Doomsday Warrior 01 (14 page)

“Oh, he’s a better fighter than I am, Rona. He holds back with me so that the sparring can give him a workout,” Rock said self-depreciatingly.

“Bull!” Rona spat out. “If anything, you could beat him. Or at least it would be a hell of a fight.”

“Such a fight will never occur,” Rockson said seriously. “I fight only my enemies to kill. The fighting that Chen and I do is the fighting of friends, of teaching one another.”

“Oh, I know, I know,” Rona said, chuckling. “No need to be so heavy-handed philosophical all the time.” She put her hand around his taut-muscled thigh. “I want you!” she said directly. “I’ve missed you a lot.” She pulled him on top of her, kissing him full on the lips, crushing her body against his with all of her strength. They embraced for several minutes, hands stroking warm flesh. Then Rock lifted her off of him and silently jumped to his feet. Taking her by the hand, he led her to one of the massage rooms at the far end of the gymnasium and locked the door behind him. Soon they were locked in the oldest embrace of man and woman. And the most pleasurable.

Eleven

C
ommandant Kuzminski got the orders. There had been one too many incidents in Little U.S.A.—the section of Stalinville where the filthy American children ran in packs, where the bagmen and garbage ladies snarled at the Red troops when they passed, where thousands of rat holes were crowded with hostile thieves and work resisters. The place was rampant with secret cells of teachers, Americans who taught the forbidden skills of reading, writing and the grammar of the English language to the waifs who stole everything that wasn’t nailed down off of the convoys of trucks that rumbled through. Sometimes trucks would even be ransacked and shipments of foodstuffs, clothing or even weapons would be carted off by the antlike swarms of violent youths. And now the final blow: an elite officer of the KGB brutally murdered by a bagman while carrying out his duties in Little U.S.A. There had to be drastic action.

Kuzminski assembled thirty men and armed them with flamethrowers and tanks filled with the fuel for the dreaded weapons at Depot C. Authorization to go in and burn out the sewer holes, the basements and alleyway homes of the vermin of Little U.S.A. had been granted. There would be no meetings with trustee civilians this time, no asking for ringleaders to be shot as examples, as in the past. No! This time the flames would cleanse the filthy resisters.

Grim determination etched the faces of the tall, black-shirted extermination squad. Their face shields were pushed up over their cold, intense eyes. Eyes of hate and murder beneath black, steel helmets. Batons hung from their belts—the stun batons of the KGB. Laser electrode firing pistols in long, narrow holsters sat on the other hip. They wore acid-resistant jackets and pants; the scum of Little U.S.A. had started making sulphuric acid bombs from canisters of acid stolen from Russian supply trucks. The little bastards would rush from the shadows and splash the burning acid into Red faces. Eight soldiers had been blinded.

The thirty men were from a special KGB counterinsurgency squad trained to kill without mercy, to spread terror through the populace. The damned regular army troops would let the tots get away with valuable property, hesitant to shoot five and six year olds. But this KGB “Special Unit” had been thoroughly indoctrinated into the realities and necessities of occupation in a hostile country.
Children are our enemies too
. Especially children! With their hand grenades hidden in little paper bags, their acid vials, their hurling of garbage cans filled with rocks from rooftops onto passing troops below—they had a million little tricks. And they were without fear.

This “burn out” should have been authorized long ago, Kuzminski thought, as he hefted his flamethrower, checking the nozzle opening. The way the graffiti got out of control! Imagine a Soviet fortress city scrawled with “USA LIVES” and “BETTER DEAD THAN RED” and the inevitable “THE ULTIMATE AMERICAN WAS HERE.” Ted Rockson, the legendary mountain brigand that the rebels and the bagpeople all worshipped like some goddamned god. Kuzminski sized up the thirty-man force, making sure every bit of the dangerous equipment was properly sealed. If gas started leaking once flames were thrown . . . Was this Rockson even a real person? the pale-faced commandant wondered. Or just a myth. Supposedly he could slip through any defense, surmount any obstacle—be everywhere at once. Whenever anything went wrong, even when an accident blew up some ammunition, the writings went up on the brick walls, on the sides of parked Red trucks: ROCK WAS HERE! Fantastic that the higher authorities had let the city walls be smeared like this without taking reprisal action long ago. Kuzminski would have. Now they had learned the hard way what he had been telling them for months in his capacity as KGB Special Units commander for the fort. These incidents will build until there is a disaster, he had warned. They had scoffed. Now the third highest ranking KGB officer of Stalinville was dead, stabbed through the throat with a maniac’s ice pick. He shuddered, thinking of the major gasping for breath, hands covering the red blood pouring out of his severed neck. But now he was gone. The commandant was glad. He had been a bastard, always putting the lower-ranked Kuzminski in his place. Always commanding him imperiously in front of other officers and troops. Screw him, he thought with a grin. Now there is more room for the ranks below to be promoted. If he could pull this incineration action off without any casualties he would look good. Very good. The dead KGB officer’s position beckoned Kuzminski like the very gates of heaven.

He inspected the gauges of all the fuel tanks strapped to the Blackshirts’ backs. Full to capacity. The Death Squad snapped their shields down and, single file, smartly exited the supply station.

Sally, a garbage lady, was picking through the rubble at the southern edge of the Little U.S.A. sector. Overhead, split and twisting radioactive clouds crawled along in a deep indigo sky of death. Though no one in the city even noticed, it was a date that once had made Americans jump and scream in joy: Independence Day. July 4, 2089
A.D.
She systematically poked through the sprawling refuse heap in which the Reds dumped all their waste, content to let the Americans smell it and pick over its rot. She had found many things in these piles. Once a comb, once a piece of flashlight that had matched another piece she had uncovered. And now she had that flashlight to reach her deep cellar home inside a broken oil tank—a good place for the past few years—warmed by her six scraggly dogs, safe. Safe. Sores of pus oozed down her chin and she wiped at them with cramped hands and arthritis-twisted fingers. She ate the plum peels and banana skins. Imagine, they wasted all that. Her dogs scrounged for bones and chewed hungrily at them. Children and an old, bent man in the muted gray stripes of a Russian prison uniform—an escapee?—loomed nearby. Everybody kept an eye on everyone else but let each other be. They were, after all, Americans. Still, there were always fights for little treasures. It was survival. The first priority was to live and Sally was a survivor. She had killed other Americans. Yes, but only to keep her strength up for Resistance Day. The day Ted Rockson’s hordes would sweep through the city. Then her strength would be needed. Not the half-strength of the weak ones she had killed to take away their food. They would have died anyway. She needed it.

Suddenly she heard steps—locksteps like she had never heard before. It was the dreaded Death Squad, KGB soldiers in their midnight black uniforms with the red skulls on their sleeves. They marched like robots over the rolling hills of trash. They were coming with . . . what were those tubes on their backs? What were the long tubes in their hands connected by black hoses to the tanks? She fought through her childhood memories. Memories repressed, finally forgotten—for good reason. Then she remembered. She screamed a scream to wake the dead. Screamed out a warning. Screamed in the loudest, shrillest scream that had ever issued forth from her lungs.

“Flamethrowers! Flamethrowers!” She began running, slipping, stumbling. The children didn’t know what was coming. They stood on the rubble piles laughing and jeering the oncoming Red troops as they had learned to do. They picked up rocks and began throwing them as the Blackshirts marched closer and closer. Their face plates reflected the random rays of purple-tinged sunlight that reached down through the poison clouds. They came in four phalanxes. The children weren’t listening to her screams. They weren’t—

Whoosh
. The first flames shot nearly a hundred feet out from five roaring flame-throwing nozzles. The flames just reached the most forward children, the ones advancing to throw fist-sized rocks. Instantly they were aflame, burning candles of flesh. Steam poured out of their sweaters and overalls as the moisture of their flesh instantly evaporated and the pink skin turned charcoal black. Flames shot from out of their bubbling eyesockets, and grotesquely ballooned out of their mouths. The other children’s voices died out behind them. There was an unearthly silence for a second. Then they dropped the rocks and turned to run.

Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.
Fifty children fell, twisting in shrieking agony; others continued to run, human torches. They ran among the other children, still further back in the rubble piles, grabbing at them, screaming for help, dragging them along in their mad death hysteria. Sharon, Stella, Rita, Maya, Henry, Cal, Mooney, Flatface—all the garbage children Sally knew, dying, dying as she watched in horror, from her hiding place in the ruins of a wrecked building.

The Death Squad didn’t lose step. They just kept advancing in lock step—
thrump-thrump
—goose-stepping to the junction in the road ahead. The Blackshirts stepped over the steaming, eyeless bodies, avoided the still-brightly burning corpses. The streets were deserted. Kuzminski led the second unit down the main avenue of Little U.S.A., a potholed dirt road about forty feet wide. No one was in sight—no resistance. He smiled. True force and they ran like dogs. Treat them severely. Make them hear death screams and they disappear. It’s easy. He had an erection in his leather pants as he searched the surrounding crumbling buildings with his cold blue eyes.

There! A hidden entrance, a partially opened cellar door—a way down into the tunnel system of the bag people, beneath the streets. Wordlessly he raised his hand; the unit stopped. He directed his men to the doorway and they poured their flames down. Whatever was there will no longer bother us, the commandant thought with deep satisfaction.

Deke, the leader of the Black Dukes, was the meanest, most feared of all the teen gang leaders of Little U.S.A. He had taken on all the other gangs—the Desperados, the Live Skulls, the Minutemen—and beaten them down. He had ruled his turf in the southern sector of the American town for two years, collecting money from the peddlers, ripping off the stragglers. But as tough as he was, Deke could see that his time had come. He looked out from the third-floor window of the abandoned firehouse that served as the Black Dukes’ headquarters. The Reds were coming down the streets with weapons that were pouring fire onto everything. Men and women ran screaming before the onslaught. Within a minute they would reach the Duke’s hiding place.

Well he had to die sometime. It had almost happened last week—they were fighting with the Minutemen over a gallon jug of wine. He had been stabbed in the groin by an opposing gang member. He had slashed the guy’s throat from ear to ear. But he had known that his days were numbered. He kissed the rabbit’s foot on his necklace dangling from his neck along with charms of other animals and tiny, gold-colored cowboys. He woke the other gang members quickly. “The Black Dukes die today,” he said to each one. They stood in front of him, their knives at the ready in their hands.

“Nothing much to say, my brothers. We’ve had good times and bad times together. But we were brothers. Now we’ll die as brothers.” They slapped hands for the final time, gave their gang war cry and, swinging their bolo nunchakas, flew down the rotted board stairs and out through the slopes of rubble that lined the street.

The Death Squad, with Kuzminski in the lead, had just sent a wall of flames down a stairwell and were now heading toward two crumbling, four-story buildings. Suddenly a group of five animal-like black youths wearing black leather jackets attacked, leaping from behind a partially standing brick wall. The sharp blades of the Black Dukes dug into Red throats. The Russians stopped resisting. The gang members rose to their feet and charged toward the remaining troops who stepped quickly back. The flames poured forth again. The five Dukes lit up like Roman candles. Their eyes melted, their faces twisted in unspeakable agony as the liquid fire met their black flesh. Their faces were dissolving, their screams issued forth continuously like the shriek of a siren blaring out death. They staggered forward, toward the Reds. The Death Squad looked nervous. Some cut their throwers and ran as the Americans stumbled forward—flaming, insane, faceless monsters with groping, burning hands. The arms of flame caught one Russian and engulfed him in a death hold. A sound that was recognizable as some kind of twisted laughter screamed out from the sizzling vocal cords of the gang member as he and the Blackshirt exploded in flames. A second and third walking, fiery corpse-thing staggered forth as a second Red was caught in a hold by one of them, its charred black flesh spitting orange and red flame as it reached forward with strangling, smoking hands.

Commandant Kuzminski stared in horror from twenty yards away with the third unit. When would these Americans value their wretched lives? He turned to the right as he heard yells of defiance. A horde of pipe-wielding adult men—of all races, their clothes ripped, their shoes falling off their filthy feet—came storming at the Reds. They came in fast, knocking some of the Russians off their feet, before they were hit with a wall of fire from more flamethrowers. Dead men all, they came forward, most dying within two or three steps, falling forward on their sizzling faces. But some kept coming, even as they burned, cursing black oaths, diving onto the Red killers, igniting them. The screaming Russian troops who were chosen for the sacrificial flames ripped at their burning plastic helmets and their thick clothing.