Doomsday Warrior 04 - Bloody America (2 page)

THE RUSSIANS:
The United Socialist States of America is run by the red-faced, heavy-drinking General Zhabnov, headquartered in the White House, Washington, D.C., now called New Lenin. A bureaucrat, careful but not cunning, and a libertine, Zhabnov spends his days eating and his nights in bed with young American girls rounded up by the KGB. Zhabnov has been appointed supreme president of the United States for a ten-year period, largely because he is the nephew of the Russian premier, Vassily. General Zhabnov rules America as his personal fiefdom. The only rules he must obey are (1) no uprisings and (2) seventy-five percent of the crops grown by the enslaved American workers must be sent to Russia. General Zhabnov believes that the situation in the United States is stable, that there are no American resistance forces to speak of other than a few scattered groups that raid convoys from time to time. He sees his stay here as a happy interlude away from the power struggles back in the Kremlin.
Colonel Killov is the head of the KGB in the United States headquartered in Denver, Colorado. He is a ruthlessly ambitious man whose goal it is to someday be premier of the world. Thin, almost skeletal, with a long face, sunken cheekbones and thin lips that spit words, Killov’s operatives are everywhere in the country: in the fortresses, in the Russian officer ranks, and lately he has even managed to infiltrate an American-born agent into the highest levels of the resistance. Colonel Killov believes General Zhabnov to be a fool. Killov knows that the American forces are growing stronger daily and forming a nationwide alliance to fight together. The calm days of the last century are about to end.
From Moscow, Premier Vassily rules the world. Never has one man ruled so much territory. From the bottom of Africa to Siberia, from Paraguay to Canada, Russian armies are everywhere. A constant flow of supplies and medical goods are needed to keep the vast occupying armies alive. Russia herself did not do badly in the war. Only twenty-four American missiles reached the Soviet Union and ten of these were pushed off course or exploded by ground-to-air missiles. The rest of the United States strike was knocked out of the skies by Russian killer satellites that shot down beams of pure energy and picked them off like clay pigeons.
Vassily is besieged on all sides by problems. His great empire is threatening to break up. Everywhere there are rebel attacks on Russian troops. In Europe, in Africa, in India, especially in America. The forces of the resistance troops were growing larger and more sophisticated in their operations. Vassily is a highly intelligent, well-read man. He has devoured history books on other great leaders and the problems they faced. “Great men have problems that no one but another great man could understand,” he lectures his underlings. Advisers tell him to send in more forces and quickly crush the insurgents. But Vassily believes that to be a tremendous waste of manpower. If it goes on like this he may use neutron bombs again. Not a big strike, but perhaps in a single night, yes, in one hour, they could target the fifty main trouble spots in the world. Order must be maintained. For Vassily knew his history. One thing that had been true since the dawn of time: wherever there had been a great empire there had come a time when it began to crumble.

One

S
omething shifted. Deep within the earth, a rumbling and grinding of massive grids of rock hundreds of miles long, pushed against one another, cracking. Something bubbled and boiled like a thing alive. It was the poison of a hundred years, the black rotting radioactive liquids that had seeped into the soil through a million cracks and collected hundreds of miles down in a dark sea of death. It was an underground ocean of stench and decay and rot, of glowing molecules with names like strontium 90, titanium 140 and krypton 85—all of them as virulent as the day they had been created red hot from the fires of the H-Bombs going off everywhere like the fourth of July a century before. It was a sea of slime and putrescence that writhed in a radioactive frenzy spitting forth clouds of toxic gas, reaching out with pseudopods, of the purest blackness.

The earth around the living lake of death shook and trembled violently, moving and quivering on every side of the dark sea. It was as if the earth could no longer stand the radioactivity; as if trying to free itself of the poisons, the earth opened up a funnel to the surface of the planet, cracking a thousand-foot-long chasm through its rocky skin. The sea of slime shot toward the surface as if propelled like lava from an erupting volcano as the crack in the earth opened nearly a mile wide, ripping the cactus-dotted prairie like a piece of paper. Black liquid swept out over the parched wastelands by the millions of gallons, the waves of darkness piled high atop one another roaring off in every direction.

The Black Sea shot across the countryside, engulfing, killing every living thing it found. They sank beneath its thirty-foot high wall of noxious slime, instantly drowning or burned to a blistery death by the super high rads contained within. The Ocean of Death swept up everything in its path: Groves of trees disappeared, snapped away like twigs, groundhogs, lizards, rainbirds, giant-horned buffalo all tore for their lives as they heard and saw the poisonous tidal wave approaching. Soon the prairie was alive with a flood of animals that ran just ahead of the River of Darkness. Running as fast as their padded, clawed, or hooved feet could carry them. Each of them knew somewhere in its primitive brain that death was just behind them. That a misstep or fall would mean the end. A wave of life fleeing a wave of death.

Two

T
he fangs of the sabre-toothed mountain lion sparkled like chromium ice picks, glistening with saliva in the rays of the setting pink sun. The creature’s eyes, narrow and red as blood, were fixed straight ahead on the human who stood in its way. The meanest-looking mountain cat Ted Rockson had ever seen: black spots the size of silver dollars and claws like meathooks came slinking toward him, growling a deep guttural sound that caught in the cat’s throat, as if afraid to go past the foot-long curved ivory teeth on each side of its opened jaw.

“Easy boy,” Rockson said, stepping slowly backward and to the side. He sensed that the creature was not after him but just wanted to get by. Behind Rock, Charles Langford, his daughter Kim, and Mountain Man Ed, all six feet eight inches of him, stood frozen, their hearts slamming in their chests. The golden-haired mountain lion edged forward. Rockson let his arm drop slowly down to his holster as he placed his thick-veined, sun-darkened hand around the reassuring butt of his .12 gauge shotgun pistol. But he wouldn’t kill the thing unless he had to. The sabre-toothed lion, Maximus Felinus, as named by Dr. Schecter’s science crew back in Century City, was one of a true new species, created from the omnipresent x-rays, gamma rays, and beta rays, eternal by-products of the H-bombs that had fallen onto America by the thousands. Mutated chromosomes, genetic patterns twisted and rearranged into new forms of life—like the cute killer pussycat that stood in front of them.

The mountain cat took a final wary look at Rockson and his crew, growled loudly, opening its jaws to their nearly two-and-a-half-foot extension, then just as quickly tore past them into the low bushland ahead. Rock let his grip on the shotpistol relax. The others breathed a sigh of relief as he turned.

“Rock, what is it about you?” Kim asked, teasing him. “Wherever you go—cats, hogs, rats, something seems to want to attack you.”

“I’ve got what they call a magnetic personality.” Rock smiled back, his violet and aquamarine eyes dancing with energy. “Everything just loves me.” Kim looked over at his broad muscled physique, and a chill coursed through her body as she remembered their nights together in the Glower’s village just days before.

Mountain Ed, his buckskin jacket flapping, his three immense antiquated hunting rifles slung over his shoulder, slapping against his back, walked several yards ahead and poked at a bloody animal carcass lying next to some thickly thorned bushes. He carefully avoided the three-inch-long blue barbs of the vegetation just waiting for something to brush against it so it could inject itself and its poison into their flesh.

“That kitty left his dinner, Rock,” Mt. Ed snorted, pointing down at a partially consumed young male elk. Rock came over and looked. Only the skull had been cracked open, snapped to pieces inside the powerful jaws of the killer cat. Brain still oozed from one side of the head, cracked like a coconut.

“They go for the brain first,” Mt. Ed said, his wiry black beard falling below the thick sun-puffed lips. “Then the heart, kidneys. This one hasn’t even touched its skull stew.”

“Strange,” Rock said, stepping back from the corpse and looking in the direction the cat had come. “They usually don’t back down from a challenge. But that one seemed scared. Of what?” If there was something that could scare
that,
Rockson wanted to know what it was and quick.

They both turned suddenly, reaching for their guns as they heard a scrambling in some dense brush just yards away. Three gray wart hogs, their long tusks standing straight as an officer’s sword, came rushing toward them. Rock ripped out his pistol, but the usually fierce warted pigs swerved to the right and tore right past the Doomsday Warrior without so much as a glance.

“What the hell’s going on?” Charles Langford, the newly elected president of the Re-United States of America grumbled.

“Beats me,” Rock said. “But I think maybe we should join them and start heading in that direction.” He started down what seemed like some sort of path the animals were following, a slightly trampled-down stretch of bushland about ten feet wide. But it was turning into a superhighway Rockson thought, as a whole new group of animals came flying through the thickets and past them, out onto more open terrain. Not one paid the slightest attention to Rockson or the others, their heads down, their legs pumping like locomotives as they shot by.

Rock kneeled down and put his ear to the earth. He heard something, something he didn’t like at all. He had heard the sound once before and he had nearly died.

“Okay folks, I don’t want to alarm you,” Rock said, looking grimly at Kim. “But we’ve got to drop everything and run. There’s some sort of flood, tidal wave heading this way.” They started a medium jog in the direction the animals were heading. Rockson could have run twice as fast but held back with Kim and President Langford who were still recovering from the radiation burns they had received just a month before. The Glower’s incredible telepathic healing powers along with Rockson’s own PSI abilities had cured the two of them, pulling poisoning radiation from their bodies. But still human beings are made of flesh and blood—they had been in deep shock, and Rock wondered how much they could take.

The Doomsday Warrior pulled out a pair of dirty field glasses, a beat-up pair that Mt. Ed had given him, after saving Rock from the same N-bomb blast that had nearly killed Kim and the president.

Now he could see it: a wall of sheerest black, like the side of a mountain, coming straight toward them. And it didn’t look like water; Rock could see that from twelve miles away. It was thick and oily and seemed to almost reach forward with pseudopods of its foul grease, grabbing and digesting the poor creatures that hadn’t been quick enough. Rock spun the glasses around in the other direction, searching for a rise, a mountain, anything that would get them out of the oncoming deluge.

The sound of the thing came to them: a dull roar, far off, with the power of ten million tons of water, crashing forward, growing with every minute as the black foulness continued to pour from the bowel’s of the earth miles away.

There! To the east, perhaps two miles away. Some kind of small hill, Rock could see through the dusty glasses. “This way,” he screamed out to the others as more animals continued to rush past them, an old mangy wolf actually brushing against Mt. Ed’s leg for a second, too scared to stop and take a bite.

“We’ve got to go faster,” Rock shouted to the president and Kim as they began to falter.

“Can’t Rock,” the president gasped. “I’m usually much stronger than this but—” He looked humiliated, angry at having to slow down the party. “Rock, leave me,” he gasped, lurching around on unsteady legs. “Take Kim and—”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Father,” Kim said loudly as the four of them stopped as Langford collapsed to the ground, his chest heaving.

“Kim, can you run?” Rock asked the petite blonde, the woman he loved.

“Yes—I—think so, but my fath—”

“Don’t worry.” Rockson placed both arms under the gasping middle-aged leader of America and swung him up over his right shoulder like a sack of potatoes. The president gasped for a moment and then relaxed, resigned. The three of them began running again, faster than before. Kim’s mouth was wide open, sucking in air, and even Mt. Ed, who Rockson knew was made of iron, began to look a little weary. But then he did have over three hundred pounds of flesh on him to carry, not to mention his huge sack of supplies and trio of blunderbusses hung over his shoulders. They tore across the increasingly sparse bushland, just black cactuses and tumbleweeds occupying the yellowish ground.

At last they reached it. Rock laid the president gently at the base of the seventy-five-foot-high hill. Kim and Mt. Ed fell against the soft curve of dirt at the base as Rockson swung the field glasses back behind them. It was there! Larger than ever. With the binoculars it took up nearly the whole lens: a wall of oily water, of some kind of liquid anyway, dark as a moonless night, stretching like a curtain of death across the horizon. What it was, where it came from, Rock would probably never know. Just one of a thousand ways of dying in America 2089
A.D.
He gave them thirty seconds to rest and then said firmly, “Let’s climb.” They protested but rose. The wall of darkness could be seen now with the naked eye as it grew and grew, roaring across the prairie, now less than five miles off. The dull roar was growing to an unnerving rumble that seemed to shake the very ground beneath them.