by Ryder Stacy
FREEDOM’S WILL
Nearly 100 years ago a Russian thermonuclear device transformed America’s amber waves of grain into a sea of nuclear waste. The land of the free has been reduced to a Soviet slave-state, repeatedly raped and plundered by its Red overlords. One man has led the desperate fight to free the once-great nation. He is Ted Rockson, the ultimate soldier of survival.
Tragedy strikes the citizens of Century City. As thousands lay dead and dying the Doomsday Warrior and his “Rock Team” travel to newly freed Pattonville in search of supplies to aid his desperate people. Through sandstorms and deadly Snakemen the FreeFighters find themselves trapped at the Great Caucus Dome, a society of brainwashed delegates. In the name of democracy and independence, Rockson and his men lock horns with the Great Nominee in a fierce battle to the death that will push the Freefighters to the very limits of their endurance—and beyond!
DOOMSDAY
WARRIOR
ROCK ’N ROLL
“Hit the deck,” Rockson shouted. He and his Freefighters all dove down as the razor-brimmed hats of the fanatic protectors sailed over their heads. Archer twisted around and managed to get one of his steel explosive arrows notched and in the air. He skewered a row of fanatic killers headed his way.
Rockson decimated a flock of protectors with a series of shots from his shotpistol. They fell, peppered with the “X” patterned explosions of his special submachine-gun bullets. Chen downed another three with a single shuriken explosive star-knife. And, as Detroit lobbed grenades to keep the other screaming enemies back, the Doomsday Warrior and his men rushed forward for the final battle.
ZEBRA BOOKS
are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
475 Park Avenue South
New York, N.Y. 10016
ISBN: 0-8217-2872-5
Copyright © 1990 by Ryder Syvertsen
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
First printing: January 1990
Printed in the United States of America
One
One second everything was normal, the next it was a living hell. Ted Rockson, a/k/a the Doomsday Warrior, was lying in his bed, down in one of Century City’s lower levels, in that pleasant state between sleeping and waking. One eye was slightly open, the other closed, still trying to cling to the soft darkness of the dream he had just been swimming in. Then the whole world was most rudely and noisily pulled into stark reality. There was a thundering roar that bolted both eyes open in a flash, and then the lights went out.
Rockson was looking up at a cloud of dust that was streaming down from the low ceiling above. Instantly a huge crack appeared almost right above his bed in his 12x15 sleeping quarters. Then as he watched with horror in the dim red light of the room’s emergency lighting system, he saw the crack widen and spiderweb out in all directions. Within a second or two the entire ceiling was bending down as if reaching below for the occupant of the room, to crush him into pulp.
“Earthquake,” Rockson’s mouth muttered without him even quite realizing he had spoken the words. His brain was a bit slower than his lips, but it instantly realized in a flash what the word “earthquake” meant. It meant he would be crushed to death in milliseconds if he didn’t move his butt faster than a hawk dropping for a kill. Even as he started to rise up, his mind feverishly wondering just where to hide, the thunder grew ever-louder, vibrating up his skull, hurting his ears as if he were inside a storm cloud. The whole room began shaking and moving around so that he hardly knew where he was. Out of his peripheral vision Rockson could see the radio bouncing off the table, and the clock dancing around like it was in a tango contest. Then a picture of an ancient whaling ship, something that he had dug up in his travels, flew right off the wall like it was trying to get back to the sea.
The cracked ceiling above him made a most threatening sound, not dissimilar to a few hand grenades going off, and Rock knew he was out of time. Although his brain didn’t seem to know just how the hell to deal with all this, his mutant body acted with its own agenda. For even as the bed shook more wildly, Rock rolled over the side of it and underneath, unconsciously knowing that the thing had a steel frame and might offer protection. Even as he hit the floor and pulled himself under, he knew that it was a chance in a million—but it was all he had. The room was just a small rectangle with nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
Rock made his move with not a moment to spare. The instant he slid under the bed, the entire ceiling came smashing down like he was at ground zero of a nuke bomb test. The room shook wildly. Everything was just darkness, crunching sound, and broken concrete flying all over the place like a hurricane of cement—from particles as small as marbles to as big as huge slabs. Two of the slabs came falling at each end of the bed, crushing it down on top of him. Rock knew he would die at any second and took a final sharp intake of breath, as if he didn’t want to go into the next world without a little oxygen still in his lungs.
As he lay there, in an awkward sideways position, his hip pressed hard against the floor which he could also feel shaking and cracking around him, the vibrations continued. They seemed to get stronger so that his very bones were being batted around inside of his flesh. Somehow through the dust he saw the entire wall that separated his sleeping chamber from the outer corridor crack all over like a huge gray egg. Then just as it collapsed, more of the ceiling came down and all he could see was jagged chunks of what had once been his room, slamming into the floor just inches from his face.
He pulled back hard, or tried to, realizing even in the madness and confusion of the destruction, that at least thus far the bed frame had provided a sort of shelter for him. He tried to pull deeper into the darkness beneath, like a child delving deeper under his covers, hoping that that would somehow protect him from the nightmares of life, real and imagined. He realized he was stuck, wedged in from all sides by the bed and pieces of concrete ceiling that had fallen on and around it. Rockson shut his eyes to protect them from the dust.
Then just as suddenly as it had started, the quake, or whatever the hell it was, stopped. There were a few more shudders, then a series of undulations, very mild almost as if the walls of Century City were alive. Then it was still. And the screams rose up everywhere out in the halls and the other sleeping quarters. It was a terrible sound, men and women trapped in the sheer animal agony of excruciating pain.
But Rockson had his own problems to worry about. Trapped as tightly as a beaver in a steel cage, he tried to move and couldn’t. Everything, every part of him felt wedged down beneath the collapsed bed. It had saved him from being totally crushed, but he could feel it pushing down all over him. Everything hurt, but somehow, just because he could feel the different parts of his body, if not move them, he figured he hadn’t any major damage. So far.
Suddenly he began coughing, hacking away as the dust and concrete particles reached deep into his throat. It hurt, burning his lung tissue and his throat like flecks of fire. He hacked away for a good thirty seconds, bringing up all kinds of garbage from below, including, by the slick feel of it, some blood. He was completely coated with dust and junk. It was as if there was no air, just soot finely crushed with a few atoms of oxygen thrown in here and there just to taunt him. He felt himself start to cough again, and, using every bit of will power, somehow suppressed the urge.
Rock tried to open his eyes, which were just as much covered with the leftovers of the collapse. They burned terribly; he could feel them coated with dust from corner to corner. He blinked hard but that only seemed to sort of pres
s everything harder against the skin. His hand had ended up wedged against the side of his cheek just inches from his face. By twisting and shimmying slowly and carefully so as not to dislodge what might well be a precarious balancing act of debris above him, Rock managed to get his index finger near his lips. He spat, but not a hell of a lot happened.
He tried again and after a few hacking attempts, a gob of spit landed on his finger and began sliding over it.
Quickly Rock lifted the spit-coated finger to his eye and lightly rubbed it into the corners. It took several attempts and a lot of coughing up, but at last he had both eyes cleared enough to see. And Rockson realized that he might as well have saved his spit. There was nothing to see. Just gray dust that floated evenly in the air everywhere.
There was the slightest dim yellow glow coming from the corridor, but it wasn’t much, a thousandth of a lumen; enough for a worm to see by. Now that everything had calmed down at least for a few seconds, he began realizing the total severity of his situation. He was trapped deep beneath the ground, in one of Century City’s lower levels. God only knew how much of the city had collapsed, how many were alive. He could hear screams coming from outside his room.
Suddenly he couldn’t breathe again. It was hard to tell if it was the dust that was everywhere or the contracting of his lungs as they sucked harder and harder for less and less air. And for one of the few times in his life Ted Rockson felt a deep terror sweep through him. A fear that a child feels when nightmares attack. A fear that can paralyze a man’s heart and make his body clamp up like a vise, his muscles shake, his blood boil inside. He could feel himself losing it, losing his center. Buried alive. A ghastly and hideous fate. And as the dust seemed to clog his lungs more by the second and fill his eyes and ears with gritty, clinging particles, Rock knew that that was exactly what was about to happen to him. He was going to be buried alive like a corpse beneath the cold concrete.
Two
Rockson lay in a sort of limbo zone between consciousness and unconsciousness. With the dust filling the air everywhere in a blanket of darkness, and hardly any air to move it all around, his prospects looked bleak. The Doomsday Warrior had never quite realized how much one’s consciousness, one’s very being, depended on sensory information coming in from the outside world. But here, trapped beneath God only knew how many tons of rubble, there was nothing coming in. The dust stopped all but the dimmest trickles of gray light from a few cracks in the far wall, probably one of the hall emergency lights that had somehow survived the catastrophe. And the screams.
Without the stimulation of the world, it was as if he hardly existed. An embryo of fear, trapped in a womb of destruction and paralysis. He tried to breathe as slowly as he could, since when he took large breaths, he would also draw in large amounts of the dust, clogging his mouth, throat, and lungs, making him feel like he was suffocating. But when he could cool himself out even a little, and take very slow, even breaths, it seemed as if he could actually get some of the precious oxygen into his tangs. It helped a little, just that feeling that he had the slightest amount of control over his environment, even if it was at the bottom of a collapsed mountain.
Rockson had no way of knowing if the whole damn mountain had given way and Century City was now crushed beneath it all. Or if the whole world—everything—was gone. He knew it wasn’t a nuke sent by the Reds, or there would have been a lot more heat generated. No, it had to be an earthquake or some fault in the geological structure beneath the mountain—a fault which moved a little too abruptly. Though it wasn’t technically that earthquake zone there in the middle of the Rocky Mountains, at least he had always thought so. But a thousand, ten thousand years between quakes meant nothing to the Grim Reaper. He did what the hell he wanted.
Rock tried to keep his mind occupied, thinking about the different parts of the city, trying to visualize just what was out there now. Sometimes his telepathic abilities actually enabled him to see beyond his immediate surroundings. But not now. He had to be in a super-relaxed meditative state and that just wasn’t happening at the moment. He’d be rescued. He had to believe that. There were work crews out there right now, no doubt digging their way down to him and the others trapped. Yes, for sure. He tried to hear, slowing his breath as much as possible, listening for any sound of help, of emergency crews slamming their tools through the concrete maelstrom. But there was nothing coming, nothing that sounded human anyway. Just the beating of his heart, and the occasional shifting of large slabs which made a grinding, terrible sound like a giant’s fingernails on a chalk board.
There was another sudden shifting of the debris above him and Rockson felt the steel frame of the bed make all kinds of threatening noises like it was thinking of snapping in half. He knew if that happened, his days were over. Crushed into pâté that only the ants would enjoy. But though the frame gave some and he could feel a little more pressure on his lower left leg and foot, it held. Thank God, Dr. Shecter’s manufacturing design people had made the things in Century City strong, to last for decades. If he ever got out of this dusty mess, he’d sure as hell thank the science chief of the city and his tech boys. If there was a city any more.
He had to stop thinking about them all, as their faces flashed before his dust-coated eyes. It was too much. He could deal with his own demise. It was hard, but God gave and took back again like a nervous shopper in a K-Mart universe. There wasn’t a hell of a lot he could do about that, other than send up a few prayers. But the others, the city itself, ending! It was too much to allow himself to think about. President Langford, Kim—they were both here too, since they’d been rescued from Pattonville a month before. They were here all right, but he had no idea what state they were in. Against his will, Kim’s delicate face flashed over and over in his mind like a neon sign gone mad. Only her face was crushed in, with bones poking out and blood all over the damn place.
Rockson gritted his teeth and with sheer force of will made himself think of other things. For some reason his mind drifted back, back through the years which flipped and spun through his mind like leaves on the wind. Back to memories that were easier to deal with, memories filled with beauty, light, and no dust.
He was a child, back in the valley where he had spent his childhood, it was a harsh but stunningly beautiful world, with slopes filled with wildflowers, running brooks and wildlife abundant, and fresh air. For a landscape a hundred years after nuke war, one would never have known that such terror had occurred, that just a hundred miles in any direction there were craters and vast, scarred areas of land. Places where hardly a thing grew but for stunted and thorned trees with bark as thick and hard as steel.
He had been a wild child. Almost more of an animal than a human child. But his father had known that the mutant boy, with his white streak of hair running down the center of his jet-black name of hair and his mismatched aqua and violet eyes, was not like other children. He was tougher, stronger, faster. He needed the wildness of the surrounding hills and woods. And so he had let the boy Ted Rockson run free almost from the moment he could walk.
Rockson drifted back, ever deeper into the past, the past which was so much more preferable than the hell state he was in now. He was six, and was climbing Telegraph Peak, about eight miles from his valley home. Why they called it that, he didn’t know, as there were no telegraphs or even the poles that had once carried such information. He climbed a rough-barked fir, the tallest of the tall trees that blanketed the slope, and at the very top he could see his house, the thin trickle of smoke rising easily into the tawny sky. Above, an eagle flew serenely on the wind, about five hundred feet up, searching with its crystal eyes for prey. It caught his eye and for a flash the boy felt something like a charge between them, a current of life, of understanding of what the other was. An understanding that they were of the same wave, the same life-electricity that fueled all things.
Then the great golden-winged bird was off on an updraft, sensing the movement of something a mile or two off. And for a flash R
ockson could see through the great bird of prey’s eyes. He was up there too, looking down. And for a moment, he felt dizzy, almost overwhelmed by the new perceptions. He would fall, he would crash down onto the trees. Then the cross-species perception was gone, and he let his pounding heart slow down again. If this was part of the legacy of being a mutant child, then so be it. He felt suddenly blessed and understood with a kind of childlike wisdom that he had to learn to allow such perceptions, such out-of-body experiences, to grow. That he was not like the other boys. For better or worse, he was different.
The scene in his mind suddenly changed. He was with his father, down by one of the nearby streams. Marston’s Creek it was called, though no one could recall just who Marston was. They were fishing, and it was a perfect day with chandelier-crystal blue sky, not a cloud up there. A slow breeze wafted through the trees that grew on each bank of the easy-flowing water, and father and son were lying back lazily on their elbows as they waited for something to bite. His father was telling him about this and that, about how to find the best spot where the fish congregated, about dealing with women. About every kind of thing that a father passes onto his son. And Rock felt lucky, incredibly lucky. He knew that this was a special, special moment. And he let it all in, soaked it up inside, his soul smiling.
Suddenly, against his will, the scene shifted again. He was ten years old, and was back in the small but comfortable cabin that he shared with his father, mother, and sisters. They were all cutting string beans, a red species that seemed to thrive since the nuke war, as the other green species had virtually all died out. Moose and bean stew was on the agenda for dinner; young Rockson’s mouth was already watering as the triple-horned moose meat was being fried up slowly to get the juices out before being thrown into the huge stew pot nearly big enough for a young lad to bathe in—a fact which Rock’s mother sometimes threatened him with when he got in trouble.
