one cared either, not after a few sips of the fiery brews.
He drank slowly. He wasn’t a drinker, but he needed this one. He was changing, maturing, growing a little older, seeing too much—who could say for sure. He had felt it first after returning from the trip to the Far West. Little lines were etched around his eyes, the white streak down the center of his midnight black hair was tinged with silver. But his rock-hard muscles were still as strong as ever, and his senses, his eyes, his ability to react instantaneously to any attack, were if anything, even sharper.
The visiphone on the white alumisynth table next to his bed beeped and Rona Wallenda’s face appeared on the small screen.
“Rock, it’s me. I—I want to see you. Why didn’t you call, I’ve been—”
“Rona, I was going to beep you in a minute,” Rockson said, switching on his end of the circuit so she could see him. He raised his glass to her image. “I swear!” He grinned the perpetual lopsided smirk that she knew and loved so well.
“I bet, mister,” she said sarcastically. “Why I bet you’ve got some girl hidden under the bed right now. I know your type.” Her beautiful green eyes flashed with half real indignation.
“Not one, three, Rona,” Rock answered sardonically, taking another sip of the delicious pseudo scotch. “You know a man like me needs more than one.”
“Well, this woman is equal to any three wenches you could ever dig up,” Rona snapped back, tossing her mane of shimmering red hair behind her alabaster shoulders. She softened suddenly, realizing that her coy barbs were not quite taking the conversation in the direction she wanted. “When will I see you?” she said, her voice now seductively soft. “I’ve missed you terribly.”
