by Ryder Stacy
“See,” Rahallah said imperiously, as a bead of sweat trickled down his forehead. “The premier orders you six men to arrest Comrade Bikunin—and all the conspirators involved in this New Committee—whatever that is. Immediately. Don’t you Premier Vassily?” He pressed the button again—Vassily awoke and nodded, looking amazingly awake considering his true virtually unconscious state.
The guards looked at each other, frightened and confused.
“Do it!” Rahallah screamed out in the most threatening tones. The guards slowly turned their weapons toward their commander and took his weapon. Their fear of the power of the premier was greater than their fear of Bikunin. They would obey the Grandfather and Mother Russia.
“You,” Rahallah said, pointing at the most intelligent looking of the secret police squad. “You are the new commander of the S.P. Premier Vassily will want a complete report on your rounding up of the conspirators by tonight. Put Bikunin in—Lubykana Prison.” The African let a slight smile twitch across his face, as Bikunin went white as a sheet, his lips unable to even talk. The guards took him at gunpoint from the room.
Rahallah collapsed back into the chair. This couldn’t go on for long like this. Hours—days. The entire Russian command was doubtless, plotting how to get rid of Rahallah—and kill the badly weakened premier. Somehow Rahallah had to buy time, for himself and the premier. They’d have to get out of the country until he regained—if ever—his powers. But how? How could he assert his power, consolidate his position and make it appear that the premier was still in power, yet be safe? The answer came to him in a flash. He would go the U.S.S.A.—a fact finding mission with the premier. He would call a summit, with Col. Killov and President Zhabnov. He would tell them it was to bury the hatchet between the Red Army and KGB forces—to get their real enemy—Ted Rockson, the Doomsday Warrior. He was the one man that could bring them all together. Rockson was the key. Rockson—who had blown up the ICBM Missile Control base in Moscow; Rockson who had destroyed their invading Nazi army in the Rocky Mountains; Rockson who had scarred the pale face of the mad Killov just months before; Rockson who had humiliated President Zhabnov right in the Oval Office of the White House. That would be the summit’s reason. And at the same time, it would get Rahallah and the premier away from all these plotters. Away from the New Committee.
Seven
He was dreaming—strange, twisted thoughts weaving in and out of his mind like a crazy quilt pattern of half-forgotten images, faces, battles. He saw a city, an incredible city beneath the ground filled with futuristic architecture, lighting, computerized machinery. But just for fleeting seconds, as the images were whizzed across his mind like a swarm of burning meteors, visible for a moment and then vanished into the very air.
He saw faces—a woman with long flowing red hair, and another woman, blonde, with blue eyes as clear as a still pond on midsummer’s day. His heart filled with aching for both of them—yet who were they, their names, their places in his life—he knew nothing. The dreams lasted through the night, torturing him as the part of his unconscious that knew the past tried desperately to get through to him.
He was dreaming of a man, a Chinese man, who fought with him. But they were not trying to harm one another, just learn from their contests. The man was his friend. Rockson again felt a surge of love and then terror as he had no idea who the man was or if he really had ever met him. They were sparring, the man’s hands whirling like a windmill in front of his eyes. Rockson felt something hit his shoulder and he parried.
Suddenly voices were rising around him. The Doomsday Warrior opened his eyes to see three Nazi guards, their rifles aimed at his chest. A fourth guard lay on the floor wiping a trickle of blood from his lip.
“You fool,” the man said, rising, “what do you mean striking me? I could have you shot this very second.”
“I apologize,” Rockson said as he rose slowly to a standing position not wanting to meet his fate, as if he was about to, lying down on his back. “I was dreaming—and had a nightmare and I thought you—” The German officer lashed out with a swagger stick he held in his right hand, slamming Rockson across the face, so that a two-inch gash appeared in the Doomsday Warrior’s thick mutant skin and a line of red ran down his cheek. The officer seemed satisfied with that, and told his men to uncock their weapons.
“He will not repeat such an error again, I assure you of that,” the officer said, addressing the slaves in the room. “Nor any of you, I dare say. Now go. You men, go to your morning departure station—the new ones who came in last night come with me.” The S.S. officer led Rockson and four of the other captured Freefighters, their chains still around their ankles, down the main road to the central square of the fortress, where nearly three hundred other recently arrived slaves were lined up having their chains removed and being branded with name and number. As they approached Rockson heard a spine-tingling high-pitched wavering sound, blasting out from speakers mounted around the square. With a start he realized it was someone screaming—a human being screaming for his very life. The voice rose and fell, occasionally begging for mercy before it resumed the terrifying animal shrieks of ultimate pain.
“What are those?” Rock asked the guard, who turned to him with an angry expression as if affronted that a slave had dared to ask him a question.
“That is the Screamer, scum. Each day, one of the slaves who has caused trouble is taken to the House of Pain and tortured. Tortured most horribly. Those are his screams. You will hear them a lot, scum. They will remind you of what happens to those who go against the rules and order of the Fourth Reich.” The guard paused. “And scum, do not dare to ask me or any other German officer a question again. It will be your last.”
Nearly a hundred S.S. guards surrounded the prisoners with their Kalashnikovs at the ready. The machine-gun posts mounted on towers throughout the fortress city were trained on them from six different towers that ringed the square. Rockson’s leg chains were at last unlocked and he was led to the next line where two fat S.S. slugs sat in chairs, electric branding irons in their hands. As each man passed, he was given his new name, which was simultaneously burned into his flesh forever.
“Smith 27,” sizzle.
“John 52,” sizzle.
“Herbert 75,” sizzle. The scent of smoking flesh filled the air, giving off a sweet smell almost of pork. At last it was Rockson’s turn and he looked down, not even averting his head as the portly brander yelled out, “Joe 113,” and slammed the white hot tab of electric fire with the words “Joe 113” onto Rockson’s forearm. The Doomsday Warrior didn’t flinch from the pain but let it enter his body as a source of pure energy. He would use the pain, the anger from it to fuel him. He wanted to remember it so that perhaps some day he could return the favor.
When the unlocking and branding procedures had been completed, the new slaves were lined up in rows at one side of the square. A tall platinum blond man came swiftly down a row of stairs from the largest building in the fortress city—the S.S. Headquarters. He wore his full dress uniform, black, creased in razor-sharp lines, black boots kneehigh, and the dark general’s cap with its single lightning bolt with “S.S.” on each side.
“I am General Kohl of the S.S. This is the only time you will ever see me. If I should see you again it will be only to look down on your dead face. You are slaves of the glorious Soviet/Nazi forces. Your lives are now devoted to the construction of this city. You may die now if you wish—just step forward and my men will be glad to send you on your way. If you wish to live, work. Work harder than you’ve ever worked in your life. I do not promise you a long life, but I do promise you death if you do not keep working. It is simple. If you entertain any absurd thoughts of escaping, let me inform you that there are nearly one hundred machine-gun towers around this fortress, sheets of barbed wire, and beyond, mine fields. No one has escaped from here alive. Many have tried. Their rotting remains are in the swamps.”
He looked them over, trying to instill the fear of his very
soul into every one of them. Fear was what drove these slaves, drove them like workhorses, like lifeless machines—the fear of guaranteed death should they not be able to work their quotas. It seemed to work very well as motivation, very well indeed.
“Goodbye then,” the general said, pursing his shrunken, almost white lips together. “And remember—you are contributing to a great cause, are being given the opportunity to do something worthwhile with your wretched lives.” He saluted the guards and turned, heading quickly back up into the S.S. building, with two truck-sized flags hanging limply outside, immense swastikas emblazoned in black on their blood-red fabric.
“Move on,” the guards said, breaking the men down into the units they would be working in. Rockson and the twenty men around him were shuffled off to Work Group G, which lined up at one side of the square. Trucks poured out of nowhere and down onto the main avenue and the slave laborers were loaded into the big dark green transport vehicles.
They drove down the main road and toward the back of the fort, passing row after row of storage buildings, then Nazi troop barracks and at last their own slave quarters on the outer edges. Rockson looked down at the blackened burning skin on his forearm and the words JOE 113. It was as good a name as any, he thought ironically. It would do for now. The truck suddenly lurched to a stop and the men were ordered out by the guards at the back.
“This is a garbage detail,” a young pimply-faced German lieutenant said to them in as officious and condescending a tone as he could muster, though his voice cracked every once in a while. “You are the waste of the waste, the scum of the scum,” the lieutenant addressed them, his red pimples covering his face like little volcanos about to erupt against the chalky whiteness of his skin.
“You are here to carry the waste products out of this fortress,” the lieutenant continued, walking back and forth in front of them. Off to his side stood another fifty or so men, those who already worked on the G-squad. “Some men considered it quite fortunate to end up here. When they move the refuse, the food, the bodies, the excrement, to the swamps to the west of the Fortress, they can eat what they can find. The men of the garage squad are the fattest men of all the slaves. So you see perhaps you are quite fortunate to be the scum of the scum.” He stood up to as imperious a height as he could at 5' 2" tall, wet his lips with a narrow tongue, and continued. “It is of no concern to me what you savages eat. All I demand of you is that the work get done. That each night whatever is here in this disposal sector is empty by nightfall. Then you and I will get along just fine and you can, as they say, have your cake and eat it too.
“My final words—you are the only slaves of the city who go outside the walls. Thus you will think no doubt of escape. Don’t. There are nearly twenty guards who will always be with you. They will kill you on the spot, without hesitation for the slightest infraction. Believe me. If you should somehow get away you would find, I’m afraid, nothing but radioactive swampland stretching for nearly fifty miles. Impenetrable. No man who has disappeared into its innards has ever returned.” The lieutenant looked around, decided he had said enough and turned on his heels back to his staff car, driving quickly off from the wretched smell that the piles of waste and bodies gave off as they festered in the slowly rising sun.
“You,” one of the guards said, pointing to Rockson and the ten men around him, “over there to the B-squad.” The Doomsday Warrior’s stomach almost turned when he looked inside a long steel dumpster and saw its load. Dead slaves from the past two days, taken from where they had fallen and just deposited here. The fortress, with somewhere between 5,000 and 6,000 slaves—they had lost count—lost nearly 200 of them a day, so rigorous was the work load they carried, so little the allowance for rest. The corpses were piled one atop another inside the rectangular garbage disposal like bloody dolls. Their faces and pale white bodies were already ballooning up, bloating from their own rotting flesh and the gases they produced. The bodies were all naked—the clothes were recycled—not the humans. And Rockson could see as he looked closer that the flesh was crawling with insects, ants, roaches, centipedes, small yellow and pink worms—all taking their fill.
“Here,” a voice said brusquely. Rockson turned; one of the slaves, a large man nearly his own size, was handing him a rusted and slightly bent pitchfork.
“What the hell is this for?” Rockson asked, not too pleased with the budding thought of what in fact they were to be used for.
“For loading, what the hell do you think, scum,” the man snarled back. “Listen, I heard about you already. You’re the troublemaker who fought with Foster 236 over in block R17. I don’t care about that, but just don’t cause no trouble here, okay? I’m Smith 679. I’m the work boss of this gang. The Nazis hold me responsible for whatever goes down. Now I don’t give a shit about anyone but myself. You understand. I’m out for me—for every scrap of food, every bit of favor I can get from the Nazi pigs. Anything—any man, gets in my way, threatens my power—he’s dead. All I got to do is tell our friends over there that you’re causing problems and they’ll shoot you on the spot.” He looked Rockson up and down, a little surprised by the calm motionless way that Joe 113 listened to the words without betraying the slightest emotion.
“Understand?” Smith 679 asked, not quite able to bring himself to look right into those throbbing eyes, but focusing on his forehead instead.
“Sure,” Rockson spat out, becoming more disgusted by the minute by everyone in this damned hellhole. God, what his fellow Americans had sunk to, he thought. The way these slaves dressed, letting their clothing just disintegrate around them. They let themselves be slaves—helped the Reds and the Nazis carry out their plans of subjugation, humiliation and death. It was as if they had all just given up from the start—said here we are, signed, sealed and delivered, do what you want with us. Why, if every slave in the complex suddenly fought back, they could probably defeat the Germans or at least destroy the fortress. He felt a stirring in his breast to make them understand, to change the way they acted and thought. To change them from slaves into men. But how in hell he would ever do that he hadn’t the slightest idea.
“All right, let’s get this show on the road,” Smith 679 roared out to the other corpse disposers, who stood around listlessly, their gray and brown rags hanging to the ground like the fallen branches of a dead tree. The head of the corpsemen walked to the back of the dumpster and unhitched a large clasp, swinging the ten-foot square steel door open with a resounding clank as it hit the outer side.
“Bring the train,” Smith 679 ordered. From around the side of a large flat square concrete structure men came pushing a flatbed railroad car, stripped of everything except its wheels and wooden top. Rockson looked around and suddenly noticed that there were two sets of railroad tracks that ran through the garbage sector and off toward the west.
“Load ’em up,” Smith 679 roared out as the flatbed came alongside the open end of the dumpster from which bodies were already sliding in bloody trails onto the ground.
Two slaves in front of Rockson leaned over and dug their pitchfork into two of the falling dead, spearing them in the chest or stomach. They pulled back as hard as they could and heaved the things up and onto the railroad car, where they landed with loud spattering sounds. Rockson took a deep breath and lanced one—a large-bellied fellow with folds of fat that had formed breasts on his chest, now half rotted away. With all his strength the Doomsday Warrior hefted the thing in a perfect arc up from the ground and over to the train, where it slammed down with a squishing thud.
The slaves forked their way through the smorgasboard of dead until the train was loaded—bodies, arms, white legs drained of their blood, dangling over the sides.
“Get behind it, all of you,” Smith 679 ordered. His voice screamed, the veins in his throat popping out whenever he gave an order, as if he had to frighten his charges at every moment of contact with them. The twenty new men of the corpse squad lined up around the back and sides of the nearly 60-foot long flatb
ed, Rockson taking the middle back end.
“Heave, heave,” Smith screamed out, standing alongside the death car, waving his arms up and down in an effort to make them put some strength into it. The hardest part was just getting the immense momentum of the thing going. It felt to the slaves as if they were pushing against a mountain. Not a budge, but as they heaved and grew beet-red with exertion, slowly, an inch at a time, the thing rolled achingly forward. First an inch each second, then a foot, until suddenly it was sliding forward as its great bulk took over. Now they just had to keep the energy going, running alongside it, pushing with outstretched arms. It was nearly a mile and a half to the outer edge of the swamp where the corpses were to be dumped. The land was flat and the car filled with newly dead raced along as if to an important meeting.
“Why the hell don’t they use an engine?” Rockson asked the slave pushing next to him, a tough-looking fellow, but with a reasonably friendly face.
“Don’t want to waste the fuel,” the man spat, as he ran pushing from behind, bent over at an almost 50-degree angle. “ ’Sides, it gives them something for us to do—and they don’t have to get all involved in the stench and all.”
“Thanks,” Rock answered, grateful to even get a normal human response from one of these cold and hostile slave workers. Smith 679 and the guard team rode alongside in a small truck, also without sides, watching with bored expressions, their Kalashnikovs on their laps. They had seen the same sight for months and it no longer disgusted or even amused them. It was just work, until they could return to their air-conditioned barracks and eat and watch the films that the base provided. For there were elite troops, every one of them the proud flagbearers of the resurgent Nazi army—that at least in the back of the minds of all the Germans here in the U.S.S.A. might one day once again become the supreme forces. But these were thoughts they never expressed to their Red commanders and suppliers. They were firmly under Premier Vassily’s control. But someday, someday . . .