by Ryder Stacy
Oh say can you see
by the dawn’s early light
The wall went up inexorably, unstoppable, at the rate of six inches an hour. The fifty-man crew who worked at this end of Little U.S.A. had been on the job two days and were behind schedule. They worked into the night, floodlights lighting up the area as bright as day. At every road, highway and alley into Little U.S.A. similar Red building teams were walling the inhabitants in.
Killov himself had directed the punitive measures. “Since they delight in dying in combat, let’s take that away from them. Let them die without purpose—let them starve, let them die of thirst. The word will go out to the occupied workers—resist and die. I vow this,” he had said to his gathered Death’s-Head officers, “no more KGB Blackshirts will die. For every one who dies, ten thousand Americans must perish. Make them understand those numbers.
“My loyal officers,” Killov had continued, addressing his top thirty men in America. “These are times of change. Great changes will sweep the face of the Earth in the coming decade. Premier Vassily is old. Soon he will be dead. I will be his successor. It is destined. You, my most trusted men, will accompany me to the very peaks of power. We shall rule the world.” Killov went on, growing excited. His eyes strained heavenward, his hands clenched in fists. The officers looked nervously at one another. Colonel Killov rarely betrayed more than the iciest of exteriors. “But there will be much blood and destruction before our leadership will take over. This is necessary. I will call upon you all to make sacrifices and carry out suicidal orders. But I know,” Killov said, “you will carry them out for me. Whatever you are called upon to do.”
“Yes!”
“Of course, your excellency.”
“Our lives are yours.”
The voices bounced back at him, each louder than the other. Killov watched the eyes of every man. Who was the spy? Who was the assassin? He would find out.
At last the wall was thirty feet high, six feet wide and topped with its cherry of razor-sharp wire. Killov himself flew in from Denver to Stalinville to make sure that the demonstration for the whole country would not fail. The senior KGB commandant of the Russian fort, Major Gorky, met Killov at the airport and accompanied him back to the main entrance of Little U.S.A..
The guards on the death-wall saw the official vehicle pull up. Everyone stopped as the honor guard below saluted and snapped their elite guard Kalashnikov Specials to their chests. Killov alighted from the black limo and perfunctorily saluted. He looked up at the ugly, gray brick-and-mortar construction. The KGB colonel ascended the wooden plank stairs and addressed Gorky who stood nervously behind him. “I trust that the wall is this high all the way around the three-square-mile area—with no gaps whatsoever?”
Gorky shook his head quickly no. “See for yourself, Colonel, with these excellent binoculars,” he offered, handing the KGB commander the sixteen-by-sixties. Killov slowly scanned the wall and the crowd of ragged Americans gathered several hundred yards inside the Little U.S.A. compound. The buildings in Little U.S.A. were, at the most, four stories high, so with little obstruction Killov could see that indeed the wall reached around the entire ghetto.
“So,” he said, handing back the binoculars and letting a razor-thin smile etch across his hawkish face, “they think they can do without us. Well, let them do without our food and water. Without our supplying them with any basics, their pilfering and murdering bands will be stopped now.”
“There is one thing, commander,” Gorky began nervously.
“What’s that?” the KGB leader snapped.
“Well, traffic is snarled—some of our convoys used to go through the center of—”
“Ah, yes. Demolish part of the sector, build a roadway through with a wall on each side. Call it Premier Vassily Highway.” Killov watched a group of scraggly Americans gather and begin singing again. If we fire, Killov thought, they will die singing their patriotic songs, like martyrs. He barked out orders to bring up water cannons and mount them on the wall. “Let them be pushed back if they try to assault the wall. But don’t waste the bullets. Let them die starving, not as martyrs. Let them be contained like animals and die like animals. Animals in the pound.” He gave strict orders to mix poison in with the water they sprayed. That would make it undrinkable, of course. He smiled. They wouldn’t know until they started vomiting their guts out if they tried to save any of the water. The wall reminded him of some ancient history—before the Great War. He couldn’t remember exactly where but a wall had been successful then too in keeping order—for a while.
Killov’s lean figure descended the makeshift scaffold stairs from atop the wall. He glanced up at the sky. The damned clouds were moving in. If it rained, there was no way the KGB could poison the rain. The Americans could build catch basins and last a long time. Well, so much the better. To starve is just as good as dying of thirst—and slower. A better lesson, Killov had other things to do. “Keep up the good work, Gorky,” he said stiffly. The KGB commandant of Stalinville saluted.
“So good to have you pay us a visit, Colonel,” Gorky said. Killov smiled wanly.
“Yes, yes. Well, keep me informed of their deaths. I want a weekly report of the proceedings on my desk each Monday morning.” The KGB leader turned and entered the staff car. “Back to the airport,” he commanded the driver. A motorcade of six motorcycles in front and two armored vehicles tore off to the outskirts of the fortress city. Killov had other things to do, other plans to make. Events were unfolding rapidly. The streets and shops of Russian Stalinville slipped past like phantoms. Tobacco, meat shop, a nightclub—he felt weary. What was wrong? He was forty-three. Perhaps that’s what it was. But at forty-five he would be premier of the world. And then these walls would go up all over the country. Because as far as Colonel Killov was concerned it would be just as good to wipe out all the Americans and start from scratch. They had only been trouble from the start. If they used neutron bombs they could effectively dispose of the remaining twenty-three million population—and then bring in more docile laborers from Africa and South America. The country, what fertile soil remained, could be turned into one vast agricultural field to supply the kitchens of Russia. Yes, he had it all planned out. On paper. When the right moment came, he would run things his way.
At the wall, the masons continued their work as the water cannons were drawn up by pulleys and placed on top of the still-setting wall. Long water hoses led back down to fire hydrants, their connections spitting out little geysers of water as the hoses filled with liquid, waiting to explode.
The senior construction engineer, a KGB architect, watched as the water cannons were adjusted and secured. Then he gave the guards the order to fire the water on the milling American crowd on the other side. Killov was right. Let them suffer in their own filth. Let this be the lesson that the American workers needed. Once this lot had died, this whole part of town could be redeveloped into a new series of dormitories for American prisoner-workers. They would be imported from other cities, apprised of the fate of their predecessors and locked up carefully at night, to be released in the daylight hours only.
He walked up and down the wall, yelling out orders to the KGB guards who manned the water cannons. “Fire at will! Make them feel the Soviet brand of justice.” He couldn’t stand all that infernal singing any longer. His scarred face—from acid thrown by one of those street children as he had ridden through Little U.S.A. the year before—was still red. It wasn’t responding to the plastic surgery. He had had no way of finding the one responsible for the attack. But now they would all die—including his youthful defacer.
The hoses were turned on full and aimed down at the crowds of ragged Americans below. They fell off balance and ran screaming as the water blasted into them with the power of a mule’s kick, smashing them in the faces, knocking the wind out of their chests and stomachs. As they fell, the powerful stream followed them across the intersection, pushing them ever-backward, rolling them around like twigs in a stream. The
construction manager watched the water push the crowd back, ramming them across the mud, against the walls of buildings, back and back into the rotting innards of the ruins they lived in.
Good, it was all working so well. Killov would be proud.
Several hundred yards away, in the basement of a four-story burned-out tenement, Sally was making a speech. Sally—the bagwoman—now the heroine of Little U.S.A., basked in her new-found status. She constantly displayed the ax with the bloodstains still on the steel head from killing the leader of the KGB flamethrower team.
A few of the rabble grumbled that her action had put them behind the wall—that they were beaten now. No food, no water. She had about fifty of them gathered about her.
“I am the smart one,” she said. “I have a plan. Listen, folks, we gonna die. No matter what—we die. But let’s die like the Black Dukes did—free, as Americans. We do something that makes the Reds know we not just sit and starve.”
“What we do?” someone asked angrily from the crowd.
“Let’s storm the walls,” someone yelled. A rotund man with a patch over one eye and a scar down the right side of his face. “Build a battering ram or ladders and attack.”
“You think they let us get ladders close?” Sally asked. “No, it all over for us but we take some of them with us. I say we burn the whole city.”
“Burn it? What good that?” a voice screamed out.
“Fool, we burn yes, but fire spread to other parts of city. Wall no stop sparks, heat, flames—they die like us. All die in flames.”
“I say ladders,” the persistent voice yelled out. “Ladders try first.”
“OK, OK, but you be fools,” Sally screamed out.
They made crude, wooden ladders from scraps of wood in the ruins. As they had no nails, the twisted, uneven pieces of wood were held together with ropes and belts. “We make many ladders,” the man with the plan said. “Give to fast runners. At night sneak up, put ladders up. Then we all come.”
There were no lights on the wall except in the middle and on each side. The weapons the garbage people had stolen from the flamethrower squads would take them out when the moment was right. They would tear along the street. They would be slaughtered, of course, atop the wall, but some Reds would die too, and if they could gain control of the wall itself . . .
Five of the fastest, legs still firm, not wounded, took the ladders and waited behind a crumbling brick wall, The moon went behind a cloud and the garbagemen opened fire with their captured Russian rifles and pistols. Two of the floodlights went dead, their glass coverings exploding down the front of the thirty-foot-high brick wall. “Now, now,” the crowd yelled behind them. The ladder runners tore across the open intersection of the once-bustling main highway. They made it to the wall though Red gunners opened fire with the water hoses and machine guns. All five ladders reached up, just short of the top. The maddened crowd of subhumans ran from the alleys, from the doorways, from the manholes and stormed the walls, scampering up the ladders. Half of them fell from the gunfire but some made it over the top. The first wave of assaulters became tangled in the razor wire, their faces and bodies cut to shreds. The others climbed over them, oblivious to their screams, and dove at Russian throats, slicing with their long knives.
Suddenly a whirring sound rose from the other side of the wall. Choppers—one, two, three of them, rising into the air just above the wall. Their powerful searchlights went on and instantly the scene of battle became brilliantly lit. The choppers began firing .50mm rounds, peppering the entire top of the wall with a deadly barrage of white-hot slugs. Their own Red troops on the wall screamed up, begging for mercy, but the chopper pilots had orders to take out everything, to stop any spillover into the Russian sector. The three choppers hovered for minutes, spraying their twin guns up and down, turning the already-dead bodies of Americans and Russians alike into bloody hamburger, shreds of flesh floating along rivers of blood, filling the walkway atop the wall and rushing over the side to create a waterfall of blood down onto both the Russian and the American sectors. The few survivors on the ground, who had been rushing the wall, screamed in horror at the instant carnage and turned, fleeing back to the cover of the nearby basements.
That night, Sally held another meeting in a huge, underground storage warehouse. Hundreds of the dregs of humanity showed up to hear her.
“Now, now, you fool, you listen to Sally. Not be ants squashed by Red foot. They got many today but they not be able to stop Sally’s plan. We burn city. Burn whole city. We die yes. But everyone come with us. Everyone.” She laughed maniacally. And some in the crowd of tattered creatures joined in.
“Everybody die,” they chanted. “Everybody die.” They sang and laughed. The ultimate joke.
“We send sparks to Russian side. They wooden like us. Anyway they not have enough water to stop such a big fire. It kill them.”
“I not want die by flame,” a filthy, nearly naked creature said through his food-encrusted beard. Sally thought a moment, then said, “We build catapults. Throw fire, like Romans.” The crowd cheered. “Yes catapults,” they chanted back. “Like Romans. We kill. We throw death on Reds. They burn. If they come get us, we shoot with weapons from hiding place.” Murmurs, shouts of agreement.
“That good idea,” a woman screamed out.
“Yes good, good idea,” they echoed around the dusty basement floor lit only by torches. They broke up into groups—each one responsible for making a catapult, though some of them had only the vaguest idea of what one looked like or how it worked. They spent the next day constructing the devices out of everything they could lay their hands on. Somehow the things were built, huge wooden contraptions using everything from immense truck springs to thick sheets of rubber, stolen from a Red truck convoy, to create the thrust for the catapult. They made six, twenty people working on each one.
That night the sky was filled with clouds. Thank God. They moved the catapults up to the crumbling wall some 150 feet from the Red barricade, carrying the torches that would light the ammo. Sally was with the catapult on the far left. They would light the world with their fiery deed, she thought, as the torches touched the huge balls of greasy rags wrapped around concrete chunks that they had piled in huge bunches next to each catapult.
“Go,” Sally screamed. The men on her catapult pushed the lever and the metal springs released the eight-foot-long wooden shaft with a huge, bent-in garbage-can cover at the end serving as a throwing bowl. Five of the fiery balls shot through the night like comets burning through the heavens, landing inside the Russian lines. One of the fire bombs landed atop the wall, instantly igniting a guard’s uniform. He ran screaming over the side. The others hit, variously, a truck, a wood-roofed supply store, the street, and a guards’ barracks. Because they had been doused with some sort of fuel—kerosene, gas, oil, whatever the garbage people had been able to scrounge up—they quickly spread the flames to whatever they landed on, squeezing out a fiery juice that oozed in every direction. They fired again and again; the night became a storm of flaming death. The balls of fire landed on building after building, some crashing through roofs and walls. The catapults were amazingly effective. And the bag people cheered each time they sent another barrage over the wall.
For a while the Reds didn’t know what was going on. Fire alarms and smoke detectors went off all over the eastern edge of the Russian sector. Then they got their choppers up and back came the incredible news: “The bastards have built some sort of catapults and are hurling the flame balls over the wall.” They began firing down, but in the smoky darkness it was hard to see. On the ground, the assembled masses, now numbering close to a thousand, having crawled out from every little hole in this part of Little U.S.A., fired up at the Red choppers with pistols and rifles, with slings and bow and arrows.
“Keep firing,” they screamed at the catapult teams. “Get as many as you can.”
Commandant Gorky was awakened at 12:30. He had dimly heard the sirens, but as his quarters were
on the side of the Russian section as far as possible from the stench of the American quarters, he hadn’t heard them well. He was on the phone screaming orders in seconds. “Call out the air force. I want the area, the entire American sector bombed. Saturated with bombs. I want the place blasted to the ground. Do you hear me?” He screamed into the phone.
“Yes, Commandant,” the air force major on duty said. “Yes, immediately.” He pulled the switch that set off the airport siren. The Full Alert code. Pilots rushed over from their barracks and were suited up in minutes, their oxygen masks dangling over their faces. They were quickly loaded with high-explosive bombs and sent up in MiG 21s, armed to the teeth.
Sally urged her people on. The fireballs continued to arc through the night onto Russian buildings on the other side. The top of the wall was now enveloped in flame, the bodies of the Red guards and the exploding ammunition adding to the fuel. On the other side, the Russian sector was burning up. The wind was picking up, and blowing to the west, quickly spreading the flames. It was better than Sally had dared hope—the entire city might well go up. Every damn Red a flaming pyre.
“Everyone die,” she screamed with joy. “Everyone die!”
The others joined in. “Everyone die. We all die.” They laughed and pointed at the rapidly expanding curtain of yellow and red flame in the center of Stalinville. “Everyone die! Everyone!”
The jets suddenly screamed overhead, falling from the smoke-filled sky like hawks of death. The concussion of their blockbuster bombs could be heard all over the city. Black dive bombers dealt out death to the rebellion inside the walls. Sally watched the bombs fall closer and closer. She looked back at the dancing flames on the far side of the wall. She raised her fist at the closing jets. “We won! Not you! We won!” She screamed her throat hoarse as a five-hundred-pound H.E. detonated two feet from her scrawny body.