by Ryder Stacy
The lake monster obviously wasn’t equipped to come out of the water and it just stood, front flippers up on the shore angrily mouthing its teeth at Rockson. The two creatures—a human and a God-knew-what, stared at each other, the lake creature’s huge red eyes bulging at Rock. The thing was obviously quite upset about losing what seemed like a sure meal. It let loose with a roar that made Rock’s hair stand on end. Opening its jaws to their widest, the creature snapped up at the pale sky several times as it showed its power and then, as suddenly as it had appeared, it flipped its body around and instantly disappeared back under the midnight black surface of the crater lake.
Rock watched the bubbles float to the surface. “Remind me never to go swimming in there, will you pal,” he said to the palomino which snorted in full agreement and perhaps a trace of mockery. They both looked as the ripples hit the sand at their feet and then the ’brid moved out, reaching a full gallop within seconds.
The first few days of their journey went easily enough, but on the fourth evening the drone spy planes grew thicker and thicker, flying overhead every fifteen or twenty minutes. The Reds were sending out everything they had to keep this sector clean, to try and discover more of the freefighter’s hidden cities. To avoid detection Rock decided to head a little further south. He would have to take a more roundabout route through an area he had never traveled but there was no choice. If he were detected by the probes a chopper force would be on its way in minutes.
Within several hours they came to more woods, scrawny, diseased, but offering some cover. The land was fairly level except for large ant mounds which Rock had only seen before out West. The ants in these colonies were all long gone. The thirty and forty foot high dirt cones stood as monuments to the ant’s history as proudly as any pyramid or Acropolis. Many creatures seemed to seek immortality through their structures—structures that would live long beyond their own quick lives. But only the Russians wanted it all—the whole damned planet as their monument, Rock thought bitterly.
They rested again during the day beneath a grove of thick red-barked trees at the edge of a meadow filled with blue flowers covered with red spots as if they had all contacted measles. Rock half drifted off into daydreams, listening to the buzz of life in the woods and the sharp chirping of the birds as they squabbled over worms and bugs and branches on which to build their nests.
At last the sun headed down again and Rockson set out. The woods quickly grew thicker and thicker and he had to dismount and use his fourteen inch bowie knife to hack through the underbrush. A strange black bush began appearing. About six feet high and wide it was black as coal, shiny and covered with thorns a good five inches long and needle sharp. Rock managed to skirt the bushes at first, but as he hacked on through the dense shrubs they grew more frequent until they became the only vegetation around him. The thorns pricked at him, ripping his skin even through his thick field jacket and pants. The needle thorns left little bloody trails on his flesh and the hybrid, too, was soon covered with a sheen of blood from the constant ripping of the dark brambles. Rockson pushed on, covering his eyes and face, tying bandannas around his hands and neck and around the hybrid’s head to protect the two of them as much as possible. They moved through the black thorn patch for a good hour before coming to the end of them. Ahead lay more fields, nearly flat with the nightlife: raccoons and field mice, owls and chipmunks all darting around pursuing their instinctual obligations.
Rock rested at the edge of the first field and wiped himself down with a penicillin-based ointment that Shecter’s people had come up with. He did the same to the ’brid and then sprayed plastiseal, a polyurethane shield that dried to a clear plastic to stop germs from entering the wounds. Feeling a little better, Rock remounted Snorter and the two continued on across the flowering fields.
The land seemed fertile here. Large open spaces with dark moist soil. Weeds and flowers of every variety grew wildly with small streams running through the land, bringing life-giving moisture to the flora. Good land, Rock thought. Perhaps it had all been farmland once long ago. They had gone for about an hour when he began feeling strange: in the pit of his stomach a growing nausea and then a numb pain on the spots where the needles had pierced the skin. He noticed that the palomino was slowing by the minute and seemed lethargic, taking deep breaths. Within minutes Rockson felt himself burning with a red-hot fever, his arms and legs tingling madly while other parts of his body became totally numb. The thorns! The Goddamn things must have contained some kind of poison.
Snorter stopped suddenly, and, hobbling for a moment, his legs twitching violently, keeled over like a huge tree felled by lightning. Foam bubbled from the hybrid’s wide-opened mouth. Rock fell from the saddle onto the dark wet ground, heavy with night dew. God, he was nearly under already. He could feel the darkness pressing in from all sides, the stars flickering on and off like a malfunctioning light bulb. An intense pain shot up from the lower part of his back through his spine and into his brain cavity, a pain like a razor blade being drawn across his raw nerves. Red hot, ripping, tearing at his neck and skull. Waves of white-hot pain shot up and down his spine. Now the pain was coming from everywhere: from his hands and feet, his ears, even his eyes all hurt with an intensity he had never experienced in his life. The poison was ripping him apart.
The hybrid writhed and made whimpering sounds on the ground next to him. Rock had never seen anything like the thorns before. They must be a new mutation. The radioactive sections of land were always creating new forms of vegetation, many of which died, unable to compete with the already successful species around them. This particular brand of hell looked like it might have some staying power. Anything that messed with it or tried to eat it would very quickly be carrion for the vultures. There was only one chance. Rockson reached for his medical supply pack strapped on the hybrid’s back and tried to reach for Shecter’s universal antitoxin which had been synthesized from a number of snake poisons. The thorns weren’t snakes but perhaps somehow their poison was based on the same chemicals. He had no other chance.
Rockson reached for the pack but nothing happened. His hand felt like it weighed a thousand pounds. The command went from his brain to his arm but the muscles wouldn’t respond. It was as if they were dead. He had to get to the bag or he was definitely dead. He reached down inside himself for that power, that extra portion of strength which was his, which had pulled him through before when the odds seemed insurmountable, which meant the difference between life and death in America, 2089 A.D. And somehow, somehow he made his arm reach out. His hand pulled the pouch back. He opened it. Every movement was impossible, painful. His fingers felt like boiling hot lead pipes but he strained and commanded his own flesh to obey his will, not the poison’s. Rockson got the anti-venom out: two hypodermics wrapped in plastic filled with the precious liquid.
He swooned as the blackness began hitting him again, sweeping down from the sky like an avalanche of death, the purest black of all, a dark blanket from which he knew he might never return. Rock stabbed one of the hypos into his arm and pushed the plunger home. He turned to the ’brid and did the same, stabbing the needle into the palomino’s neck. The hybrid started for a moment and then settled down again. Then he sank down onto the cold ground, pressing against it, incredibly heavy, every cell like iron. The darkness shattered down on him in tidal waves pounding onto the reef of his consciousness with a roar that swamped every sense. Then there was nothing.
Eleven
The Central Processing Hall of Pavlov City was a madhouse. Prisoners or volunteer workers, as the Reds euphemistically called them, were continuing to be brought in from all around the Midwest. Every hour brought more of the workers and lower dredges of society—“garbage” people, thieves, beggars, the lowest of the underclass—into Pavlov City. The entire city was a factory, a factory for turning docile American workers into killing machines for the Reds. Colonel Killov, now in control of the fortress, allowed the processing to continue at full speed as he himself had
not yet decided the final outcome of his takeover of the brainwashing center. With KGB guards stationed at strategic spots, the Red Army troops continued to process the new prisoners and funnel them into the mindbreaking building.
The workers were transported in by truck, chopper, and freight jet and fed through Main Processing—a football-field-sized concrete walled building where the workers were photographed, given a set of gray clothes, and tattooed with an electric branding iron on their shoulders. The Red guards continued to tell them they were being trained for working with special machinery which would bring them increased benefits and privileges. Few of the workers really believed this but had little choice as armed troops were everywhere. Besides they had already given their souls over to the Reds years before in their youths when they had learned that obedience meant life, disobedience meant death. So they went willingly into the mindbreaking machines.
Chaplin-47 had been trucked in from the Russian fortress city of Trotskyville where he had been unceremoniously hauled from his cot in the middle of the night and stuffed into a Red diesel truck that joined a convoy carrying thousands of other workers. He was unloaded just inside the gates of Pavlov City and herded into the processing hall. He was frightened and showed it, his squat face, nearly chalk white, his narrow lips pursed tightly as he clamped his teeth together hard. He wasn’t a large man, about five feet four inches and not that strong so he wasn’t sure just what the Reds wanted with him. Most of the other Americans in the hall were bigger. His life in Trotskyville had not been pleasant but somehow he felt that what lay ahead would make his alleyway cardboard home soon seem like a paradise in comparison.
“You!” a guard said, pointing at him. “Over here!” He pulled the slow moving Chaplin-47 through a checkpoint and onto a line of workers who were standing stark naked. “Take it off!” a second guard said, walking up and down the hundred man line of nude flesh.
“You mean my clothes?” Chaplin-47 asked trembling.
“No, your head if you don’t move, idiot,” the guard shrieked, walking up to the worker. He pushed him rudely with the butt of his Kalashnikov in the chest. “I said take it off and throw it onto this belt over here.” He pointed to a swiftly moving conveyor belt which took all the clothing of the captives and carried it away to two thousand degree furnaces. One thing the military didn’t want here was lice and crabs brought in by the filthy Americans. So all their articles of clothing, every possession they brought with them was destroyed.
Chaplin-47 stripped down to his thin knees and knobby elbows. He deposited his prize blue flannel shirt with only three holes in it on the conveyor and watched sadly as it was sucked down a ramp and disappeared through a small door. It had taken him nearly three months to get the shirt—real flannel and now . . . He stood there quivering in the slight chill of the late afternoon, covering his rather small genitals from the view of the other men who stared nervously straight ahead. The line moved slowly with Chaplin at the end and the group entered a large room. The door was slammed shut behind them and shower heads on the walls shot out bursts of hot chlorine-smelling water. The men danced around under the hot streams enjoying the sensation. It was the first time any of them had ever felt hot water. A voice boomed out from a hidden loudspeaker.
“Pick up the brown soap on the floor and the scrub brushes and wash your bodies thoroughly. Any man who is not cleaned will be punished.” The cleanest group of men who ever walked the planet emerged five minutes later from the other side of the washroom and were handed sets of drab clothing. They were herded into another room and questioned briefly by Red Army officers about their age, health, place of origin, and job function. After questioning, Chaplin-47 was taken to the mess hall, a huge room filled with tables. Everywhere were workers dressed all in the same gray outfits, slurping away at their thin stews and eating coarse loaves of bread. Chaplin-47 hungrily took a tray, loaded up with food, and moved off to an empty seat to gobble down the meal—more food than he had seen at one time for years.
After the meal the men seemed a little more cheerful and smiles were even seen here and there. After all at least they weren’t going to be shot. Who would feed a man and then kill him? Knowing that their lives extended into the near future at any rate, and with full stomachs, the workers faced their unknown fates with a trace less anxiety. Chaplin-47 was led through a series of barracks along with twenty other men. Pavlov City was already huge and growing by the day. A group of barracks laid out in concentric circles, the outer circle growing at the rate of one new hundred-man barrack per day, built by the slave labor under the watchful eyes of the ever present guards. Chaplin was taken to one of the newest of the barracks and shown a small cot.
“Sleep!” the guard commanded the prisoners and left, locking the door behind him. A video camera mounted high on the ceiling swung slowly back and forth, sending the images back to a central video control with nearly five hundred monitors being watched by technicians. Chaplin-47 lay awake for hours, wondering just what the hell was going on and what his fate would be. He prayed to some unknown guard that he not suffer too greatly. At last he fell asleep, dreaming of happier days far back in his childhood.
He was awakened at the crack of dawn by some very burly guards who kicked the sleeping workers as they walked through each barrack. The prisoners were led outside and through hall after hall until they came to Central Processing. This was the tallest structure in Pavlov City—nearly forty stories high and even this building was still growing. President Zhabnov obviously had plans to make this city one of the largest Russian enclaves in America. He was diverting every bit of material he could muster into the construction of the city. The hundred men were taken up in an immense elevator nearly fifty feet wide and led down a long brilliantly lit hall. They could hear screams coming from behind locked doors. Screams of the most intense agony. Suddenly their lack of concern disappeared. Their guts tightened into knots. Something was wrong!
One of the workers made a dash back down the heavily waxed white linoleum floor but got barely fifty feet before streams of Red slugs tore through his chest and stomach. He fell to the floor, a writhing pool of ripped intestine and lung tissue dripping out like badly butchered meat onto the clean shiny linoleum. The guards pushed the prisoners forward with the muzzles of their rifles. Oh sweet Jesus, Chaplin thought to himself, his hands clenched together like little rocks, what are they going to do to me? The workers were led into an immense chamber filled with rows of strange plastic seats with helmets hovering just above them. The rows of seats with what looked like space helmets extended off as far as Chaplin-47 could see. Overhead, burning fluorescent lights hung down, casting the peculiar scene with a merciless brilliance.
“Now sit down in the seats,” the guards screamed out, holding their rifles straight out on the Americans. The workers sat one after another, surrounded on all sides by the Russian guards. Once they were seated, guards quickly made their way up and down the rows of seats and threw hand clasps closed on the terrified workers. They were now strapped firmly in place. An officer of some kind with a white smock covering his uniform stood in the aisle between the rows and addressed them.
“Welcome to Pavlov City, American citizens. You are here to be retrained. Retrained in your minds. The way you think and feel. You will not be killed, I assure you. And any pain you feel is only part of the necessary surgery we must perform on you. Just as an operation for a broken arm or leg causes pain but in the long run is good for the organism, so must we perform a sort of operation on your minds. You enter this chamber as workers, but you shall leave here as soldiers for the cause of world communism.” As he spoke, guards went up and down the rows of prisoners, lowering the helmets down onto the workers’ heads, setting them down so that two long steel prongs, sharp as ice picks, just touched the scalps of the workers.
Chaplin-47 felt the cold steel at his skull. Oh Jesus, no, no—they were going to stick those things in him, into his brain. No, this couldn’t be happening. His life hadn�
�t been good but he had built his little cardboard home and had saved a few rubles, perhaps enough to buy a woman for himself. There had been something—but now . . . He struggled in his steel containment, his wrists unable to move more than a fraction of an inch in their imprisonment. The officer’s words dimly penetrated his panic-stricken mind.
“Go with it,” the Red official continued. “I suggest very strongly that you go with the commands you will hear. Do not resist! If you resist you may well die. I have seen those men who have fought back against this mind processing and they made me want to vomit. So, if you care anything about your wretched lives, surrender your will, go with it. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain.” He looked at the rows of recruits for the mindbreaker and stepped back toward the control panel at one end of the room. The guards, too, stepped away as they had been splattered before by exploding brains and knew enough to keep their distance.
The officer pulled the activation switch and the helmets above the workers’ heads came to life with a dull whirring sound. Ruby red lights came on at the very tips of the prongs which poked down from beneath the helmets. Slowly, ever so slowly, moving at a snail’s pace, the laser probes began lowering into the Americans’ heads, pushing through the bone, grinding down into the skull cavity. The men heard their own skulls, cracking and melting under the laser beam that shot down into their flesh. The bone beneath the laser’s ruby light began melting and went up in puffs of acrid smoke. Then the needles pushed deeper, into the soft gray tissue of the human mind, burning out memories, destroying whole systems of self-regulation and command.
Chaplin-47 smelled his own head burning, the smoke wafting down. He could feel the probes pushing through the bone of his skull and then a sickening slurping sound as the twin laser needles began vaporizing the first layer of brain tissue. He screamed! His shrieks joined the chorus of other human screams. The Russian soldiers stuffed cotton in their ears. Sometimes these Americans could really put up a racket. The pain, the pain was unbearable: razors, knives cutting into his mind, his memories being literally burnt out of him; dreams, hopes, desires exploding in pops of brain sap into nothingness.
