by Ryder Stacy
Letvok suddenly spun the Mind Breaker’s control to full pain. Instantly the laser needles altered course, tapping the depths of ancestral terror. Scranton had groaned a deep spasmodic groan of a man being immersed in the fires of hell.
“My balls,” he screamed. “Make the demons stop. Don’t let them. Not—yaaaaa!” He had screamed for five minutes without cease until Letvok had turned the dial back to neutral.
“I want to hear you tell me the location of Century City. I will reward you.” Letvok had turned the dial up slightly toward pleasure. Scranton stirred, smiling though he had defecated in his pants and urine ran down his leg, forming a yellow puddle on the floor.
“See your violet women?” Letvok asked.
“Faintly, faintly—bring them closer, please bring them closer.”
“I will as soon as you tell me where Century City is.”
Scranton had smiled. “Century City is in heaven.”
“Bah,” Letvok had yelled, spinning the dial to the pain side and leaving Scranton as he screamed incessantly about demons eating his testicles. The others were led away. They could hear the screams for the next ten minutes. Then it stopped. Scranton had been dragged into their cell and thrown on the floor.
They had slapped him in the face and kept saying his name until he finally came round.
“Porter,” Rockson said softly, “see that Scranton gets the best—give him my rehabilitation suite for as long as he wants. He may act confused or withdrawn for a while. But see that he’s not disturbed until he wants to be. I have something I have to do.”
Rockson exited the debriefing room and walked down the corridor. He pressed his palm against a wall sensor and the detention-room door slid open. Inside, the captured Letvok sat on a wood chair. He turned and smiled. “Ah, Mr. Rockson—come to talk to me?” He had little fear for it was known that Americans didn’t torture.
Rockson icily eyed the man up and down. The cigarette dropped from the fingers of the Russian scientist. Fear widened his eyes as Rock rolled up his sleeves to reveal thick, rippling muscles. Rockson approached the Mind Breaker scientist with balled fists. Letvok began whimpering like a baby.
When Rock left ten minutes later, he felt a little guilty. But only a little. He had stopped short—just short—of finishing Letvok. There would be enough time to nurse him back to health. Then Letvok would serve as the subject of the Mind Breaker that they had taken from the Stalinville lab and brought back with them. There was much that had to be learned about this machine. And its operating secrets would be pried out of Letvok with his own device. Poetic justice.
Rock rolled down his sleeves. He wondered what the Russian version of hell was. Rats? Demons? If they didn’t believe in God, could they believe in demons? Or were their deepest nightmares about meeting an American Freefighter in a one-to-one struggle to the death? Soon they would find out what Letvok feared. And Armstrong would be avenged. Cruelty was not the American way—but this was cruelty with a purpose: to extract the information they needed about the Mind Breaker and the extent of its modifications.
So they planned to brainwash the occupied people’s brains. A devilish plot to send out the Americans from the occupied areas to fight their own countrymen. And Letvok knew just how far along the project was. He would know if there was any weakness in the plan, any failure to program the slave populace. Any way to bring them back out of the mindless devotion to Killov and their newly adopted country, Mother Russia.
Twenty-Two
It was Rockson’s second day of R&R back at Century City. It had been a long time since he had been able to just sit, think, let his body uncoil. He spent hours in the meditation chamber, a small, sparse white room decorated with only a pillow in the center and a sprig of fresh flowers at one end, set on a small black table. Here, citizens of Century City could come to let their minds, bodies and spirits take a rest. It was a place where they could absorb the energies of daily life and digest them in silence and peace. Rock felt it a necessity to spend a day or two in one of the eight rooms, every month or two. Reflection, self-knowledge, harmony of muscle and brain tissue—these things gave him great strength and power. Where others faltered, ran, or became confused and disoriented, Rock was as centered and set as his namesake.
Letvok, meanwhile, at the other end of the city, in one of Shecter’s labs, was spilling the beans about the Mind Breaker: its operation, modification program, and the ways in which the Reds were implementing it. Shecter had read the statements of the freed American hostages and was, therefore, totally committed to using the device on Letvok. His normally humanitarian scruples were somewhat dulled by the brutal realities of the Russian torture factory, which had been managed by Letvok.
The buzzer on Rockson’s wrist phone, worn only inside Century City where the low-level frequency couldn’t be picked up by the Reds, went off with a humming beep. He put his mouth to the one-inch grid on the face of the wireless phone. “Yes?”
“Rockson, this is Rath. Expedition Five is back—and I think you’ll want to hear their report. In fact, you’d better come take a look at what they found.” Rath was unusually excited.
“What’d they find, Premier Vassily on a platter with an apple in his mouth?” Rath let out a forced laugh.
“Really, Rock, it’s quite . . . We’re having the first debriefing in Intelligence Room C.”
“I’m coming,” Rock said, touching the small Off dial on the side of the transmitter. He rolled a civilian white cotton shirt on over his muscular frame and was off. Expedition Five had been headed by a tough but untested young man, Walt Brady, Rock remembered. It had headed out into the Northwest—unexplored territory. It was their most ambitious expedition so far—a thirteen hundred mile trek into the hot zone. There were rumors about that area: that it was the home of the Glowers, that no man had ever returned from there. But Brady, if he had done nothing else, had accomplished that.
Rockson went up the four levels to the intelligence section and entered the debriefing room. Rath sat in a broad, plastic chair with the five remaining members of the expedition across from him. The five were bearded, though they were also freshly bathed and patched up, and outfitted in crisp, new white clothes. They stood up, as the military commander of Century City entered. Rockson motioned for them to sit, and walked over to Rath’s left, sitting down next to O’Shannon, the intel chief’s right-hand woman. She gave Rock a warm and melting look with her fathomless green eyes. He responded with a deprecating grin. The direct stares of women were something he still couldn’t quite feel comfortable with. And there were many such lingering stares.
Rock snapped his head forward and looked at the five returned Freefighters. “What’s out there?” he asked the one with the insignia, Brady. Brady had been an arrogant young upstart before he left. Too sure of himself. Now he had changed. He had the eyes that you get when you see things no man has seen. Eyes like Rock’s. Premature wrinkles etched the young man’s darkly tanned face. Brady leaned forward toward Rock, unblinking. He had lost any traces of bulk, now muscle and guts lay under those coveralls.
“Rock,” he said, “it’s—it’s incredible out there. The things we’ve seen. I—I don’t quite know where to start.”
“Brady,” suggested Rath, “why don’t you just begin with your departure from Century City. We need every bit of intel from you to add to our central files and particularly the extension of our mapping data. I trust you kept full compass and landmark records,” Rath added hopefully.
“Got it all right here, sir,” Brady said, pulling out a weather-beaten notebook. He handed the data to Rath and then breathed out a deep sigh, as if in preparation for a long story. “Well, we encountered fairly normal conditions the first two, three days out. The Rockies are much the same for a distance and then we came to some lower terrain that looked fairly easy going. We headed across some really immense fields of weeds and small game. Very rich. In fact, I’d say that heading due west for almost two hundred miles the land has really
grown back. It’s beautiful, Rock,” he said, his face lighting up. “Deer, raccoon, birds, even berries and sassafras tea. Things I’d just read about in the books. It’s all out there.”
“Bagged us some mighty tasty boar, out in them wilds,” Keppler, the oldest member of the expedition, spoke up. “Tuskers, a tribe of them. Mean, too. They attacked us. Had to take out the whole advancing front line to stop ’em. Meat succulent as a sweet woman, Rock.” The other men laughed, as O’Shannon’s ivory complexion blushed pink.
“Anyway,” Brady continued, “after less than a day on the open brush country, we encountered some heavy hit zones. The Reds must’ve dropped two or three within a thirty-mile radius. The land was wrecked, a sickly gray color, like ash left out in the rain. Nothing grew there—nothing normal. There was some sort of algae growth, big blankets of a greenish-red plant that just lived on top of the radioactive dirt. The radiation grew intense very quickly and we suited up with the anti-rad Dr. Shecter provided. We had to stay sealed for two days, drinking only the water we carried. We didn’t dare stop for sleep, but just kept going. It was too far to turn back. We’d either make it to some hospitable spot or—” Rath looked on, adjusting the sound level on his recorder. He was a fanatic on the subject of geographic mapping of America, believing that through a clear picture of how the United States was now altered, they could plan for the future development of the nation.
“Strangely,” Brady went on, “we found water in an unexpected place, to say the least. We came upon three immense volcanos—must have been created from the H-blasts. Two were totally dead, craters as big as the moon’s, but a third was still active, or had been recently. The ground was hot, and inside lava was still bubbling, sending up clouds of steam. The volcano had also created underground springs around the area, some which fed right out of the side of the crater, hot but drinkable. We camped in one of the dead volcanos and filled the hybrids with water. The hardened lava beds tore the hell out of our boots, and even cut up the ’brid’s stone-hard hoofs.
“The next day we headed on, and came out of the dead zone by nightfall. We had fairly clear going again for about a day and a half, mostly savannah-type terrain. Saw some large cats—fangs, odd stripes and patterns—Draper sketched some of them,” Brady said, nodding to the youngest member of the expedition, a budding artist, who had drawn nearly two hundred pictures of their encounters. “Took photos, too, but lost them in a ’brid fall.
“Then we came upon a pink mist. It was like a fog, so thick you couldn’t see more than three or four feet in front of you. We used the compass and just kept heading exactly 275 degrees. Jefferson fell into a damn quicksand pit,” Brady said, smiling at the black member of the expedition who looked down sheepishly, “but we got him out before any permanent damage was done.
“The fog wasn’t dangerous—that was our first surprise. As we descended, at probably five hundred feet an hour, the fog lifted from around us—it covers this whole area, Rock, acts as a sort of greenhouse effect. Lets heat and an eerie, pinkish glow come down, then keeps it all contained. We were in temperatures and humidities I never felt except in the steambaths here. It was a veritable sauna and as we went on we came upon something unbelievable: dense jungle as far as the eye could see. Trees, vines, screaming birds and insects everywhere. And most of the inhabitants of the place were big. Write this down in your records, Rath,” Brady said, turning to the intel chief. “Giant bees as big as—” he held his hands out until they were about two feet apart—“moths with wings as big as newspapers, velvet-winged dragonflies as big as a man’s leg. And vines and ferns everywhere. There were ferns that must have been 100, 150 feet high. If my history’s not mistaken—terrain like that is very similar to the prehistoric days on Earth.”
“That’s right,” Rath said. “It’s one of Dr. Shecter’s theories that the long-term radiation makes some species revert to their primitive genetic programming. A de-evolution if you will.”
“Well, I for one believe the venerable doc is right,” Brady said. “The whole area looked primeval. As we went in further there were these creepers everywhere—we had to hack our way through. The first night camping in the jungle we noticed that the tips of the vines were moving—and as it got darker the damn things grew right into our encampment. We would have been smothered by morning, if not for taking turns burning the things away and hacking at them with machetes. They’re apparently—” he paused—“carnivorous. Grab insects and small mammals. Some sort of walking Venus’s-flytrap. I don’t know if they have a taste for humanity or not but we didn’t give them a chance to find out. They burn pretty good for fresh green pulp—and they make a nerve-wracking noise as they die, a high-pitched squeal like a finger being raked across a chalkboard. Anyway, it went on like that all night and we were exhausted by dawn. The creepers only moved at night however and we got into higher elevations by the next nightfall.
“We moved on for the next few days without incident, making good time until we came to a wide, roaring river. We had to stop for nearly a day to make a raft capable of carrying us and the ’brids across the river. Then, again, it was vast, empty stretches populated only by strange vegetation that kept changing every twenty or thirty miles. We were attacked here by several carnivores: two big cats, a bear and a—I can’t really call it anything, because none of us had ever seen one before, but it had horns and . . . The kid has pictures. Finally—Draper, hand me the map, will you?” He was given a wrinkled, folded map which he spread out on a flat coffee table between the Expedition Force and the intel chief. A gnarled finger with a torn nail descended on a spot at the very left edge of the map. There were mountains drawn in and rivers, and a red line showing their progress.
“At this point we found footprints. Small hurried prints of a boot without a heel. We spent a day and a half tracking the prints—the ground was black here, Rock. It was the deadest looking soil I’ve ever seen. Not a damn thing grew here. We finally caught up with the print maker. Never saw anything like him—it—before. He was about three feet tall and—here’re some pics.” He produced some faded drawings of the creature and showed them to Rath and Rockson. Rock whistled as he flicked through the prints one by one. They showed a tiny, pale man with bulging forehead, wearing some sort of blue one-piece suit. Then a drawing showed him stripped, obviously dead. Bluish-white skin, shrunken, useless genitals, lesions of unhealing rad burns. It was a pathetic sight. There was a weapon next to it—a strange pistol that Rock figured shot some sort of liquid or gas, not bullets, from its smooth, chamberless design. It was sized just right for the tiny hand beside it.
“Too bad it was dead when you found it,” Rockson said. Brady looked him squarely in the eyes.
“It wasn’t, Rock. And it spoke English—kind of.”
“What did it say?” Rath asked impatiently, leaning forward in his stiff way.
“It was frightened. It had taken a pot shot at us while it was running up a pumice dune. You should see the beam that comes out of that little weapon. It creased my field shirt.” Brady rolled up his white coverall sleeve and showed an ugly straight scar about six inches long just below the shoulder. “Hurt like hell—still, I can’t blame it. We fired back and missed, but as it ran it slipped and fell a good sixty feet onto some rocks. We ran to it and it was still alive, barely. It was amazed that we spoke English. It said it had never seen the likes of us before and was afraid we were one of the predators that stalks the edges of the dead zone. But get this, it’s an American, just like us. It’s descended from the original technicians who manned the missile silos in that area. They’ve stayed there all these years. They call themselves the Technicians. It told us its people were dying. It was called Vorn and was the hunter for its people. It kept saying, ‘They’ll die without me, without sustenance. I am the hunter.’ Then it died.
“We searched for days for its underground silo complex but to no avail. That land is nothing but black soot. No Russian force would ever go out there. It’s a blank hot zone
on their maps too. Seems the silos were covered with layers of sand and dirt thrown up by three or four big blasts. Hidden from any satellite’s prying eyes. Before the little guy died he said he figured us for mutated predators, because—get this, Rock—the Technicians think they’re the only ones left of the Americans. Imagine, all these years living underground, inventing new things to keep them alive—like these black beam pistols, and God knows what else—thinking that blackness around them was all that was left of the entire world. Incredible.”
“It is,” Rath mumbled.
“We finally had to give up trying to find the silos as our food and water were running low again. We charted some other territories and headed back. This weapon of theirs—we brought it back. It’s incredibly powerful. I feel that we should mount a better-equipped larger force to go back. It could mean—”
“Our ace in the hole,” Rock said. “A new weapon to fight the Reds with—a force that, from what you say— You have the pistol with you?” Rock asked, looking suddenly around for a bag.
“Down in Dr. Shecter’s laboratory. He was enthralled. Started spouting formulas, yelling orders to his assistants. They’re performing full-scale tests on it right now. It’s apparently some sort of—” Brady hesitated at the unfamiliar words—“particle beam disintegrator. Sir, I’d like permission,” Brady said, turning to Rath, “to head the second expedition.”
“Not a chance,” Rath said bluntly. “You and your men have absorbed too many rads even for Freefighters. You need complete decontamination procedures including a series of iodine and calcium injections to evacuate any radioactive trace elements. Two months minimum. That’s Century City policy,” Rath said almost apologetically.
“I have more mutant cells than anyone,” Rock said drily. “I want that expedition, Rath.”