by Ryder Stacy
He unsaddled the hybrid, burying what he didn’t need of his traveling supplies. He spoke to the powerful but gentle animal, holding the big brown head in his hands.
“Good luck, boy. I’m going to tether you here. If we’re lucky we’ll meet again. Make our way back to Century City. If I don’t come back, you’ll be able to break free from these small branches easily enough.” He patted the ’brid on the nose and set off down the steep slopes toward Pavlov City and his destiny. The palomino stared after its master for a long time and then lowered its head, searching for the tastiest clumps of mottled green and brown grass.
Rock took the supplies he had brought with him for his entrance to the Red Fortress out of his small pack—a disguise. He would need it here. His face and name were posted up in every post office and jail in America. TED ROCKSON—WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE—50,000 RUBLE REWARD to the man, Russian or American, who brought him in. Rock put a gray dye in his hair and then a thick gray mustache on. Rath’s Special Services’ people had given him the stuff along with some other tricks of the trade he might need inside. Satisfied with his masquerade after looking in a small metal mirror, Rock threw the pack over his shoulder and headed down the hill.
He hoped that at least a small American community had sprung up on the outskirts of the city. The Reds usually paid no attention to the towns that grew around every fort. No more attention to the filthiest lowest levels of society than they would give to a mosquito. Besides, somebody had to carry the garbage out to the dumps and perform menial tasks. He would make his way into the city as one of those “untouchables” that now roamed America like the hobos of old. He got to the bottom of the range of hills and started along some fairly swampy land, the dirt soft and squishy beneath his feet, reeds growing high as corn. He moved cautiously as these kinds of terrain sometimes had quicksand pits which could suck an animal or a man down in minutes.
Rockson had a good five miles to go before reaching the gates of the fortress and that suited him fine as it would be to his advantage to enter at night when the darkness and the shadows and the tiredness of the troops would make detection unlikely. He had gone about a mile when he saw something sticking out of the swampy ground just ahead. It couldn’t be! He moved closer. Jesus Christ! A body lay half submerged in the muck, just feet and legs poking out from the ground, the upper half of the corpse buried beneath the sucking black dirt. Must have gotten caught, poor devil, Rock thought. But upside down? Did the guy take a running dive? He moved on slowly, cautiously. Anything out of the ordinary in America 2089 A.D. could mean trouble—death. He pushed his way through a thick clump of high green reeds and emerged into the open.
Ted Rockson had seen just about everything in his life, but even he, as tough as he was, felt himself grow nauseous at the sight before him. Bodies! Bodies everywhere. Strewn around the swamp like so much garbage. Bodies half submerged in the thick foul-smelling mud, buried halfway, heads, hands, feet sticking out like grotesque growths on the soil. He moved his hand down to his pistol instinctively, now hidden beneath an oversized khaki shirt. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands of the rotting corpses—probably all American workers, stripped clean of any bit of clothing. Bodies in every stage of decay from skeletons picked clean as desert bones to foul-smelling, decomposing corpses, ballooned out with the gases of their own rotting bodies. He examined some of the dead bodies more closely, those he could get to close enough to stand the stench of. Strange. None of the bodies had any marks on them except—the skulls had tiny holes at the top of the brain casing. The mindbreaker! These were all rejects of the Red mindbreaking operation. Workers who for one reason or another hadn’t taken whatever fiendish conditioning the Russians were trying to instill in them. Men who had gone insane, screaming their guts out as the devilish probes were thrust deeper and deeper into their brain matter.
Rockson walked on, amazed at the extent of the death. A graveyard above ground. And a testament to the nature of the Red beast. He wished every soft-liner from Century City could see this sight. Their own puking guts would force them to change their tunes of accommodation. It was all too obvious to anyone who would dare to look. The Russian forces of occupation wanted one thing and one thing only: complete domination and control of every American citizen. The sight of so much terrible suffering and wasted life made Rockson realize again with crystal clarity just why he was fighting, devoting his life to the war against the Reds and just how deep his enemy’s evil went.
The swamp went on for nearly two miles, every foot of it crammed full of the human garbage. Finally, he came to the end of it, demarcated by a long barbed wire fence. He had to dart suddenly into the surrounding weeds as two Red trucks drove up and unloaded yet another delivery of death. Another hundred corpses, their faces frozen in the most agonizing death masks, lips spread apart, jaws cracked wide open as they must have literally screamed themselves into oblivion. The trucks rolled off again and Rockson found himself on a narrow dirt road that led to the city.
He felt sickened from the sight of so much death. It was one thing for men to die in battle, or from disease, or even to be eaten by the wild creatures that roamed the wastelands of America, but to go like this, for no reason, destroyed like a rodent and then discarded, nothing but garbage. That was something almost too terrible to contemplate. He felt shaken inside and vowed that he would avenge those poor wretched souls whose minds had been torn apart. Someone would pay. He went on about another mile, out of the swampy terrain and onto flat parched fields, one well worn dirt road through the middle which widened slowly as it approached the city. Already the ever present shantytowns that sprang up around Red forts began appearing at the side of the road. Just a few little shacks at first, lean-tos of gnarled branches topped with rusted pieces of tin and cardboard. Then more and more, until the sides of the road and the flat dry ground beyond was filled with the poverty shacks. The dredges of society, who fulfilled the city’s lowest tasks and were therefore spared the mindbreaker, stood around outside their hovels talking with one another, clothed in rags. Children scampered through the stinking alleyways formed by the rows of crumbling huts, naked, pursued by starving mongrels barking and snapping at their thin legs.
The dredges stared at Rock, seeming to take too much notice of him. He wondered why with some apprehension. His disguise surely hid his true identity. He looked down at his clothing. What had seemed back in Century City like torn garments, hardly distinguishable from any other untouchable, now appeared to be a rich man’s apparel compared with the shredded rags that clothed the hordes along the sides of the road. That was why they stared at this man who looked like he must be rich. But then why was he walking. His disguise already didn’t hold together. And if they noticed something wrong, the Red guards at the entrance to Pavlov City would too.
Rockson walked off the road, over to a group of men playing checkers on the ground, having gouged the board into the dirt with twigs and using light and dark pebbles for pieces.
“Anyone want to trade clothes with me?” Rock asked the group. Three men jumped up instantly, surrounding him.
“And who would you be, mister, wanting to trade? Maybe you got some riches in that there satchel of yourn,” the largest of the three, a bearded greasy-looking lout with huge blubbery lips said with a sneer. Rockson stared the man hard in the eyes.
“I’m not looking for trouble, mister, and I’d advise you not to start any. I just want to trade these clothes of mine for one of your sets of duds.” The big man reached out with a hand covered with brown warts toward Rock’s shoulder bag. Rock grabbed hold of the wrist and twisted it quickly over and down. The man fell to the dirt screaming in pain.
“You broke me hand, broke me Goddamned hand,” he moaned. The others stared at Rockson with consternation. He had just taken down the local bully as easily as if he were a child. One of them piped up.
“I’ll go for the deal, mister.” He eyed Rockson’s pants and jacket with greedy eyes. He had never had a set of clothes like
that in his life. A little dirty, but not even one hole. He’d be the envy of the shacklands. They went behind a hut and exchanged garments. Rock could feel the bugs crawling around the lining of the man’s ripped and filthy shirt but sacrifices had to be made. He looked down at himself with new appearance. Yes, it would do fine. Torn, riddled with holes, stained with years of sweat and filthy toil. Rock thanked the man and headed back down the road toward the fort. The newly clothed untouchable paraded around in front of his neighbors who jealously eyed his new appearance: blue jeans without a hole, a light blue workshirt with just a few threads showing, and an amazingly perfect khaki jacket. The man kept his hand on a long icepick inside the inner pocket of the jacket. He would die to protect his new acquisitions. In the camp of the poorest he was suddenly a man of means.
Rockson headed toward the fort which grew closer and bigger by the minute. The outer walls that formed the defensive perimeter were nearly forty feet high, concrete two feet thick with barbed wire running along the top. He walked up to the main entrance, manned on every side by submachine-gun-toting guards. They eyed him without really taking much notice, just one of many untouchables who came and went. Rock passed the first defensive perimeter with a big lump in his throat as he walked into the enemy’s camp. If any of these soldiers knew who he was . . . At a second checkpoint a Red Army sergeant stopped him and asked in a weary voice.
“Where you going, scum?”
“Garbage detail, sir,” Rock said in as meek and terrified a voice as he could muster. He looked down at the soldier’s feet and wrung his hands together in a gesture of submission.
“Oh, get on then,” the guard said, turning away and spitting. That had been easy enough, Rockson thought. Almost too easy. He headed down the long open streets of Pavlov City, head bowed down as were the heads of all the imprisoned Americans, for even looking straight into the eyes of a Red soldier could mean death. But he saw everything from the corner of his eyes, saw the work crews marching, the lines of prisoners being taken to the brainwashing center. Rockson blended in easily with the other untouchables who walked around pushing wheelbarrows filled with waste. No one noticed the most wanted man in America. They were too busy building their wretched city.
Rockson walked around for what seemed like miles, taking mental notes on every structure, on the troop quarters and munitions dumps. They must be building the place day and night. Zhabov must have been pouring every ruble he could lay his filthy hands on into the city. Obviously he saw the products of Pavlov City as something that would give him a big edge over Killov in their ongoing power struggle. To confuse matters even more, Rock began noticing what were without question KGB. They wore the feared blackshirt uniform and the death’s-head patch on their shoulders. What the hell were KGB doing inside a Red Army fort as important to Zhabnov as this. But if that sight shocked him, Rockson nearly did a double take as he rounded the next corner and saw a squad of about one hundred men wearing a type of Russian uniform he had never seen before, darker than the usual with an American flag patch with a rifle through the center. They marched by in double time and Rock knew instantly they were Americans. Americans in Russian uniforms. A sight that made him want to vomit.
Suddenly the endless low buildings gave way to a large exercise and marching field where thousands of soldiers were going through every kind of battle exercise: obstacle courses, firing ranges, march drills. The trainers were all Russian but the troops were Americans. Every last one of them. Rock walked along the perimeter of the field, picking up little pieces of refuse as if he were one of the eternal garbage pickers who wandered around the Red forts cleaning them as surely as barnacles cling to rocks, sucking every bit of loose waste from them. Totally unnoticed, Rockson took in the bizarre sight of Americans training to be Russians. Then he saw their eyes, when he got close enough—the eyes of the Americans—and it made him shudder. It was the eyes of the dead. Their bodies were still functioning but their eyes stared straight ahead. Rock remembered reading about a creature from the past history of America, South America, if he recalled correctly. They had had a name for men like this—zombies, they had called them.
So the Reds were turning American workers into zombie soldiers to go out and kill their countrymen. His worst fears were confirmed. And by the looks of it they were turning them out by the thousands. The men’s heads were all shaven and had those telltale puncture wounds at the very top of the skull. Little bumps that would never completely heal where the mindbreaker probes had burned out their past identity and instilled a command more powerful than love or hate—a command to obey their Red masters.
Rockson felt his entire being tremble. His hatred for the Red beast was at a new peak. He vowed at that moment to destroy the entire city. Somehow, some way he would stop this hideous experiment from being carried to fruition. He made a complete reconnaissance of the city, totally unnoticed by the overconfident Red troops, as he pretended to pick up little bits of paper. As the sun set Rock hid near the large concrete building in the center of the fortress, inside a garbage dumpster filled with construction waste—bits of woods, sawdust, rusting buckets filled with hardened concrete. The dumpster was about two hundred feet from the barbed wire fences surrounding the forty story building. Guards patrolled around it in groups of five, submachine guns cradled in their arms.
Rock waited nearly three hours until activity in the Red city had died down to virtually nothing. They would all be sleeping now. Even the guards would have their senses at their lowest readiness. It was time to strike. He took out his bowie knife and headed toward the fence. They had set up a defensive perimeter which for the normal man would have seemed impenetrable, but Rock’s eyes took in the machine-gun emplacements, the guard towers, the bunkers with slits of light and immediately saw the weak spot. To the right, in the space between two towers, the lights of the floodlamps faded to a dark gray. He headed toward the blind zone, crawling along on his arms and legs, his dark filthy clothes hiding him among the shadows. The moon, thank God, was packed between immense jagged brown and purple clouds that filled the skies like radioactive boulders. Rockson got right up to the fence which was electrified. He took out a piece of thick material from his pack and wrapped it around his hands. The fence was nearly ten feet tall. Rock slid right up to the base of the steel mesh and watched the two guard towers. Not a sound, nor a movement. He braced himself for the shock and leaped the height of the electric fence, grabbing the barbed wire at the top. He pulled himself over with every ounce of his mutant strength and soared over the top. The surge of electricity passed through the thick burlap material around his hands, and he gritted his teeth as he soared in a perfect arc over the top, landing on the other side in the dirt. He rolled instantly into a darker shadow created by one of the towers and waited a few seconds to see if he’d been spotted.
Nothing! Rockson made his way, creeping among the dark spots until he reached the base of the ominous brainwashing building. He spotted an entrance of some kind below ground. Some sort of service access, he thought, for taking care of the subterranean machinery of the building. He slid down the steps to a door that was chained shut with a padlock. He fitted the bowie knife between the lock and its chain and pushed with all his strength. It took three minutes but finally the small metal lock had enough and popped off its chain link. Rock pushed the door open and headed into the monolithic structure.
The basement halls were dimly lit by unshielded lightbulbs, and, seeing no one in sight, the Doomsday Warrior moved swiftly through the labyrinth of corridors until he reached the fire stairs. He bounded up them three at a time. He’d start on the second floor and work his way up until he found just what the hell was going on. Rock opened the steel door to the second floor slowly, his knife in his hand, cocked and ready. A guard about thirty feet down the hall sat facing him but his eyes were closed as he dozed, dreaming undoubtedly of vodka flowing down the steppes of Mother Russia. Rock slid into the hall, silent as a cat. He headed straight for the Russian who so
mehow sensed the motion and opened his eyes. The Red soldier bolted upright in his chair and grabbed wildly for his pistol at his side. Rock’s fourteen inch blade spun through the air like a whirling blur of death. It entered the Russian’s throat sticking clean through. The man’s eyes bulged as big as apples and he dropped to the floor spitting blood and gurgling out death noises. Rock ripped the bowie knife from the corpse’s throat and headed down the corridor.
Bells! Everywhere! He heard doors slamming and loudspeakers blasting away in Russian. They were on to him. He rushed back toward the fire door through which he had just entered but heard a click just as he reached it. Locked! Rock tore down the long neon-lit hall toward the far end some two hundred feet away. He reached it and swung through the door just as a squad of Reds rounded the corner to the right. He veered to the left away from them just yards ahead of them. He sprinted with all his strength, and within a few seconds tore ahead of them, coming to another intersection of halls. The place was a Goddamned maze, he muttered mentally, and took a left, down a corridor filled with glass doors announcing Lieutenant this and Major that in gold letters. Ahead of him another squad of Reds suddenly appeared. He was cut off.
The Russians closed in on him from both sides and as they approached, Rock noticed that they weren’t regular Red Army at all—every man was dressed in the dark brown fatigues but they all wore the hideous emblem of the death’s-head on their shoulders. Elite troops—the officer closest to Rockson smiled and spoke in broken English.
“Ted Rockson, I presume! You may as well surrender. We have been expecting your presence for days. I promise you you cannot escape. The floor is filled with over two hundred of our elite troops. Please—no fuss—yes?”
