by Ryder Stacy
“I beg you—I have a family. I was just carrying out orders. If it wasn’t me it—it would have been someone else. And—and I always gave the prisoners a chance. They were given weapons. If they survived they, too, could become gladiators.”
“You make me sick, scum. Only following orders. Don’t you know those words were said by other murderers like you nearly one hundred and fifty years ago. Men who delighted in torture and execution. It’s those who ‘just follow orders’ who make this world a living hell for the people of the planet. People who want to live their meager lives out in peace. But no—you wouldn’t let them have even their pitiful short lives to live. You had to go out and drag them from the ditches and the fields and end their existence in terror and blood.”
“Rockson, I am rich.” Dubrovnik gulped, blood streaming in tiny trickles down his face from the many glass cuts. He backed off until he bumped against the back wall of the control booth, trying to keep away from the deadly duo-blade, so coated with blood. If he could just reach his desk and the pistol inside.
“I will give you anything you want. You could be powerful here in Russia. A man like you. We respect power—and courage. I promise you that—”
“Shut up,” Rockson snapped. “I don’t want to hear any more of your lies. You make me want to vomit. Just look out your window at the graveyard below. It’s all your doing—every man there owes his fate to you.” Dubrovnik made a leap for the desk and ripped open the drawer. He pulled the revolver out and raised it. Rockson would die now. But the Doomsday Warrior was too fast for the overweight, jowled Commissar. With a powerful leap he flew toward the Red, spinning the duo-blade at the face that had made so many tremble. The pistol was at chest level and Dubrovnik’s finger was tightening on the trigger when the hooked end of Rock’s blade tore into the commissar’s face. The tip slammed into the Red’s right eye, cutting it in two and then continued through the optic nerve deep into the brain. Rock pulled the duo-blade out, taking the bloody eyeball with it, hooked like a squirming worm on the tip. Dubrovnik’s pistol went off, hitting a guard who was just climbing in the window behind Rockson, sending him flying backward onto his comrades. The Red torture master threw his hands over the oozing socket, now a dripping black hole. His own brain tissue squeezing out through his fingers like a thick paste. He let out one feeble scream and then, his legs twitching in a bizarre dance of death, half hopped several feet toward Rock. The Doomsday Warrior stepped to the side as the hideous dying thing brushed past him. The body took another trembling step or two, and the slashed brain decided it was dead. The commissar slammed across the broken window frame and fell dead as stone, his three hundred and ten pounds of flab draped over the sill.
Rockson turned toward the window and the waiting guards outside who held pistols and swords nervously in their sweaty hands. With the duo-blade in one fist and the dead Dubrovnik’s pistol in the other, he walked calmly toward the greeting committee.
“Comrades—fuck off,” Rockson said with a commanding tone. “Your master is dead. No one has to know whether you fought me or not. Run! Run now and I’ll let you live.” There were nearly a dozen of the heavily armed bodyguards. But they had seen what this tornado of fury and violence could do. Their master was gone. There would be another master—and they would serve him—or they could die here on the charnel grounds of the blood-coated stadium. They looked at one another with cowardice showing in every eye. Then without a word they made their decision, and turned and ran down the slimy steps. Rockson let a thin smile cross his tight lips. So much for Russian heroism.
The Doomsday Warrior tore back down the wet steps of the coliseum, row after row of bodies slumped in their seats, vodka and gin flasks hanging uselessly from the pockets of their thick fur coats. He joined Archer and the freed men below. But most of the grisly work had been done. Nearly a hundred of Russia’s top echelons of leadership lay dead or dying, packed atop one on another in the narrow aisles between the curving rows of seats like sardines in a net of death.
Suddenly, as if they knew their work was done, all the fighters stopped and turned toward Rock. Archer raised his splattered axe high in the air, as if saluting the gods who watched transfixed from the silver clouds above, and let out a primitive roar of triumph. The other freed men joined him. They, the victims, had become the hunters—and they had left a mark that the Russian Empire would not soon forget.
“We’re finished here,” Rockson said. “We’ve got to move. They’ll be sending everything this side of Vladivostok. We wouldn’t have a chance with just these weapons.” The Doomsday Warrior turned and ran down the slippery steps toward the arena grounds where bodies still lay, the big cats chewing on them furiously. He scrambled back down on one of the nets draped over the wall and down onto the damp ground. Archer leaned over the edge and didn’t even use the net, dropping with surprising agility twelve feet to the ground. The fighters hesitated just behind him, looking down at the lions and tigers, cheetahs and leopards, their bloody jaws pumping like machines over their half-eaten prey.
“They’re eating din-din,” Rock yelled back up to the somewhat fearful men. They had faced the gladiators but tigers—that was different. “I swear to you they couldn’t be less interested in you right now. Cats always stop and eat when they kill—law of the jungle. We can walk right by them as long as they don’t think we’re trying to steal their catch.” To prove his point Rock started across the field of living death, keeping a safe distance from the predators. They glanced up with wary eyes but kept chewing.
The faint roar of approaching Russian helicopters—and from the sound, a fleet of them—quickly convinced the timid to rush down the nets and run across the field. A few of the cats jumped to their feet as one of the men got too close, but the quick flash of a sword quickly dissuaded even these kings of the jungle to back off and return to safer entrees. The remaining eighteen men followed Rockson through the dark opened gates and down into the winding tunnels and pathways of the subterranean world of the coliseum. Rock tried hard to remember the turns and doors that led up to the surface. He made it a point, from years of mountain fighting, to memorize the route out of any area that he entered. An occasional guard or bunch of arena attendants tried to block them, but Rock and Archer in the lead ranks smashed on through without even stopping. After many minutes of running at near top speed they came to a sharply sloping ramp and burst through a low gate and out into the wide avenue that ran past the front of the stadium.
Special Riot Police cars were pulling up, but Rock and the freed men were upon them before they could even raise their big Togar Assault rifles. The evening sun chopped like a red fist into the buildings that towered around them, golden spires, twisting spinningly into the deep blue sky. The men ran down a side street as night fell, darkening the pavements and creating a maze of shadows from the roofs above them. Many of the streetlights were out in this part of Moscow—the poorer members of the citizenry lived near the coliseum. It was considered declassé by the Red elite who preferred the other side of town with its hills and lawns and sprawling mansions.
Thank God for Russian inefficiency, Rock thought, as they ran down one narrow street after another, disappearing into the southern ancient sector where the buildings were delapidated and crumbling and the darkness almost total. Behind them they could see whole migrations of Red choppers roaring around, searching for the men who had made a monkey of Russian power. Every cop, riot squad, army patrol, and elite special forces unit would be looking for them—and wouldn’t rest until they were caught.
Rock prayed that he wasn’t leading them all into a death trap, perhaps just around the next corner. His sixth sense told him there was something ahead—people—a few of them waiting. He held up his hand and the men behind him stopped. Rock put his pistol around the the corner building to see if it would draw fire—none. He carefully edged around and looked.
“Rockson, man, we was buzzing out about your arrival schedule,” Yuri Goodman said. “It was name tha
t tune time.” Rock let the gun drop with a laugh.
“So you old jazz masters heard the news?” he said across the alleyway.
“Man, the whole town is jumping with the jive of your performance over at the coliseum,” Yuri said. Rock and the freed men walked over to the jazz king and his small band of dissidents. They stood nearly two feet shorter than the fighters, and with their long black robes, pasty white faces, and immense gray-black eyes, they looked like some sort of Snow White’s Seven Dwarfs—from an insane asylum.
“Let’s split the scene,” Yuri said, turning and pointing to an almost hidden manhole cover, layered with dust and grime. Two of his men rushed over and lifted the steel covering with two long hooks. “Take a trip on the A Train, daddy-o,” Yuri muttered and descended down a narrow metal ladder. Rock and the freed man followed the quickly moving dissident. Anton Coltrane, one of the jazz men who always took up the rear, took a final darting look down the street. Soldiers were drawing closer, just blocks away, but they wouldn’t find this. He slammed the cover closed, invisible in the night darkness, just a crack in a street of dirt and garbage, and scrawny dogs wandering like lost souls looking for heaven.
Eighteen
The challengers of Russian rule sat around large oval tables in the cool dank night air of the subway, thick with scents of moss and rust, planning how they would attack. They drank cup after steaming cup of fresh coffee and espresso which the dissidents said they had stolen from shipments of Columbian beans sold at a deluxe gourmet store for the top Red brass.
Rockson and Archer would take the Missile Control Complex and the freed men would come with him. They would use the explosives that the dissidents had brought up by the crateload. If Rock could take out even half their atomic weapons with this one punch, it would be a blow heard around the entire planet. The dissidents, meanwhile, would make a move they had been planning for years, but until Rockson’s example, had been unsure how to proceed. They would storm the Moscow prison: a decaying stone czarist-built detention center housing nearly five thousand men. Many of them were political prisoners: artists, writers, and members of the dissident’s own force.
“We ready for the biggest jam session ever tooted on the planet,” Yuri Goodman said to Rock with a lopsided grin on his chalk-white face.
“With dynamite playing drums,” Rock answered.
The dissidents drew maps on a blackboard they had discovered years before in what had been the subway director’s offices. They drew long arrows with piercing thin pieces of chalk, showing Rock and his men just how to reach the Russian high-tech complex and the location of the main beams of support.
At last the dawn broke, spitting gobs of pale light through the rock-covered gratings far above. The attackers loaded up with rifles, submachine guns, and dynamite, two-by-three-foot wooden boxes of the stuff—a virtual armory. The dissidents would use their full array of supersonic instruments: clarinets, trombones, flutes, saxophones, even tubas. Each was equipped with a sound amplification system that could kill. It had been invented years before by one of their more famous dissident ancestors—a Nobel prize winner who had been marked for death by the Reds right after the war. He had continued working on his sonic experiments down in the subways until he had perfected the electronically assisted atomic-batteried section with microchips and amplifying circuitries. The normal sound of the instrument was phased much in the same way that a laser puts all light waves in synchronous flow. All this scientific jargon meaning one thing—it could kill—kill violently and horribly with the receiver of the supersound having his body’s cells disrupted so violently that, at the instrument’s highest output, the victim would melt into a human slime. The dissidents played different tunes, depending on whether they wanted to stun, kill, or destroy. The melodies, having certain melodic structures, notes, and decibel peaks, had been precisely calculated as to what their effect would be. For rats and tunnel creatures they played “Chattanooga Choo-Choo;” for rendering Red soldiers unconscious, the “St. Louis Blues;” and for wipeout time they blared out “Take the A Train.” These songs had been banned throughout the Russian Empire, as had all jazz, considered a degenerative example of capitalistic music. The Red soldiers feared the tunes, not understanding how they killed, but knowing that a song was heard and then a combat trooper was dead.
“We free the Polits,” Yuri said proudly, slamming his small hand down on one of the dynamite crates. “Cats be dancin’ in Chicago tonight.”
“And Down in New Orleans,” Rock added, remembering the snatch of song from an old Century City archive record. Rockson and his team loaded the wooden boxes filled with explosives on their backs and hefted their weapons from the gladiator fights. Only now they carried subs as well, courtesy of the dissidents’ stockpile.
They were led down one of the long tunnels, Archer growing nervous as they traveled through the darkness, remembering his encounter with the subway creature. Perhaps there were more. He shuddered, made sure his crossbow was loaded, and moved into the safe circle of light cast by one of the dissident’s round red globe lights that created dancing shadows on the smooth tunnel walls as they walked. They marched for nearly an hour, and the guide, Igor Brubeck, led them up a narrow manhole causeway, through which steam drifted up from large industrial pipes that fed the factories of the city above. The diminutive man pushed up on the steel manhole cover at the top of the ladder with a single thrust of his surprisingly strong arms and led the attackers to the surface.
They found themselves at the edge of an immense industrial park that stretched off in every direction. Here were some of the empire’s largest and most complex factories—turning out high-tech metals, alloys, computer chips, lenses, and oil-based plastics.
“The big daddy-o dome is over there,” the dissident said, lifting his hand from beneath his long black robe, and pointed a bony finger toward the horizon. The men turned. There it stood, like some impossible ball, a plaything of the Gods, only these Gods carried the power to ignite the world in a ball of atomic fire. The freed men, Rock, and Archer stared at the eight hundred-foot-high dome with consternation. It seemed impossible that they could destroy such a monstrosity of technology. It was a faded gray, ridged with radar screens and telecommunication bowls covering its smooth outer shell like metal warts, in communication with and sending constant commands to its still large fleet of killer satellites and tracking stations high above the earth. A crew of nearly five hundred technicians continuously monitored their courses through the heavens, making slight corrections from time to time. The Reds ruled the skies—through this. If any nation ever got uppity enough to get hold of a bomb or a missile and sent it toward Mother Russia, these sats could detect it and blast it from the sky with a single blast of laser power. This building made them the ultimate rulers of the earth.
Rockson looked long and hard at the huge radar center. He had never seen a structure so dense. It looked like a small mountain, thick and impenetrable. Guards stood on high towers circling the perimeter of the place. It was well protected. Too well, Rock thought, even for these battle-hardened fighters.
“Check you out later,” the guide said, descending back down the manhole opening. “And don’t play no flat notes.” The steel cover slammed shut. Rock and his crew were on their own. They started forward, leaping from shadow to shadow. It was almost two-thirds of a mile to the outer perimeter of the dome, but there was no point in giving themselves away with a glint of steel to one of the tower watchers.
At last they got to within about sixty yards of the darkest outer part of the fenced-in gate surrounding the complex. Rockson motioned them all to get down behind a large grime-coated metal dumpster that had been left outside with the base’s garbage. The Reds weren’t expecting an attack. There had never been one—not here in such a heavily guarded area. No one would dare. Rock knew the guards would be lax—maybe a little drink or two of burning Russian vodka to keep the chill off a man’s back.
“Can you get him?” Rock asked
Archer softly, pointing to a lone soldier leaning on the edge of a guardpost some one hundred fifty feet away. The next tower was nearly one hundred yards off on each side. If they could just take this one out and quickly replace one of their own, Red uniform and all, they might be able to enter. Archer nodded without a word, loaded an arrow into his crossbow and squinted down the homemade sights of his deadly weapon. He had taken many a squirrel and duck down at a much farther distance. He relaxed his immense body, breathing out, and took aim. His ham-sized tongue licked quickly across his lower lip as he pulled the trigger. The sliver of steel hurtled through the air with the whisper of death on its spinning head. It buried itself dead center of the guard’s chest, and he fell backwards, an instant corpse. Rock edged toward the fence and then pulled himself up over the ten-foot-high link chain perimeter, coming down instantly on his feet on the inside of the military compound. He rushed toward the tower and through the wooden door at the bottom and quickly made his way up the circular staircase three steps at a time. He stripped the dead guard’s uniform from him and held it up to himself. Not too bad—the guy was broad shouldered if a little shorter than Rock. But then the disguise would have only to work for a few moments. The guard was a sergeant, Rockson discovered, suddenly noticing the stripes on his inner jacket shoulder. He finished changing, putting the Russian uniform on over his battle clothes. He covered the hole in the center of the breast pocket with the handle of the submachine gun the Red had been holding and then propped the dead man against one of the beams in a leaning position as if smoking a butt—just in case any of the other posts looked over.
He left the tower and began walking casually toward the dome.
The freed men dropped over the fence one at a time, throwing their explosives up to the next man. At last they were all over, even Archer, who nearly toppled the link fence as he lay scrambling on its top for a few moments. They waited in the inner shadows of the tower for Rockson to make his move.