by Ryder Stacy
“Thought we might find you here, Mr. Rockson,” Rufus said, his submachine gun trained on the Blackshirts who started for their guns and then thought the better of it. “You didn’t pay your bill for all that food and drink you and your boys quaffed down,” he said with a grin, “so we thought we’d come around and collect.” Killov lay on the floor trembling, the drugs in his system making his heart race like an engine. He shot angry looks at his men as if telling them to go for their weapons. But with so much firepower trained on them not one dared make a move—even on command of the “Skull.” Rufus rushed forward, pulled a long-bladed hunting knife from his belt, and sliced the leather straps that held Rock in the death chair. The Doomsday Warrior rose, rubbing his wrists together, amazed that he was still alive. He could still feel little stabs of pain on top of his head where the twin laser probes had just barely broken through the skin before being knocked off by the explosions. Rufus walked the few steps to Kim and freed her as well. She jumped up and ran to Rockson, tears steaming down her face.
“I know I’m just a crybaby—but when I saw those glowing horrors starting to go down into you . . .”
“We better get out of here, Mr. Rockson,” the head porter said, keeping an eye on the sprawled Blackshirts. “This place is gonna be hotter than a monkey’s asshole in about five minutes. My men are all over the building laying down plastique. We’re gonna blow this place right out of the ground—they’ll never torture another person here. I can tell you that. Here.” He handed Rock one of the packs that they all wore and a submachine gun. “Got enough plastique in there to blow a whole side of this place out.” He looked at his watch. “Got four minutes, thirty-seven seconds to get out of here. We’re going to get your pals out. Rendezvous is by the truck at the front gate. Okay?”
“Yeah,” Rock said, smiling. He put out his hand. “And thanks. Thanks to all of you. I had a feeling there was more to all of you than met the eye.” Rufus took his hand firmly.
“Believe me, and I speak for all of us, Mr. Rockson. It’s an honor to work alongside a man like you. You give us all hope in these dark, dark times.” He released Rock’s hand and looked over at the dozen or so KGB’ers cowering on the floor and their master Killov trying to squirm behind a table.
“What do you want to do with this scum?” Rufus asked, an expression of utter revulsion on his face.
“I’ll handle them,” Rock said with a wide grin.
“Let’s go, boys,” Rufus said, turning and heading out the door. “Four minutes exactly Rockson,” he said as he disappeared down the hall. Rock immediately walked over to the KGB leader, who covered his head with his arms as if that would somehow ward off the impending attack, while Kim covered the guards with a second submachine gun, ready to pull the trigger at the slightest motion.
“You heard the man,” Rockson said. “We got just a few minutes—so let’s not dally, okay?” He reached down, grabbed Killov by the collar, and lifted him up like a rag doll. With the KGB leader frantically struggling like some trapped rodent, Rockson carried him over to one of the Mindbreakers that still seemed to be in working condition and threw the man down in the seat, immediately pulling the headpiece down.
“No, no, Rockson—I’ll do whatever you want, anything.”
“That’s right—you will do what I want. Where’s the President?”
“He’s alive—just four doors down this corridor. I swear—we only did preliminary drilling—he still—he still has his mind.”
“Which is more than I can say for you,” Rock said, leaning over and pushing the same buttons that the tech had. But nothing happened. The electrical system had been shorted in the explosions. He looked at his watch—three minutes. There wasn’t time to play around with this fool. Rockson walked over to Kim and pulled her to the door.
“But Rock, you can’t let them get away with—” Before she could finish her sentence, the Doomsday Warrior extracted one of the little packets of plastique from the backpack Rufus had given him and set the timer for five seconds.
“Bye-bye boys,” he said, throwing it through the doorway and then slamming the thick metal door behind him. “Let’s go—fast,” he screamed at Kim, grabbing her hand. They tore down the main corridor as the plastique went off with a muffled roar, shaking the floor for a second. Rock found the fourth door and burst through it, his submachine gun swinging back and forth ready to fire. But no Russians were in the room. Just one American—Charles Langford, the President of the Reunited States of America—with his mouth hanging open dripping green drool.
“Father,” Kim cried running to him. “Father, it’s me, Kim,” she screamed just inches from his face. But there was no response—his eyes were vacant as a cow’s, staring, focused straight ahead. His scalp had been burnt and two little holes had been drilled in the center of his head. “Rock, Rock, he’s gone,” Kim began crying, her tears falling down onto the President’s face.
“There’s no time, Kim,” Rock yelled. “We’ve got to get out of here—there’s one and a half minutes left.” He lifted Langford under the armpits and got him standing, but the man was obviously unable to walk—unable to do anything. Rock took the pack from his back and handed it to Kim. “Hold onto this baby—we may need it.” He reached forward and lifted the President up, throwing him onto his shoulder with a single powerful heave.
The Freefighters ran back down the corridor toward the main door. Explosions were going off here and there as the porters confronted their enemy, plastique style. They reached the central hub of the Octagon, which was a wreck—bodies everywhere, covered with concrete and dust from the crumbling ceiling and walls—and tore down the long hall with its doors kicked open, hanging by their hinges, with Rock carrying the President over his right shoulder with one arm.
“Ahead,” Rock suddenly screamed, “to the right!” Kim jerked her head around and saw two Blackshirts aiming Kalashnikovs from a doorway. Without a moment’s hesitation, she threw the plastique she had pulled from the pack and set for two seconds. It skidded down the shiny waxed floor as the Freefighters stopped in their tracks and glued themselves against the far wall.
The mini-bomb went off like a lion’s roar, teeth of fire reaching out and ripping the KGB’ers into a thick spray that flew backwards slamming into a wall with a picture of Colonel Killov hastily thrown up on it. Rock and Kim shot forward through the smoke and at last reached the main door where a whole pile of DeathHeads lay blown apart—heads, arms, legs lying unattached to anything in particular. They flew through and out into the cool night, Kim grabbing another death packet and readying it. Rock saw the gate ahead and the porters—already standing around it with the rest of the Rock team. They waved at him frantically to run faster, pointing at their watches. But running at full speed while carrying a one-hundred-and-eighty-five-pound man on your back is not the easiest of endeavors.
They were about a hundred feet from the high mesh fence when the Octagon went up like Mt. Vesuvius, throwing them both to the ground as if a Mack truck had slammed into them. The entire roof of the eight-sided structure flew up from the sheer pressure of the expanding air below, breaking into countless pieces, which flew off spinning wildly. Whole backpacks of the plastique had been set at all the main girders of the building, and their detonation instantly severed the supports in a maelstrom of burning metal. The building shook violently and then collapsed at the same instant on every side. Enough concrete and steel to build a small city came crashing down as if the world itself were crumbling. Dust and debris filled the air, shooting out in every direction in a tornado of rubble, covering the Freefighters with a coating of thick gritty particles. A funnel of writhing smoke rose up into the sky, higher and higher, forming an almost mushroom-shaped cloud that hovered over the devastation below like a funeral shroud.
When the shrapnel had stopped flying, Rock and Kim slowly rose from the ground, dusted themselves off, and walked over to the rest of the team who were also lifting themselves up. Rock carried the President in
his arms.
“Is he dead?” Rufus asked with a worried look.
“He ain’t dead—but he ain’t alive, either,” Rockson said bitterly. “The Reds got to do a bit of their handiwork on him. I just don’t know.” He shook his head slowly, a look of pure murder etched on his chiseled face.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” the head porter said. “This place is going to be crawling with the bastards within minutes.” The fighting forces loaded up into the truck the porters had brought and headed off into the night, leaving behind them the biggest piece of burning wreckage on earth.
Like the opening of a horror movie of the days before the Great War, a hand wriggled up through a covering of black ash, the fingers moving slowly as if trying to grab hold of something. Then the arm broke free. Like a corpse rising from its grave, digging itself free of its own resting place, a body covered in thick gray ash clawed its way out of the earth. The thing sat up trying to rub the soot from its eyes so it could see. And it saw only death, destruction on a mega-scale, as the tiny black eyes took in the magnitude of what had just occured minutes before.
Colonel Killov sat up, blood dripping from every part of his battered flesh. He was slightly amazed to be alive.
The moment Rockson had tossed the package of high explosives into the Mindbreaking room, Killov had been off. His paranoid propensity to check the closest escape exit of every building he went into had paid off this time. For the others all lay dead, crushed to a pulp that couldn’t even be buried. But the KGB commander had somehow managed to make it out the back, running as fast as his trembling, drug-propelled legs could carry him. And he had made it—barely—getting a hundred feet away from the Octagon before it erupted in its final dance of death.
He tried to stand up but fell instantly to the rubble, his right leg broken. The pain didn’t matter—as the Master of Death Killov thrived on pain—even his own. For pain was his philosophy—the religion by which he ruled. But the destruction of the Octagon—where his top commanding officers had been bivouacked—and the escape of Rockson and the President—that was another story. The KGB commander looked up at the rising cloud of what had once been the immense structure, looked up at the black ocean of smoke and fire—and saw death, its eyeless sockets looking down, searching for souls to carry off. And the colonel’s own eyes met the fiery face of the Destroyer and screamed up to it.
“Hear me, great one. Let me live. Let me continue so that I may deliver the wretched ones who have done this to you. Look in my heart—for I am your servant. I live only to carry out your promises of eternal pain.” On the brink of madness, the Blackshirt Commander raised his fist and shook it up at the blackness. And far above—the face of Death wrapped in a shawl of human flesh—nodded yes.
Twenty-One
The porters took the Freefighter/Aussie force they had helped to escape back to the railroad junction where the Silver Bullet sat between two rusting freight trains, undetected. The team got out and stood in front of the bullet-shaped engine, looking at the black warriors who had saved their lives, barely able to find the words.
“We owe our lives to you,” Rock said at last, knowing that any words would sound trite, meaningless—compared to what the porters had gone through, had risked, to save them. “I know what this rescue has done for you—it’s blown your cover.”
“Forget it, Rockson,” Rufus said, standing inches taller than he had when acting out his “nigger” role as servant on the train. “Man’s gotta make decisions about his life—and we all decided that there wasn’t many more important things than saving the President of the United States—and Ted Rockson. If the Reds had killed both of you—well, there wouldn’t be a hell of a lot of hope left in this land. And hope—that’s what a man needs, even more than food or water.”
“But your jobs,” Detroit piped up, suddenly feeling a ton of guilt—as if it had been his words of censure back on the Bullet that had forced the porters to carry out such a daring and dangerous mission. “What the hell will you all do now? I mean—working these trains is your life.”
“Oh, I don’t think we’ll be losing our jobs,” Rufus said with a smile. “We all look the same to these Russians—just another nigger in the woodpile. Once the heat blows over, they’ll be running these trains again—and they’ll be needing our services. They don’t feel important unless they got people waiting on them hand and foot. No, we’ll be riding the rails again, I know it. Meanwhile, I got lots of reading to catch up on before the next battle begins. I got all of Dostoesvsky to read—and believe me, that guy wrote by the pound.”
The Freefighters and Aussies thanked their jailbreakers and boarded the train, which Reston had all fired up and ready to go. The Silver Bullet pulled out, the chromed chimney sending up a cloud of smoke as the warriors of freedom waved goodbye to the black men standing motionless by the tracks. The luxury train quickly reached top cruising speed and shot out of D.C. like a steel snake with its ass on fire. Behind them the Freefighters could see the battle for Washington between the Red Army and Killov’s forces continuing as artillery barrages shook the city. But with the dreaded KGB commander dead—or so they believed—surely the Blackshirt army would crumble.
The President was put in a sleeping car attended by Kim, who kept putting cold compresses on his head, unsure of how to even begin treating the damage that had been done to his brain. The two Mindbreaking experts that Rock had brought along examined Langford but came out shaking their heads, telling Rockson that they couldn’t do a thing. Perhaps, back in Century City, surgeons could attempt to fix the torn brain tissue—but they didn’t hold out much hope.
“Perhaps the worst thing,” Ashton told Rockson with a drawn look on his face, “is that he’ll live. The functions of the brain that govern breathing, involuntary reflexes, and the like are all working. The man could survive twenty, even thirty years. But whether or not he’ll ever be able to think even one thought again—is now in God’s hands.” Rockson wanted more than anything to be with Kim, to comfort her in her time of pain. But he was responsible for all the fighters—and they still had to get out of this thing alive.
“You find anything on this train worth using?” he asked one of the Aussies who had stayed behind. “Anything big-league?”
“Better believe it, Yank,” Croft, Boyd’s second-in-command, answered. “Back there near the end—last two cars—we thought they was just storage or something since all the doors were locked. But we pried ’em open and whadda you think—the bloody thing’s are filled with anti-aircraft batteries and even some mini ground-to-air missiles. Ain’t quite sure how to operate ’em, but—”
“Chen, Detroit,” Rock yelled out to the middle of the dining car where the men were eating a hastily prepared breakfast of eggs and bacon that McCaughlin had whipped up. “Check out the heavy-duty stuff this guy found in the back. We may be needing it.”
“Will do, Rock,” Detroit said, slopping down a last bite of food. The two of them headed back to the mobile artillery, to get it ready just in case. The Silver Bullet shot out past the suburbs of the Capital, little boxes of houses—homes to the upper echelons of the Red hierarchy and their families; past the five-megaton crater about twenty miles from the city, its ugly rim tall and jagged, a monument from the past, in all its dark glory. They sped past the huge concrete buildings that housed the factories where slave workers were paid only with bowls of gruel and died by the hour. Past it all—and toward the west, which for all its cratered and poisoned terrain was home to Rock and the Freefighters.
They were about a hundred miles out of Washington when Rock got an urgent call over the train’s intercom from Reston.
“Problems,” the gritty oldtimer yelled over the roar of the engine. “Now, I don’t even know quite how to use the damned thing, but the radar scope up here is showing something coming after us. A whole bunch of somethings—and Rock, they’re moving fast.”
“Just keep her going,” Rock said. “Give it everything you got—we
’ll do what we can at this end.”
“Sure, Rock, and—” he paused, looking down at the twenty blue dots on the console monitor that were gaining by the second, “it’s been nice working with you.”
“It ain’t over yet, pal—not by a long shot.” He clicked off and got Chen and Detroit on the wireless transmitter that hooked all the cars of the Bullet together. “You figure out those doohickeys back there?”
“No sweat, Rock,” Chen answered. “We’ve used all this stuff before in one form or another. The main thing is figuring how the hell to get the roofs of the cars to rise up—they’re built on some kind of hydraulic system—so we can shoot the damned things out.”
“Well, figure it out fast,” the Doomsday Warrior said. “Cause we’ve got company coming.” Rock turned to the entire force, still gobbling down everything in sight. “Chow’s over, boys,” Rock said. “The Red’s are on our trail and closing fast.”
“What do you want us blokes to do?” Boyd asked, his men quaffing down the last remaining cans of Russian beer with their sausages.
“We’re going to have to make a stand of it. We’ll be sitting ducks if we just let them blow us apart. Get every bit of heavy stuff you have,” he said, addressing the attentive fighters. “Mortars, machine guns—whatever—and get ’em up on the roofs.” The men jumped up from their tables and got to work, passing the equipment out the back doors and up on top of three of the cars near the center of the train. Within minutes they were ready, sitting high, waiting for the enemy to show.
They didn’t have long to wait. Out of the east came first a loud drone and then a whole squadron of heavily armed Red choppers, bearing down on the train like hawks trailing a wounded rabbit. Suddenly they were upon the Silver Bullet, dropping out of the sky, releasing a barrage of rockets and machine-gun fire. The slugs dug into the sides of the grading as the rockets burst all around the Freefighters. They returned the greetings, opening up with everything they had, trying to sight up the jet-powered craft. But shooting a stationary target is one thing—trying to knock down a fleet of twisting, turning helicopters moving at up to 300 mph is a different story entirely. The Americans and their Australian compatriots fought valiantly, firing right up into the blurs that filled the air above them, as streams of death poured down.