by Ryder Stacy
Killov sat down in the velveteen armchair of the luxury suite as the phone rang. “Yes?” he said, picking up the gold French antique phone.
“The entire city is ours, Excellency,” reported Antonovich, the head of the commando units.
“Excellent, excellent,” Killov replied, popping a pill in his mouth from an ample supply in his inner pocket. He sipped some cold water from a crystal goblet on the phone stand. “Casualties?”
“Sixteen of our men—about a hundred of theirs. Most wounded, perhaps twenty dead,” the commando leader replied.
“Good. Kill the wounded. Round up all the officers who are on duty and imprison them. Once the fortress is completely secure I want you to take a hundred men and take control of the mindbreaking facilities. Do not interfere with the operation, just control it. I will be there shortly to see just what our friend Zhabnov had been up to.”
“Yes, Excellency, immediately,” Antonovich snapped. Killov hung up the phone and turned to the commander of the fort who held the side of his face which dripped blood from a long gash opened by the gunbutt hit.
“So,” Killov said to the man, who this time kept facing the wall so as not to receive another smash in the face, “You see we are already in control. Now, just tell me where the records are being stored of this Lincoln operation and perhaps I will let you live.”
“Never,” Commander Peshtro said loudly, trying to sound brave to himself as much as to Killov.
“Never?” Killov laughed. “Please do not bore me with a dramatic scene of bravery. I will find the records anyway. My men are already searching for them. Your life means nothing to me, but I would imagine it holds some sort of meaning for you.” Peshtro’s face twitched with indecision. If he told Killov anything, Zhabnov would have his testicles torn out. If he didn’t . . . Somehow he feared Killov more. “I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you,” he blurted out, avoiding the accusing looks of his senior officers.
“Good, wonderful, in fact. Please have a seat,” Killov said, pointing to the chair next to him. Peshtro, still holding his hand to his cheek as blood oozed through the pale fingers, sat down several feet away from the skull-like visage of Killov.
“You’ll find the computer tapes of progress to date in Sector Seven-B. The file reports are in the Central Storage Warehouse behind the main brainwashing building.” Killov snapped his fingers and two of his aides ran from the room to find the records.
“Now tell me, Commander,” Killov said, smiling a fearsome thin grin at the trembling Peshtro, “Just what are you all up to here in Pavlov City anyway?” He poured the man a drink, a crystal glass filled with golden brandy from a decanter and handed it to him. Peshtro drained the glass in a second and, gasping for breath, told Killov just what Zhabnov’s plans were for the creation of an American worker army to fight the freefighters. Killov listened intently.
“How ingenious,” the KGB commander said when Peshtro had finished. “I really didn’t think that the fat man had so much imagination. I’ve underestimated him. But tell me one further thing. Did not Zhabnov also have plans to use this American army against my own KGB forces, knowing that his regular Red Army troops would be loathe to fight me?” He looked at Peshtro who seemed to wince at the question.
“I—I—” he stuttered, too nervous to answer.
“You needn’t go on, my dear commander. Your stuttering speaks volumes.” Killov turned to his officers. “Take him out and dispose of him.” Peshtro began sobbing.
“You said—I’d—”
“I said nothing,” Killov replied, taking a sip from the goblet. “Let’s see, how high are the walls of the city?”
“Sixty feet, Your Excellency,” an aide said instantly.
“Throw him off the wall!” Killov said, looking away.
“No! No!” Peshtro screamed as guards dragged him away. Killov’s eyes were narrow as razors. It was sand below, he thought. Maybe all the Commander’s bones wouldn’t be broken. Maybe he could crawl the two thousand or so radioactive miles to Washington and get a medal for bravery from Zhabnov. Their conflict had, with this action, moved for the first time into the open. If the doctors did their work in Moscow there would be no repercussions. If not, all traces of the operation could be eliminated with explosives and blamed on Ted Rockson and the freefighters. He went to the window of the suite and looked out. He could see across the vast plains over the small fires of the poverty camps. Yes out there the commander might find some water, maybe in a hundred miles or so. He laughed and popped another “alert” pill and instantly felt the tingling exhilaration fill his bloodstream. He was hooked now but he didn’t care. Power, he wanted more and more power. The phone rang.
“Yes!” Killov answered.
“We have total control of the fort now, Excellency. Anti-air defense is in place.”
“Good, permit only the brainwashing of the American prisoners to continue. I will come shortly to visit the operation.” He hung up. There was nothing like a good disciplined force of even a few hundred men against anybody. Discipline was what counted, and Killov’s Death Squads were the most disciplined forces in the world for they knew the penalty for failure. Fear! Fear was the best teacher, and of that emotion the colonel was an expert. He would rule because he deserved to rule—the world.
Within the Kremlin’s grim walls Premier Vassily lay dying—a victim of the spreading tumorous cancers that blotched his frail face and gaunt body. Near him sat his faithful servant Rahallah, a black man whose ancestors had been servants of the Russian elite for as long as any of them could remember. Rahallah would bring hot water bottles to place on the painful areas of the premier’s diseased body and speak softly to the Grandfather-of-all-the-world, telling him that—yes he was loved, and yes he was a great and beneficent leader. Rahallah, the premier’s only confidant, the only man he dared trust, kept news of the power struggle unfolding in the U.S. from his master as much as possible. The old man lay almost motionless for days at a time, coughing up bits of bloody sputum onto the white satin pillows beneath his head, just waiting for the moment when the icy hand of the reaper would grab hold of his throat and squeeze for the last time. Then Rahallah would kill himself, the black servant had already decided, rather than serve his master’s enemies.
Rahallah believed that his master was basically good. It was after all, a relative judgment—these concepts of good and evil. But certainly compared to the truly evil Killov or the banally evil Zhabnov, the Grandfather was a benign character on the stage of the post-war world. Vassily demanded that the Soviet Empire be careful with the balance of nature—what was left of it. He resisted the calls for massive atomic destruction of the empire’s enemies by many of his advisers and particularly Colonel Killov, who seemed to have quite a taste for the neutron bomb, which he constantly requested permission to use. Vassily was, in the cast of characters of 2089 A.D., a moderate and scholarly man who despised only the rulers in the Kremlin who, one hundred years before, had pressed the buttons that spelled atomic cataclysm for most of the peoples of the world. The Grandfather had spoken many times of how the premier responsible for the holocaust, Drubkin, shouldn’t be lying in Lenin’s Tomb beside the founder of the nation; how he should be in a garbage heap, reviled, not worshipped. But now the Grandfather, destined by fate to rule the world, was dying, and in place of this canny old goat would come wolves like Killov.
Vassily pulled Rahallah’s head closer and whispered to him.
“Do not let those doctors near me, my faithful friend. I know they mean me ill. You—you are my only friend. The only man on this planet I can trust.”
Then the black servant of the ruler of the world felt the hand go limp, sag like a doll’s hand in his. He ran and called in the doctors with their stethoscopes and hypodermics. The medical men rushed in, their black bags in their hands. The head physician, Menzies, opened his bag on the night table and extracted a vial with a rubber stopper. He pulled out a needle and punctured the stopper, filling the hypo with a clear li
quid. His colleagues pulled up the frail premier’s night robe to reveal his blotched sunken chest. Rahallah felt something strange—the way the doctors looked at one another, the way they smiled too broadly at him.
“Wait!” the black servant yelled out. “I’ll give it to him when he feels better. Not now!”
“But—” Menzies began to protest. “He must get these drugs right now—or the prognosis is not at all good. I’m—I’m afraid he doesn’t have long without receiving these treatments.”
“Rahallah! Rahallah! Where are you?” the premier whispered feebly, holding his thin veiny hands up in the air.
“Here! I am right here, Grandfather,” the black servant said, reaching out and grabbing hold of the trembling hands of the leader of the world.
“How long?” sighed the servant.
“Two weeks—a month. Who can say?” Menzies nervous eyes stared into the blackness of Rahallah’s impenetrable eyes, trying to read the man’s reaction. He couldn’t. The doctors left Rahallah with the serums, telling him to inject the premier every eight hours. They would return the next day, they promised, and departed.
As soon as they were out the door Rahallah went downstairs, determined to do something. Something he had been taught as a boy by his grandfather who wished to pass on the secrets of the medicine men of the Imbagi tribe of East Africa from which Rahallah’s people originally came. He still kept the knowledge buried in his memory—all the strange incantations, herbal cures that he had been shown—before his training to become a servant, before his training in Russian, mathematics, in forgetting his tribal knowledge. He gathered herbs from the kitchen staff. Although just a servant he had somehow become a powerful figure to the Kremlin staff over the years. They almost forgot his stature, so natural had it become for Rahallah to command; first carrying out the premier’s orders, transmitting them to others, even generals; then without even realizing it, beginning to think for the premier—giving out orders that he knew the premier would have wanted.
Rahallah went to his private quarters, a large room a floor below the premier’s with all the luxuries of the very rich. His window looked out over Red Square, the constant crowds passing by, staring up at the home of the most powerful man in the history of the planet. The black servant reached under the bed and pulled out an old leather satchel that he hadn’t touched for nearly fifteen years. It was filled with the potions, fetishes, secret teachings that his own grandfather had passed on to him. Rahallah prepared a concoction of various foul-smelling powders and liquids and placed them in a plastic bag, tying it securely closed. A poultice that the doctors, if they ever saw it, would abhor: a poultice to remove the bad things in the body. To remove as his mentor had told him, the demons from within. The demons that made the red blotches, for they had red cancer sores even in his tribe. The mutated form of skin cancer was now worldwide due to radiation. He would remove the evil within Vassily and restore his vital energy. He would slip it under the premier’s nightshirt and remove it whenever the doctors came and he would not give Vassily the pills. The Red medicines had failed, or worse, were poison. Rahallah would reach back into pre-civilization to save the Grandfather. The past and the present would do battle within the body of the failing premier.
Ten
Ted Rockson set out on his long trek to Pavlov City at about three in the morning after saying a farewell to a tearful Rona. She always mentally cursed herself for falling in a deeper love with Rockson every time he came back to Century City from one of his many perilous encounters with the outside world. And this, perhaps the most dangerous mission of all. She stood at the eastern exit of Century City, staring silently at the shadowy figure as he rode off. She watched until the dark shape atop a hybrid was swallowed up by the night. Then she turned and reentered the subterranean caverns of Century City, the steel door covered with leaves closing quickly behind her.
Rockson rode down the steep mountain trail, the cold night air refreshing as it blew sharply against his skin. The moon hung low in the western sky, a curved scimitar colored deep violet by the poisoned atmosphere. It was theorized by Dr. Shecter that the atmosphere had at least four layers of radioactive material circling above it, covering it with a shroud of death. Strontium, krypton, hydrogen, and plutonium—still as radioactive as the day they were released into the sky in writhing red-hot mushroom clouds. Shecter believed that as the radioactive atoms slowly fell back to earth they would be destroyed by the planet’s own natural cleansing processes—of rain and gravitational grinding until they were slowly dispersed over the entire planet, still deadly but reduced to single molecules incapable of much damage. But first, there would be centuries more of even worse climactic conditions as the radioactive blankets blacked out more and more of the atmosphere, condensing in lower and lower orbits into a single great revolving ring of death.
Great! Rockson thought, musing over the doctor’s hypotheses as he stared up at the orbiting moon looking oddly wounded as if bleeding from her dark craters. The half ball of purple-white ducked ever deeper behind the high pine trees that knotted the trail ahead. Rock turned around but already couldn’t see the mountain beneath which Century City was built. He was alone again, in the vastness of the night sky, where he had been a thousand times before. He and the unfiltered forces of life and death. Rock was in his element: the solitary facing of all challenges. The stars overhead twinkled by the trillions, burning through the dark clouds that hung over the planet. Burning with promise and hope. Hope for America. Hope for those who fought to live free.
The Doomsday Warrior rode through the night atop the sturdy hybrid, Snorter, whose keen big eyes and senses were perfectly attuned to the night. The palomino who was named after its habit of snorting and looking back around at Rock whenever given a command, as if not quite wanting to obey Rockson, or at any rate showing Rock that another creature existed who served at its own will—not his. Yet, it always obeyed this man, the hybrid that stood a shoulder taller than any other in Century City, the hybrid that could run like the wind itself as Rock had found several times when pursued by enemy forces.
They rode through the night and had almost reached the edge of the eastern range of the Rockies by morning. Just ahead lay long flat plains stretching off to the horizon, dotted only by an occasional odd hill composed mostly of wreckage from the war. Rock rested just at the edge of the green mountain woods, waiting for the day to pass. He napped the light sleep of the warrior as the hybrid stood nearby, its eyes closed in sleep. The Red spy drones had been plentiful in this area lately. He prayed that they weren’t zeroing in on Century City. So far they had been lucky. But the war would be stepped up now that the freefighters were conducting such bold and successful attacks on the Russian convoys. Things would get a lot hotter in the next few weeks and months.
The sun set quickly that evening, dropping like a stone. Bulbous clouds covered the evening sky, sickly, orange looking. Rock hoped he wasn’t in for an acid rain or a tornado. The damn clouds had the most eerie color, like the inside of a corpse. He headed the hybrid out onto the wastelands and rode him at a good pace once the land really flattened out. The ’brid positively flew along the red and green-tinged hard-packed ground. It reveled in its power and speed, letting its muscular legs pump away with full power. Rock bent forward in the saddle, pulling his head close to the ’brid’s thick neck to cut wind resistance. The steed moved at a gallop as the thick orange clouds dropped lower and the air became bitterly cold.
Ahead were several bodies of water. Rockson had seen them before. He had passed several times through this area: the Five Lakes region. Five immense lakes almost side by side where five 2-megaton H-bombs had gone off errantly. Probably a multiple warhead aimed for some entirely different target that had ended up blowing up the middle of nowhere, Rockson mused. Maybe got winged by one of our defensive missiles. There had probably just been a few ranchers and farms to begin with in this area, then nothing. Rock pulled the reins lightly and the hybrid skirted the first of the
large black lakes almost perfectly circular in shape and a good two miles across. No trees, bushes, not a blade of grass grew around them. What should have been fertile soil was, in fact, poisoned by the still radioactive lakes flat as sheets of glass on this cloudy day.
They came to the second, then the third of the lakes, passing by them in just minutes as Snorter tore along the rocky ground with Rockson crouched full forward in his black leather saddle. As they were passing the fifth and largest of the man-made lakes Rock saw a shadow in the middle. A large head broke the surface, something with an impossibly long neck and scales. “What the—” Rock muttered out loud. He stopped the ’brid by the bank of the lake, pulling sharply on the reins which the Palomino responded to instantly. Rock pulled out his field glasses and sighted out to the center. Nothing! Just ripples where the thing had been a second before. He moved the binoculars around, searching. The hybrid suddenly reared back and, moving like lightning, ran about forty feet away from the water’s edge. Rock nearly fell off but threw his hands forward and grabbed the ’brid’s thick mane. He was about to berate the disobedient steed when he heard a loud sound as of a waterfall behind him and turned around in the saddle. There—a large head was breaking the surface of the lake only a few feet from shore. The hideous head was reptilian on a neck a good twenty-five feet long. Scaly flippers flapped madly as the creature tried to edge onto the shore in search of its meal. Its five foot wide jaws filled with row after row of bayonet-sized teeth snapped at the air, toward Rockson. Rock saw why Snorter had fled. Smart creature. Smarter this time around than him.
