Doomsday Warrior 03 - The Last American (12 page)

“I’m afraid every word is true. It’s indescribable out there. Only the toughest of you could survive.”

Rath looked out over the audience with a thin smirk. He had been vindicated by Rockson himself. They knew that the Doomsday Warrior didn’t lie . . . or exaggerate. He had no need to. Rath continued with even more vehemence than before.

“My point is just this. It’s well and good to have delegates who are truly representative of C.C.—women, youth, scholars, technical staff—but they’d be appetizers for some of our hungry American creatures who roam the wastelands.” He paused a second to let it all sink in, then said quickly, “I propose that Ted Rockson and three of
his
strongest men undertake this expedition
—by acclamation
!”

The audience erupted into pandemonium with equally large numbers yelling “Yes!” as screamed “No!” It was the inevitable question that has always brought democratic principles and the reality of survival into conflict. Rock was slightly surprised at Rath’s turnabout, as the man had been putting such pressure on him not to go just the day before—but it was true, every word of it. It wasn’t the time or place to be sending picnic invitations.

Willis quieted down the place and allowed an orderly debate to take place that lasted nearly five hours. Finally it was proposed that a compromise solution be taken in which Rock would pick his best man and the other two delegates would be chosen from among all of Century City’s citizens. The compromise passed and then votes were taken on a total of fifty candidates. At last, after they had been up nearly the entire night and consumed countless gallons of coffee the two were elected—Terry Shriver, the most influential woman in the city, one of the members of the Council itself and the head of the Economic Development Committee, and, Dean Keppel, considered by many to be the most educated and scholarly man of the subterranean city. The dean was the head of the Century City University, which produced nearly a hundred graduates each year. The university taught all the modern skills—computer, survival skills, plant and animal identification, weapons usage and production—as well as the old Liberal Arts standbys—English, biology, history and even Latin. Dean Keppel was a stern taskmaster, but those who graduated—and all did—were educated and taught to think for themselves. Keppel, a man in his mid-fifties, had a whitish-silver mustache and spoke with a Southern accent. Within Century City’s original tunnel-trapped group of survivors, there had been men and women of many races, colors, and creeds. When they had built the tunnel into something resembling a city, they had often grouped into units similar in some way to themselves. These units had maintained a kind of ethnic consciousness, keeping the old traits, life styles and accents alive. Thus, McClaughlin with his Scottish brogue and heavy-drinking ways was descended from the Scottish-Irish subculture of the city, while Dean Keppel had grown up in what was called the “Little South” section of the city—Level 17, where those who identified with that particular persuasion had gone to live. These ethnic groupings, with their own style of dress and mannerisms, with their own foods and holidays, even parades, and, of course, their accents, which they not only kept but fostered and tended like a lingual garden—kept the spirit of a people, a way of life from the old America alive.

Rock was glum about the choices of Dean Keppel and Terry Schriever as delegates. Were they physically and emotionally strong enough to make the arduous journey? Rock would be allowed just one man to take with him to protect these two. Who should it be? Who was the
toughest
?

Eight

T
he sun rose shakily over the Colorado Rockies. The night had been long and hard, hard as a tomb. The acid rains had come and spewed out their fuming black droplets as big as grapes. Rain that melted, ate, everything that it touched. Throughout the surrounding peaks and valleys corpses lay, black and smoldering, fused into grotesque mockeries of living flesh, with their heads and flesh and bones all run together like plastic left too long out in the sun. Here and there a creature screamed out in mortal agony—its legs gone, its hide dotted with black, hairless sores where the drops had hit. Soon, the predators would prowl and would strike, putting the hideous half-dead animals out of their misery. Thus, even death could be merciful, even the carnivore a blessing to some who would end between its jaws.

A smoky mist covered the lowlands, foul and putrid, the still rising steam of the acid rains pungent and burning in the nostrils. And from out of the mists, the tallest structure on earth, black and ominous, oozing evil from every steel pore, rose into the orange dawn.
The Monolith
—headquarters of the KGB in America—a vision so terrifying to the surrounding slave workers and farmers in their little shanty towns that they were barely able to look at the monstrous structure. It towered over them always, a reminder of their powerlessness and of the fate that awaited them were they to displease their Russian masters.

From the eightieth floor of the black steel and glass structure, Colonel Killov, commander of the Blackshirts, looked out over the land of postwar America—the land around what had once been Denver, now his seat of power. Others rejoiced in beauty, what little of it there was to find, but Killov found his pleasure in ugliness, darkness, and death. He watched with serene pleasure as the lingering mists from the acid rains swept across the American slaves’ huts and lean-tos off in the distance. He absorbed the sickly orange glow of the sun as it hobbled over the mountains to the east, a plodding ball of dull fire hardly able to compete with the darkness of the world. He could see it all from up here, through his huge tinted picture windows that ran the length of the entire floor on every side—his home and operations center—the clouds, the gray mountains, the wastelands to the south, charcoal-colored, devoid of green, red, blue.

“Yet another day,” the skull-faced commander mumbled to himself, cracking open yet another packet of Arthovalium—his sixth dose in the last twelve hours. His hand trembled as he put the big pill in his mouth and swallowed it down with some tepid water left sitting on his black marble desk from the night before. He would have to do something about this increasing drug habit of his. He didn’t like to think about it—he was taking so many pills now. It was not that he cared about the rightness or wrongness of it, but he couldn’t die. That was all. The colonel had too much to do. Destiny had brought him to this peak of power for a reason. “Yes, I will cut down my doses and eat. But not today. Today there is much to do.” He let himself gaze out the window for a few more minutes—one of his few pleasures—watching the wounded sun crawl out of the grave of night. Gray etching itself on black. He craned his neck, as below hundreds of Ziv staff cars and motorcycles began pulling up in the immense parking lot off to one side of the Monolith.

Over nine thousand men and women worked in the KGB Center, called the “Death House” by the Americans. The round, eighty-story building was set in the center of a vast KGB fortress, with its own military base and factory complex. About five miles away was the Red Army fortress—separate, unwelcome. The KGB demanded its own space. It did not want to mix. The meaning of KGB was fear—to watch over the Soviet military as well as the American slaves. Mixing meant familiarization and friendship. This could not be. Not the Blackshirts. Their black uniforms and red death’s head medallions showed that they were not ordinary—but immortal, superhuman. An image had been created of supreme strength and violence, and it was believed—by all. And that was how it must be. For fear only worked when it
was
believed.

Within the walls of the Monolith, myriad functions were carried out. From information fed in from military operations, informers, spydrones, and the KGB’s own network of intelligence operatives, a comprehensive picture was drawn of rebel activity and trouble spots around the country. The intelligence units took up the bottom twenty-five floors, filled with maps—floor-to-ceiling, contoured maps of the entire country, flashing with multicolored lights to designate types of disturbance. Green lights for environmental dangers—from earthquakes to radioactive mists—red lights for rebel attacks, orange lights for possible freefighting cities, and blue lights for all the other KGB centers in the United States. Messengers constantly ran from floor to floor as their superiors yelled out orders. The sheer enormity of spying on such a vast country as the U.S. was a constant struggle. There were always problems, always emergencies—breakdowns of equipment, rebellions, sabotage of factories and the Red fortresses by the underground. The Red Army were fools, barely capable of going out and capturing a few rebels, let alone understanding the whole picture—the emerging patterns. That work was for the KGB.

On the next fifteen floors were the counterespionage “services”—the ruling bureaucracy that sent out the Death Squads to liquidate all those thought to be troublemakers. There were no laws they had to obey—they were the law, the judge, the jury, and the executioner. They reigned over the country like barbarian warlords of the past.

From the forty-first to the sixty-fourth floor were the communications networks, linking all KGB centers in the country with Mother Russia, as well as with their comrades in arms around the world. From Timbuktu to London, from Paris to Tokyo. Radio, laser systems, and giant radar dishes on the roof slowly turning their fifty-foot cones followed linking satellites ten thousand miles above the atmosphere. Information was sent and received from virtually every corner of the world. The wires buzzed with energy as the global Soviet Empire talked to itself.

On the top fifteen floors were the administrative offices of the top KGB officers. Here the rooms were huge and plush, with Persian rugs and flowing copper waterfalls. The elite of the elite—their death’s heads cast in solid gold—the most feared men in America ruled from here—Killov, Turgenov, Dashkov, Mukstadt.

Below the ground floor, the original designers of the Monolith had built an additional ten stories down, pushing a good two hundred feet into the ground. Here, it was thought, just in case of counterattack, the structure could be used as a fallout shelter, and thus it was built with twenty-foot thick concrete reinforced walls, airlocks, self-contained oxygen supplies, and provisions for years. But the KGB had quickly found a much better use for these subterranean floors—a use more fitting to their line of work: torture chambers. The floors beneath the Monolith were equipped with over five hundred cells, in case large-scale interrogations became necessary. The most advanced—and the most primitive—torture devices known to man were here, a laboratory of the implements of pain. From bamboo shoots inserted under fingernails, still effective on many American fortress workers, to sophisticated electrode devices, which when activated to the genitals were capable of producing exquisite pain.

The torture squad consisted of nearly a hundred men, the most sadistic of the KGB crews, who had been chosen just for their qualities of mercilessness and cruelty. Down below they had their own world. There were no rules, no one to answer to. God help the man or woman or child who set foot through those basement doors. Most were never seen again. The few that were released were mindless vegetables, their bodies ripped, scarred, their brains reduced to functions of stumbling and excreting. Most could hardly talk, or if they could, wouldn’t. They sat in the streets of the American shanty towns, or lay in ditches moaning softly, unable to communicate their private hell.

Fortunately for them, most did perish within the walls. If death could ever be called fortunate, it was here that such a thing could be said of it. For the KGB of 2089
A.D.
were experts in every kind of pain that the human body could experience. They studied the ways of pain, the uses of pressure points and blades and electricity and ice and beatings and stretchings and glass inserted in the rectum and broken. But why go on, only those who give torture or feel it would want to know every detail. When death came it was a blessing.

Still, there was one thing that grated on the torture squads. The freefighters. Somehow, their own scientists and psychologists had come up with a psychological conditioning that could overcome pain. They felt the torture, but blocks came on in their minds that permitted no access to the secret information that the KGB wanted most desperately—the locations of the American Free cities. The freefighters would scream and then spout nursery rhymes, the name of their girlfriend, or their favorite food. Even in death they had the last laugh on their KGB tormentors, who thus far had been totally incapable of breaking through their mental armor.

Until the last six months, that is. The number one priority of the KGB scientists for the last twenty years had been to develop some method, some device capable of smashing through these blocks, and now, at last, success was within reach. The Mindbreaker, invented by Dr. Nikolai Chernov, would make the difference. The device used laser beams to actually penetrate the brain tissue and short out the brain block, by slicing certain vital brain connections, producing along the way a pain undreamt of heretofore. As Chernov has said when presenting the first of the devices to Killov, “The rulers of hell itself would be happy to have such a machine. The pain produced by them is virtually infinite. We’ve only used them at the lower power levels and the results are . . . extraordinary.”

And they had been, Killov thought, as he stepped away from the windows of his death palace. Thus far, the KGB had been able to break three captured freefighters and had found the locations of their cities—Westfort, Pragmatic, and Little New York had all been demolished by neutron bombs. Of course, another fifteen captured rebels had been able to withstand the power of the Mindbreaker, letting their brains dribble out through their ears without revealing anything of importance. How they could do it, take the pain, was beyond Killov’s comprehension.

But now the colonel’s greatest accomplishment to date was at hand—the destruction of the “Re-Constitutional Convention,” as the rebel fools were calling it, that was to be held in two weeks. How clever of me to bide my time and not expose my mole—imagine one of my deep penetration operatives sent from Moscow only six months before, able to infiltrate into the very building where the meeting was to take place, supplying furs for the delegates for blankets. Killov laughed out loud. They would all soon be a lot warmer than they had expected. He was glad he hadn’t acted on previous information gathered by another spy who had uncovered a freefighter town only miles from the Convention site—Eisenhowerville—yes, he could have moved against them, but what a measly target—a poor, dilapidated mining town of at most a few thousand struggling rebels, breeding like rats and biting once in a while, daring to steal a little cheese from Red convoys—mostly regular Red Army. No, he had waited, and now—now he would crush the entire leadership of the underground in one fell swoop. Then he could turn all his attention to Zhabnov and his wretched old uncle, Premier Vassily. Destroy them, and Killov would rule.