by Ryder Stacy
No—it couldn’t be, he thought, disbelieving what his own perceptions were telling him. He moved down the slope and pushed aside the side of a brown, spiked bush. Four men sat around a fire on pieces of a fallen tree. One of them was cooking over low flames, humming softly to himself. It was—McCaughlin—and the Rock team. A sardonic smile passed over Rockson’s face as he rose and stepped forward, both hands raised.
“All right boys, don’t shoot me now,” the Doomsday Warrior said, walking toward them. “I’m here to surrender.” They looked up, startled at the sound of the voice. Then their eyes lit up like Christmas bulbs on the trees of their ruddy faces.
“Holy shit, as I live and breathe,” Detroit Green’s ebony dark face broke out in a wide grin. The bull-like man said, “He done returned from the dead.” He spoke in a mocking southern accent, almost dropping the piece of venison he held in his hand. They just sat there looking up, their jaws hanging open as if struck dumb. McCaughlin, Archer, even Chen couldn’t make a sound.
“It’s me boys, but you look in such a somnabulant state right now that if I make a speech I’m afraid you might pass out.” They jumped up and rushed over to their leader, the man they were sure had been killed. The team gathered around him, slapping the Doomsday Warrior on the back, wanting to make body contact with Rockson, to make sure it wasn’t just a pipe dream, to touch the flesh of his breathing body.
“How the fuck did you—” Detroit began, tilting his ebony face sideways above the broad sweatshirt-covered chest.
“It’s a long story,” Rock said. “Too long. And you? I was sure you all were a group of charcoal statues I found.”
“We saw ’em, too,” Chen piped in, running his hand along the dark mustache that curved down across his Oriental mouth, below the deep almond eyes. “In fact when we scoured these hills we found scores of them.” The Chinese martial arts master was nearly invisible in his neck-to-toe black ninja suit. Only the flames of the fire flickering over his face showed the presence of a man.
Rock turned to Archer. The huge near-mute was smiling with a grin as broad as his watermelon-sized face. He cradled his immense steel crossbow in one arm and squeezed Rockson around the shoulder with the other, almost lifting him off the ground. At seven feet plus and at least four hundred pounds, although no one had ever really been able to weigh him, the man had the strength of a grizzly bear.
“He likes you, Rock.” Detroit laughed. “He was sure looking blue in the face when we all thought you wasn’t around no more. We were thinking of electing a new team leader, but we all just looked at each other and said—no way.”
“Wasn’t the same without you, Rock,” McCaughlin piped in back at the fire where he was tending his venison à la campfire. “Kinda’ like steaks without no steak sauce.”
“I’m touched,” Rockson said, putting his hand with the shotgun pistol across his chest.
“Well, if we waited for a signal from you to tell us things were all right,” a woman’s voice suddenly said from the edge of the clearing, “we’d be up there all night.” Kim and Langford walked over to the fire. The men all saluted with respect. They had been at the Re-Constitutional Convention as well and knew who Charles Langford was. They stood at attention, even McCaughlin rising. They were all freefighters and as such, part of the newly formulated United States Army. It sounded good—the U.S. Army.
“Please, please!” Langford said, waving his hands for them all to sit down. “No formalities out here. It seems ridiculous.” The president stood on one leg, rubbing the other. Now that they had stopped walking, cramps were beginning to set in.
“Here sir,” Chen said, offering his log seat to Langford. “Sit down—we have food ready.”
“Good, good.” Langford smiled, dropping to the log with a long exhale of relaxation. The moon was starting to rise now casting a ghostly glow over the assembled freefighters. But at least for now they were safe. And there was food. Things could be a lot worse. And would be.
Five
In Washington, President Zhabnov, supreme commander of the United Socialist States of America—the U.S.S.A.—tossed and turned in his large feather bed trying to wake himself from a nightmare. Two young girls, hardly in their teens, lay on each side of him. One was a twelve-year-old Negress, the other a little blond-haired thing. Both were as smooth and formless as children. But the Russian president of America liked them that way. The girls shifted uncomfortably away from the fat hairy man who slept between them, praying that he wouldn’t “take them” again. He had hurt them so.
But Zhabnov had other things on his mind: Killov! Colonel Killov was chasing him, even in his dreams. Was there no escape from the skull-faced madman? Deep in sleep the KGB commander followed him, haunting, threatening. Zhabnov was running down a long well-lit hallway—a hospital corridor, and someone was after him. Then Zhabnov was slipping. He looked down. The shiny white floor was red with blood, a sea of blood coming out from under every door. Then the doors opened and dead men, corpses, their faces pale blue, their arms held out stiffly in front of them, came at him. They opened their lipless jaws to bite at him. Then they were all over the “supreme president,” ripping at his flesh. Killov stood behind them, commanding them to kill, to “eat the pig.” Zhabnov screamed again and again. Then he awoke.
The obese Red general sat bolt upright in the master bedroom of the White House. The portrait of Franklin Roosevelt stared down through the darkness from across the wide, oak-paneled suite. The wide feather bed was soaked down the middle with his sour sweat. Zhabnov reached over and pushed one of a row of buttons on a control panel mounted on the bedboard, nearly crushing the little three-breasted Negress beneath him. Within seconds the door opened and a servant rushed in, snapping on the wall light.
“A drink man, make me a drink right away! Triple bourbon with ice—quick, quick!” He shook his hand impatiently, then wiped it across his goateed red-flushed face. His hair was thinning on top, just wisps flattened down over the shiny skull, his big stomach and breast-fat chest hung out in the air, shiny with cold sweat. The servant, an ancient pale-faced Ukrainian who trembled as he walked and spoke with aristocratic accent, quickly and expertly poured the drink from Zhabnov’s long cherry wood bar that popped out of a paneled wall with the flick of a dial. He brought the bourbon over and handed it to the supreme president, not daring to even glance down at the two naked forms surrounding Zhabnov.
“Go! Go!” Zhabnov waved his hand and the servant rushed out, shutting the lights and gently closing the door behind him.
Zhabnov took a deep gulp from the glass. Three ice cubes just as he liked it, floating, clanking together at the top of the artificially frosted crystal. Within seconds he felt the wonderful glow of alcoholic fire sweep through his gullet, and a warm glow rushed over his face. What the hell was he worried about? He could handle everything. Premier Vassily was allied with him now—against Killov. Even the “Grandfather” had realized Killov’s threat, especially after the conspiracy of the doctors, when Killov’s physician agents had tried to poison and kill the premier with injections of cancer cells.
But the premier had survived and given Zhabnov the word. No more would there be a careful balance of power between the three of them—the Communist trinity that ruled the world. Now it was the premier and Zhabnov to the death against Killov.
“He must be stopped,” Vassily had said to Zhabnov over and over on his last call. “The man is mad. He wants to destroy the earth.” Zhabnov had never heard the premier so frightened. But now President Zhabnov had his own band of assassins after the colonel of the dread Blackshirted KGB. Killov would never know when or where they would strike—or how they would kill him. One of them would succeed. Of this Zhabnov was sure. He finished the drink and felt much better. He turned toward the small blond girl and put his thick hand on her soft, lithe thigh.
“Come here, little one,” the supreme president said, squeezing her young flesh. “Come to me.” He grabbed the sub-teen who tried to feign sle
ep and pulled her atop his aroused, obese body.
In Moscow, Premier Vassily, the “Grandfather,” ruler of all the world—from the tip of South Africa to the Siberian Steppes, from Argentina to Canada—sat in his wheelchair on the intricate marble terrace overlooking Red Square. Below him, crowds filed past, petty functionaries heading home from their bureaucratic positions, their long days of stamping and denying requests from around the Soviet Empire. They trudged through the snowy streets several feet deep from the early fall snows as more flakes licked down from the turgid sky, thick with undulating Arctic clouds ready to deposit yet another load of their frozen moisture onto the Red capitol below.
The premier turned to the last page of The Phemonology of Mind, by Hegel, the philosopher who had created the ideas from which Karl Marx had written Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto among others. The books that had shaken the world. Were still shaking the world. It was hard to believe sometimes the power of words, of writing. Two books had caused such explosive reverberations. From Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky, then Stalin, all the way up to the present—Vassily, an unbroken line of leaders who had carried out The Communist Manifesto with a vengeance. Vassily was highly aware of his place in history. He hadn’t asked to become ruler of the world. But once he had begun rising in the Red hierarchy, had seen that his intellect and ambitions were of greater power than those around him, the outcome had been inevitable. There are those who are born to rule—must rule. It was beyond the desires of a man. He, Vassily, had been trapped by the forces of history to run things. To run everything. And so he did, and so he would until the day he died.
But there were problems—many. His grip on the world was slipping. Vassily, ever the pragmatist, could see it all clearly. The reports he received via satellite from the far-flung legions, much like Romans, he thought, remembering his history—with their isolated fortresses trying to hold back the barbarian hordes—told him that things were heating up. Every day brought more disquieting reports of rebellion, crop failures, sabotage, attacks on his forces. Years before they had all just been skirmishes, guerilla attacks—a Russian soldier stabbed in the throat in a godforsaken back alley—in Morocco, in Afghanistan, in Brazil. But now the subject peoples were growing more dissatisfied with their lot—and bolder. They had been promised more for years. More food, more autonomy—under the stern gaze of their Red rulers. But nothing had come to pass. The Soviet Empire needed more and more of the raw materials and the few goods that these subjugated countries could produce. The Soviet machine was like some starving creature that ate all that it received and instead of being satisfied just grew hungrier and hungrier. The Soviet peoples in Mother Russia had gotten used to having everything delivered to them. Their own agricultural system had deteriorated to the point where it only supplied about a third of Russia’s needs. Everything had to be “imported,” a euphemism for taking whatever was needed, and leaving the natives to eke out whatever meager survival they could.
Even the Russian factory system had fallen apart. Little was being produced anymore—other than military equipment and ammunition. The world was slowly falling back into a primitive mode of existence. Industrial technology had been forgotten in the empire over the last century. Each decade the ability to build new machinery, tools, cars, computers, electronic components had fallen farther behind. The Reds had let their high technology at the time of the Great War go fallow, using the vast armaments they had already stockpiled with which to rule. A huge class of “servicers,” as they were called, had been able to keep most of the machinery going—constantly oiling the equipment, cleaning the immense factories, replacing worn parts from a dwindling stockpile. But this could only go on for so long.
Only the immense Satellite and ICBM Control Complex on the outskirts of Moscow was kept at peak efficiency—a budget of nearly two billion rubles a year was required just to keep the huge military installation from falling apart. Two fifty-story buildings sat on each side of a steel/magnesium, plastic-coated dome nearly eight hundred feet high that controlled the spy sats, the killer sats, and the guidance system for the armada of remaining Red missiles. The satellites that had shot down the American missiles from the skies as they streamed toward Mother Russia like so many tin ducks in a shooting gallery. Laser beams and particle beams arcing down from the dark heavens like bolts of white-hot lightning, disabling the U.S. weapons so they plummeted into the sea and sank to the depths of the ocean floor.
The giant control center really wasn’t needed any longer—as Red intelligence confirmed that no other country on earth had any remaining nuclear weapons. All the nukes were within the Red domain now—an ace in the hole in case the rebels around the world got the upper hand. Not that Premier Vassily wanted to use them. The planet had been poisoned enough already by radioactive pollution. The fertile regions within Russia had been cut to nearly a quarter—and the same was true everywhere. Vast deserts now stood where once fields of crops had danced in the clear sun. But now the sun was sickly and pale as it tried to beat its way through the dust and strontium clouds that continued to circle high above the earth.
Sometimes he felt so tired. Vassily ruled a crumbling empire and deep inside he knew it, though he would never admit it, even to himself. Somehow he had to buy time, to work out accommodations with the rebels so the Russian Empire could at least remain dominant if not in total control. Nearly twenty million Red troops were dispersed around the earth—the largest occupying army in history, and the supplies needed for the bureaucratic backup to support such a force was immense. And things were getting worse, not better. The empire he had taken over in bloody purges in the Kremlin nearly thirty years before was falling apart. Half of southern Asia was no longer in his firm grasp. The war lords there—Asians and rebellious Russian army officers—had created their own little fiefdoms where they ruled with even more of an iron fist than the regular army. China was on fire, under the control of the fanatical Muabir, the Flame of Allah. His armies of horse riding, religious zealots were only too willing to die to reach paradise. They attacked huge Russian convoys now, losing thousands of their men in the process, but causing increasing damage as they armed themselves with stolen rifles and even heavy artillery. Indochina was exploding in a renewal of Buddhism, as monks burned themselves and roused their people to rebellion. How could you kill people who killed themselves?
Premier Vassily felt another one of his migraines coming on and pushed the button on the small wireless transmitter affixed to the side of his electric wheelchair. America—that was the worst of all. The freefighters, as they called themselves, were growing bolder by the day—and now they apparently possessed some new secret weapon that had destroyed several Red convoys—if destroyed was the word. He had received reports that nothing but fused metal had been left of nearly a two thousand man, thirty tank force. His scientists couldn’t even discover what the technology behind the weapon was. How was it possible that rebels living in caves could produce such miracles of death. Unless? Unless the American fighters were far more advanced than either Killov or Zhabnov realized.
And Killov himself—ready to battle it out with Vassily for control of the world. No longer content to play his role behind the scenes, the KGB commander was directly challenging the Red Army. It was too much—too much. Somehow he had to make a move. If only he could make peace with some of the rebel rulers in each country—buy them off. Or even—he hated the word—make some sort of concessions. If he could get the legendary Ted Rockson to join forces with his and Zhabnov’s regular army in the U.S.S.A. they could defeat the mad KGB colonel once and for all.
The headache slammed into his skull like howitzer shells. Suddenly a soft cultured voice spoke up just behind him.
“Sir, I have your brandy and some of the pain killers that seemed to help last week.” It was Ruwanda Rahallah, Vassily’s black African servant whom he had taken to trusting and confiding in more and more these days. Vassily was surrounded on every side by spies and assassins. There were so few
men he could trust. But he knew the tall, black ebony African was one of them. Vassily let his grim face relax and he smiled.
“Ah, thank you my friend. You are always here when I need you.” Rahallah, once an African prince of the Masai Tribe of East Africa, snatched by Reds when just a child to become a slave back in Russia—now the aide and confidante to the most powerful man in the world, handed the premier two opium pills and then his glass of afternoon brandy. Vassily swallowed the tablets down instantly with a slug of the rich golden brandy. Within seconds he felt the headache diminishing. Rahallah stood still, resplendent in his stiffly creased white tuxedo and white gloves, attentive, awaiting his master’s any request. His strong sculpted face with high cheekbones reflected the setting sun’s greenish rays as they pierced the twisting storm clouds overhead. He looked almost frightening, like some war mask from times long ago. Vassily shuddered slightly, whether from the cool evening air or the vision of Rahallah’s primitive past—he couldn’t tell.
“What do you think about?” Vassily asked the African. “Beneath that calm exterior, what goes on in that black mind of yours? I know you’re a smart man, probably more intelligent than my entire staff. What? What, tell me!” The premier was agitated. Tonight everything seemed threatening, ominous.
“I think only of how I can serve you, sir,” Rahallah said with a stony face. “I’ve been with you for many years. And I’ve come to know you for what you are—a good man—trapped by the exigencies of history. You’ve done well. As well as you can with what you have.”