by Ryder Stacy
The Freefighter/Aussie force leaped over the emplacements and rode right toward the wide wooden doors of the front entrance. Detroit yanked two more of the grenades from his chest belt and flung them forward with the accuracy of the best of the pre-War baseball pitchers. Two strikes—the death balls slammed into opposite sides of the thick oak doors, shredding them instantly into toothpicks. Without breaking stride, Rock rode his ’brid through the smoking entranceway and into the main hall, followed by the rest of the Fighters, their eyes darting around, searching out the enemy.
Five Reds suddenly darted from a doorway, submachine guns in their hands, and turned, trying to get a bead on the Doomsday Warrior and the stampede behind him. Rockson clicked his .12-gauge death dealer to auto with one finger and pulled the trigger a fraction of a second later with the other. The wide-barreled weapon jerked back in his hand six times, and five bodies exploded into a blood tornado, splattering the walls and the front of Rock and his ’brid with their sticky remains. He pulled the creature to a sudden stop, its hooves locking, making it skid several yards forward before coming to a halt. Behind him, the rest of the force nearly piled up on one another in such close quarters, but somehow stopped, breathless, and waited for Rock’s orders.
“We’ll spread out—five men to a floor. Free all prisoners—and watch out. Cover the back of the man next to you every fucking second.” They shot up the stairs, Rockson taking the first floor with his main men inches behind him. They exited onto a long corridor that seemed to go on forever, with bright neon lights flaring down every twenty yards. The floors were spotless, the walls as well—white, everywhere. Antiseptic so the murders committed within them could be clean, pure.
“Archer, Chen—that way,” Rock yelled. “McCaughlin, Detroit—come with me.” They split up and shot down the corridor, kicking open every door they passed. Inside, they found prisoners in every state of decay and torture. Men sitting naked on seats, waiting to be fed into the Mindbreakers; men chained to walls, their bodies half-eaten away with whips and electricity and acids. The Reds had apparently tried to raise torture to an art form in this particular fortress, giving each prisoner a taste of every one of the possible mediums of pain. The Freefighters freed them all, and sent them toward the stairs and out to freedom. Most had been so abused for so long they couldn’t understand the concept, and looked at their liberators with dumb eyes. Rockson fired his reloaded pistol into the ceiling to frighten them off. Dumb as cows, they headed meekly down the stairs.
On every floor they found room after room of prisoners and freed them, but no President, no Kim. Rock’s heart was growing cold. Could they already have been . . . ? He refused to think of it. They were too valuable—just too valuable. In a locked office on the third floor, Rock found a cowering official hiding underneath a couch. He dragged the man out and threw him down in the middle of the carpeted floor.
“Speak, slime,” the Doomsday Warrior said, cocking his pistol and holding the half-dollar sized barrel directly between the eyes of the terrified Red.
“Please, please, I’m just the head of operations—nothing to do with torture—or Mindbreaking,” the man lied, wiping his eyes, groveling beneath the feet of the Freefighter.
“There’s only one way you’ll live, slug,” Rock said, pushing the barrel hard against the sweating head. “Tell me where President Langford and his daughter are. I swear—though I want to see you dead on the ground—I’ll let you live. By the Flag of my country.”
“B-b-but they’re not here,” the man stuttered, both of his bloodshot eyes focused on the huge muzzle that threatened to blow his brains out at any second. “I swear to you on Lenin’s sacred mausoleum. They were here for only about twenty-four hours, and then President Zhabnov himself ordered that they be well-treated and flown immediately to Washington. You must believe me. I would give them to you in a second if they were here. Do you think I would die to protect them?” Another flood of tears swept out of the weasel eyes.
“Shit,” Rock said, throwing the man backward so he fell to the floor with a thud.
“You believe him?” Detroit asked, grenades in both hands ready to take out any squads of Red attackers.
“Yeah, he’s too big a coward to lie. Cowards will tell you everything they know in one second. They’d hand over their own mothers—to live. They’re gone, all right.” He looked at the officer lying on the floor who had covered his blubbering face with his arms, and reholstered his pistol. “Come on—let’s get the hell out of here.”
The Freefighters and their Australian compatriots stood on a low rise about a mile from the fort and looked at their handiwork. Flames sprouted like tall trees everywhere among the ruins of what had once been one of the Russian Empire’s strongest American fortifications. Within the rubble, the pack of predatory octopi continued to eat everything that moved, enjoying what had started out as a very unpleasant journey.
Vast crowds of the freed prisoners gathered around the mounted fighters and looked up at them with helpless expressions. Rockson stood up high on the stirrups of his ’brid and yelled out to them:
“You’re free now—all of you. You may not even know what the word means—but if you want to live, you’ll learn fast. We can’t take you with us, so you’ll have to do things on your own from now on.” The hundreds of milling freed prisoners tried to listen, tried to loosen their dull minds to comprehend what the man who had destroyed the fortress was saying.
“Wait until the mutations have finished with the Reds—then go inside the fort and get weapons for yourselves—guns, knives. You’ll need them to survive out here.” He looked around at them, pitying them, knowing that less than a tenth would be alive within weeks. But the laws of Darwin applied, as they always would, with merciless finality.
“You are all men. Hurt, wounded, half-mad, but you are still men. Always remember that—and you will survive.” He pulled the reins of his hybrid and headed off.
Thirteen
“The Night of Blood will begin,” Colonel Killov said, standing beneath an immense map of America that hung on one wall of the Monolith’s War Room. He pressed a button on a computer before him, and the message to begin the operation was flashed across the country to over a hundred different locations. With a satisfied grimace, the KGB commander stepped back and looked up as one hundred blue dots began flashing on the huge contoured map. They headed slowly toward one hundred flashing red dots—the locations of Zhabnov’s Red Army Fortresses—crawling like snails on the screen, but in reality tearing toward the forts by jet, chopper—every bit of equipment that Killov had been able to throw together. And there had been a lot. He had been secretly stockpiling weapons and aircraft of all types for years, requisitioning far above his allotments from Moscow, claiming he had sustained huge losses in his fight against the rebels. But the equipment had remained largely dormant—greased, stored in underground bunkers—until today.
He popped a Tranquil to keep himself relaxed and two small tabs of Benzophenol to give his aching body the energy to continue. He knew it would be a long day—days, perhaps—until the tide of battle was clear. Already he hadn’t slept for four days. His eyes were like dark shells—sealed almost tight, only pinpoints of glowing darkness peering out from within. But the top brass of the KGB Military Command knew that though the colonel looked more like a member of the walking dead than ever, his skin almost nonexistent over his cheekbones and lips, the very top of his flesh luminescent with a blue shine that only corpses carry, still his mind functioned as effectively, as ruthlessly as a razor-sharp guillotine—capable of descending on any of them at any second. And they had seen what causing the DeathHead Commander displeasure could result in. Thus they stiffened up in fear as he walked around the baseball-field-sized underground War Room, looking over their shoulders at their computers and telecommunications monitors. But he seemed in a good—for him, joyful—mood.
“Excellent, excellent,” he said, actually laying his fingers for a moment on the shoulder of a y
oung lieutenant who was manning a screen that showed two Red fortresses had already fallen to KGB forces. The officer tried not to shake as the bony tendril rested on him. It felt cold, so cold. But in a second Killov was off again, checking another screen as the officer shuddered and looked back at his data, feeding it into a central computer. Everything was going according to Killov’s plans, and he seemed to almost dance around the flashing, beeping room in a state of ecstasy. Death was his profession, and tonight the colonel was at the peak of his accomplishments.
Throughout the country his forces moved in to take control of the Red fortresses. Though his hundred thousand men were outnumbered nearly fifty to one, it wasn’t a fair fight they were seeking. His was the way of the doublecross, the deception, the fifth column. And thus across America the Red fortresses were attacked, first by agents planted within who enabled many of the attack columns to simply march in and take things over. Once the ranking officers of each fortress had been captured, it was a simple matter to handle the remainder of the troops. They were assembled and told that their commanders were traitors and that the KGB was “temporarily” taking over the fortress until the Red Army Headquarters in Washington could replace them. Soldiers are taught to obey orders and the Russian soldiers were taught doubly. To disobey an order in the Red Army meant torture—or worse. Killov had counted on this—and so far, as blinking red lights on the vast map were replaced by blue ones every few minutes—the entire attack strategy was working perfectly.
The officers around the War Room began to applaud. “Your name shall go down in history, sir,” General Strinyin said, saluting him. “Never has such a small force taken over such a large one in such a short time. Not in the entire military history of the planet. Excellency, you are the greatest military mind ever.” Killov’s chalk-white face flushed red with the compliment. It was true—he was the greatest martial mind on earth. None were so bold, so willing to gamble it all. Hitler, Alexander, Napoleon—they all paled in comparison to “The Skull.”
Faint from the excitement, Killov left the cavernous room momentarily and shot up to the eightieth floor in the express elevator reserved for his exclusive use. He needed to calm down—to relax. He could feel his drug-bloated heart missing almost every other beat. His breath came in short hard gasps. The KGB commander lay down on his couch and reached in his jacket, pulling out two more Tranquils to calm him. Within minutes he felt the drug sweep into his bloodstream, sending out its chemical message to his nerves and arteries to relax. Slowly the heartbeat softened and became regular and he was able to breathe again.
Killov rose and walked to the window, turning out the lights behind him from a master wall switch. Out there, the world was shining with the reflected light of the half moon and a trillion stars. And it was his—all his, now. Every cricket chirping, every boulder in those snow-capped mountains. It all belonged to him to do with what he wished.
Fourteen
Rock was furious with himself for not having done a more thorough reconnaissance of the fortress. He should have made contact with local resistance leaders—taken a little more time to find out exactly what the status of the President’s imprisonment was. Not that the total destruction of a Russian fortress wasn’t always good news—but they had wasted time, valuable time in the attack. And now somehow they had to make it up again. The liberation fighters headed straight southeast for two days while Rockson tried to figure out what the hell to do. After nearly forty hours of nonstop riding they came to a small Freefighting village, nestled in deep woods, which he had visited years before—Jeffersonville. After getting the armed guards hidden in the surrounding trees to believe that he was indeed Ted Rockson and that his somewhat unusual riding companions were not some new form of Russian sabotage, but friends, they were all led into the tree-covered village and given food and water.
Rockson was treated as an honored guest, causing some amazement in the Australians, who hadn’t realized that the man they had been riding and fighting with was a national hero.
“Your name hasn’t quite filtered down to the bottom of the world yet,” Lieutenant Boyd joked with Rock as he drank some of the homemade beer that the village folk offered. The Doomsday Warrior told the military and civilian leaders of the small, four-thousand-person village about the destruction of Fort Svetlanya. They in turn told him of the Night of Blood, which the Freefighters out riding the dark prairies hadn’t even been aware of.
“Yes, we’ve been receiving messages by carrier pigeon from five neighboring states,” Wallace, the leader of the free community, told Rock and the Freefighters as they gobbled down loaf after loaf of home-baked bread and slices of rare venison. “Colonel Killov has apparently finally decided to make an all-out strike against the pig Zhabnov. And thus far, Rockson—it looks like he’s succeeding.”
“Killov will make Zhabnov look like a Sunday School preacher,” Rock said, ripping a piece of succulent meat from a leg bone. A thought suddenly crossed his mind, nearly making him spit out his last bite. “Jesus Fucking Christ,” the Doomsday Warrior said. “I’m partially to blame for this. Killov would never have attacked if he had known retaliation from Vassily back in Russia was possible. But when I was in Moscow recently I destroyed their satellite and ICBM Command Center. In a way, I paved the way for this ‘Night of Blood.’ ”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Rockson,” Wallace said softly, stroking his long soft white beard. “If you hadn’t destroyed this complex, Killov would have struck anyway—and Premier Vassily would in turn have sent over a storm of his missiles. We would all be ashes at this moment. No, the only evil has been done by the KGB ruler. But the battle is not over yet.” The man, old and lined like a weatherbeaten tree, had a calmness, a sureness about him that made Rockson take heed of his words. There was something about the man—an aura, a palpable presence of power about him. Rock sent out a quick telepathic burst of energy to see if Wallace was, like him, a mutant with ESP abilities. There was no response but Rock felt his thoughts come up against a solidity—almost a wall of mental energy. It was as if the man had powers—perhaps greater than Rockson’s—but didn’t wish to reveal them. Rock respected the response and stopped sending. He spoke up again, no one else in the room aware of the mental interaction that had occurred in the space of a second.
“Well, that makes it even more imperative that we rescue the President and his daughter,” the Doomsday Warrior exclaimed loudly, hitting the palm of his hand on the table in frustration. “If Killov gets hold of them, they’re dead for sure—after they’ve had their very skins cut off them layer by layer. I know that man,” Rock said, with a dark look in his shining violet and aquamarine eyes. “He’s different. He’s sick in a way that perhaps no other human on this planet is sick. He is in love with darkness, with pain. He thrives on it. We can’t let him get his hands on them.” He spoke with an anger that none of his fellow Freefighters had ever seen in him. Usually, even in the most desperate of situations, he was cool and rational, knowing that anger is the worst of planners. But tonight he burned with rage, his eyes like blazing stars.
“Ahem,” Wallace said, breaking the clenched silence. All eyes turned toward him, even Rockson’s, who slowly swung his head around. “There is a way to get there even faster, you know—to Washington, that is.”
“What do you mean?” Rockson asked, calming his voice, taking a few deep breaths.
“The Silver Bullet Express,” Wallace answered. “You might not have heard of it yet. It’s only been operational this far west for a few months now. All part of Vassily’s and Zhabnov’s plan to increase cross-country communications and travel.”
“What the hell is the Silver Bullet?” Detroit spoke up.
“A train, son,” Wallace answered. “In the old days before the War, there were trains running all over this country. But most of them were knocked out by the atomic strike. Most—but not all. The Silver Bullet used to run from Washington, D.C. and then on to Chicago and finally to Salt Lake City. When the Reds came
in a century ago, the tracks west of Chicago had been shattered in scores of places and they just used the eastern route to the Capital. But now—it’s complete again. They had their slave workers out there for years building the damned thing, and just a few months ago they christened it—had a big celebration and all at the Nebraska Central Station, about fifty miles south of here.” Wallace paused for a moment, letting all the information sink in.
“Now, I ain’t saying it would be easy, but if somehow you could get on that train—take control of it—and of course keep the Reds from finding out you had it—you could hitch yourselves a free ride all the way to Washington, D.C.”
“But the train,” Rock asked, his eyes suddenly glowing with the merest possibility of hope, “surely it doesn’t run every day. The next one might not be here for weeks.”
“Nope,” Wallace grinned, “we stole the schedule just the other day.” He held up a somewhat tattered brochure. “And it says right over here . . .” He opened it, found the right page, and handed it over to Rock, “. . . that one is scheduled to arrive from Salt Lake City heading east in two days.”
“Do you have a map of the route?” Rock asked, rising from his seat.
“Better than that,” Wallace answered, motioning for a long-haired man who had been standing silently against the wall to come forward. “I’ll give you a guide.”