Doomsday Warrior 02 - Red America

by Ryder Stacy

  “There’s no time to be sick, baby,” Rock said firmly as they moved at a half run down the long hallway. “Nor time to faint, or waver. We must live, Kim! Both of us. I don’t care about my life. I’m just another American freefighter doing his best. Death’s been on my shoulder for years. But you can’t die. I can’t let you. There’s too much beauty in you. Too much life in this world of death.” He looked at her sharply as they rounded a corner. Her pale color brightened slightly and her face took on the flushed pink of anger and the will to survive.

  “I’m with you, Rock, all the way. And I can’t bear to think of life without you either. We must both survive.”

  They rounded the end of one of the long mazelike halls. Two officers came running at them with their rifles pushed forward like spears, ready to fire. More bells began ringing all around them. The two stared wide-eyed in surprise at Rockson who reacted with the speed of a lightning bolt. He slammed the butt of his machine pistol up into the nose of the closer man, driving the nasal bone up and into the man’s brain. Rock turned without a second look at the falling man and pushed the barrel of the pistol into the second man’s stomach as the elite forces’ officer raised his rifle. Rock pulled the trigger and let the gun shake for a few seconds before he lowered it. The would-be killer slumped to the floor.

  Rockson was enraged now. He barely felt the Reds were human anymore after their treatment of Kim. He wouldn’t let the bastards harm her—or any other American in this damned brain destroying building. He didn’t want to just kill them—he wanted to destroy them. To obliterate them, the whole stinking lot. Rock lifted one of the dead man’s Trakhov 7.2mm service revolvers, wiped the blood from the handle and gave it to Kim.

  “Use it, baby, if you have to.” She held the big weapon in her small white hands and put her finger on the trigger.

  “I’m ready, Rock, and if they catch us again I’ll use it on myself before I let them take me prisoner.”

  “Don’t talk like that, Kim,” Rock said angrily. “Don’t even think like that.” He pulled her and ran toward the third floor lobby and the elevators. He had heard some of the guards talking and knew that the mindbreaking equipment was on the twentieth through the thirtieth floors. He pressed the up button on the elevator panel and within seconds the doors of one swung open. So far so good. The automatic shutdown systems hadn’t had time to go on yet. He pressed twenty and put his finger on the trigger of the machine pistol. The doors sprang open and Rockson jumped out the moment the shiny stainless doors flew open and sprayed the machine pistol around the floor. Screams and sounds of bodies hitting hard surfaces was the only reply. When he pulled his finger from the trigger, bodies lay strewn haphazardly around like broken dolls covered with red paint. Whoever had been lying in wait, their own guns drawn, had received a murderous surprise, Ted Rockson style. He bent down and stripped the bodies of their weapons, six pistols and three submachine guns and loads of extra ammunition. They’d need every bit of firepower they could muster—Rock knew that a war lay ahead of them.

  Alarms began ringing out everywhere, hideous squeals of warning throughout the building. They had minutes at most before this floor, too, would be filled with the KGB and this time they wouldn’t be taken so easily. Kim helped Rock to carry the additional weapons and clenched her lips tightly as they stepped across the still twitching bodies. They sped down the main hall, their arms absolutely filled with destruction. They came to a large wooden door with a small glass window at eye level. Rock’s sixth sense told him that someone, more than one, probably was just the other side. He stood back and set the submachine gun on full auto and sprayed a line back and forth across the door three times. He dove through the door, hitting the floor in a roll and somersaulting over. He came to a stop again, facing the door, his submachine gun ready to release another volley of death. But there was no need. At least not for these two. He had been right: Two Red Army regulars had been waiting—they waited too long.

  Kim ran in and joined Rockson and they moved forward cautiously. They turned the corner and came to one of the holding pens that the Reds stuffed their prisoners in while waiting their turn to be brainwashed. Nearly four hundred American workers cowered behind the bars, sullen, terrified, staring at the half-naked nymph and heavily muscled man.

  “What the hell?” they exclaimed as one when they saw Rockson draw up to them on the run. In his uniform and sunglasses he looked like just another of the Red officers.

  “Stand back,” he yelled over the murmur of the prisoners. “I’m here to help you, not to hurt you.” They looked distrustfully at this strange man, his black clothes covered with blood and the blond-haired girl at his side. “Back! Back!” Rock yelled. “There’s no time to play games.” The workers pulled to the back part of the cell, crunching against one another. Rock held the muzzle of the submachine gun to the lock, and, turning his head away, fired ten rounds into the mechanism. The door flew open and the prisoners filed out of their cell, scared but happy to be free at least for a moment from the fate that they all now knew awaited them in the mindbreaking machines just down the hall.

  Rock stepped into the center of the confused prisoners and yelled for them to be quiet. “Listen to me. Listen carefully. We have only minutes. I’m here to help you live. You were all about to be destroyed as men. I know you’ve grown up in the Russian fortress cities, most of you, and you’re used to obeying the authorities. I’m not here to criticize you for that—but now you must fight. They were going to destroy your brains, use your bodies for their filthy work. For the first time in your lives you must fight back. You may all die, every one of you. We may all die but we are Americans and there are things worse than death. The time to strike back, to rebel is here!”

  The workers looked at one another nervously. Their whole lives had been spent kowtowing to the Reds. They had been born in slavery, brought up in slavery, sent to work in the Russian factories when they were twelve. They had been nearly crushed, nearly but not completely.

  “Are you—the Rockson?” one of the prisoners, a large balding man in prison grays sizes too small for him, asked.

  “Yes, I’m Ted Rockson—I’m here to free you.”

  “The Rockson,” several of them half screamed. The man who had lived in their most secret dreams their entire lives, the man whose name was scrawled on the crumbling walls of every ghetto in America.

  “The Ultimate American,” several gasped, their eyes as wide as if they had just seen an angel descending down from the heavens. They had all heard of him. Every single worker in America had. And though they had prayed he existed and would someday come to free them—in their guts they had feared he was not real. No man could fight the Reds with all the strength they had, all their armies and weapons.

  But Rockson had. And now he was here! For them! He had come to save them!

  “We are with you, Rockson,” said one of the largest prisoners, an obvious brawler, with a black eye and bruised knuckles. “Give me a gun!” He walked up to Rock, who could see the cold respect in the man’s eyes. He had killed already—Russians, Rock knew. He handed the man a submachine gun and five clips.

  “Here, you put the—”

  “I know how to shoot it,” the prisoner cut him off curtly.

  “Good,” Rockson said. He could count on this one. The other prisoners stepped forward, slowly at first, and then more of them, their eyes and voices growing louder, brighter by the second. For the first time in their lives there was hope. They took the weapons that Rock and Kim handed out, and Rock gave a thirty second course in firing them.

  “We must get more weapons—many more. And free all the prisoners in this hellhole. Then we can fight our way out. Every Red we kill means another rifle and pistol for us, so let’s spread out. Move in groups of ten. If one man falls take his gun and fight on. Many of us will die—but as men. AS MEN!” Rock yelled out. The prisoners cheered him, raising their pistols and rifles in the air. They echoed his words back, rising in ever louder chor
uses.

  “As men! As men! As men!”

  “You Americans come with me,” Rockson said, picking the strongest and meanest looking of the lot. “You’ll work with me. Ours will be the hardest job.” The men’s faces lit up with pride that the Rockson had chosen them.

  The workers tore off in all directions, down the hallways, onto the other floors, killing and grabbing more and more weapons from the Reds who were not prepared for the desperation, the violence, of the prisoners’ attack. Rock heard the shots ringing out everywhere and smiled a blade-thin grin. The Reds would be feeling something they weren’t used to—Fear!

  “Kim, you stay here,” Rock said as he assembled his instant commando team.

  “Forget it, Rock,” Kim said defiantly. “We’re in this together.” She held her submachine gun higher in her hands to show him she was as ready as the released men.

  “All right then, baby,” Rock said softly, looking at her with a mixture of admiration and concern. “But stick close by me. This, as they used to say in the old days, when they had them, isn’t going to be a picnic.”

  With Rock and Kim in the lead and the thirty man force behind them, they headed off down the hall toward the brainwashing operation. Two immense steel doors were tightly shut about two hundred feet down the corridor, clamped tight as a tomb when the first alarms went off. They came to the door and Rock quickly looked it over—no way they could shoot their way in.

  “I heard them talking about some sort of weapons cache just before the main mindbreaking chamber,” one of the freed prisoners said coming up to Rock.

  “Spread out,” he commanded the workers. “You—down that way. You men—over there. We’re looking for their weapons storage. If you find anything, yell!” They spread out, opening every door. Rock could hear occasional shots ringing out as his men found a cowering Red hidden inside an office. Suddenly there came a noise down one of the smaller hallways.

  “Here! We found it.” Rock and Kim tore down the white and red checkered tile floor to the almost hysterical voice. They ran into a large room filled with shelves of weapons. Rifles, submachine guns and—what Rock had been hoping for—small explosives, hand grenades, shells for mortars. It was a regular mini-armory.

  “You five men,” Rock said, pointing at the first five workers who showed up at the door. “Run down to the other floors with as many weapons as you can carry. Tell the workers you see to come up here to get arms and more ammo.” The freed Americans loaded up their arms with as much as they could possibly carry and headed down the hall, hardly able to walk. Rock loaded up with grenades and five heavy mortar shells and went back to the steel doors of the brainwashing center. He set them down right at the crack of the two sliding doors and told everyone to get back about a hundred feet down the hall and behind the corner. He pulled the fuse on a ten second grenade, dropped it in the center of his little altar of death, and tore ass back to cover. He had just rounded the corner, when the first of the explosions went off. Even from nearly eighty feet away he could feel the shock waves of the detonation and flung himself onto the floor near the huddled prisoners, sliding nearly ten feet on his stomach.

  Behind him the grenade went off, then nothing! Damn, it hadn’t det— The thought had barely reached his brain that it had failed when a roaring thunderous blast shook the floor and walls, knocking plaster down from the ceiling. Then another. The shock waves reverberated through the building. Rock and his team of freed workers waited another ten seconds for any secondaries and then ran back through the smoke and rubble that littered the hallway. The doors had been ripped off their hinges and smashed open as if a giant metal-eating creature had taken some big bites right out of the foot thick steel. Rock rushed in, firing at several shadows moving in the smoke on the other side. Bodies smacked to the floor. The others filed in behind him, grabbing up the fallen weapons of three more dead guards. The lingering wisps of smoke cleared quickly, and Rock nearly gasped as he took in the sight before him.

  Men—rows and rows of men, strapped into plastic chairs with the mindbreaker covering the entire top of their skulls. It ate away at them like some hideous parasitic beast, sucking out their brain fluids, burning away at their memory systems with teeth of laser fire. The rows of writhing strapped-down men went on as far as Rockson could see. There must have been thousands on this one floor alone. And they screamed. God how they screamed, their mouths opening as wide as human muscle and bone could stretch. They let out howls of pain—animal screams of the most torturous unbearable sensations of ultimate horror. Their veins stood out on their faces like leather cords. It appeared that their eyes would surely pop out of their sockets, trailing bloody tendrils. And in some cases they had.

  Rock and the free prisoners ran down the lines of shrieking prisoners, ripping the helmets up and off their heads. But this only made the confined Americans scream even louder and then fall dead as the laser prongs cut wildly in every direction inside the men’s skulls.

  “Don’t pull them out,” Rock yelled above the din of torture. “There has to be a reverse procedure on these devices.” He looked around and saw at the far end of the immense brainwashing chamber windowless and filled with the smell of sweat, fear, and fecal matter which exploded out of the tortured bodies, unable to control their own functions any longer, a control room, glassed in behind dark purple polarized glass. Rockson took off, moving with all the speed his mutant body possessed. Like the wind, like a bullet searching out flesh, he reached the door at the far end before the two Red technicians inside could make their escape down a back stairway.

  “Hold it!” Rockson yelled out, jumping through the doorway, “Or I’ll blast your fucking guts all the way back to Moscow!” The two mindbreaker operators, white-coated and unarmed, stopped in their tracks, raised their arms and turned slowly around. Rock continued. “Now, I don’t want any bullshit from you or any stalling. I’m not in the mood to play any games.” He let loose with a stream of whistling slugs from his submachine gun that bore into the floor just in front of their feet. The two jumped nearly a foot off the ground and let out with cries of terror.

  “Don’t kill us, no, no,” said the shorter, pudgier one with blood smears nearly covering the front of his laboratory smock. “We can stop them, but we can’t undo the process. What’s done is done.”

  “Well, stop the damn thing! Now!” He lifted the gun again and walked up to them, shoving the hot muzzle into the face of the one who had talked.

  “I’m moving, I’m moving,” the man positively shrieked and started forward. The pale pimple-faced Red ran to a complicated looking set of controls, dials, and buttons and frantically pressed in the code for the mindbreakers to withdraw from their brain drilling. Within a second, the small lights above each helmet went from green to red and the machines began withdrawing their white-hot laser probes from the screaming prisoners.

  “Come with me,” Rock ordered, leading the two back out to the floor where the victims of the mindbreakers were being released from their living hell. They rose from their blood-soaked chairs, those that still could move. Many were mindless zombies who sat staring straight ahead. Others died on the spot, the shock of the entire experience too much for their weakened nervous systems to take. Out of the thousand being brainwashed two hundred and seventy-three were able to act coherently and speak.

  Rockson had the two technicians strapped down to the chairs the American prisoners had been in just minutes before. The two Reds grew white faced and stuttered out pleas, too scared even to yell.

  “No, we showed you,” the pudgy one begged. “Don’t kill us.”

  “We—we—were only following orders,” the older one said, his eyes, usually filled with contempt, now dilated in terror. Rock walked back to the control room and pushed the on button. The computers came to life, lights flashing, meters moving with activity. He walked past the technicians and smiled at them as the helmets lowered and the icepick probes began their descent into Russian skull tissue for a change.


  “Have fun boys, You’ll have to tell me what it’s like sometime.” Rockson led the newly released prisoners out into the hall and had his men arm them with as many spare weapons as they had collected. From within he heard the screams of the technicians as the laser teeth began ripping their brains.

  “Men!” Rock addressed the new recruits as his own thirty man team stood around him, cradling their pistols and rifles as lovingly as if they were babies. “You’re free now. Free for the first time in your lives. You’re no longer slaves to the Reds. But now you will have to fight.” The newly freed prisoners listened to this strange man of steel strength who addressed them.

  “I am Ted Rockson,” Rock continued.

  “The Rockson,” they gasped, their eyes widening in confusion. The Rockson was real; they could hardly believe it. All these years just a shadowy figure in their thoughts and dreams. But he was real and if he was real, then anything was possible.

  “Yes, ‘the Rockson,’ as you call me,” Rock said sarcastically. “But the truth is that I’m just a man like you and you.” He pointed at two of the freed workers, still trying to get their bearings, blood oozing from the two swollen holes at the top of their head. “Just a freefighter, like ten thousand, a hundred thousand others around America.” They all listened intently, every man around Rock silent with awe. “And what that means is that the Russians are not supermen. They’re not immortal. They can be killed. You’ve been raised in fear of them. They’ve tried to make you think that you were all powerless against them. But that is all lies. You are strong. There are Red bodies lying down below, that these men here have already demonstrated their ‘powerlessness’ on.”