by Ryder Stacy
Detroit said, “I’ll find out.” He climbed down and started to loosen the twisted wreckage. In a minute he shouted with relief. “Good news—I don’t see a body. Rock must have grabbed on somewhere above. He’ll need help!” But just then, there was a series of rapid fire shots from outside the tower lobby. Detroit shouted, “Keep the bastards at bay men; I’m going up the elevator shaft.”
“I’m coming too,” said Chen, rushing over. “Leilani is handling McCaughlin; he’s not too bad off.”
“ME TOO,” Archer added, bounding over to the group gathered at the open elevator shaft.
Detroit said, “Rock said I’m in charge while he’s upstairs, I decide who climbs. Archer, I don’t trust the cable with your weight.”
“MEEE CLIMB,” Archer protested.
“Look,” Detroit said with exasperation, “it’s like this—only Chen will climb. I want to go up too, pal, but we’re needed down here.”
Chen nodded. “I’m best at this. I’ll find out what gives.” Detroit didn’t want Archer to hear his next remarks to Chen, so he whispered them in the Chinese-American’s ear: “If Rock’s dead—or unable to finish the job—find the satchel of explosives and finish.”
Chen nodded. He immediately started climbing up the cable.
Seventy-one stories up, Rockson, hanging by his very strong fingers, heard the elevator door slide open. He was hanging to the right, out of sight of the KGB men who now peered into the floorless elevator car from Killov’s domain.
“Ha—it worked, Stanislov,” said the blond with the cheek scar, “We have rid ourselves of Rockson! I told you the elevator trap would work!”
“Yes, indeed,” the older man replied. “Now let’s get to the windows, keep the .105 in action. There might be more of the attackers coming in behind our reinforcements!”
The pair of Soviet officers left the elevator area. Rockson, with a painful, desperate try, swung his feet onto the landing as soon as they were gone. He was sure he had broken both fingers; but they weren’t his only trigger fingers, and he could still use his fists if need be. A mutant could “put away” such pain—when he had to!
He walked through the ante-room of the suite like a cat—and again reached the doors of the room with the control panel. He nudged the door and, finding it open, pushed in. There were three men slumped at the lit-up panel.
“What the hell?”
Rockson felt each man’s neck for a pulse, and just as he expected by the blood caked on their ears and around their lips, they were dead. Why?
His mutant instincts, the same feeling for danger that had saved him in the elevator, now tickled him again. He had to do something. Rock looked around. There was a rack with—what the hell was it? Some sort of heavy earmuffs! Just one pair.
Rock picked it up. It was more like a plastic shield for the ears, the kind airport workers use around jets.
That clicked. The sound of the crystal weapon had killed these technicians. Rock quickly put the pair of super earmuffs on. A readout was flashing “OVERRIDE.” What did that mean? Maybe the panel was being bypassed. Killov must be somewhere, directly controling the ray weapon.
Rockson noted that the central seat was missing. He looked around—nothing. He looked up and saw a circular grey bulge in the ceiling of the room, directly over the missing control seat. Was Killov up there?
Rock decided that he must be! But it looked like hours’ work to break in. There didn’t seem to be any crack in the uniform grey convexity of the steel sanctuary above.
Rockson smiled. Okay, I won’t go in! If Killov is in there—let him stay there and die when the bomb goes off!
Rockson went back toward the elevator shaft, determined to plant the seventy pounds of high explosives one flight up—alongside Killov’s domain. He’d kill two birds with one stone—blow the crystal to bits along with its mad owner.
It took a lot of awkward, dangerous maneuvering for Rockson to get himself—and the seventy pounds of explosives—up through the elevator’s trap door. Still, after ten minutes, he was standing on the car’s roof and packing the plastique into a big lump. He jammed a radio-controlled blasting cap fuse into the mass of death, then made his way back down to the 71st floor and swung back into the carpeted ante-room.
As he did this, Rockson heard a grunting just yards below. Someone was coming up the cable.
Crouching down with his big blade at the ready, he saw Chen scramble into the room.
“God, it’s you!” He put down the knife.
“Rock,” Chen gasped breathlessly. “You’re alive!” Chen quickly explained why he had made the climb.
Rock handed Chen the radio-control detonator. “Get back to the others. If I’m not back in ten minutes, get out of the building—and blow it up with this.”
“Why aren’t you coming down with me?”
Rock grimaced. “Because of Killov. He’s here. I’m going to kill him personally. I just don’t trust the bastard to die in the explosion! I’ve blown him up—or thought I did—several times in the last few years!”
Chen resisted leaving, but Rock made it an order.
Once Chen left the way he had come, Rockson piled furniture until he could climb up and touch the surface of the bulging grey metal in the ceiling. It was cold steel. There was a micro-thin seam—too narrow for a blade. Rock had to open it somehow if he wanted to personally waste the madman.
He pondered the problem of how to get in. It seemed insurmountable.
Killov, in his darkened domain, was lining up Baltimore as a target again. This time he wouldn’t miss. Suddenly he heard a knock. Who could be knocking on his floor? He should ignore it, and yet, he was a curious man. Killov clicked on the intercom. “Who is it? Who dares—”
“Sir!” a hoarse voice yelled in Japanese-accented Russian. “It is Nakashima! I am alive! You buried my twin brother’s body, not mine. I am alive, master. Let me in.”
Killov nearly fainted with relief. Yes! Of course! It was too tragic to be true! Nakashima wasn’t dead; his dear friend had returned to him, to share his glory.
“Oh my friend, come in, come in!” Killov shouted. “I’m dilating the door!”
Rockson saw the micro-slit in the grey metal globe start bending. Slowly, like a lens shutter, a hole was appearing. No time to waste! The Doomsday Warrior dove into the aperture, just as it was wide enough to take him in, and started to pull himself up.
The tall, very gaunt man in a tight black outfit gasped out, “You,” and reached for a switch. The door hole snapped shut on Rockson’s body. He was jammed waist high, halfway in, halfway out of the strange dark chamber filled with stars.
Rock winced in pain, trying to pull himself first in, then out. Nothing worked. He was immobilized.
His eyes adjusted to the near-total darkness, and Rockson beheld Killov, the Skull, standing over him.
Mad laughter erupted. Killov’s neck veins pulsed in sadistic excitement when he saw that the Doomsday Warrior was pinned. “Well—you surprised and disappointed me, Rockson. You are very clever to imitate Nakashima . . . but not clever enough. I wish I could draw out this moment more . . . savor it. You look a fine sight. This is an ingnominious end for the fabulous Doomsday Warrior, wouldn’t you say?”
Killov lifted a shiny automatic pistol in his left hand.
“Fuck you, asshole,” Rock said, expecting a bullet.
“My, my. Is cursing the last thing you wish to do in this life?” That mad laugh again. Then Killov, instead of squeezing off a round, put the automatic down. The colonel lifted his right arm. It seemed to Rockson to be peculiarly thicker than his left one.
“I will make you suffer, Rockson! A bullet is too easy, despite my eagerness to get back to my ultimate weapon. This arm’s sleeve contains a firing mechanism for a compressed air gun. It can fire several very long spikes. And they are tipped with a poison that will give agonizing pain for sixty seconds—then death!”
Killov pulled back his sleeve, and Rockson saw a glint of
sharp metal. Then Killov let loose a barrage of steel spikes. The shafts dug deep into Rock’s shoulder—but not his chest—because he twisted suddenly. Still, Rock was seized with immense pain. He groaned as the pain coursed from the poisoned wounds in his body. Then the pain grew and grew.
He screamed out several times in agony. After a minute, he jerked spasmodically, and then his eyes rolled up and he slumped over.
Killov stepped over to Rockson and kicked him in the face. No response, even though the trapped man’s nose broke with a crunch.
“So, now you are finally dead, and I rule the world,” Killov intoned.
The colonel turned, retook his control seat and started fiddling with the dials.
Rockson lifted his head an inch. All of the death-jerks hid his hands working up along his body. Now he had room to silently pull himself out of the darkened chamber. Rockson, controlling the torturous pain wracking his body, blood oozing from his boot-snapped nose, lept down onto the carpet below Killov’s lair. He dove into the elevator shaft and started sliding down the cable. In just seconds Chen would set off the explosives!
Twenty-Six
Killov, who had returned to his seat sure Rockson was dead, was set to destroy Baltimore. Then the situation screen lit up. Several lines of green lights were depicted coming up at his space mirror from the Soviet Union. All the lines were missiles, the readout said, and were tipped with nuclear warheads!
“No!” Killov gasped, “no, please . . .” He didn’t know exactly who to address his earnest prayer to. Sometimes the colonel sensed that he was serving a darkness beyond the stars. To that dark force he directed his cry. “Please, Dark One, don’t let them destroy my weapon!”
Suddenly the green lines stopped dead, hundreds of miles below the space mirror, and slowly winked out.
Killov smiled; he remembered the manuals told that the space mirror system had its own defenses. The defenses were over a hundred years old—then again, there is no atmosphere to damage delicate parts in space. He dismissed the mystical element in what happened. Systems had powered up and acted, that was all.
He snapped on his worldwide radio connection, beaming his hideously enlarged, echoing voice throughout the planet on all frequencies. “Attention. This is Killov. I have allowed you all a little more time in order for you to see the failure of the missile attack on my space mirror. Now you all know my power is unstoppable. Surrender at once; that is all!”
Killov put the headset on and listened to a frantic set of surrender offers coming from Russia, from China, and even from President Zhabnov in the U.S.S.A.
“One at a time, one at a time,” he snapped. “I want only one man to answer me—and that is Premier Vassily himself. Vassily? Are you there?”
“Yes, you bastard,” came a dry unsteady voice. The grandfather of the world was on the line! The voice that Killov knew so intimately well, his old boss Vassily, ruler of the World Soviet, said, “I surrender, Killov! Come and take your prize—come take Moscow. I am old and tired . . . and you win.”
Killov’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. “You are not just stalling for time? Planning another counterattack?”
“No, we surrender. We have seen you destroy so much that we conclude your power is absolute. To save the world, I surrender it. The World Soviet States are all yours!”
Though such a surrender was inevitable, Killov still had somehow not really expected it. He had longed for Vassily not to reply, so he could broil the capital city of the world—Moscow—to ashes.
The colonel hesitated. What should he do? Accept surrender? Or laugh in their faces and keep destroying targets?
Killov, after a long minute, said, “Okay, I’ll send my representative to Moscow—to assume power until I arrive. In the meantime, Vassily, I must now eradicate the American rebels in their Century City. I will not tolerate the American resistance like you have, Vassily. My rule shall be absolute!”
“Killov,” the premier’s aged voice cracked out. “Don’t! They will call you and surrender, I am sure. It must be some technical problem that has prevented the Americans from replying to you!”
“Too late for surrender calls,” Killov said. “They will all die.” Forgetting Baltimore, Killov started redirecting the space mirror toward the western United States.
The Freefighter force ran in a hail of tracer bullets through a screen of heavy smoke. Dodging around an arriving tank, they reached a department store’s shattered display windows. “In, we go in the windows,” the black Freefighter yelled, jumping up and smashing the last shards of broken glass to clear the way. He was followed in by Chen, who together with Archer helped lift a limping Ted Rockson into the display. Rockson had managed to defeat the poison that the spikes had unleashed in him—his mutant constitution—and had reached the lobby. There, he was greeted by the others. Chen had disobeyed orders; their leader was two minutes past the deadline. Then they all broke out of the closing steel ring of KGB reinforcements.
“Rock, how soon do we explode the bomb?” Detroit asked.
“Now,” Rock said. “Everyone—get behind something—Takashimaya Department Store’s walls look thick.”
“By Lenin,” Scheransky uttered. “I sure hope they are—”
His words were cut off when Chen pressed the button of the remote detonator. The Earth shook; the blast nearly threw them off their feet. Rockson peered from behind a thick support pillar and saw the tower was coming down in two sections. Spinning down separately, end over end, like some gigantic stunt driver, was the crystal.
Rockson and the others watched the KGBers in the plaza try to get out of the way of a million tons of twisted steel girders and fractured masonry—and fail. Then, as smaller debris peppered their sanctuary, they retreated farther into the darkened department store.
Chen said, “We did it Rock! No one could have survived that! Certainly Killov is dead!”
Twenty-Seven
When the heavy dust clouds cleared sufficiently, the victorious Americans and their allies left their shelter. They walked toward a strange glow in the mists. Rockson had an idea of what the flickering glow was, but it was Scheransky, leading the group, who cried out: “God it didn’t break. The crystal is intact. How can this be?”
Rock had no answer. He stood up on a pile of debris to get a clear view. The huge crystal was half embedded in the broken pavement of the intersection. It still pulsed with blue and green energy.
Scheransky touched Rockson’s shoulder and said, “It is like the thing is alive, like it has a heartbeat—only colors, not pulses.”
“It is a living being,” said Leilani. She shucked her flak jacket and stepped past them, bending to touch its shimmering surface. She was immediately suffused in the crystal’s glow, which turned a pale blue as it engulfed her. Leilani put her ear to the twelve-foot, circular crystal and listened for a while to something nobody else could hear, stroking the thing like a baby. Then she started sobbing.
“What is it?” Rock asked. “What do you hear?”
Leilani turned and said, “Oh Rockson, it is so sorry for what it has been forced to do! The Gnaa crystal wants to die, but cannot. It doesn’t want to live with the memory of all the destruction. It says it is not damaged. Only heat can destroy it. Heat of many thousands of degrees. It wants us to help it die!”
“Let’s get out of here,” implored Scheransky. “We did the job. The tower’s gone, Killov’s gone, and—”
“No,” Rockson said, as he turned. “Whether or not Leilani’s right about the crystal having a soul, she is right about one thing. The crystal has to be destroyed! It’s the most dangerous thing in the world. We’ve got to melt it down.”
“Maybe,” suggested Chen, “we can set it on fire with gasoline.”
“No,” Rockson said. “I believe Leilani’s right. It needs more heat than that to destroy it.”
“The only way,” sobbed Leilani, “is to immerse it in Mount Fuji’s volcanic heat. That is how it wants to die. We must throw it int
o Mount Fuji’s crater!”
“Why that’s ridiculous,” Detroit protested, keeping his eyes peeled for enemy soldiers. “To drag it there would take hours—if we could even do it at all.”
Rockson had to admit the request seemed unfulfillable. There was a sudden noise. It sounded like air hissing out of a tube. Rock spun around. Everywhere, he saw people pouring out from hiding places in wrecked buildings and heading toward them. The surviving citizens of the city.
Morimoto shouted at them in Japanese, telling them the party around the crystal was friends, not Russians.
The Freefighters stood and watched as the giant crowd surged forward. Leilani stood there in her sarong, suffused with blue light in the aura that pulsed out of the Gnaa. The crowd was surging closer, shouting and pointing at Leilani and the strange crystal.
The foremost of the crowd fell to make prostrations on the street, as if they were worshiping. The others followed suit. It grew very silent, like a religious event.
Still suffused with blue light, Leilani raised one hand and said softly but clearly, “Know this, that I am the Gnaa, a creation of mankind, yet I am the first intelligent creation. I apologize for what I have done and only wish to end my existence before more evil men arise to use me once more. Please—take me to Mount Fuji volcano and put me in its cleansing fire.”
Rock’s jaw opened wide. Leilani had a transfixed expression; her eyes were empty. She was speaking not for herself, but at the direction of the crystal, in some sort of link with it again.
She lowered her head and stepped from the crystal; the aura parted from her and faded. Rock put the jacket she had dropped back over her bare shoulders. Leilani smiled up at him. “It spoke?”
“Yes it spoke, through you,” he said, holding her shivering cold body close to him.
Leaders in the crowd now started to cry out directions, and many moved into the buildings again. They returned quickly with lengths of cable and long heavy ropes.
