Doomsday Warrior 04 - Bloody America (19 page)

Rockson had higher game on his mind than the scrambling crowd. He had heard the ominous voice of Dubrovnik throughout the afternoon—that ultimate assigner of men to the fate of the arena. Now the commissar of entertainment would himself get a chance to partake of the fun and games. The Doomsday Warrior rushed up the long steps of the stadium two at a time, slashing away with his duo-blade at anyone who dared get in his way. Not many did—and those who tried fell, spouting red spray. Rock didn’t slow down. He was a whirlwind of death, his purple and blue eyes glistening with the fire of the avenger, the streak of white hair down the center of his black locks splattered with bright red dots of blood, like some sort of painting of doom. He could see the control booth far above at the very top of the stands. As he approached he saw the guards, the personal protectors of the commissar, stepping from a side door, pulling their weapons as they tried to get a bead on him.

It took less than a minute to reach the top as Rockson, running at full speed, went up the stairs like a man possessed. As he reached the top row of seats, he leaped a low iron fence. There were nearly a dozen bodyguards awaiting his arrival. But what they had planned was not necessarily what Rock had in mind. Pretending to come right at them he veered at the last moment to the side and rushed up to the huge window behind which Dubrovnik stared out with fear-stricken eyes. Rockson pulled his arm back and thrust the Menace’s trident, which he had picked up half broken from the ground, with all his strength at the window. It smashed into a thousand fragments, shooting shards of razor-sharp teeth back at the commissar, cutting his face with myriad slashes. Rock waited a moment for the collapsed window to fall and then leaped through the opening, his duo-blade held high in his right hand.

“I’m so pleased to meet you,” Rockson said. “I’ve heard such nice things about you.”

“Please Rockson, I—I—meant no harm,” the cowering Dubrovnik said, edging backward, away from the enraged American. “I—I—was going to let you live. The premier had given orders just to—to scare you.”

“You’re the worst liar I’ve ever heard,” Rock said with a sneer. At the side, guards frantically tried to get back in the door. But Dubrovnik had locked it from the inside.

“I beg you—I have a family. I was just carrying out orders. If it wasn’t me it—it would have been someone else. And—and I always gave the prisoners a chance. They were given weapons. If they survived they, too, could become gladiators.”

“You make me sick, scum. Only following orders. Don’t you know those words were said by other murderers like you nearly one hundred and fifty years ago. Men who delighted in torture and execution. It’s those who ‘just follow orders’ who make this world a living hell for the people of the planet. People who want to live their meager lives out in peace. But no—you wouldn’t let them have even their pitiful short lives to live. You had to go out and drag them from the ditches and the fields and end their existence in terror and blood.”

“Rockson, I am rich.” Dubrovnik gulped, blood streaming in tiny trickles down his face from the many glass cuts. He backed off until he bumped against the back wall of the control booth, trying to keep away from the deadly duo-blade, so coated with blood. If he could just reach his desk and the pistol inside.

“I will give you anything you want. You could be powerful here in Russia. A man like you. We respect power—and courage. I promise you that—”

“Shut up,” Rockson snapped. “I don’t want to hear any more of your lies. You make me want to vomit. Just look out your window at the graveyard below. It’s all your doing—every man there owes his fate to you.” Dubrovnik made a leap for the desk and ripped open the drawer. He pulled the revolver out and raised it. Rockson would die now. But the Doomsday Warrior was too fast for the overweight, jowled Commissar. With a powerful leap he flew toward the Red, spinning the duo-blade at the face that had made so many tremble. The pistol was at chest level and Dubrovnik’s finger was tightening on the trigger when the hooked end of Rock’s blade tore into the commissar’s face. The tip slammed into the Red’s right eye, cutting it in two and then continued through the optic nerve deep into the brain. Rock pulled the duo-blade out, taking the bloody eyeball with it, hooked like a squirming worm on the tip. Dubrovnik’s pistol went off, hitting a guard who was just climbing in the window behind Rockson, sending him flying backward onto his comrades. The Red torture master threw his hands over the oozing socket, now a dripping black hole. His own brain tissue squeezing out through his fingers like a thick paste. He let out one feeble scream and then, his legs twitching in a bizarre dance of death, half hopped several feet toward Rock. The Doomsday Warrior stepped to the side as the hideous dying thing brushed past him. The body took another trembling step or two, and the slashed brain decided it was dead. The commissar slammed across the broken window frame and fell dead as stone, his three hundred and ten pounds of flab draped over the sill.

Rockson turned toward the window and the waiting guards outside who held pistols and swords nervously in their sweaty hands. With the duo-blade in one fist and the dead Dubrovnik’s pistol in the other, he walked calmly toward the greeting committee.

“Comrades—fuck off,” Rockson said with a commanding tone. “Your master is dead. No one has to know whether you fought me or not. Run! Run now and I’ll let you live.” There were nearly a dozen of the heavily armed bodyguards. But they had seen what this tornado of fury and violence could do. Their master was gone. There would be another master—and they would serve him—or they could die here on the charnel grounds of the blood-coated stadium. They looked at one another with cowardice showing in every eye. Then without a word they made their decision, and turned and ran down the slimy steps. Rockson let a thin smile cross his tight lips. So much for Russian heroism.

The Doomsday Warrior tore back down the wet steps of the coliseum, row after row of bodies slumped in their seats, vodka and gin flasks hanging uselessly from the pockets of their thick fur coats. He joined Archer and the freed men below. But most of the grisly work had been done. Nearly a hundred of Russia’s top echelons of leadership lay dead or dying, packed atop one on another in the narrow aisles between the curving rows of seats like sardines in a net of death.

Suddenly, as if they knew their work was done, all the fighters stopped and turned toward Rock. Archer raised his splattered axe high in the air, as if saluting the gods who watched transfixed from the silver clouds above, and let out a primitive roar of triumph. The other freed men joined him. They, the victims, had become the hunters—and they had left a mark that the Russian Empire would not soon forget.

“We’re finished here,” Rockson said. “We’ve got to move. They’ll be sending everything this side of Vladivostok. We wouldn’t have a chance with just these weapons.” The Doomsday Warrior turned and ran down the slippery steps toward the arena grounds where bodies still lay, the big cats chewing on them furiously. He scrambled back down on one of the nets draped over the wall and down onto the damp ground. Archer leaned over the edge and didn’t even use the net, dropping with surprising agility twelve feet to the ground. The fighters hesitated just behind him, looking down at the lions and tigers, cheetahs and leopards, their bloody jaws pumping like machines over their half-eaten prey.

“They’re eating din-din,” Rock yelled back up to the somewhat fearful men. They had faced the gladiators but tigers—that was different. “I swear to you they couldn’t be less interested in you right now. Cats always stop and eat when they kill—law of the jungle. We can walk right by them as long as they don’t think we’re trying to steal their catch.” To prove his point Rock started across the field of living death, keeping a safe distance from the predators. They glanced up with wary eyes but kept chewing.

The faint roar of approaching Russian helicopters—and from the sound, a fleet of them—quickly convinced the timid to rush down the nets and run across the field. A few of the cats jumped to their feet as one of the men got too close, but the quick flash of a sword quickly dissuaded even these kings of the jungle to back off and return to safer entrees. The remaining eighteen men followed Rockson through the dark opened gates and down into the winding tunnels and pathways of the subterranean world of the coliseum. Rock tried hard to remember the turns and doors that led up to the surface. He made it a point, from years of mountain fighting, to memorize the route out of any area that he entered. An occasional guard or bunch of arena attendants tried to block them, but Rock and Archer in the lead ranks smashed on through without even stopping. After many minutes of running at near top speed they came to a sharply sloping ramp and burst through a low gate and out into the wide avenue that ran past the front of the stadium.

Special Riot Police cars were pulling up, but Rock and the freed men were upon them before they could even raise their big Togar Assault rifles. The evening sun chopped like a red fist into the buildings that towered around them, golden spires, twisting spinningly into the deep blue sky. The men ran down a side street as night fell, darkening the pavements and creating a maze of shadows from the roofs above them. Many of the streetlights were out in this part of Moscow—the poorer members of the citizenry lived near the coliseum. It was considered declassé by the Red elite who preferred the other side of town with its hills and lawns and sprawling mansions.

Thank God for Russian inefficiency, Rock thought, as they ran down one narrow street after another, disappearing into the southern ancient sector where the buildings were delapidated and crumbling and the darkness almost total. Behind them they could see whole migrations of Red choppers roaring around, searching for the men who had made a monkey of Russian power. Every cop, riot squad, army patrol, and elite special forces unit would be looking for them—and wouldn’t rest until they were caught.

Rock prayed that he wasn’t leading them all into a death trap, perhaps just around the next corner. His sixth sense told him there was something ahead—people—a few of them waiting. He held up his hand and the men behind him stopped. Rock put his pistol around the the corner building to see if it would draw fire—none. He carefully edged around and looked.

“Rockson, man, we was buzzing out about your arrival schedule,” Yuri Goodman said. “It was name that tune time.” Rock let the gun drop with a laugh.

“So you old jazz masters heard the news?” he said across the alleyway.

“Man, the whole town is jumping with the jive of your performance over at the coliseum,” Yuri said. Rock and the freed men walked over to the jazz king and his small band of dissidents. They stood nearly two feet shorter than the fighters, and with their long black robes, pasty white faces, and immense gray-black eyes, they looked like some sort of Snow White’s Seven Dwarfs—from an insane asylum.

“Let’s split the scene,” Yuri said, turning and pointing to an almost hidden manhole cover, layered with dust and grime. Two of his men rushed over and lifted the steel covering with two long hooks. “Take a trip on the A Train, daddy-o,” Yuri muttered and descended down a narrow metal ladder. Rock and the freed man followed the quickly moving dissident. Anton Coltrane, one of the jazz men who always took up the rear, took a final darting look down the street. Soldiers were drawing closer, just blocks away, but they wouldn’t find this. He slammed the cover closed, invisible in the night darkness, just a crack in a street of dirt and garbage, and scrawny dogs wandering like lost souls looking for heaven.

Eighteen

T
he challengers of Russian rule sat around large oval tables in the cool dank night air of the subway, thick with scents of moss and rust, planning how they would attack. They drank cup after steaming cup of fresh coffee and espresso which the dissidents said they had stolen from shipments of Columbian beans sold at a deluxe gourmet store for the top Red brass.

Rockson and Archer would take the Missile Control Complex and the freed men would come with him. They would use the explosives that the dissidents had brought up by the crateload. If Rock could take out even half their atomic weapons with this one punch, it would be a blow heard around the entire planet. The dissidents, meanwhile, would make a move they had been planning for years, but until Rockson’s example, had been unsure how to proceed. They would storm the Moscow prison: a decaying stone czarist-built detention center housing nearly five thousand men. Many of them were political prisoners: artists, writers, and members of the dissident’s own force.

“We ready for the biggest jam session ever tooted on the planet,” Yuri Goodman said to Rock with a lopsided grin on his chalk-white face.

“With dynamite playing drums,” Rock answered.

The dissidents drew maps on a blackboard they had discovered years before in what had been the subway director’s offices. They drew long arrows with piercing thin pieces of chalk, showing Rock and his men just how to reach the Russian high-tech complex and the location of the main beams of support.

At last the dawn broke, spitting gobs of pale light through the rock-covered gratings far above. The attackers loaded up with rifles, submachine guns, and dynamite, two-by-three-foot wooden boxes of the stuff—a virtual armory. The dissidents would use their full array of supersonic instruments: clarinets, trombones, flutes, saxophones, even tubas. Each was equipped with a sound amplification system that could kill. It had been invented years before by one of their more famous dissident ancestors—a Nobel prize winner who had been marked for death by the Reds right after the war. He had continued working on his sonic experiments down in the subways until he had perfected the electronically assisted atomic-batteried section with microchips and amplifying circuitries. The normal sound of the instrument was phased much in the same way that a laser puts all light waves in synchronous flow. All this scientific jargon meaning one thing—it could kill—kill violently and horribly with the receiver of the supersound having his body’s cells disrupted so violently that, at the instrument’s highest output, the victim would melt into a human slime. The dissidents played different tunes, depending on whether they wanted to stun, kill, or destroy. The melodies, having certain melodic structures, notes, and decibel peaks, had been precisely calculated as to what their effect would be. For rats and tunnel creatures they played “Chattanooga Choo-Choo;” for rendering Red soldiers unconscious, the “St. Louis Blues;” and for wipeout time they blared out “Take the A Train.” These songs had been banned throughout the Russian Empire, as had all jazz, considered a degenerative example of capitalistic music. The Red soldiers feared the tunes, not understanding how they killed, but knowing that a song was heard and then a combat trooper was dead.