Doomsday Warrior 05 - America’s Last Declaration (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

T
hey fell from the sky like wounded birds, twisting, spinning out of control. Wingless, their arms and legs swung wildly in the cold air. The two men dangled from billowing black parachutes that ballooned out above them. They gripped the straps that led up from their shoulder harnesses for dear life as they watched the world below come shooting up at them like a bullet.

There were only seconds before impact and Ted Rockson and Archer, the giant near-mute member of the Rock team, dropped ever closer . . . to their doom. The MIG jet they had stolen and escaped from Moscow in spun wildly past them, plummeting straight down. But it wasn’t their quick descent that made their hearts beat faster and their eyes open wide—it was the immense iceberg-dotted lake that they were about to plunge into. Lake Superior, according to the maps in the MIG. It had seemed so welcoming, so comforting just minutes before as the two freefighters realized they were home—or nearly. But now as they prepared to splash into its frigid waters, having misjudged their drop angle and been blown by the North Wind, it changed every second into an enemy that was about to kill them.

All their attempts at altering the course of the falling chutes were in vain as the constant cold stream of air from the arctic wind slammed them down toward the dark blue water.

“Hold on, man, we’re going in,” Rock yelled to Archer who was about forty feet away and twenty feet above him. They hit the water hard, sending up great splashes of the frigid liquid around them. Parachutes slow descent, they don’t stop it, and with the additional helping hand of the downdraft they were slammed into the lake like spears, going under nearly twenty feet into the murky depths. Rockson opened his eyes but could see nothing in the dark water, though the cold, near-freezing water burned his eyes as if it were alcohol. He knew he had only seconds before the parachute would fill and drag him down to the bone-littered bottom. Holding his breath tightly in his lungs he tried to unhitch the metal clasps around his chest. His mutant body had among other things given him the ability to hold his breath for nearly three minutes, so he knew he had time—if he didn’t panic. Yards away in the near impenetrable gray water he could sense Archer struggling furiously to rip the harness off his body.

“Slow down—keep calm,” Rock sent off in a telepathic burst to the giant of a man. His PSI abilities, developed by the Glowers, worked with them—but were not reliable on a human. He prayed that Archer would receive. The Doomsday Warrior at last got the chute clasp undone and eased out of the confining straps. He shot up toward the surface, lit with the flashing beacon of daylight, and broke the water, opening his mouth wide to take in the life-giving air. He waited a few seconds for Archer to appear, as he pulled the parachute into a tight bundle and wrapped his belt around the bottom of it, creating a six-foot balloon of air. Archer’s chute still bobbed on the surface some twenty yards away, moving up and down furiously as if it had hooked some immense fish.

“Damn,” Rock muttered, letting go of his makeshift life raft. He filled his lungs to their bursting point and dove back into the depths. He quickly found Archer, still tearing at the harness as if it were some jellyfish trying to swallow him. The bear of a freefighter was already sucking in water through his wide opened mouth. There was still time if . . .

The Doomsday Warrior swam straight down and over to the near-mute and motioned for him to relax and stop his frantic strugglings. But in his desperate panic Archer, who feared nothing on this earth except confinement, was panic-stricken to the point of hysteria. Rock knew there was only one thing to do. He made a spear hand with his fingers and drove the stiff tip into the edge of Archer’s throat, just below the ear. The iron-hard punch hit into the thick flesh like a striking piranha, knocking the man out cold.

“Sorry about that, big fella,” Rock thought as a pair of rainbow-colored fish nearly three-feet long with bands of red and purple streaming across their rippling scales swam by. “But I’m sure you’ll forgive me later.” He tread water just in front of the unconscious freefighter and quickly undid the parachute straps around the beer-barrel-sized chest. Rock grabbed hold of a big clump of the thick hair of the ex-mountain man and pulled with all his might, dragging Archer up from his watery imprisonment. Had Archer already sucked in too much water Rockson could never have done it. But there was obviously enough air left in the freefighter’s lungs to make him buoyant.

The Doomsday Warrior broke the surface and sucked in the frigid air greedily. He yanked with all his strength and Archer’s blue-tinged face came out of the water line. Rock swam the few yards to his parachute raft, which seemed to be holding the air he had sealed into it, and dragged the near-mute onto the edge of the floating black nylon. Seeing the big chest remain still, Rock, holding with one hand to the raft, swung down and over with his other arm, slamming into Archer’s back like a baseball bat. The bear of a man sucked in a horribly raspy breath and then coughed violently, spitting up scummy water. He breathed in quickly about twenty times and then his heart and lungs seemed to get in gear as he opened his earth-brown eyes.

The last thing he remembered was Rockson punching him under the water. And as if the thought to strike back had been suspended between brain and hand, Archer’s ham-sized fist rose to strike back. Rock blocked it with his free hand and yelled across to Archer as the parachute-raft bobbed more violently beneath them, stirred up by the changing tide of the nearly thirty-mile-wide lake. Waves four-feet high swept over them, heading toward the sandy shore some two miles off.

“You’re up, man. Look around—you’re safe,” Rock yelled. Archer prepared to strike again, his animal responses too honed from years of living in the murderous wilds, the mountains and prairies of the West, to stop. But suddenly he looked around, his large, bearded face sweeping across the gray skies, the dark clouds like boulders dragging themselves across the silver sword of the horizon. His face went from primitive fury to a sweet joy in the space of a second. Rockson let out a laugh as he watched the transformation.

“Arrrrcher freeeee,” the big man growled. Then he looked over at Rockson, realizing his hand was still suspended midway between them. He sheepishly let the fist open and dropped it to the parachute raft. “Roooccckkssonnn saaaaaaave,” he moaned, looking down at the black nylon float with deep embarrassment in his eyes.

“Forget it, pal,” the Doomsday Warrior said. “I probably would have done the same. You’re too much of a warrior to ever stop fighting. Anyway, we ain’t got time to make apologies,” Rock said, pointing toward the shore. “We’ll freeze to death if we’re out here very long. And I don’t know how long this parachute boat is going to hold up.” As he spoke they could both see air bubbles slowly rising from the water at the far side of the chute from a small tear in the fabric.

The two freefighters pulled themselves halfway up onto the air-filled chute, and began kicking furiously, aiming the wobbly craft toward the near shore. It was a good two miles off but the combined force of their churning leg power, sending out a furrow of white foam behind them, and the tide which was headed in that direction made them move at a good clip. Still, they could feel their feet and thighs growing numb from the intense cold. Only the constant motion of their flesh and muscles, pumping blood through their systems, kept their bodies from freezing up solid like the small icebergs that floated around them.

The sky was growing increasingly dark with the far clouds growing ever closer. Storm clouds ready to release their storehouse of moisture as snow or ice. Rock had seen clouds like this before—filled with death, the Black Snow. Sometimes the coal-black flakes burned the skin, other times they just fell harmlessly, blackening the sky as if the sun had been extinguished but composed of normal water vapor. There was no way of telling until the flakes fell onto the flesh. And by then . . . They kicked their way nearly half the distance to the shore, tiring somewhat, the numbness creeping throughout their bodies. But the sheer willpower of the two freefighters kept them going, struggling to survive. Even when the body said enough, the mind said go on. Rockson could see by the increasingly blueish tinge of Archer’s face that the big man wasn’t going to last a hell of a lot longer. His own mutant body seemed able to withstand the rigors of the freezing temperatures more readily. But then his kind—the star-patterned mutants—had been bred by evolution to survive the new world, the world of 2089
A.D.

They were but half a mile from safety, the jagged shoreline peppered with bent-over black-barked pines within sight, giving both men a renewed burst of energy when Rockson noticed an object in the water some hundred yards ahead. It came straight toward them—against the tide. Suddenly a huge reptilian head broke the icy surface, lifting nearly thirty feet out above the lake.

“Jesus Christ,” Rockson sputtered as they both let their legs stop dead in the water, the bubbling trail they had created stretching out behind them nearly a quarter mile. The lake reptile eyed them with burning red eyes as large as basketballs. Its razor-toothed jaws opened wide enough to swallow a buffalo, thick saliva pouring down into the rushing water. It was dark green, scaled from the neck on down, with foot-thick yellow bands circling its body every five feet. Much of the creature still lay submerged, but from the size of the head and the car-sized flippers that it splashed on each side to keep afloat, Rock guessed the thing was a good hundred feet long. And it didn’t look on the friendly side. Archer reached behind him for his crossbow and swung it around, pulling out one of his two remaining arrows from his aluminum quiver. He quickly fitted one into the firing slot.

The monstrous lizard kept watching them as if savoring the meal it was about to partake of before actually taking the first bite. Archer let fly with the arrow which buried itself just above the creature’s right flipper. The thing let out a roar of pain, throwing its head high in the air so that the neck stretched almost straight up like a thick green tree. Then it slammed down into the lake, disappearing within seconds beneath the surface, sending out waves in all directions from the explosive blast of its descent.

“Arrrcheeer killlllllll,” the freefighter said with a grin, putting the metal crossbow back around his shoulder.

“I’m afraid it won’t be as easy as—” But Rockson’s words were cut off as the lake monster came up like a rocket from beneath them. Its green head slammed into the raft throwing it into the air, Rock and Archer flying off in opposite directions. They came to the surface spitting water, staring at one another from about ten yards apart. The parachute raft slowly sank some thirty feet away, ripped in half as big bubbles burped their way to the surface.